boatman.
be easy, ma’am, it’s all correct, that’s only ’cause we tacks:
we shall have to beat about a bit,—bill, keep her out to sea.
mrs. f.
beat who about? keep who at sea?—how black they look at me!
[pg 111]
boatman.
it’s veering round—i knew it would! off with her head! stand by!
mrs. f.
off with her head! whose? where? what with?—an axe i seem to spy!
boatman.
she can’t not keep her own, you see; we shall have to pull her in!
mrs. f.
they’ll drown me, and take all i have! my life’s not worth a pin!
boatman.
look out you know, be ready, bill—just when she takes the sand!
mrs. f.
the sand—o lord! to stop my mouth! how every thing is planned!
boatman.
the handspike, bill—quick, bear a hand! now ma’am, just step ashore!
mrs. f.
what! an’t i going to be kill’d—and welter’d in my gore?
well, heaven be praised! but i’ll not go a sailing any more!
a spent ball.
“the flying ball.”—gray.
a ball is a round, but not a perpetual round, of pleasure. it spends itself at last, like that from the cannon’s mouth; or rather, like that greatest of balls, “that great globe itself,” is “dissolved with all that it inherits.”
four o’clock strikes. the company are all but gone, and the
[pg 112]
musicians “put up” with their absence. a few “figures,” however, remain, that have never been danced, and the hostess, who is all urbanity and turbanity, kindly hopes that they will stand up for “one set more.” the six figures jump at the offer; they “wake the harp,” get the fiddlers into a fresh scrape, and “the lancers” are put through their exercise. this may be called the dance of death, for it ends every thing. the band is disbanded, and the ball takes the form of a family circle. it is long past the time when church-yards yawn, but the mouth of mamma opens to a bore, that gives hopes of the thames tunnel. papa, to whom the ball has been anything but a force-meat one, seizes eagerly upon the first eatables he can catch, and with his mouth open and his eyes shut, declares, in the spirit of an “examiner” into such things, that a “party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.” the son, heartily tired of a suit of broad cloth cut narrow, assents to the pro
[pg 113]
position, and having no further use for his curled head, lays it quietly on the shelf. the daughter droops; art has had her almack’s, and nature establishes a free and easy. grace throws herself, skow-wow any-how, on an ottoman, and good breeding crosses her legs. roses begin to relax, and curls to unbend themselves; the very candles seem released from the restraints of gentility, and getting low, some begin to smoke, while others indulge in a gutter. muscles and sinews feel equally let loose, and by way of a joke, the cramp ties a double-knot in clarinda’s calf.
clarinda screams. to this appeal the maternal heart is more awake than the maternal eyes, and the maternal hand begins hastily to bestow its friction, not on the leg of suffering, but on the leg of the sofa. in the mean time, paternal hunger gets satisfied; he eats slower, and sleeps faster, subsiding, like a gorged boa constrictor, into torpidity; and in this state, grasping an extinguished candle, he lights himself up to bed. clarinda follows, stumbling through her steps in a doze-à-doze; the brother is next, and mamma having seen with half an eye, or something less, that all is safe, winds up the procession.
every ball, however, has its rebound, and so has this in their dreams—with the mother who has a daughter, as a golden ball; with the daughter, who has a lover, as an eye-ball; with his son, who has a rival, as a pistol-ball; but with the father, who has no dreams at all, as nothing but the blacking-ball of oblivion.
literary and literal.
the march of mind upon its mighty stilts,
(a spirit by no means to fasten mocks on,)
in travelling through berks, beds, notts, and wilts, hants—bucks, herts, oxon,
[pg 114]
got up a thing our ancestors ne’er thought on,
a thing that, only in our proper youth,
we should have chuckled at—in sober truth,
a conversazione at hog’s norton!
a place whose native dialect, somehow,
has always by an adage been affronted,
and that it is all gutturals, is now
taken for grunted.
conceive the snoring of a greedy swine,
the slobbering of a hungry ursine sloth—
if you have ever heard such creature dine—
and—for hog’s norton, make a mix of both!—
o shades of shakspeare! chaucer! spenser!
milton! pope! gray! warton!
o colman! kenny! planche! poole! peake!
pocock! reynolds! morton!
o grey! peel! sadler! wilberforce! burdett!
hume! wilmot horton!
think of your prose and verse, and worse—delivered in hog’s norton!—
the founder of hog’s norton athenæum
framed her society
with some variety
from mr. roscoe’s liverpool museum;
not a mere pic-nic, for the mind’s repast,
but tempting to the solid knife-and-forker,
it held its sessions in the house that last
had killed a porker.
[pg 115]
it chanced one friday,
one farmer grayley stuck a very big hog,
a perfect gog or magog of a pig-hog,
which made of course a literary high day,—
not that our farmer was a man to go
with literary tastes—so far from suiting ’em,
when he heard mention of professor crowe,
or lalla-rookh, he always was for shooting ’em!
in fact in letters he was quite a log,
with him great bacon
was literally taken.
