The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 17, No. 484, April 9, 1831

FROM THE SPANISH

“That much a widowed wife will moan,When her old husband’s dead and gone,I may conceive it;But that she won’t be brisk and gay,If another offer the next day:I won’t believe it.“That Cloris will repeat to me,Of all men, I adore but thee,I may conceive it;But that she has not often sentTo fifty more the compliment,I won’t believe it.“That Celia will accept the choiceElected by her parents’ voice,I may conceive it;But that, as soon as all is over,She won’t elect a younger lover,I won’t believe it.“That when she sees her marriage gown,Inez will modestly look down,I may conceive it;But that she does not from that hour,Resolve to amplify her power,I won’t believe it.“That a kind husband to his wife,Permits each pleasure of this life,I may conceive it;But that the man so blind should beAs not to see what all else see,I won’t believe it.“That in a mirror young coquetsShould study all their traps and nets,I may conceive it;But that the mirror, above all,Should be the object principal,I won’t believe it.”Fraser's Magazine.

THE SLAVE SHIP, A GALLEY YARN

Come all you gallant sailors bold, that to the seas belong,Oh listen unto me, my boys, while I recount my song;’Tis concerning of an action that was fought the other day,By the saucy little Primrose, on the coast of Africa.One evening, while we the deep with gentle breezes plough,A sail is seen from our mast-head, hard on the weather bow;The gloom of night now coming on, of her we soon lose sight,But down she bears, about five bells, as if prepared for fight.Yet here she overreach’d herself, and prov’d she was mistaken,Thinking by passing in the dark, that she could save her bacon;For British tars don’t lose a prize, by fault in looking out,So we brought her to, with much ado, at eleven o’clock about.All hands were call’d to quarters, our guns were clear’d away,And every man within the ship, was anxious for the fray:Our first lieutenant went on board, her hold to overhaul,And found them training of their guns, to the boatswain’s pipe and call.To get near the main hatchway, our officer contrives,But some ruffian-looking rascals surrounded him with knives;For well they knew we peace must keep, unless that we could tellThat slaves were actually on board, detecting them by smell.Striving this object to attain, he firm resistance met,So then return’d on board in haste, fresh orders for to get;Says he, “It is a spanking ship, I’m sure that she has slaves,And bears from sacred house and home, the wretches o’er the waves.”“Oh! very well!” our captain cries, “for her we will lie by,And on the morrow’s coming dawn, a palaver we will try;For should we now attempt to make a pell-mell night attack,I fear our fight would heavy fall upon the harmless black.”So early the next morning, we gently edged away,Our captain hail’d the stranger ship, and unto her did say—“If you don’t send your boat on board, and act as I desire,Although you bear the flag of Spain, into your hull I’ll fire.”The Slaver swore that all our threats should not his courage scare,And that th’ assault of such a sloop was quite beneath his care:Our captain calls, “Stand by, my lads! and when I give the word,We slap off two smart broadsides, and run her right on board.”The signal then was given, a rattler we let fly,And many a gloomy Spaniard upon her decks did die:“Now fire again! my British boys, repeat the precious dose,For round and grape, when plied so well, they cannot long oppose.”Now peals the roar of battle strife, now British hearts expand,And now the anxious sailor pants to combat hand to hand;With grapnels and with hawsers, we lash’d her to our beam,Although the muzzles of our guns did o’er our bulwarks gleam.“Away, my men!” the captain cries, “’tis just the time to board,”Upon her decks we jump’d amain, with tomahawk and sword;The conflict now was sharp and fierce, for clemency had fled,And streams of gore mark’d every blow—the dying and the dead.Our captain heads the daring band, to make the Velos strike,But soon received a dangerous thrust, from a well-hove boarding pike.We thought ’twas all “clue up” with him, although he cheered us on,And we determined, every man, the Slaver should be won.We beat them on the main deck, till they could no longer stand,When our leader sings out “Quarter!” some mercy to command;But now the sherry which we made, with panic fill’d the horde,For some dived down the hatchways, and some leap’d overboard.Close to their scudding heels our lads did their attentions pay,Cutlass in hand, to hold their own—to capture more than slay;Through slippery gore we fought our way, the quarter-deck to gain,And in loud cheers her mizen peak soon lost the flag of Spain.Our prize we found was frigate-built, from Whydah she sail’d out,With near six hundred slaves on board, and eight score seamen stout;Equipp’d with stores of every sort, the missile war to wage,And twenty long guns through her ports seem’d frowning to engage.Of those that were made prisoners, they all were put abaft,And we with well-arm’d sentinels paraded fore and aft;We pick’d up all the slaughter’d men, and hove them in the deep,Where, full in number fifty, they take their final sleep.And twenty more disabled Dons, with eyelet holes and scars,Were treated by our surgeon the same as our own tars;For when they struck no time was lost, to the Primrose they were sent,And arms and legs, and broken heads, strict ordeal underwent.Our chief was badly wounded, likewise the master too,One midshipman, the boatswain, and nine of our ship’s crew;Besides three seamen killed outright, who thus resign’d their breath,And in the hour of vict’ry gained a patriotic death.So now my story to conclude, although beyond my might,—I write these lines to let you know, how loyal tars can fight;So toast the health of those brave lads that bore the palm away,And beat the Spanish ship Velos on the coast of Africa.United Service Journal.

SPIRIT OF DISCOVERY

VENTRILOQUISM

The art of the ventriloquist is well known: it consists in making his auditors believe that words and sounds proceed from certain persons and certain objects in his vicinity, while they are uttered by himself; and it is founded on that property of sound in virtue of which the human ear is unable to judge with any accuracy of the direction in which sounds reach it. This incapacity of the ear is the fertile source of many of those false judgments which impress a supernatural character upon sounds that have a fixed locality and a physical origin.—We know of a case, where a sort of hollow musical sound, originating within three or four feet of the ears of two persons in bed, baffled for months every attempt to ascertain its cause. Sometimes it seemed to issue from the roof, sometimes from a neighbouring apartment, but never from the spot from which it really came. Its supposed localities were carefully examined, but no cause for its production could be ascertained. Though it was always heard by both persons together, it was never heard when A. alone was in the apartment, and the time of its occurrence depended on the presence of B. This connected it with his destiny, and the imagination was not slow in turning the discovery to its own purposes. An event, however, which might never have occurred in the life-time of either party, revealed the real cause of the sound, the locality of which was never afterwards mistaken.

In order to understand what part this indecision of the ear performs in the feats of the ventriloquist, let the reader suppose two men placed before him in the open air, at the distance of one hundred feet, and standing close together. If they speak in succession, and if he does not know their voices, or see their lips move, he will be unable to tell which of them it is that speaks. If a man and a child are now placed so near the auditor that he can distinguish, without looking at them, the direction of the sounds which they utter, that is, whether the sound comes from the right or the left hand person, let the man be supposed capable of speaking in the voice of a child. When the man speaks in the language and the accents of the child, the auditor will suppose that the child is the speaker, although his ear could distinguish, under ordinary circumstances, that the sound came from the man. The knowledge conveyed to him by his ear is, in this case, made to yield to the more forcible conviction that the language and accents of a child could come only from the child; this conviction would be still further increased if the child should use gestures, or accommodate his features to the childish accents uttered by the man. If the man were to speak in his own character and his own voice, while the child exhibited the gestures and assumed the features which correspond with the words uttered, the auditor might be a little puzzled; but we are persuaded that the exhibition made to the eye would overpower his other sources of knowledge, and that he would believe the accents of the man to be uttered by the child: we suppose, of course, that the auditor is not allowed to observe the features of the person who speaks.

In this case the man has performed the part of a ventriloquist, in so far as he imitated accurately the accents of the child; but the auditor could not long be deceived by such a performance. If the man either hid his face or turned his back upon the auditor when he was executing his imitation, a suspicion would immediately arise, the auditor would attend more diligently to the circumstances of the exhibition, and would speedily detect the imposition. It is absolutely necessary, therefore, that the ventriloquist shall possess another art, namely, that of speaking without moving his lips or the muscles of his face: how this is effected, and how the art is acquired, we do not certainly know; but we believe that it is accomplished by the muscles of the throat, assisted by the action of the tongue upon the palate, the teeth, and the inside of the lips—all of them being movements which are perfectly compatible with the immutability of the lips themselves, and the absolute expression of silence in the countenance. The sounds thus uttered are necessarily of a different character from those which are produced by the organs of speech when unimpeded, and this very circumstance gives double force to the deception, especially when the ventriloquist artfully presents the contrast to his auditor by occasionally speaking with his natural voice. If he carries in his hand those important personages Punch and Judy, and makes their movements even tolerably responsive to the sentiment of the dialogue, the spectator will be infinitely more disposed to refer the sounds to the lantern jaws and the timber lips of the puppets than to the conjurer himself, who presents to them the picture of absolute silence and repose.

Mr. Dugald Stewart, who has written an interesting article on ventriloquism in the appendix to the third volume of the “Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind,” has, we think, taken a very imperfect view of the subject. He not only doubts the fact, that ventriloquists possess the power of fetching a voice from within, but “he cannot conceive what aid the ventriloquist could derive in the exercise of his art from such an extraordinary power, if it were really in his possession.” He expresses himself “fully satisfied, that the imagination alone of the spectators, when skilfully managed, may be rendered subservient in a considerable degree to the purposes of the ventriloquist;” and he is rather inclined to think, that “when seconded by such powers of imitation as some mimics possess, it is quite sufficient to account for all the phenomena of ventriloquism of which we have heard.”

From these observations it would appear, that Mr. Stewart had never witnessed those feats of the ventriloquist where his face is distinctly presented to the audience—a case in which he must necessarily speak from within. But independent of this fact, it is very obvious that there are many imitations, especially those of the cries of particular animals, and of sounds of a high pitch, which cannot be performed pleno ore, by the ordinary modes of utterance, but which require for their production that very faculty, of which Mr. Stewart doubts the existence. Such sounds are necessarily produced by the throat, without requiring the use of the mouth and lips; and the deception actually depends on the difference between such sounds, and those which are generated by the ordinary modes of utterance.

The art of ventriloquism, therefore, consists in the power of imitating all kinds of sound, not only in their ordinary character, but as modified by distance, obstructions, and other causes; and also in the power of executing those imitations by muscular exertions which cannot be seen by the spectators. But these powers, to whatever degree of perfection they may be possessed, would be of no avail if it were not for the incapacity of the ear to distinguish the directions of sounds—an incapacity not arising from any defect in the organ itself, but from the very nature of sound. If sound were propagated in straight lines, like light, and if the ear appreciated the direction of the one, as the eye does that of the other, the ventriloquist would exercise in vain all the powers of imitation and of internal utterance. Even in the present constitution of the ear, his art has its limits, beyond which he must be cautious of pushing it, unless he calls to his aid another principle, which, we believe, has not yet been tried. In order to explain this, we shall analyze some of the most common feats of ventriloquism. When M. Fitzjames imitated the watchman crying the hour in the street, and approaching nearer and nearer the house, till he came opposite the window, he threw up the window-sash, and asked the hour, which was immediately answered in the same tone, but clearer and louder; and upon shutting the window, the watchman’s voice became less audible, and all at once very faint, when the ventriloquist called out, in his own voice, that he had turned the corner. Now, as the artist was stationed at the window, and as the sound from a real watchman must necessarily have entered by the window, the difference between the two directions was considerably less than that which the ear is unable to appreciate. Had the ventriloquist stood at one window, and tried to make the sound of a watchman’s voice enter another window, he would have failed in his performance, because the difference of the two directions was too great. In like manner, when M. Alexandre introduced a boy from the street, and made him sing from his stomach the song of Malbrook, he placed his head as near as possible to the boy’s chest, under the pretence of listening, whereas the real object of it was to assimilate as much as possible the true and the fictitious direction of the sounds. Had he placed the boy at the distance of six or eight feet, the real singer would have been soon detected.

We have made several experiments with a view of determining the angle of uncertainty, or the angle within which the ear cannot discover the direction of sounds; but this is not easily done, for it varies with the state of the air and of surrounding objects. If the air is perfectly pure, and if no objects surround the sounding body, the angle of uncertainty will be less than under any other circumstances, as the sound suffers neither deviation nor reflection. If the sounding body is encircled with objects which reflect sound, the echoes arrive at the ear, at short distances, nearly at the same time with the direct sound; and as they form a single sound, the angle of uncertainty must then be much greater, for the sound really arrives at the ear from various quarters. The ventriloquist, therefore, might avail himself of this principle, and choose an apartment in which the reverberations from its different sides multiply the directions of the sounds which he utters, and thus facilitate his purpose of directing the imagination of his audience to the object from which he wishes these sounds to be thought to proceed.

Quarterly Review.

THE GATHERER

A snapper up of unconsidered trifles.

SHAKSPEARE

EPITAPH ON STERNE

How often wrongs our nomenclature,How our names differ from our nature,’Tis easy to discern:“Here lies the quintessence of wit,For mirth and humour none so fit,And yet men call him—Stern—e!”

LADIES FORMERLY IN PARLIAMENT

(For the Mirror.)

Gurdon, in his Antiquities of Parliaments, says, “The ladies of birth and quality sat in council with the Saxon Wita’s.” “The Abbess Hilda (says Bede,) presided in an ecclesiastical synod.”

“In Wighfred’s great council at Beconceld, A.D. 694, the abbesses sat and deliberated, and five of them signed the decrees of that council along with the king, bishops, and nobles.”

“King Edgar’s charter to the Abbey of Crowland, A.D. 961, was with the consent of the nobles and abbesses, who subscribed the charter.”

“In Henry the Third’s and Edward the First’s time, four abbesses were summoned to parliament, viz. of Shaftesbury, Berking, St. Mary of Winchester, and of Wilton.”

“In the 35th of Edward III. were summoned by writ to parliament, to appear there by their proxies, viz. Mary Countess of Norfolk, Alienor Countess of Ormond, Anna Despenser, Phillippa Countess of March, Johanna Fitz Water, Agneta Countess of Pembroke, Mary de St. Paul Countess of Pembroke, Margaret de Roos, Matilda Countess of Oxford, Catherine Countess of Athol. These ladies were called Ad Colloquium et Tractatum, by their proxies, a privilege peculiar to the peerage to appear and act by proxy.”

P.T.W.

N.B. They no doubt manfully asserted their colloquial rights.

FASTING

From a very old work, "Noble Numbers."Is this a feast to keep,The larder leane,And clean,From fat of veales and sheep?Is it to quit the dishOf flesh yet stillTo fillThe platter high with fish?Is it to fast an hour,Or, ragged to goOr showA downcast look or snore?No, ’tis a fast to doleThy sheaf of wheatAnd meatUnto the hungry soul.It is to fast from strife,From old debateAnd hate;To circumcise thy life.To show a heart grief rent,To starve thy sin,Not bin;And that’s to keep thy Lent.

ANNUAL OF SCIENCE

This Day is published, price 5s.

ARCANA of SCIENCE, and ANNUAL REGISTER of the USEFUL ARTS for 1831.

Comprising POPULAR INVENTIONS, IMPROVEMENTS, and DISCOVERIES Abridged from the Transactions of Public Societies and Scientific Journals of the past year. With several Engravings.

“One of the best and cheapest books of the day.”—Mag. Nat. Hist.

“An annual register of new inventions and improvements in a popular form like this, cannot fail to be useful.”—Lit. Gaz.

Printed for JOHN LIMBIRD, 143. Strand;—of whom may be had the Volumes for the three preceding years.

1

Hutchins’s Dorset, vol. i, p. 279, 2nd edit.

2

Maton’s Observations, vol. i. p. 12.

3

Hutchins’s Dorset, vol. i. p. 286, 2nd edit.

4

Our correspondent’s communication is in appearance “full, fair, and free,” as all “representations” ought to be.—ED.

5

Ribbans’s “Effusions.”

6

The greater part of the kings, both of Israel and of Judah, served strange gods. Under Josiah, as he cleared out the Temple, the book of the laws of Moses was found by Hilkiah the priest, and was delivered to the king, who was much struck with the threatenings it contained.

7

About fifty years after the destruction of Jerusalem, when the great body of the Jews held the opinion that the time for the appearance of their Messias had arrived, there arose this man, who announced himself in that character, and called himself Bar Cochef, or the “Son of a Star.” He was acknowledged by numbers of his people, who became his followers, declared him their king, and made war upon the Romans, many of whom were destroyed, both in Greece and in Africa. His power continued betwixt three and four years, when the very people who had supported him proclaimed him an impostor, and gave him the name Bar Cosifa, or the “Son of a Lie.”

8

One of Mr. St. John’s lines in the Essay on the Influence of Great Cities (the worst in the volume,) is “The very name of London sounds sweetly to me.” This is not a whit better than the man who thought “no garden like Covent Garden, and no flower like a cauliflower.” Captain Morris’s “sweet shady side of Pall Mall,” compared to these sentiments, is a piece of delicious refinement.