The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844

‘Mr. Speaker: I feel incompetent to measure this comprehensive subject. Were my thoughts as deep as the Mississippi, and as clear as the Ohio, I could not grasp its whole magnitude. It requires a mighty mind; one that can look beyond the landscape; he must be able to look even beyond the ocean; to grapple with all the intricacies and winding convolutions of the subject, and to map in his mind the whole length and breadth of its territories. Here, Sir, is a river, whose broad and deep stream meanders from Paducah through one of the most fertile tobacco countries in the world, to Ross’s landing, and at the terminus of the great Charleston railroad, and possessing a steam navigation of eight hundred miles, and giving commercial facilities to the briny ocean. Behold this vast channel of commerce; this magnificent thoroughfare of trade; one grand, unbroken chain of inter-communication, like to a prodigious sarpent, with his head resting upon the shores of Europe, and his lengthened form stretching over the ocean and curling along this great winding stream in serpentine grandeur, proudly flaps his tail at Paducah! ••• Sir, the ball is in motion; it is rolling down in noise of thunder from the mountain heights, and comes booming in its majesty over the wide-spread plain. Yes, Sir, and it will continue to roll on, and on, gathering strength and bulk in its onward progress, until it sweeps its ponderous power to the town of Paducah, and there stand a towering monument of patriotic glory and sublime grandeur, with the noble American eagle proudly perched upon its cloud-capped summit, and gazing with swelling pride and admiration down upon the magnificent spectacle of the greatness of human wisdom and power!’

Every-body has heard of the good old lady who purchased a family Bible at a bookstore, and soon after returned it, being desirous to exchange it for one of larger print. ‘We have at present no Bible,’ said the clerk, ‘of a larger-sized type than the one you have.’ ‘Well,’ replied the lady, ‘I wish you would print me one, and I’ll call in a day or two and get it!’ She thought a request so reasonable could readily be complied with. One of our most prominent publishers mentions a clever anecdote of a poetess, who in reading the proofs of her forthcoming volume, found passages of a page or more in length enclosed in parenthetical pen-marks in the margin, with ‘Thomson,’ ‘Gray,’ ‘Moore,’ ‘Burns,’ ‘Wilson,’ etc., inscribed at the end. One day a letter accompanied the return-proofs, in which the lady remarked, that ‘she had endured the repeated insinuations of the publisher long enough; she was no plagiarist, whatever her other literary faults might be; she had on each occasion looked over the works of Moore, Thomson, Burns, Gray, etc., but with the exception perhaps of a passage in Wilson’s ‘Isle of Palms,’ there was not even the slightest pretext for a charge of plagiarism. She would thank the publisher, therefore, to discontinue in future his groundless hints upon the margins of the proof-sheets.’ The initiated will understand that the ‘insinuations’ of which the poetess complained, were simply the names of the different compositors, indicating the lines at which they severally began to place her effusions in type! ••• Many a reader will recall, as he peruses the subjoined unpretending sketch, a kindred scene in his own experience, ‘when life and hope were new:’

OUR OLD MEETING-HOUSE

Lord, ’tis not ours to make the seaAnd earth and sky a home for Thee;But in Thy sight our off’ring stands,A humble temple, ‘made with hands.’

‘Many years ago, when ‘the dew of the morning was fresh upon me,’ there stood, just in the edge of the village where I was born, an old church edifice. The graves of many an early settler were round about it; and often as the shadows of evening were settling upon the valley, with half-averted face and hurried steps have I stole noiselessly by to our rural home. O, how many associations crowd upon the memory, in connection with that rude old meeting-house! It was an old-fashioned, square building, without portico, or steeple, or belfry. The winter’s hail and summer’s rain had beaten against it for half a century. Its numerous small windows, without curtain or blind, let in floods of light. Its small pulpit, perched high upon one side, and close to the wall, concealed the preacher’s body, while the heads of the congregation were just seen rising above the square high-backed pews. Hardly a cushion was to be seen; and the interior furnishing was of the simplest and plainest character. I have said that it had associations of great interest. It is now more than an hundred years since a small band of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians settled in that valley. Though but few in number, and braving the elements and the savages, they determined to carry with them into the wilderness not only the Christian’s hope, but the Christian’s ordinances. A small building of logs arose soon after the settlement, in which for many years an educated and regularly-ordained minister preached the gospel to a little flock. The inquiry had already commenced; ‘The prophets, where are they?’ The larger part of the pioneers had sunk into peaceful graves, when the war of the revolution commenced. It was still a frontier hamlet, and was soon swallowed up and lost in that terrible whirlwind of death which year after year swept over the settlements of Central New-York. When peace was restored, the remnant of the inhabitants whom war and disease had spared, returned to their former homes. But though war and disease had impoverished them, they had not forgotten the God of their fathers. Having no house for assembling together, the inhabitants met in what they termed ‘the meeting-house yard;’ and there organized anew that church which has continued thence to this day, and determined upon the erection of the old meeting-house of which I have spoken. Under the open heavens, with their feet upon their fathers’ graves, they dedicated themselves anew to the service of Him who was Lord overall, and whom they acknowledged as their only Sovereign. I have looked over the records of that meeting with emotions never to be forgotten. The gray-haired patriarch, loaning on his staff with one hand, and with the other guiding our youthful footsteps to the house of prayer on every Sabbath morning, was one of that small number, and took an active part in that solemn ceremony. The stillness of a Sabbath morning in the country has often been remarked. How often, amid the din and bustle of the great city, does the heart of him who has been accustomed to the holy quietness of the day of rest in some secluded valley, pant for a return to the home of his youth! Such has been my own experience; in the far-off past I see again the gathering of the quiet, orderly congregation; I hear the voice of the good old father who ministered in holy things; I sit by the open window and look out upon the green graves thick strown round the old meeting-house; the warbling of the feathered songsters in the grove near by falls softly upon the ear. The voice of prayer is hushed, and the voice of praise ascends. Alas! the voices of most of those which were then attuned on earth, are now attuned to more celestial music in another world!

‘But our old meeting-house, where is it? It has gone with those who, in the midst of trials, and in the plenitude of their poverty, with their own hands hewed out its massive timbers; and the place that knew it knows it no more! It was in the fall of the year that a traveller on horseback rode up to the principal hotel, and as he dismounted and handed the reins to his host, he inquired what building that was in the southern part of the village? On being informed that it was the meeting-house, he remarked, with a dogged air, that ‘he had often seen the Lord’s house, but had never seen the Lord’s barn before!’ The comical remark of the traveller produced an immediate action. The good old house soon disappeared. A more ambitious edifice was built in another part of the village. The land-marks are now entirely effaced, and the spot where it stood has been added to the ‘meeting-house yard.’ The monuments of the young and the aged who sleep there dot over the place where the first Presbyterian congregation, ay, the first congregation of Evangelical Christians of any denomination, in Central New-York, assembled to worship the living God.’

We are promised by an esteemed friend some interesting extracts from the original American correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan, whose ‘Memoir and Correspondence,’ edited by her son, has recently attracted so much attention and remark in Great-Britain. Mrs. Grant appears to have been a woman of very remarkable powers, and of the most admirable common sense. Her observations upon the ‘amusive talents’ of Theodore Hook, and his entire devotion to their cultivation, are replete with the soundest wisdom. The distinction between living to amuse the public merely, and the exertion of one’s intellectual powers for one’s own benefit, and with an eye to the claims of riper years, is admirably discriminated and set forth. There is not perhaps a more instructive lesson than that conveyed by professional wits, who are ‘first applauded and then endured, when people see that it is all they have.’ As auxiliaries, as contrasts, with reflection and thoughtful exercitations of the mind, wit and humor are felicitous matters; as an intellectual main-stay, however, they have been weighed in the balance by a hundred brilliant examples, and have always been ‘found wanting.’ ••• Punch, at this present writing, save three or four numbers, in February, is among the missing. Late issues however, furnish some valuable contributions to academical statistics; as for example, Mr. Boys, who in his report upon the metropolitan school-visitation, writes as follows:

‘The use of sponge for cleaning slates he found confined to 17¼ per cent.; of whom 5½ used the sponge wet with water, and 11¾ with saliva; the remaining 82¾ made use of the latter liquid and the cuffs of their jackets instead of sponges, with an occasional recourse to the pocket-handkerchief. The author found, in schools in which the Latin language was not taught, a lamentable deficiency in the knowledge of the meaning of ‘meum’ and ‘tuum;’ he pointed out how the great extent of juvenile crime might thus be accounted for, as being caused by the absence of all instruction in the Latin language, and hoped that teaching it would soon be made obligatory upon all school-masters.’

There is a humorous sketch of an examination of law-students, from which we select an ‘exercise’ or two:

‘Ques: Have you attended any and what law lectures? Ans: I have attended to many legal lectures, when I have been admonished by police magistrates for kicking up rows in the streets, pulling off knockers, etc.

Ques: What is a real action? Ans: An action brought in earnest, and not by way of a joke.

Ques: What are a bill and answer? Ans: Ask my tailor.

Ques: How would you file a bill? Ans: I don’t know, but would lay the case before a blacksmith.

Ques: What steps would you take to dissolve an injunction? Ans: I should put it into some very hot water, and let it remain there until it was melted.

Ques: What are post-nuptial articles? Ans: Children.

Ques: What is simple larceny? Ans: Picking a pocket of a handkerchief, and leaving a purse of money behind.’

We have had books on etiquette, of various kinds, lately, but a work of this sort for prisons will be found, one would think, to supply an important desideratum. George Selwyn, when a servant was sent to Newgate, for stealing articles from the club-house of which Selwyn was a member, was very much shocked: ‘What a horrid report,’ said he, ‘the fellow will give of us to the gentlemen in Newgate!’ This feeling will doubtless be more general by and by:

‘In consequence of complaints that have been made by persons committed to prison before trial, who object to their not being allowed to mix with other prisoners, it has been thought necessary to frame a Book of Etiquette for prison purposes. Of course a superior delinquent, like a forger, could not be on visiting terms with a mere pick-pocket, nor could a man charged with stealing a hundred pounds, feel at his ease in the society of one whose alleged theft might be mean and insignificant. It is, we believe, intended to introduce the prisoners to each other formally, not by name, but by the offence with which they are charged. Thus, the Governor of Newgate would say to Felony: ‘Allow me to introduce you to Aggravated Larceny. You ought to know each other—indeed you ought. Aggravated Larceny, Felony; Felony, Aggravated Larceny.’ By a nice adjustment and proper application of the rules of etiquette, a very admirable system of social intercourse might be established in all our prisons, and the present complaint of a want of ‘good society,’ which falls so severely on superior scoundrels, would at once be got rid of.’

Deafness, although sometimes rather annoying—as for example in the case mentioned in preceding pages by John Waters—is yet not without its advantages. Your conversational ‘‘Deaf Burke,’ who can endure any amount of ‘punishment’ without being the worse for it,’ enjoys not unfrequently a great deal of negative felicity. We envied the condition of such an one the other day, while sitting with a friend at the ‘Globe,’ over such potables and edibles as that matchless establishment can alone set before its guests. At a table in near proximity, sat two Englishmen, whose comments upon ‘matters and things’ in America were embodied in such ‘voluble speech’ that we could scarcely hear ourselves speak. ‘They may talk about their hinstitutions as much as they please,’ said one of the speakers, ‘but honly look at ’em—see their heffect, from the ’ead of the government, down. Yesterday I perused in the ‘Courier’ newspaper an account of a negro’s skin, hentire, that was found with the ’ead attached, in the Mississippi river!’ ‘’Orid, isn’t it! Think o’ such a thing as that picked up in the Tems! And last week. I read in the ’Erald of a man near the Canada lines, who was found dead by the side of a fallen tree, half eaten up by wild hogs or panthers. He ’ad a flask of whiskey by his side, which he had taken ‘neat,’ till it had killed him; and in his pocket was a dirty pack o’ cards, wrapped up in a copy of the Declaration of Hindependence! That’s your liberty for ye!’ ☞ See if these very absurdities be not found embodied within a twelve-month in some new work by a travelling Englishman, upon that ‘miserable experiment at self-government, the United States of America!’ ••• Here are some scraps of ‘Parisian Gossip’ which will not be altogether uninteresting to American readers. One of our Paris letters states that at a splendid party given by Lady Cowley, there occurred a rather curious incident. ‘Among the guests was a Mr. L–, (one of the snobiculi, most likely,) who, believing that none but a friend whom he addressed was within hearing, said, ‘And they call this a party? Why, I never saw any thing so dull in all my life. It is not worth the trouble of dressing for such an affair; and then the rooms are so intolerably hot.’ Unfortunately, the noble hostess was standing near, and overheard him, and immediately said: ‘Mr. L–, there (pointing to the ante-room,) is a cooler room, and beyond it is the hall, still cooler.’ This prompt and significant hint was felt, understood, and taken.’ ‘Every body in Paris knows or has heard of Halevy the composer, and his brother, the author. A bon mot of a pretty and sarcastic lady, at the expense of both of them, is now going the round of the gossipping circles. ‘Do you like Halevy, the author?’ inquired a friend. ‘Pas du tout, pas du tout!’ answered the lady; ‘He is as dull as if his brother had composed him!’ Eugene Sue has hatched a large brood of ‘Mysteries.’ The Journal des Debats having published ‘Mysteries of Paris,’ the Courier Français is now publishing the ‘Mysteries of London.’ At Berlin no less than four different authors have published its ‘Mysteries.’ The ‘Mysteries of Brussels’ are being detailed in one of its journals. The ‘Mysteries of Hamburg’ have been exposed in print. At Vienna they are giving the ‘Mysteries of Constantinople;’ and a Paris newspaper promises in a short time the ‘Mysteries of St. Petersburg.’ Going on at this rate, there will soon be no ‘Mysteries’ in the world, and even the very word will become obsolete.’ ••• ‘The God of our Idolatry’ contains some home-thrusts at the national love of money, and not a few just animadversions upon the standard of respectability which obtains, in certain quarters, among us. Hamilton and Basil Hall’s experience in this regard seems also to have been that of our correspondent. The tendency of this standard, in a social and intellectual point of view, is very far from elevating. ‘You are going to the dinner at –’s to-day, of course,’ said a lady with ‘an eye to the main chance’ to a friend of ours, the other day; ‘the company will be composed of some of our most ’fore-handed citizens—all heavy men,’ Our friend did go to the dinner; and he found the guests as ‘heavy’ as their best friends could have wished them to be. ••• Reading, in presence of a travelled friend, the proof of the admirable paper which opens the present number, we came to the passage which records the opinion of Kepler, that ‘the world is a vast animal, that breathes and reasons;’ whereupon our listener remarked: ‘No doubt of it; it is an animal; I’ve seen its four-quarters myself!’ It was a pun worthy of a butcher. ••• We are not so certain that the moral of ‘The Independent Man’ is ‘an unexceptionable one.’ The ‘Charcoal-sketcher’ expresses the general opinion, we fear, in this regard: ‘There’s a double set of principles in this world, one of which is to talk about and the other to act upon; one is preached and the other is practised. You’ve got hold, somehow, of the wrong set; the set invented by the knowing ones to check competition and to secure all the good things for themselves. That’s the reason people are always praising modest merit, while they are pushing along without either the one or the other. You always let go when any body’s going to take your place at table; you always hold back when another person’s wanting the last of the nice things on the dish. That’s not the way; bow and nod, and show your teeth with a fascination, but take what you want for all that. This is manners—knowing the world. To be polite is to have your own way gracefully; other people are delighted at your style—you have the profit.’ ••• The reader will not overlook the ‘Alligatorical Sketch’ in preceding pages. We begin to perceive how much the alligator has been slandered. It yawns merely, it would seem; and the only care requisite is, to be absent when its jaws close! ‘The ’gator isn’t what you may call a han’some critter, but there’s a great deal of openness when he smiles!’ The smile of an alligator!! ••• ‘Cleanliness,’ says Fuller, ‘is godliness;’ and he is not far out of the way; for no man, we think, can be a dirty Christian. In a moral and religious point of view, then, we are doing good service in calling public attention to the spacious baths of Mr. Charles Rabineau, at the Astor-House, and at his new establishment at Number 123 Broadway, Albany. Go wash in them and be clean, reader, and thank us for the joy which you will experience, when you shall have come out of the water and gone your ways. ••• One of the late London pictorial publications contains a portrait of Sir Hudson Lowe, the notorious keeper of Napoleon, the Emperor of the French, at St. Helena. It is in perfect keeping with the generally received estimate of the character of that functionary. The wretched thatch that disfigures without concealing the intellectual poverty of his narrow skull; the scowling features; the ragged penthouse brows; are ‘close denotements’ of the truth of ‘Common Report.’ In short, judging from the much-bepraised ‘likeness’ to which we allude, if Sir Hudson Lowe was not a tyrant, and a small-minded one withal, God doesn’t write a legible hand. ••• Some clever wag in the last Blackwood has an article, written in a hurry, upon the hurriedness of literary matters in these our ‘go-ahead’ days. ‘People,’ he says, ‘have not only ceased to purchase those old-fashioned things called books, but even to read them. Instead of cutting new works page by page, they cut them altogether:

‘When England luxuriated in the novels of Richardson, in eight volumes, it drove in coaches and four, at the rate of five miles an hour. A journey was then esteemed a family calamity; and people abided all the year round in their cedar parlors, thankful to be diverted by the arrival of the Spectator, or a few pages of the Pilgrim’s Progress, or a new sermon. To their incidental lives, a book was an event. Those were the days worth writing for! The fate of Richardson’s heroines was made a national affair; and people interceded with him by letter to ‘spare Clarissa,’ as they would not now intercede with her Majesty to spare a new Effie Deans. The successive volumes of Pope’s Iliad were looked for with what is called ‘breathless’ interest, while such political sheets as the Drapier’s Letters, or Junius, set the whole kingdom in an uproar. And now, if Pope, or Swift, or Fielding, or Johnson, or Sterne, were to rise from the grave, MS. in hand, the most adventurous publisher would pass a sleepless night before he undertook the risk of paper and print; would advise a small edition, and exact a sum down in ready money, to be laid out in puffs and advertisements! ‘Even then, though we may get rid of a few copies to the circulating libraries,’ he would observe, ‘do not expect, Sir, to obtain readers. A few old maids in the county towns, and a few gouty old gentlemen at the clubs, are the only persons of the present day who ever open a book!’ And who can wonder? Who has leisure to read? Who cares to sit down and spell out accounts of travels which he can make at less cost than the cost of the narrative? Who wants to peruse fictitious adventures, when rail-roads and steam-boats woo him to adventures of his own? People are busy ballooning or driving; shooting like stars along rail-roads, or migrating like swallows or wild-geese.’

In allusion to the illustrated newspapers, now vieing with each other in enterprise and expense, in the British metropolis, the writer says: ‘The pictorial printing press is now your only wear! Every thing is communicated by delineation. We are not told but shown how the world is wagging. Views of the Holy Land are superseding even the Holy Scriptures, and a pictorial Blackstone is teaching the ideas of sucking lawyers how to shoot. Libels are veiled in carricature. Instead of writing slander and flat blasphemy, the modern method is to draw it, and not to ‘draw it mild’ either. The columns of certain papers bear a striking likeness to a child’s alphabet, such as ‘A was an Archer, and shot at a frog.’ All the world is now instructed by symbols, as formerly the deaf and dumb. We have little doubt of shortly seeing announcements, standing like tomb-stones in those literary cemeteries, the Saturday papers, of ‘A new work upon America, from the graver of George Cruikshank;’ or ‘A new fashionable novel, (diamond edition,) from the accomplished pencil of ‘H. B.’’ ••• We have a ‘Query’ from a Philadelphia correspondent, as to whether Mr. and Mrs. Wood would not be likely to come over here, if invited, and in company with Brough, and other artists, establish English opera among us. Touching the disposition of the Woods in this matter, we know nothing; but Brough is too busily employed to admit of such a consummation. What with his agency for the new sporting gun-powder, (which Daniel Webster declares to be superior in strength and cleanliness to any other thing of the kind in the world,) and for the ‘Illustrated London News,’ ‘Old Parr’s Life-pills’ etc., he has scarcely leisure to achieve his private calls, and execute occasionally, for the gratification of his friends, those charming airs which are indissolubly associated with his name. ••• Messrs. Snelling and Tisdale’s ‘Metropolitan Library and Reading-Room,’ at 599 Broadway, near Houston-street, supplies an important desideratum in that quarter of the metropolis. In addition to a well-stocked library and reading-room, there are coffee, conversation, chess, and cigar-apartments, and all the belongings of a first establishment after its kind. ••• We had clipped for insertion, from a Baltimore journal, a poem in honor of Ole Bull, entitled ‘The Bewitched Fiddle,’ which we have unluckily mislaid or lost. It was by Mr. Hewitt, a popular song-writer and musical composer, and was one of the most fanciful and felicitous things we have seen in a month of Sundays. As it is at this moment out of our power to print it, we can only counsel our readers, if they encounter it any where, not to fail of its perusal. ••• We have a pleasant metropolitan story to tell one of these days, (at least we think so,) of which we have been reminded by the following from a late English magazine: