had taken upon him to build Mr. Mule’s house, had totally overlooked the paramount occasions on which young ladies might wish to step out of them. A great architect should think of such things; for surely it must trouble his repose, when he comes look back coolly upon his past life, to recollect that he only and his cursed plans have stepped between many a pair of lovers and the tenderest meetings. It is impossible to calculate the amount of human suffering which such master-builders may have caused. And, with regard to Mr. Mule’s master-builder in particular, be it hereby made known to the whole literary world, that he only was the cause that, in bending out too far, Miss Fanny Blumaner lost her balance and fell out. It is true that the cornet caught her in his arms, but that was a mere accident; and the whole case is a warning to master-builders how they can attempt to build houses in which young ladies are to live, any more than to build epic poems, without first solemnly asking themselves (as Horace directs)
Quid valeant humeri, quid ferre recusent.
But, to leave master-builders to their own sad reflections, let us attend to Miss Fanny, who uttered a slight scream on finding herself standing upon the lawn; whether from joy at her unexpected liberation, or from terror at the mode of it, we do not pretend to be certain. A faint echo of this scream penetrated through the dreams of the two dragons; and both awoke simultaneously. Mr. Mule was dreaming at the moment of a basilisk; the basilisk turned into a dragon, and the dragon into a Prussian dragoon, who seemed to be in the act of throwing his arms about some fair marble statue that stood upon the lawn before his house. The statue screamed, and Mr. Mule awoke. On the other hand, Mrs. Tabitha having been reading before bed-time of some Turk who absolutely maintained a harem in London during the reign of Queen Anne, was dreaming that this wicked Turk insisted on adding herself to his female museum; which vile design however, we are happy to assure the public and the lovers of virtue in particular, she was resisting in the most determined manner. Waking at this particular moment, Mrs. Tabitha saw nothing but what was very natural in the circumstance of the scream; she felt herself fully warranted in appropriating the scream as the natural expression of her own. An English poet[1] has recorded, in two striking lines, that he was awoke under circumstances not very dissimilar—viz. at the very moment when he was charging the enemy, and had his victory torn from him in
- ↑ “My own shout of onset, as the armies advance,
How oft it awakes me from visions of glory!”
Coleridge.
