wooden-legged—a hero of chivalry struck off by the hand of native at a single heat—a beautiful relique of old-fashioned bigotry—a perfect fossil of effete notions—a peremptory and pugnacious man, who would stomp to and fro about the town, during political ferment, with a most war-betokening visage, his hands in his pockets, whistling a low Dutch psalm-tune, which bore no small resemblance to the music of a north-east wind when a storm is brewing. The very dogs, as they eyed his excellency, and heard his wooden foot-fall, skulking anywhither in dismay. It argues a significant talent for ironical composition and easy badinage in Mr. Irving, that he has sustained to the last, in this perhaps over-long history, the quaint tone of subdued comedy and simple gravity which marks its opening. It abounds in pungent reflections profitable for later times, and likely to remain applicable until the last public quack and parliamentary humbug and official mountebank shall be no more.
"Salmagundi" belongs to the same—the earliest—stage in the author's literary career, and partakes of the same satiric features. But the satire is good-natured enough in both cases, and indeed comes from too kindly a heart to be impregnated with any very bitter stuff. What Byron calls
The royal vices of the age, demand
A keener weapon and a mightier hand.
And against such it is not Geoffrey Crayon's mission to set himself in array.
Still there are follies e'en for him to chase,
And yield, at least, amusement in the race.
So that, although it is not for him, "good easy man, full surely," to confront and apprehend gigantic vice stalking in the streets, or to extinguish the "guilty glare" blazing from what threaten to be "eternal beacons of consummate crime," yet he can speak on the hint,
Are there no follies for my pen to purge?
Are there no fools whose backs deserve the scourge?
And, albeit, the fools have nine lives, and kind Geoffrey's scourge, or cat, hath only one; he lays it on with what appetite he may. He certainly has the gift "d'apercevoir le ridicule, et de le peindre avec grace et gaieté." And as certainly, he has had no such "evil communications" with a mocking spirit[1] as to corrupt his "good manners," or freeze his warm heart. Hitherto Mr. Irving had catered for the New World. He was now to identify himself with the literators of the Old, by publishing "The Sketch-Book," under (to use his own words) "the kind and cordial aus-
- ↑ Speaking of the above "sense of the ridiculous," and of the art of painting it with vivacity and mirth, Madame de Staël adds: "Ce n'est pas là le genre de moquerie dont les suites sont les plus à craindre; celle qui s'attache aux idées et aux sentimens est la plus funeste de toute, car elle s'insinue dans la source des affections fortes et dévouées."—De l'Allemagne, IV., § ii. This "wise saw," in its warning against the perverting tendencies of satire, reminds us of a "modern instance." Thomas Moore, a man of as gay and kindly a disposition as the author of "Salmagundi," had attained a fkr greater renown as a satirist, and with far greater pretensions to that "bad eminence," when, apprehensive of its corroding power, as well on agent as patient, he wrote in his diary (1819): "Resolved never to have anything more to do with satire; it is a path in which one not only strews, but gathers thorns." Five years previous, Lady Donegal had urged him to take the same resolution, on the same grounds.
