last-named spirit, articles of French produce have been declared contraband in the spiritual Parnassia)—I read them a rough preexistent, or as we say here, copy, of Maxilian. When who should be standing behind my chair, and peeping over my shoulder (I had a glimpse of his face when it was too late, and I never saw a more Cervantic one), but a spirit from Thought-land (North Germany I should say), who, it seems, had taken a trip thither, during the furlough of a magnetic crisis, into which his Larva had been thrown by Nic, senior, M.D.* and a Mesmerist still in great practice. Well there would have been no harm in this, for in such cases it was well known, that the spirit, on its return to the body, used to forget all that had happened to it during its absence, and became as ignorant of all the wondrous things Γίνεται δ' αὖ it had seen, said, heard and done, as Balaam's ass. ὄνος ὁ ὄνος ἐξαγγελιζόμενος. But unluckily, and only a few months before, Mr. Van Ghert (who, as privy counsellor to the King of the Netherlands, ought to have known better) had, by metaphysical skill, discovered the means of so softening the wax tablet in the patient's cranium, that it not only received, but retained, the impression from the movements of the soul, during her trance, resuggesting them to the patient sooner or later, sometimes as dreams, and sometimes as original fancies. Thus it chanced, that the great idea, and too many of the sub-ideas, of my ideal work awoke, in the consciousness of this Prussian or Saxon,Frederic Miller is the name, he goes by-soon after the return of the spirit to its old chambers in his brain. Alas! my unfortunate intimacy with a certain well-known" Thief of Time," for which my originality had suffered on more than one former occasion, was part in fault! But, be this as it may, so it chanced, however, that before I had put a single line on paper (my time being, indeed, occupied in determining which of ten or twelve pre-existents I should transcribe first) out came the surreptitious duplicate, with such changes in names, scene of action, thought, * See "Archiv des thierischen Magnetismus," edited by Professor Eschenmiayer and Co. I mentioned one of Dr. Nic's cases, with a few of Doctors Kieser's and Nasse's, and of Mr. Van Ghert's, to Lemuel Gulliver; but I found him strangely incredulous. He (he said) had never seen any thing like it. But what is that to the purpose? What does any one man's experience go for, in proving a negative at least I could not even learn from him that he had ever met with a single Meteorolithe, or sky-stone, on its travels from the volcanoes of Jupiter, or the moon, to our earth, images, and language, as the previous associations, and local impressions of the unweeting plagiarist had clothed my ideas in. But what I take most to heart, it so nearly concerning the credit of Great Britain, is, that it came out in another country, and in high Dutch! I foresee what my anticipator's compatriots will say -that admitting the facts as here related, yet the Anselmus is no mere transcript or version, but at the lowest a free imitation of the Maxilian or rather that the English and German works are like two paintings by different masters from the same sketch, the credit of which sketch, secundum leges et consuetudines mundi corpuscularis, must be assigned to the said Frederic Miller by all incarnate spirits, held at this present time in their senses, and as long as they continue therein; but which I shall claim to myself, if ever I get out of them. And so farewell, dear Corrector! for I must now adjust myself to retire bowing, face or frontispiece, towards THE READER, with the respect due to so impartial and patient an Arbiter from the AUTHOR. MAXILIAN. FLIGHT I. It was on a Whitsunday afternoon-the clocks striking five, and while the last stroke was echoing in the now empty churches -and just at the turn of one of the open streets in the outskirts of Dublin--that a young man, swinging himself round the corner, ran full butt on a basket of cakes and apples, which an old barrow-wife was offering for sale; and with such force, that the contents shot abroad, like the water-rays of a trundled mop, and furnished extempore-on the spur of the occasion, as we say—a glorious scramble to the suburban youngsters, that were there making or marring this double holiday. But what words can describe the desperate outburst, the blaze of sound, into which the beldam owner of the wares exploded! or the "boil and bubble" of abuse and imprecation, with which the neighbor gossips, starting from their gingerbread and whiskey stands, and clustering round him, astounded the ears and senses of the ill-starred aggressor! a tangle-knot of adders, with all its heads protruded towards him, would not have been more terrific. Reeling with surprise and shame, with the look and gesture of a child, that, having whirled till it was giddy-blind, is now trying to stop itself, he held out his purse, which the grinning scold with one snatch transferred to her own pocket. At the sight of this peace-offering, the circle opened and made way for the young man, who instantly pursued his course with as much celerity as the fulness of the street, and the dread of a second mishap, would permit. The flame of Irish wrath soon languishes and goes out, when it meets with no fuel from resistance. The rule holds true in general. But no rule is of universal application; and it was far from being verified by the offended principal in this affray. Unappeased, or calling in her fury only to send it out again condensed into hate, the implacable beldam hobbled after the youth, determined that though she herself could not keep up with him, yet that her curses should, as long at least as her throat and lungs could supply powder for their projection. Alternately pushing her limbs onward, and stopping not so much to pant as to gain a fulcrum for a more vehement scream, she continued to pursue her victim with “ vocal shafts, as Pindar has it, or ὡς πρῖνος ἐμπρησθείς i. e. spitting fire like a wet candle-wick, as Aristophanes ! 46 And well if this had been all-an intemperance, a gust of crazy cankered old age, not worth recording. But, alas! these jets and flashes of execration no sooner reached the ears of the fugitive, but they became articulate sentences, the fragments, it seemed, of some old spell, or wicked witch-rhyme : Ay! run, run, run, Thou Devil's own! Pass The glass! the glass, Though there is reason to believe that this transformation of sound, like the burst of a bomb, did not take effect till it had reached its final destination, the youth's own meatus auditorius; and that for others, the scold's passionate outcry did not verbally differ from the usual outcries of a scold in a passion yet there was a something in the yell and throttle of the basket-woman's voice so horrific, that the general laugh, which had spread round at the young man's expense, was suspended. The passengers halted, as wonder-struck; and when they moved on, there was a general murmur of disgust and aversion. The student MAXILIAN-for he it was, and no other, who, following his nose, without taking counsel of his eyes, had thus plunged into conflict with the old woman's wares-though he could attach no sense or meaning to the words he heard, felt himself, nevertheless, seized with involuntary terror, and quickened his steps, to get as soon as possible out of the crowd, who were making their way to the pleasure-gardens, the Vauxhall of the Irish metropolis, and whose looks and curiosity converged towards him. His anxious zig-zag, however, marked the desire of haste, rather than its attainment and still as he pushed and winded through the press of the various gay parties, all in holiday finery, he heard a whispering and murmuring, "The poor young man! Out on the frantic old hag!" The ominous voice and the wicked looks which the beldam seemed to project, together with the voice-and we are all, more or less, superstitious respecting looks—had given a sort of sentimental turn to this ludicrous incident. The females regarded the youth with increasing sympathy and in his well-formed countenance (to which the expression of inward distress lent an additional interest), and his athletic growth, they found an apology, and, for the moment, a compensation, for the awkwardness of his gait, and the more than most unfashionable cut of his clothes. It can never be proved, that no one of the Seven Sleepers was a tailor by trade; neither do I take on myself to demonstrate the affirmative. But this I will maintain, that a tailor, disenthralled from a trance of like duration, with confused and fragmentary recollections of the fashions at the time he fell asleep, blended with the images hastily abstracted from the dresses that passed before his eyes when he first reopened them, might, by dint of conjecture, have come as near to a modish suit, as the ambulatory artist had done, who made his circuit among the recesses of Macgillicuddy's Reeks, and for whose drapery the person of our luckless student did at this present time perform the office of Layman.* A pepper-and-salt frock, that might be taken for The jointed image, or articulated doll, as large, in some instances, as a full-grown man or woman, which artists employ for the arrangement and probation of the drapery and attitudes of the figures in their paintings, is called Layman. POSTSCRIPT. Previously to his perusal of the several par a greatcoat,—but whether docked, or only outgrown, was open to conjecture; a black satin waistcoat, with deep and ample flaps, rimmed with rose-color embroidery; green plush smallclothes, that on one limb formed a tight compress on the kneejoint, and on the other buttoned mid-way round the calf of a manly and well-proportioned leg. Round his neck a frilled or laced collar with a ribbon round it, sufficiently alien indeed from the costume below, yet the only article in the inventory and sum total of his attire that harmonized, or, as our painters say, was in some keeping-with the juvenile bloom, and [mark, gentle Reader! I am going to raise my style an octave or more]—and ardent simplicity of his face; or with the auburn ringlets that tempered the lustre of his ample forehead! like those fleecy cloudlets of amber, which no writer or lover of sonnets but must some time or other, in some sweet Midsummer Night's Dream of poetic or sentimental sky-gazing, have seen astray on the silver brow of the celestial Dian! Or as I myself, once on a time, in a dell of lazy Sicily, down a stony side* of which a wild vine was creeping tortuous, saw the tendrils of the vine pencilling with delicate shadows the brow of a projecting rock of purest Alabaster, that here gleamed through from behind the tendrils, and here glittered as the interspace. Yes, gentle Reader!-the diction, similes, and metaphors of ticulars of the student's tout-ensemble,, I am anxious to inform the reader, that having looked somewhat more heedfully into my documents, I more than suspect that the piece, since it came from the hands of the Sartor of Macgillicuddy, had been most licentiously interpolated by genii of most mischievous propensities—the boni socii of the Etruscan and Samothracian breed; the "Robin Good Fellows" of England; the "Good Neighbors" of North Britain; and the "Practical Jokers" of all places, but of special frequency in clubs, schools, and universities. * The author asks credit for his having, here and elsewhere, resisted the temptation of substituting "whose" for "of which"-the misuse of the said pronoun relative "whose," where the antecedent neither is, nor is meant to be represented as, personal or even animal, he would brand, as one among the worst of those mimicries of poetic diction, by which imbecile writers fancy they elevate their prose-would, but that, to his vexation, he meets with it, of late, in the compositions of men that least of all need such artifices, and who ought to watch over the purity and privileges of their mother tongue with all the jealousy of high-priests set apart by nature for the pontificate. Poor as our language is, in terminations and inflections significant of the genders, to destroy the few it possesses is most wrongful. |