as a sequent distractions, which seemed to import that I was to participate with my ears alone. Well, the literary lions were fed; I resigned myself to absorbent attention. Such sentiments and sentences! Such subtle distinctions of their myriad-minded selves from the many-headed outside! Such witticisms! strange and sombre as flashes from thunder-clouds! Their laugh was the most serious part of all; it put me in mind of the desolate shrieks of a South-American aviary. Their esprit du corps was affectation, which stalked about like a spectre, scaring away every thing good or beautiful. The very pabulum of their minds was book-mould. Their every idea seemed flicked on foolscap; thoughts done up in paperscraps, like curls: their brains were like Genoa filagree, imitations of imitations; they were themselves unreal beings, brought together in an epicycle of feeble reflection. A cloudy-looking man would serve up some rechauffe sentiments of love or philosophy, which, it was evident, had been hashed and hashed over again, to be reproduced on periodical occasions. Another pamphlet-minded being would bring up some unctuous paradox, all writhing with ingenuity, which he would revolve with the luscious gusto of a Hottentot rolling a rich grub-worm under his tongue and then the incomprehensible rejoinders and replications; and eke the Baronne at the piano with harmonious hand and many a silky sigh ugly as the angel above a church-door-singing an ariette to her soulman must be the pink of chivalry and pearl of gallantry to believe that she has a soul--and her great blue-boiled eyes gleaming with entusymusy and tea. Then the soul-dissecting critiques of the would-be wits and can't-be gentlemen,' who discuss petits operas comiques and grand operas lamentables as you might expect a drummer to play the harp; and then there is a tall and tender species of monster who 'piles on the poetics, 'thick and slab,' like a mud-fresco, with his hand on his heart, and with such a bungling grace that Job himself would feel incited to choke him. Enough of boudoir belles-lettrists, who, 'bit by the dipsas,' instead of striving for the laurels of publication, are content to repose on the roses of coterie criticism, and to pour forth the efflux of their souls at such bas bleu reunions as this, which, in turn, award to their virgin modesty and Virgilian elegance a kind of double-refinedfourth-proof fame; a fame like the order of the garter, most flattering because most select. I listened duly and dutifully to half-a-dozen of these garbled farragoes of fudge; the miscarriages of blasé brains; prosopopeias of absurdity: they were execrable enough, but more deserving of commiseration than malison. Books have done wonders for them; taste, nothing. Just to see them turning up their old vellum-colored noses at the dynasty of dames and dandies of the KURSALL, which stands 'between the wind and their nobility,' and from whose light canons they discept so virulently; and to hear a new proselyte of their club recite an ode in which he styles their literary labyrinth the abode of the muses,' and congratulates the Baronne on her classical proximity - just twenty stadia distant to the Fountain of Hippocrene, as he profanely designated this Sangrado-Hall! 'At last I felt sick of imitating Job. I was in the clouds, out of my element, and like the Emperor Augustus, I aspired to descend. A fièvre de cheval was upon me: my lungs refused any longer to breathe the affectation of their air. The stream of their discourse had been gradu ally widening and widening, with a yawning expansion, until at length it stagnated into a dismal lake, over which a laudanum mist seemed to impend. The aesthetic tea had been drunk to a drought, and the metal dew-point, when the brain-atmosphere deposits its most ethereal reveries, was reached the BARONNE VON BLUDGEONBORE was reclining amid her elegant and refined sensibilities, like a cat in crockery, when I completely lacerated her delicate notions of bienséance by rising to go. The truth is, that a charming Highland hoyden, who had been ill-starred enough to accompany me thither, had nearly contracted a strabismus through her despairing efforts to keep awake; and we mutually released each other from the situations in which we had so long remained, like Guatimozin and his minister, each on his own coals. We left them to their metempsychosis of dulness, and never returned to the scene where I had outraged the first principles of my being.' 'At your old lunes-satirizing. But, good diable boiteux, who is the flabby little man, following like an ancient divinity, all wrapped in a cloud?' 'You mean that spaniel-man, freighted with a pipe and shawl. Did you ever see a man emit smoke with such a rushing abandon? That's the Baronne's husband, or male adjunct; for, not being literary, he cannot live on the same platform. He is as vain, and at the same time as insouciant of his wife as was King Candaules. The Baronne, according to him, is un ange de savoir et un diable d'esprit. Poor fellow! he solaces himself well enough with his mistress- his pipe. It's the cus tom of the country, you know, on a plus de fumée que de roti in Germany. Every body smokes; every thing smokes. Why, this very spring is introduced all the way from the reservoir up-hill, smoking in a pipe. Why then should the beer-blooded men abstain? I am convinced that the BARON VON BLUDGEONBORE would sooner part with his eye-tooth than his pipe. 'Do you see that group of men, all aloof and listless? That's the way with your veteran gamblers, always milk-and-watery in the morning; ascetics by day and Sybarites by night. In them you behold a Junto of Jasons, who are here, like the Argonauts of old, on an expedition after the GOLDEN FLEECE: it remains to be seen whether they will end or not in being fleeced themselves. As you value your appetite, as well as other tastes, let me conjure you not to engage in play. Look now at that miserable knot of conspirators, as they appear before breakfast, wrapped in the solitude of their atrocious mystery: the 'Secret Ten' of Venice were Samaritan saints in aspect, compared with them. If you are weary with the riant side of life, and wish to view its blacker features, you have only to come to the Kursall at midnight, and to watch the string of smileless souls who pour forth from the Saloon of Finance, looking as if just emerged from the Cave of Trophonius. Poor devils! they have forgotten how to take pleasure in any thing else. They remind me of the old man liberated from the Bastille, who found the uncongenial world without so unattractive to his vacant soul that he sighed again for incarceration. Baden, by the design of nature and the instrumentality of M. Benazet, is a refined Arcadia; but to the perverted vision of such men as these, it wears only the soil of the California which they seek.' O frosty Age? Are Care, Pride, Envy, Vanity, and Fear, Like Love, immortal? or do these dwell here ? And Truth, Hope, Peace-congenial, simple, pure Reason, Delight-shall only they endure Beyond the limits of thy chilling stage, O hoary Age? O frosty Age! how chilling upon mine While Youth's vain dreams at Passion's broken shrine Spare me awhile the terror of thy glance; I was born in the year 1803, in an eastern city. I state this because it is the custom, whenever one begins a sketch in the auto-biographic style, to name the native place, whether it be an important point or not. To me, this question about a birth-place is a matter of small moment. I should have reached the same position I now hold, had I been brought into the world under a hedge. An error of civilization will always invest a man with honor, whatever may be his character, if he be born in a palace. I scorn such a feeling. My parents being in comfortable circumstances, I received a good education. We lived in a large, old-fashioned house, near what is now the heart of the city. Long since, the mansion disappeared, crushed by the march of commerce. I will mention here as a curious fact, that after the death of my parents, and before the old house was demolished, my brother Tom, a silly, reckless fellow, (as you will see,) wandered about it, and even obtained the key, and moped for an hour or two in the deserted rooms, particularly his mother's chamber. It is a wonder that the moisture of the damp walls, oozing through the ragged paper, and the wind from the broken window-panes, did not make him sick; but I suppose the excitement springing from the sentimental nonsense rife in ill-regulated minds, destroyed the ill effects of the musty air. I was never a favorite at home, even when a boy. My mother, to be sure, was always kind; but she loved my brother Tom and my sister Nancy better, a great deal better than me. My father was a strange sort of a man, and talked but little. He never liked me. My brother and sister rather avoided me; and Nancy, especially, never gave me reason to suppose she did any thing but fear me. I do not know the reason of this. I was always well-behaved; my principles were of the first order, and are to this day. I gave her a great deal of excellent advice, which she never followed. Many a lesson, too, has Tom had from me, concerning the proper course to succeed in the world. I might as well have advised infants. When I was old enough to see that I was not liked, I wisely kept away from them, and attended to my own affairs. Having no fondness for play, I have, since my thirteenth year, engaged in no game whatever; therefore, in my boyhood I had no intimate companions. Why should I associate with boys when my mind was far away from them and their pursuits? The only lad I had any particular liking for, was John Solomons, a youth of Jewish parentage; and he cheated me out of ten dollars in an affair of boyish traffic. I respected his adroitness, but the loss of the money galled me; and from that time I had no dealings with him. I was the more grieved in this matter, as I had arranged, as I supposed, to make the above sum out of him, when, by an unlooked-for and masterly stroke in the course of the negotiation, he obtained the advantage of me. While very young, I observed the advantage which wealth gains. I noticed the general love of gold. Foreigners, particularly Englishmen, say it is the peculiar vice of this country. It is false. It is peculiar to no country; and during my visit to England, whither I went on important financial business, I found that, in that land, it was a passion which absorbed all the rest; it was even stronger there than the idolatry of rank, which is saying a great deal. The burly islanders have one great gift which quite charmed me the art of keeping money after they get it. In this they are greatly in advance of us, for I consider our grand national fault to be an inability to hoard money, which is very painful to an enlarged mind. I say that I discovered early the great point to be gained in this world, and since that time I have devoted myself to the acquisition of wealth. I have always been strictly honest, but also strictly economical. I think a man has a right to his own: and if I do not choose to throw away my thousands to colleges or charitable institutions, in what am I to be blamed? What I have måde I will keep. Let each man take care of himself. When my mother died, I was about twenty-nine years of age; my brother Tom was twenty, and my sister Nancy seventeen. After this event, Nancy was much broken down: Tom was as bad as any woman I ever saw, while my father seemed to fail from that hour. Back-biters in the mercantile world have accused me of being heartless. They do not know me; for I am sure I was very sorry when my mother died, and when she blessed each of us before she departed, I wept. But why was it, that while Tom and Nancy grasped her hands and caught the unspeakable love of her dying-look, while my father knelt by her side, gazing in dry-eyed agony at her features, which the hand of death had already touched; why was it that I stood in comparative calmness at the foot of the bed? Some may say I wanted feeling; some may cant about heartlessness; but I say it was because I had been treated coldly by the family, and had gradually been induced to regard myself as a stranger at home. Did I not know that I was as capable of loving my mother as Tom, (who, by-the-bye, could never lay up a cent in the world,) could I have been allowed? Then what use is there in all this humbug about feeling? Perhaps the reason of Tom's greatness in my mother's eyes lay in the fact of his being a handsome fellow, for that sort of thing always takes with women. And I-to speak plainly-I was ugly. I am said to have a strange cast in my eye, which gives me a disagreeable expression. An enemy of mine has called it a stony, wicked look, as though I could help it if it were so. I am thin in person, and in early youth was afflicted with dyspepsia, which imparted to my haggard features a yellow tinge. Therefore, to fools and silly girls my form and features might have been unpleasing; but what of that? I thank |