'Among the flowers I loved best was the 'ladies' slipper;' and of all birds, the 'wood-pecker,' who reminded me of the shoemaker, by his 'tapping the hollow beech

tree.'

'I was invited freely to make a selection of scraps from the variety of all colors under the bench, where my friend presided, with a judicial gravity which would have become a higher sphere. Nor has the scrap-book of my riper years contained any thing so choice, in my view, as was thence transferred to my capacious pocket. Indeed, I felt as rich as the Emperor of Morocco.

'No person ever embodied more completely the description contained in the old song:

'THERE was an old cobbler who lived in a stall,
Which served him for parlor, and kitchen and hall;
No coin in his pocket, no care in his pate,

No ambition had he, nor yet duns at his gate.'

'It is quite probable that he was discreet in obeying the philosophical injunction, which I have chosen as my text, and contented himself with the useful but unpretending calling to which he confined his energies. During his whole life he had been a squatter, without ever being disturbed in his possession; and an appropriate tribute to his memory would have been a monument of cobble-stones.

'Thus my mind was early turned toward those intermediate agents in producing Christian resignation, in spite of bunions and corns. I have since observed how many proverbs, and sayings, and witticisms have had their origin in the vocabulary of the shoemaker. The young are enjoined on all occasions to 'put their best foot forward; ' to rely on themselves, and 'not to wait for dead men's shoes.' There is no more expressive term to signify the discovery of an obstacle than to say: 'We know where the shoe pinches.'

Whatever the value of a body, it is useless without a sole. It was a sentimental shoemaker who invented the name of ' Oxford Ties.' How appropriate to the friendships and associations formed at that celebrated seat of learning, and which had their origin in that place!

When one is haughty or presuming, he is said to be 'high in the instep;' when he has become poor, he is said to be 'run down in the heel.'

'Formerly, shoes were made so extravagantly long in France, that the toes had to be looped up, until at length a law was made reducing their length 'in toto.' There can be no more useful and economical proverb than the familiar one, that 'a stitch in time saves nine.'

'Lord BYRON was exceedingly sensitive on account of the deformity of his feet, which was probably the reason of his avoiding the 'clubs.' In HooD's 'Diary of a Joke-Hunter,' the unconscious punster of a coachman says: 'I expect to draw the boot of my vehicle on the heel of Lunnen Bridge by twelve o'clock.'

'A traveller in China says, that no Chinese will allow himself to be visited until his boots are on; and any one calling must wait till he has performed that part of etiquette. The Roman Catholics remove their hats in passing the door of a cathedral; and the Mohammedans take off their shoes on entering a mosque.

'An old gouty gentleman, having lost a pair of capacious shoes, said, that the worst wish he had was, that the shoes might fit the thief.

'The celebrated Radical HUNT made a fortune by the manufacture of shoe-blacking. After he obtained a seat in Parliament, Sir ROBERT PEEL satirically made an allusion in a speech to the shining qualities of his opponent. To which HUNT replied, that whereas he (HUNT) was the first of his family who had obtained a fortune by trade, Sir ROBERT was the first of his who had been able to live without trade.

'There have been several eminent shoemakers who, having taken Peg-asus for their

'FRAILTY, thy name is woman!

A little month; or ere those shoes were old,

With which she followed my poor father's body.'

'FOOTE, the actor and manager, had a wooden leg. COLEMAN says: "This prop to his person I once saw standing by his bed-side, ready dressed in a handsome silk stocking, with a polished shoe and a gold buckle, awaiting the owner's getting up. It had a kind of tragically comic appearance; and I leave to inveterate wags the ingenuity of punning upon a Foote in bed and a leg out of it.' Although rather too serious a subject for a pun, it seems somewhat of a paradox how a man could be so long a celebrated comedian with one foot in the grave!

"I turned down the sheet which was over him,' says TRELAWNEY, in his Memoirs of Lord BYRON, 'to satisfy myself about his feet — it was too true. He had the

face and form of an APOLLO, with the feet and limbs of a Sylvan satyr.'

'It is to be presumed that the philosophic and moralizing Mr. WELLER drew much of his experience in human nature, and fine arts, from the elegant occupation with which he beguiled his leisure moments at the White Hart.

'Mrs. PARTINGTON one day took up the paper, in which she saw something about the 'Shoe-Dealers' Bank,' and laying down her spectacles, she exclaimed: 'Law, me! I wonder who will have a bank next? I don't want any of their bills; I have had enough of 'em; and Mr. PARTINGTON was always complaining of their extravagant charger!'

'It is a custom still kept up among superstitious people, to throw their old shoes over their heads, for good luck, when vacating a house in which they have lived. To insure success, the person must not look behind after the performance of the operation.

'An old woman having predicted to her graceless son, that he would die in his shoes, the vagabond took the pains to kick them off, just previous to being hanged!

'It was said of a celebrated lawyer, that he kept a pack of thread in his hand, which he unwound as he proceeded in his speech. My ball is now unwound, and my paper being out, and the patience of my readers being exhausted, I must at last come to an end.'

Even so to the waxed end, we presume. PERTH GRANTON, you are a Sutor who shall not woo in vain for the favor of a place at our Table. WE are pleased to learn that BENSON J. LOSSING, author of the well-known 'Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution,' is at present actively engaged on a 'Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion,' which has received cordial well-wishes and warm praise from W. C. BRYANT, Professor LIEBER, EDWARD Everett, George TICKNOR, EPES SARGENT, R. C. WINTHROP, GEORGE S. HILLARD, JARED SPARKS, O. W. HOLMES, S. AUSTIN ALLIBONE, H. T. TUCKERMAN, JAMES R. LOWELL, and GEORGE W. CURTIS. They will be issued in twenty parts, to make altogether one thousand pages; will be superbly illustrated, and last, not least, will be published by GEORGE W. CHILDS, Esq., of Philadelphia, the well-known publisher of Dr. KANE'S 'Arctic Regions.' Persons possessing pamphlets, or other materials relating to the rebellion, will confer a favor by sending them to the author, B. J. LOSSING, Esq., Poughkeepsie, N. Y. THUS far, O friends! had KNICK progressed with his Gossip, leaving many things unsaid or unsung, when the sudden summons of the imperious 'type-master' incontinently abbreviated us. What there is left, behold will it not appear in the June number?

THE KNICKERBOCKER.

VOL. LIX.

JUNE, 1862.

No. 6.

SUN-SHINE IN THOUGHT;

OR, CHAPTERS ON THE CHEERFUL AND JOYOUS IN LITERATURE AND ART.

'FOR my part, I say it in all solemnity, I have become sincerely suspicious of the piety of those who do not love pleasure in any form. I cannot trust the man that never laughs; that is always sedate; that has no apparent outlets for springs of sportiveness and gayety that are perennial in the human soul. I know that Nature takes her revenge on such violence. I expect to find secret vices, malignant sins, or horrid crimes springing up in this hot-bed of confined air and imprisoned space, and therefore it gives me a sincere moral gratification, any where and in any community, to see innocent pleasures and popular amusements resisting the religious bigotry that frowns so unwisely upon them. Any thing is better than dark, dead, unhappy social life; a prey to ennui and morbid excitement, which results from unmitigated Puritanism, whose second is usually unbribed license and infamous folly.' — REV. DR. BELLOWS ON 'MIRTH.'

FROM the rural communes of the Atlantic States, much good has gone forth, mingled with inseparable qualifications, which to us, who hope for newer and more genial developments, and are opposed to such antiquated forms as cause more suffering than benefit, decidedly appear as evil. The good was, a stern independence, an appreciation of the value of education, the faculty of selfgovernment, as shown in well-managed town-meetings; and a persevering, incredibly varied industry, which has had the effect in all parts of America, where Puritan descent or influence has shown itself, of socially raising both farmer and mechanic above the level of the corresponding classes in Europe. The evil which was not so bad in its place, and which really was not an evil until it became antiquated and useless, since it was in the days of trial an element of strength — is that same grimness, that Pharisaical 'seriousness,' which has been in these later days so often an easy cloak of protection for narrowminded bigots and hypocrites. Hence it came that every ignorant fellow who had a mind to enforce 'respect'-every petty, bilious domestic tyrant, who VOL. LIX.

33

wished to make home a hell, and bend every thing to his conceits and egotisms, found it an easy matter to do so, by affecting austerity. Such men, forsooth, are serious! What matter if those who rebelled against this sourness, became by the very force of antagonism more desperately wicked and wretched; what matter if Pharisaism destroyed more souls than it saved; what matter if it destroyed all real appreciation of Beauty and Art, and fostered shams and oddities, and monstrous social distortions! those who lived within its charmed circle could always exclaim,' We are good, we are not as these publicans and sinners,' and the world granted it!

There was an eccentric humorist the well-known 'Yankee Hill'— who was wont, in one of his so-called lectures, to narrate his experience of one of those rural communities in which every man, woman and child was thoroughly penetrated by the conviction, that propriety of demeanor is identical with inflexible rigidity of countenance. Laugh if you will, dear reader I fear that we both in our time have met with far too many of these miserable martyrs to the most contemptible of all narrow-minded affectation — those poor wretches who are like donkeys indeed, in being the gravest of all animals. Well, our Hill, in this village of all propriety, gave one of his entertainments, which, however coarse, were certainly laughter-moving enough, consisting of quaint stories and broad, droll delineations of character. To his amazement, not a soul moved a muscle. He went on, he exerted all his powers of fun, he told his stories, which were wont to put whole theatres in a roar-all were silent. Some of the damsels indeed indulged in convulsive twitchings, and seemed to be suffering acutely inwardly; while others gave their friends hurried pokes with the elbow, but these demonstrations subsided instantly when the eye of the lecturer, or the attention of two or three were attracted by them. lence the exhibition concluded, and in silence they sought their homes. After all was over, and while Mr. Hill was reflecting in the bar-room over the apparent failure of his efforts to please, there approached a complaisant rustic, who in gratified tones began to congratulate the lecturer on his ability and success. 'Tell you what, Mister Hill,' said he, ‘that are show of yourn was wonderful; it railly was. It was jest all I could do- mind, I tell you to keep from snickering. I deu declare, I never came so near larfin' right eöut before, in all my life!'

renown

In si

Every age has its Protestantism, its earnest remonstrance of a few men, inspired by the Spirit of Truth, against antiquated shams and modern abuses. The purest Protestantism of the present day—since those who urge it are, of all reformers, the least likely to profit by their labors, either pecuniarily or in is that which is levelled at those errors and corruptions which both press and pulpit spare, be it from timidity, or because they believe them to be so entwined with a good old order of things, that to pull at the one will be to uproot the other. Who that thinks doubts that the leading political topics which rack the country, are much more than abstractions which would quietly settle themselves with the advance of industrial progress? But brawling and vain politicians must quarrel, and quarrel again over them, and howl to Buncombe, while the real business of Congress is shelved, or committeed out of

sight, and honest creditors of Government pine from year to year on the hope deferred, which maketh the heart sick. Is not legislation bought in every State through 'members of the third house,' or 'lobbyers,' and is not every bill a matter of purchase? Is not wretched, illiterate, 'sensation' trash puffed and brazenly trumpeted, and boldly defended as first-class literature ? stuff which poisons and enervates all youthful taste? If murder and outrage dress themselves in melo-dramatic forms, are they not promptly forgiven by the public, if the mise en scène was only sufficiently thrilling'? Is there sufficient law to control crime in our great cities, when leading forgers, and assassins, and thieves are intimate with ministers of the law, or sometimes with the highest dignitaries of the land, and live securely? Against all this, and much more, we need such protesting, such Protestantism as will force a sense of disgrace and neglect home to every citizen who holds a vote. And where are the voices which should thunder out these protests? Here and there, there is indeed one which manfully and in trumpet tones speaks well to the world. Such men I honor, as I do all that is greatest and noblest; honor them as exponents of that bravery which is one of the holiest principles of a pure nature. But where are the great majority of those who should be up and doing? What are they saying, what preaching? In how many sermons, how many lectures, how many books, ah! reader, will you find a vigorous onslaught on any thing save flat abstractions, and how many are there who take up the active, burning evils which are preying away vigorously on the souls of auditor, and reader, and the whole land?

Men who bear patiently with all more or less directly foster all of horrified at the tone and 'tenden

This terrible tolerance of glaring evils is accompanied by a very great intolerance toward petty violations of forms. the sins which I have enumerated, and who them, can be shocked at a harmless jest, be cies' of joyous philosophy, and grow eloquent over the sinfulness of dancing, Sunday-visiting, and opera-going; in fact, from my own studies of character among my fellow-countrymen, I feel compelled to assert, in all truth and sincerity, that I firmly believe that the great majority of the laity, who object to harmless amusements, and a cheerful, liberal cosmopolite tone of life, are generally guilty, more or less, either in their social relations, in politics, or in business, of what is really, stripped of all evasion, nothing but mean, hateful crime. This is all the natural result of the unnatural Pharisaism of which I have spoken. Drive Joy, drive Nature out of life, and you will drive the unnatural or criminal in. Tell a man that whenever he is merry he shall only sing psalms, and his canticles will be a spell to raise the Devil withal. Probatum est.

And here let me pause. Reader, if you are a truly religious man, born and bred under these influences, yet still so gifted with common-sense as to admit that Religion never was designed to make our pleasures less, methinks' I can see the puzzled, doubting air with which you have read all this; humming, and displeasedly exclaiming: 'Why, yes, what you say has doubtless much truth in it, but then the spirit of it is so improper; and if one tears away all these good old sober forms, why, who knows what dreadful results there may