Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/232

222 and four in the afternoon. If we attend one of these receptions, which we undoubtedly shall do, we shall find him in court dress, as well as the foreign ministers, always excepting the envoy from the French Republic, who makes a point of going in what, to say the best of it, is an absolute dishabille!

As we leave the General’s we meet our friend the clothier at the corner of Second Street. He tells us he has been, the previous evening, to the New Theatre, where he has seen Mrs. Inchbald’s play, “Every One has his Fault,” with the farce of “No Song, no Supper.” “Mrs. Whitlock, sister to Mrs. Siddons, is the chief actress,” says he, “and the theatre is as elegant, convenient, and large as Covent Garden. I could have fancied myself in England again, the dress and appearance of the company, the actors, and the scenery were so English. The ladies wore the same small bonnets, some of chequered straw, and others had their hair full-dressed, without caps, just as in England. The gentlemen, too, had round hats, high collars to their coats, quite in the ‘mode’; yes, some of them even wore coats of silk striped!” The tailor-like enthusiasm of our friend is very funny, but we remember his trade, and excuse him. His brilliant description, however, determines us to see for ourselves what an American theatre is like. Circumstances compel us to defer our visit for a week or two, when we see the Philadelphia company in the Baltimore theatre. Perhaps we are unfortunate, for great is our disappointment. It may be that one person sees with a democratic eye, while the optic of another is tinged with aristocracy.

We are early in our places in the pit, the back row of which is taken up by a number of very well-dressed boys. These urchins set up a violent clamour, beating with sticks, stamping with their feet, and shrieking loudly for “Yankee Doodle” and “Jefferson’s March,” just as if they had been in the gallery. This juvenile spirit of liberty seems to please the occupiers of the boxes. The stench of tobacco smoke, the fumes of various intoxicating drinks, and the shouts of these youths would be sufficient, but, as if to complete our disgust, a critical-minded buffoon, noisy and coarse-tongued, makes comments, close behind us, in a voice louder than that of the performers. Often do we entreat him to be silent, but in vain; we are reminded that we are in the land of liberty! A London audience would have turned him out. Should we attempt to do so, the whole pit would interfere in his behalf. The play is “Coriolanus;” and, after loading with abuse the “supers” who swell the processions, enact the part of “plebs,” and crowd generally about the stage, when Coriolanus falls a sacrifice to the swords of Tullus Aufidius and the Volscian Chiefs, our buffoon roars out with many oaths,—“That’s not fair; three to one is two much; let him get up again and have a fair chance; one at a time, I say!”

Such are a few of the actual experiences to be met with in the newly United States during the last five years of the eighteenth century. 2em

the Rhine and the Moselle have their distinctive characters, so has the Main. It is through the whole of its course a peculiarly smiling, happy, devil-may-care river.

As the Rhine is strong, the Moselle beautiful, so is the Main genial. Its nature is fitly imaged in the pages of its peculiar poet, who however seems rather to have drawn inspiration than to have drunk water from its bed; the poet who was actually too full of the spirit of song to suffer the fetters of verse: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, who died in his house at Bayreuth as genially as he had lived, in his easy-chair, with his pet canaries hopping about his head. Well may the Germans call him the “only one!”

The Germans are proud of the Main, as they are proud of Richter, for his freedom from foreign shackles. If they cannot boast of their river as the Spartans did of their women, that he has never seen the smoke of an enemy’s camp, they can boast that an enemy has never permanently possessed a foot of his banks. But this is in great part owing to his central situation. Certain it is that the same race of Franks, freemen or nobles par excellence, who came into the country at the great migration, and went forth, a part of them, to subdue Gaul and make it France, still are dominant in their old haunts, and their women bind their heads in the traditional red kerchief of a thousand years ago. So Schiller testifies of this river—

Mine are but ruinous castles, in sooth, but still I console me,

Seeing the self-same race flourishing there as of yore.

The derivation of the word Main is a puzzle. Some say it denotes a stream with two arms, and was originally Mān, comparing it to that “forked radish with head fantastically carved” which is Carlyle’s definition of the species to which he belongs. Some again derive it from Mān or Mon, the moon-god, as having, like the crescent moon, two horns. This Mān is pronounced in middle Franconia, Moyn or Moen, hence the Mœnis of Pomponius Mela, and the Mœnus of Tacitus. Others think its name only denotes the main affluent of the Rhine, the Big River, as the ocean, from its size, is called the main.

In old times the Menapii dwelt on its banks, and derived their name from their habitation. The Main has the honour of having something in common with the Nile. As the Egyptian river is formed by the junction of the Blue and White Niles, so is the Frank river formed by the junction of the White and Red Mains, which, after it becomes a single stream, fertilises banks that bear wine, both white and red. The colours attributed to the streams are most probably derived from the colour their respective waters take from their bottoms. The Red Main springs from the Rothmansbrunnen in the Semmelsbuch, a lonely hamlet near Schwärtz, flows through Creuser, St. Johann and Georg near Bayreuth, and meanders on across fat Franconian plains to Steinhaus, where it is joined by the White Main after a run of