Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/307

290 abhorrence of mean selfishness; the same laughter-love in the fair bedlam earth; the same deafness to the world's, but not to honour's, voice;—these were no more than the first faint lines of similitude which constituted them one soul lodged in two distinct bodies. Neither is the fact that they were foster-brothers of study, and had the same sciences, even to jurisprudence, for their nurses, of any great weight, seeing that frequently the very similarity of studies acts upon friendship as a deleterious dissolvent. Nay, even the discrepancy occasioned by their opposite polarity, Siebenkäs being more inclined to forgive, Leibgeber to punish; the former being more of a Horatian satire, the latter more of an Aristophanic pasquil, full of unpoetic and poetic harshnesses,—is sufficient to account for their being suited as they were. But as female friendship rejoices in likeness of apparel, so their souls wore the undress and morning-suit of life,—their two bodies, I mean,—altogether of the same trim, colour, button-holes, lining, and cut; both had the same brilliancy of eye, the same sallowness of countenance, the same stature, leanness, and all the rest; for indeed nature's prank in producing likenesses is much more common than is generally supposed, because it is remarked only when some prince or other great man is imaged forth in a bodily counterpart. I could have wished, therefore, that Leibgeber had not been limping, and thereby given occasion to distinguish him from Siebenkäs; more especially as the latter had cleverly abraded and extirpated the mark by which he too might have been distinguished from the other, with the cautery of a live toad burst upon the mark, which consisted in a pyramidal mole by the side of his left ear, in the shape of a triangle, or of the zodiac light, or of a comet's tail reversed; in fact, of an ass's ear. Partly through friendship, and partly through relish for the mad scenes which were occasioned in every-day life by their being mistaken for one another, they wished to carry their algebraic equation yet further, by bearing the same Christian and surnames. But this involved them in a contest of flattery; for each insisted on becoming the other's namesake, until at last they settled the dispute by each retaining the name taken in exchange, after the Otaheitean fashion of exchanging names together with the hearts. As it is already some years since my hero has had his honest name filched from him by his name-thief of a friend, and has got the other honest name instead, I know no help for it in my chapters, but am obliged to produce him in my muster-roll, even as I presented him at the threshold, as Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs, and the other as Leibgeber (i.e. ' Bodygiver '), —although I want no critic to tell me that the more comical name Siebenkäs (i.e. ' Sevencheese ') would be better suited to the humorous visitor, with whom it is my intention by-and-by to bring the world better acquainted than even with myself."— Siebenkäs, s. W., t. xiv. pp. 31-33.

We have selected this passage, both as the key to that thimbleriggery and exchange of persons upon which the whole plot of