Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/443

Rh wooden-legged—a hero of chivalry struck off by the hand of native at a single heat—a beautiful relique of old-fashioned bigotry—a perfect fossil of effete notions—a peremptory and pugnacious man, who would stomp to and fro about the town, during political ferment, with a most war-betokening visage, his hands in his pockets, whistling a low Dutch psalm-tune, which bore no small resemblance to the music of a north-east wind when a storm is brewing. The very dogs, as they eyed his excellency, and heard his wooden foot-fall, skulking anywhither in dismay. It argues a significant talent for ironical composition and easy badinage in Mr. Irving, that he has sustained to the last, in this perhaps over-long history, the quaint tone of subdued comedy and simple gravity which marks its opening. It abounds in pungent reflections profitable for later times, and likely to remain applicable until the last public quack and parliamentary humbug and official mountebank shall be no more.

"Salmagundi" belongs to the same—the earliest—stage in the author's literary career, and partakes of the same satiric features. But the satire is good-natured enough in both cases, and indeed comes from too kindly a heart to be impregnated with any very bitter stuff. What Byron callsAnd against such it is not Geoffrey Crayon's mission to set himself in array.So that, although it is not for him, "good easy man, full surely," to confront and apprehend gigantic vice stalking in the streets, or to extinguish the "guilty glare" blazing from what threaten to be "eternal beacons of consummate crime," yet he can speak on the hint,And, albeit, the fools have nine lives, and kind Geoffrey's scourge, or cat, hath only one; he lays it on with what appetite he may. He certainly has the gift "d'apercevoir le ridicule, et de le peindre avec grace et gaieté." And as certainly, he has had no such "evil communications" with a mocking spirit as to corrupt his "good manners," or freeze his warm heart.

Hitherto Mr. Irving had catered for the New World. He was now to identify himself with the literators of the Old, by publishing "The Sketch-Book," under (to use his own words) "the kind and cordial