Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/444

428 of Sir Walter Scott," and by the agency of the prince of book-sellers, John Murray. This Sketch-Book he compares with that of a wayward trayelling artist, who, following the bent of his vagrant inclination, copies objects in nooks, and comers, and by-places; the result being a volume crowded with cottages, and landscapes, and obscure ruins, but neglectful of St. Peter's, or the Colosseum, the cascade of Terni, or the bay of Naples, and without a single glacier or volcano in the whole collection. This absence of aught volcanic or violent, removes the sketches from participation in Diderot's judgment, that "les esquisses ont communément un feu que le tableau n'a pas. C'est le moment de chaleur de l'artiste, &c." Look not in these esquisses for feu or chaleur. They are the placid, dreamy droppings of a limner's truant crayon, wandering over the paper at its own sweet will. Variety the collection designedly has; the collector's design being that it should contain something to suit each reader, to harmonise with every note in the gamut of taste. "Few guests," argued he, in arranging his Miscellany—"few guests sit down to a varied table with an equal appetite for every dish. One has an elegant horror of a roasted pig; another holds a curry or a devil in utter abomination; a third cannot tolerate the ancient flavour of venison and wild fowl ; and a fourth, of truly masculine stomach, looks with sovereign contempt on those knick-knacks here and there dished up for the ladies. Thus each article is condemned in its turn; and yet amidst this variety of appetites, seldom does a dish go away from the table without being tasted and relished by some one or other of the guests." Is pathos your passion? There is "The Widow and her Son," to ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears—the affliction of a widow, aged, solitary, destitute, bereaved of her last solace; and there is "The Pride of the Village," a love tale, and a tale of sorrow unto death—a prose elegy, most musical, most melancholy, on as pretty a low-born lass as ever ran on the green sward. Is humour to you a metal more attractive (though every true taste for pathos involves a hearty relish for humour, and vice versâ)? There is the discursive chapter on "Little Britain"—that heart's core of the city, that stronghold of John Bullism, as it seemed to Mr. Crayon, looking as usual through coloured spectacles, so that he here recognised a fragment of London as it was in its better days, with its antiquated folks and fashions, where flourish in great preservation many of the holiday games and customs of yore, and where still revisit the glimpses of the moon not a few ghosts in full-bottomed wigs and hanging sleeves, or in lappets, hoops, and brocade. Such a Little Britain was hardly to be found in Great Britain when Geoffrey pilgrimised amongst us; and is now traceable, in its merest outline, only in his Sketch-Book. Then, again, there is the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," recording the expedition of Ichabod Crane, and his adventure with the Goblin Horseman; and the essay on "John Bull," from an American point of view; and the "Christmas Dinner" at Bracebridge Hall, with boar's head and carol, with wassail bowl of "gentle lamb's wool," celebrated by Master Simon, in certain roistering staves about the "merry browne bowle" and the "merry deep canne," and followed by a Christmas mummery, superintended by a Lord of Misrule, in which Ancient Christmas duly figures away with a frostbitten nose, and Dame Mince Pie, in the venerable magnificence of a faded brocade, long stomacher, peaked hat, and high