Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/88

74 think," quoth he, "there was as much truth in them as in most Reveries." Not at all a startling proposition.

The Reveries he thus translates into trivial fond records, are four in number. One, over a wood fire—where the smoke is made to signify doubt (the question being wife or no wife, and the pros and cons summed up in an almost odious spirit of calculation), while the blaze signifies cheer, and the resultant ashes desolateness and bereavement. Another, by a city grate—plied first with sea coal, and then with anthracite. A third, over a cigar—lighted successively with a coal, a wisp of paper, and a match. And a last reverie, concerning the morning, which is the past; noon, which is the present; and evening, which is the future.

The earlier portion of these desultory sketches—which, with more unity of design, the author is of opinion would have made a respectable novel, but which he preferred setting down, in what he calls "the honester way," just as they came seething from his piping hot brain-pan, "with all their crudities and contrasts uncovered"=the incipient stage of these reveries is marked by a mocking-bird note, which is by no means the keynote of the volume. Badinage and banter—never ill-natured in the least, nor in any degree harsh and grating—are freely employed in the bachelor's preliminary cogitations; and he takes care to prevent your ultimately resolving him into a mawkish or miss-mollyish sentimentalist, by approving himself, in limine, a sharp-eyed, sharp-witted, sharp-spoken fellow. The same man who means to tax your lachrymal glands to the utmost, before he has done,—and to make a rapid succession of cambric concomitants necessary to every young lady-reader,—begins by all sorts of sordid and most unromantic disquisitions on wives by hypothesis. A possible Peggy, for instance, is introduced, who harasses her spouse by filling his house with plaguy relations, and who is suddenly, or by quick gradations of decay, discovered to be a fright, and who comes down to breakfast with a rough shock of hair and in such infernal slippers, and whose apology for the cold coffee is, that the complainant should not have been so long dressing,—while, as for the uneatable butter, she has no other, and hopes he'll not raise a storm about butter a little turned. There is an "I calculate" tone about the bachelor's method of striking the balance, in his matrimonial speculations, that has set some of Peggy's sex against him, and hardened their tender hearts against giving him their full sympathy when his hour of affliction (in reverie) is fully come. In his wailings of bereavement they regard him, therefore, only with the half-pity one vouchsafes to the Admetus of Euripides, who mourns his Alcestis in such self-occupied fashion as this:

Ah, what worse ill has man through life

Than to lose his faithful wife?

Better that I had dwelt alone

Without the consort—that is gone!

Happy are they whose life is single,

That never with these sweet ones mingle!

The grief for ills that only touch

A single life, is not so much:

But to perceive our children droop

Under disease's mortal swoop;

And to behold the bridal bed