Читать книгу: «International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science - Volume 1, No. 9, August 26, 1850», страница 2

THE DECAY OF GREAT FAMILIES

Not the least valuable parts of Burke's just published "Anecdotes of the Aristocracy," are a species of essay on the fortunes of families. The following is from a chapter on their decadence:

"It has often occurred to us that a very interesting paper might be written on the rise and fall of English families. Truly does Dr. Borlase remark that 'the most lasting houses have only their seasons, more or less, of a certain constitutional strength. They have their spring and summer sunshine glare, their wane, decline, and death.' Take, for example, the Plantagenets, the Staffords, and the Nevills, the three most illustrious names on the roll of England's nobility. What race in Europe surpassed in royal position, in personal achievement, our Henries and our Edwards? and yet we find the great-great-grandson of Margaret Plantagenet, daughter and heiress of George Duke of Clarence, following the craft of a cobbler at the little town of Newport in Shropshire, in the year 1637. Beside, if we were to investigate the fortunes of many of the inheritors of the royal arms, it would soon be discovered that

'The aspiring blood of Lancaster'

had sunk into the ground. The princely stream at the present time flows through very humble veins. Among the lineal descendants of Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, sixth son of Edward I., King of England, entitled to quarter the Royal arms, occur Mr. Joseph Smart, of Hales Owen, butcher, and Mr. George Wilmot, keeper of the turnpike-gate at Cooper's Bank, near Dudley; and among the descendants of Thomas Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, fifth son of Edward III., we may mention Mr. Stephen James Penny, the late sexton at St. George's, Hanover Square.

"The story of the Gargraves is a melancholy chapter in the romance of real life. For full two centuries, or more, scarcely a family in Yorkshire enjoyed a higher position. Its chiefs earned distinction in peace and war; one died in France, Master of the Ordnance to King Henry V.; another, a soldier, too, fell with Salisbury, at the siege of Orleans; and a third filled the Speaker's chair of the House of Commons. What an awful contrast to this fair picture does the sequel offer. Thomas Gargrave, the Speaker's eldest son, was hung at York, for murder; and his half-brother, Sir Richard, endured a fate only less miserable. The splendid estate he inherited he wasted by the most wanton extravagance, and at length reduced himself to abject want. 'His excesses,' says Mr. Hunter, in his 'History of Doncaster,' 'are still, at the expiration of two centuries, the subject of village tradition; and his attachment to gaming is commemorated in an old painting, long preserved in the neighboring mansion of Badsworth, in which he is represented as playing at the old game of put, the right hand against the left, for the stake of a cup of ale.

"The close of Sir Richard's story is as lamentable as its course. An utter bankrupt in means and reputation, he is stated to have been reduced to travel with the pack-horses to London, and was at last found dead in an old hostelry! He had married Catherine, sister of Lord Danvers, and by her left three daughters. Of the descendants of his brothers few particulars can be ascertained. Not many years since, a Mr. Gargrave, believed to be one of them, filled the mean employment of parish-clerk of Kippax.

"A similar melancholy narrative applies to another great Yorkshire house. Sir William Reresby, Bart., son and heir of the celebrated author, succeeded, at the death of his father, in 1689, to the beautiful estate of Thrybergh, in Yorkshire, where his ancestors had been seated uninterruptedly from the time of the Conquest; and he lived to see himself denuded of every acre of his broad lands. Le Neve states, in his MSS. preserved in the Heralds' College, that he became a tapster in the King's Bench Prison, and was tried and imprisoned for cheating in 1711. He was alive in 1727, when Wootton's account of the Baronets was published. In that work he is said to be reduced to a low condition. At length he died in great obscurity, a melancholy instance how low pursuits and base pleasures may sully the noblest name, and waste an estate gathered with labor and preserved by the care of a race of distinguished progenitors. Gaming was amongst Sir William's follies—particularly that lowest specimen of the folly, the fights of game-cocks. The tradition at Thrybergh is (for his name is not quite forgotten) that the fine estate of Dennaby was staked and lost on a single main. Sir William Reresby was not the only baronet who disgraced his order at that period. In 1722, Sir Charles Burton was tried at the Old Bailey for stealing a seal; pleaded poverty, but was found guilty, and sentenced to transportation; which sentence was afterward commuted for a milder punishment."

MADRID AND THE SPANISH SENATE

Gazpacho; or, Summer Months in Spain, is the title of a new book by W. George Clark, published in London. Gazpacho, it seems, is the name of a dish peculiar to Spain, but of universal use there, a sort of cold soup, made up of familiars and handy things, as bread, pot-herbs, oil, and water. "My Gazpacho," says the author, "has been prepared after a similar receipt. I know not how it will please the more refined and fastidious palates to which it will be submitted; indeed, amid the multitude of dainties wherewith the table is loaded, it may well remain untasted." It at least deserves a better fate than that. The volume relates, in a pleasant, intelligent, and gossiping way, a summer's ramble through Spain, describing with considerable force the peculiarities of its people, and the romantic features by which it is marked. The clever painter could not have better materials. The party-colored costumes of the peasants, like dahlias at a Chiswick show; the somber garments of the priests, the fine old churches, the queer rambling houses, looking centuries old, the dull, gloomy streets of Madrid, the life and activity of the market-place. Such are the objects upon which the eye rests, and of which Mr. Clark was too observant to neglect any. The following passages will give an idea of the materials of which the Gazpacho is made up:—

MADRID

"I left, I suppose, scarcely a street in Madrid which I did not traverse, or a church which I did not enter. The result is hardly worth the trouble. One street and church are exactly like another street and church. In the latter, one always finds the same profusion of wooden Christs, and Madonnas in real petticoats, on the walls, and the same scanty sprinkling of worshipers, also in petticoats, on the floor. The images outnumber the devotees here, as in all other Roman Catholic countries (except Ireland, which is an exception to every rule.) To a stranger, the markets are always the most interesting haunts. A Spaniard, he or she, talks more while making the daily bargain than in all the rest of the twenty-four hours. The fruit and vegetable market was my especial lounge. There is such a fresh, sweet smell of the country, and the groups throw themselves, or are thrown, into such pretty tableaux after the Rubens and Snyders fashion. The shambles one avoids instinctively, and fish-market there is none, for Madrid is fifty hours' journey from the nearest sea, and the Manzanares has every requisite for a fine trout stream, but water.

"Madrid has one peculiarity which conduces very much to the visitor's comfort, namely, that there are very few inevitable 'sights' to be gone through. The armory said to be the finest in the world; the palace, ditto (which people who are addicted to upholstering may go and see, if they don't mind breaking the tenth commandment); the museum of natural history, where is the largest loadstone in active operation between this and Medina; and the Academia, nearly complete the list. Everybody should devote a morning to the last-named, were it only for the sake of the Murillos. The famous picture of 'St. Isabel giving alms to the sick' has been arrested at Madrid on its return from Paris to Seville. As the Sevilians have instituted a 'process' for its recovery, it is likely to stay there for some time longer. 'The Patrician's Dream' is quite cheering to look upon, so rich and glowing it is. Shut your eyes to the semi-ludicrous effect of husband, wife, and dog, in a decreasing series, like the three genders in Lindley Murray, all asleep.

"The gardens of the queen, sunk in a deep hollow below the palace, deserve a visit. The head-gardener, of course a Frenchman, struggles gallantly against all kinds of difficulties of soil, climate, and lack of water. By a series of ingenious artifices he has concocted a plot of grass, some ten feet square, to the great astonishment of all natives."

NARVAEZ IN THE SENATE

"One day my kind friend Colonel S. took me to hear a debate in the Senado, the Spanish Chamber of Peers, which holds its sittings in the chapel of a suppressed convent, near the palace. By dint of paint, gilding, and carpets, the room has been divested of its sanctified aspect, and made to look like a handsome modern room. They have not thought it necessary that a place in which a hundred gentlemen in surtouts meet to discuss secular matters in this nineteenth century, should be made to resemble a chapel of the fifteenth. Antiquity is here represented in the person of two halberdiers, who stand to guard the door, dressed in extravagant costume, like beefeaters in full bloom. Rows of raised seats extend on each side of the room; in the center, facing the beef-eaters, are the chair and desk of the president, and on each side a little tribune, from which the clerks read out documents from time to time. The spectators are accommodated in niches round the walls. Each member speaks from his place, and the voting is by ballot. First a footman hands round a tray of beans, and then each advances, when his name is called, to a table in the center, where he drops his bean into the box. The beans are then counted, and the result proclaimed by the president. On the right of the chair, in the front, is the bench assigned to the ministers; and there I had the good luck to see Narvaez, otherwise called Duke of Valencia, and a great many fine names besides, and, in reality, master of all the Spains. His face wears a fixed expression of inflexible resolve, very effective, and garnished with a fierce dyed mustache, and a somewhat palpable wig to match. His style of dress was what, in an inferior man, one would have called 'dandified.' An unexceptionable surtout, opened to display a white waistcoat with sundry chains, and the extremities terminated, respectively, in patent leather and primrose kid. During the discussion he alternately fondled a neat riding-whip and aired a snowy pocket-handkerchief. Those who know him give him credit for good intentions and great courage, but do not expect that he will ever set the Thames on fire, whatever he may do to the Manzanares. He is a mixture, they say, of the chivalric and the asinine: a kind of moral mule. His personal weakness is a wish to be thought young, and hence he was naturally angry when Lord Palmerston wanted to give him a 'wrinkle.' I saw, likewise, Mon, the Minister of Finance, smiling complacently, like a shopkeeper on his customers; and the venerable Castanos, Duke of Bailen, who, as he tottered in, stooping under the weight of ninety years, was affectionately greeted by Narvaez and others. On the whole, the debate seemed to be languid, and to be listened to with little interest; but that is the general fate of debates in July."

THE KANASZ

Of the Servian swineherd we have heard something of late, both in history and romance; because this was the vocation of Kara George, the Servian Liberator. In Hungary the swine-keeper does not seem to be so respectable a person. Here is a sketch of him from Max Schlesinger's new book on the Hungarian war:

"The Kanasz is a swineherd, whose occupation, everywhere unpoetical and dirty, is doubly troublesome and dirty in Hungary. Large droves of pigs migrate annually into the latter country from Serbia, where they still live in a half-wild state. In Hungary they fatten in the extensive oak-forests, and are sent to market in the large towns, even to Vienna, and still further....

"It is a true enjoyment to live in these shady forests. The oak attains a finer and more luxuriant growth on the Hungarian soil than in any part of Germany. The hogs find food in profusion, and commonly stuff themselves to such a degree that they lose all desire for roving about: so that dog, master, and ass, lead a comparatively easy life, and are left to the quiet enjoyment of nature. But the lot of the Kanasz is a pitiable one when, at the close of summer, he has to drive his swine to market. From Debreczin, nay even from the Serbian frontier, he has to make a journey on foot more toilsome than was ever undertaken by the most adventurous traveler, pacing slowly over the interminable heaths in rain, storm, or under a burning sun, behind his pigs, which drive into his face hot clouds of dust. Every now and then a hog has stuffed itself so full as to be unable to stir from the spot; and there it lies on the road without moving, whilst the whole caravan is obliged to wait for half a day or longer, until the glutted animal can get on his legs again; and when at length this feat is accomplished, frequently his neighbor begins the same trick. There is truly not a more toilsome business in the wide world than that of a Kanasz.... The fokos is a hatchet, with a long handle, which the Kanasz hurls with great dexterity. Whenever he desires to pick out and slaughter one of his hogs, either for his own use or for sale, the attempt would be attended with danger, in the half-savage state of these animals, without such a weapon. The fokos here assists him; which he flings with such force and precision, that the sharp iron strikes exactly into the center of the frontal bone of the animal he has marked out; the victim sinks on the earth without uttering a sound, and the drove quietly proceeds on its way. That he can strike down a man with equal precision at eighty to a hundred paces, is proved by the gallows at the entrance of the forest—the three-legged monument of his dexterity. During recent events, too, the surgeons of the Austrian army will readily furnish the Kanasz and Csikos with certificates of their ability and skill."

THE "WILD HUSSAR" OF HUNGARY

France, Russia, Prussia, and other countries, have introduced the Hussars into their armies; but these soldiers are merely Russian, French, and Prussian cavalry, dressed in the Hungarian laced jacket: they want the spirit, the horse, and—the 'Magyar Isten.' For this reason, the Hungarian Hussar will not acknowledge them as brethren; and whenever he comes in contact with foreign Hussars, he lets them feel in battle the full force of his contempt. A story is told, that during a campaign against the French in the war with Napoleon, the bivouacs of the Prussian and Hungarian Hussars were near to one another. A Prussian came over to his neighbors in a familiar way with a glass of wine, and drank it to the health of his 'brother hussar.' But the Hungarian gently pushed the glass back, and stroked his beard, saying, 'What brother?—no brother—I hussar—you jack-pudding.'

This expression is not to be mistaken for a brag. The Hungarian hussar is no fanfaron like the French chasseur, but he is conscious of his own powers, like a Grenadier of the Old Imperial Guard. The dolmany, the csako, and the csizma, have grown to his body; they form his holyday dress even when off duty—the national costume transferred into the army; and as he is aware that this is not the case in other countries, the foreign Hussar's dress is in his eyes a mere servant's livery; and logically the man is not altogether wrong.

The Hussar, like the Magyars in general, is naturally good-tempered. The finest man in the service, he is at the same time the most jovial companion in the tavern, and will not sit by and empty his glass by himself when a Bohemian or German comrade at his side has spent all his money. There is only one biped under the sun who is in his eyes more contemptible and hateful than any animal of marsh or forest. This is the Banderial Hussar—that half-breed between Croat and Magyar, that caricature of the true Hussar, who serves in the cavalry, as the Croat in the infantry, of the Military Frontier. Never was an Hungarian Hussar known to drink with a Banderial Hussar; never will he sit at the same table: if he meets a snake he crushes it under foot—a wolf he will hunt in the mountains—with a buffalo he will fight on the open heath—with a miserable horse-stealer he will wrestle for a halter; but as for the Banderial Hussar, he spits in his face wherever he meets him.

It was at Hatvan, or at Tapjo-Bicske, that Hungarian and Banderial Hussars were for the first time in this war—the first time perhaps in the recollection of man—opposed to one another in battle. If looks could slay, there would have been no need of a conflict, for the eyes of the Magyars shot death and contempt at their unworthy adversaries. The signal of attack sounded; and at the same instant, as if seized by one common thought, the Hungarian Hussars clattered their heavy sabres back into the scabbard, and with a fearful imprecation, such as no German tongue could echo, charged weaponless and at full speed their mimic caricatures whom fate had thrown in their way. The shock was so irresistible, that the poor Croats could make no use of their sabers against the furious onset of their unarmed foe: they were beaten down from their saddles with the fist, and dragged off their horses by their dolmanys; those who could save themselves fled. The Hussars disdained to pursue them; but they complained to their Colonel at having been opposed to 'such a rabble.'—Schlesinger.

Original Poetry

A HOROSCOPE

BY ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH

"Quorum pars magna fui."

 
Oh! loveliest of the stars of Heaven,
Thus did ye walk the crystal dome,
When to the earth a child was given,
Within a love-lit, northern home;
Thus leading up the starry train,
With aspect still benign,
Ye move in your fair orbs again
As on that birth long syne.
 
 
Within her curtained room apart,
The pale young mother faintly smiled;
While warmly to a father's heart
With love and prayer was pressed the child;
And, softly to the lattice led,
In whispers grandams show
How those presaging stars have shed
Around the child a glow.
 
 
Born in the glowing summer prime,
With planets thus conjoined in space
As if they watched the natal time,
And came to bless the infant face;
Oh! there was gladness in that bower,
And beauty in the sky;
And Hope and Love foretold a dower
Of brightest destiny.
 
 
Unconscious child! that smiling lay
Where love's fond eyes, and bright stars gleamed,
How long and toilsome grew the way
O'er which those brilliant orbs had beamed;
How oft the faltering step drew back
In terror of the path,
When giddy steep, and wildering track
Seemed fraught with only wrath!
 
 
How oft recoiled the woman foot,
With tears that shamed the path she trod.
To find a canker at the root
Of every hope, save that in God!
And long, oh! long, and weary long,
Ere she had learned to feel
That Love, unselfish, deep, and strong,
Repays its own wild zeal.
 
 
Bright Hesperus! who on the eyes
Of Milton poured thy brightest ray!
Effulgent dweller of the skies,
Take not from me thy light away—
I look on thee, and I recall
The dreams of by-gone years—
O'er many a hope I lay the pall
With its becoming tears;
 
 
Yet turn to thee with thy full beam,
And bless thee, Oh love-giving star!
For life's sweet, sad, illusive dream
Fruition, though in Heaven afar—
"A silver lining" hath the cloud
Through dark and stormiest night,
And there are eyes to pierce the shroud
And see the hidden light.
 
 
Thou movest side by side with Jove,
And, 'tis a quaint conceit, perchance—
Thou seem'st in humid light to move
As tears concealed thy burning glance—
Such Virgil saw thee, when thine eyes,
More lovely through their glow,²
Won from the Thunderer of the skies
An accent soft and low.
 
 
And Mars is there with his red beams,
Tumultuous, earnest, unsubdued—
And silver-footed Dian gleams
Faint as when she, on Latmos stood—
God help the child! such night brought forth
When Love to Power appeals,
And strong-willed Mars at frozen north
Beside Diana steals.
 

BROOKLYN, August, 1850.