Читать книгу: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 17, No. 487, April 30, 1831», страница 4
SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS
FAMILY POETRY
—Modo sumptâ veste virili!—HOR
Zooks! I must woo the Muse to-day,
Though line before I’d never wrote!
“On what occasion?” do you say?
OUR DICK HAS GOT A LONG-TAIL’D COAT!
Not a coatee, which soldiers wear
Button’d up high about the throat,
But easy, flowing, debonair—
In short a civil long-tail’d Coat.
A smarter you’ll not find in town
Cut by Nugee, that Snip of note;
A very quiet olive-brown
’s the colour of Dick’s long-tail’d Coat.
Gay jackets clothe the stately Pole,
The proud Hungarian, and the Croat,
Yet Esterhazy, on the whole,
Looks best when in a long-tail’d Coat.
Lord Byron most admired, we know,
The Albanian dress, or Suliote;
But then he died some years ago,
And never saw Dick’s long-tail’d Coat.
Or, past all doubt, the Poet’s theme
Had never been the “White Capote,”
Had he once view’d, in Fancy’s dream,
The glories of Dick’s long-tail’d Coat.
We also know on Highland kilt
Poor dear Glengary used to dote,
And had esteem’d it actual guilt
I’ “the Gael” to wear a long-tail’d Coat,
No wonder ’twould his eyes annoy,
Monkbarns himself would never quote
“Sir Robert Sibbald,” “Gordon,” “Roy,”
Or “Stukely” for a long-tail’d Coat.
Jackets may do to ride a race,
Or row in, when one’s in a boat;
But, in the Boudoir, sure, for grace
There’s nothing like Dick’s long-tail’d Coat.
Of course, in climbing up a tree,
On terra firma, or afloat.
To mount the giddy top-mast, he
Would doff awhile his long-tail’d Coat.
What makes you simper, then, and sneer?
From out your own eye pull the mote;
A pretty thing for you to jeer!
Haven’t you, too, got a long-tail’d Coat?
Oh! “Dick’s scarce old enough,” you mean?
Why, though too young to give a vote,
Or make a will, yet, sure, Fifteen
’s a ripe age for a long-tail’d Coat.
What! would you have him sport a chin
Like Colonel Stanhope, or that goat
O’Gorman Mahon, ere begin
To figure in a long-tail’d Coat?
Suppose he goes to France—can he
Sit down at any table d’hôte,
With any sort of decency,
Unless he’s got a long-tail’d Coat?
Why Louis Philippe, Royal Cit,
There soon may be a sans culotte;
And Nugents self must then admit
The advantage of a long-tail’d Coat.
Things are not now as when, of yore,
In Tower encircled by a moat,
The lion-hearted chieftain wore
A corselet for a long-tail’d Coat.
Then ample mail his form embraced,
Not, like a weazel, or a stoat,
“Cribb’d and confined” about the waist,
And pinch’d in, like Dick’s long-tail’d Coat;—
With beamy spear, orbiting axe,
To right and left he thrust and smote—
Ah! what a change! no sinewy thwacks
Fall from a modern long tail’d Coat.
For stalwart knights, a puny race
In stays, with locks en papillote,
While cuirass, cuisses, greaves give place
To silk-net Tights, and long-tail’d Coat.
Worse changes still! now, well-a-day!
A few cant phrases learnt by rote
Each beardless booby spouts away,
A Solon, in a long-tail’d Coat.
Prates of “The march of intellect”—
—“The schoolmaster” a Patriote
So noble, who could ere suspect
Had just put on a long-tail’d Coat?
Alack! Alack! that every thick-
skull’d lad must find an antidote
For England’s woes, because, like Dick.
He has put on a long-tail’d Coat.
But lo! my rhymes begin to fail,
Nor can I longer time devote;
Thus rhyme and time cut short the tale,
The long tale of Dick’s long-tail’d Coat.
Blackwood’s Magazine.
SIR JOHN HAWKINS’S HISTORY OF MUSIC
The fate of this work was decided like that of many more important things, by a trifle, a word, a pun. A ballad, chanted by a fille-de-chambre, undermined the colossal power of Alberoni; a single line of Frederic the Second, reflecting not on the politics but the poetry of a French minister, plunged France into the seven years’ war; and a pun condemned Sir John Hawkins’s sixteen years’ labour to long obscurity and oblivion. Some wag wrote the following catch, which Dr. Callcott set to music:—
“Have you read Sir John Hawkins’s History? Some folks think it quite a mystery; Both I have, and I aver That Burney’s History I prefer.”
Burn his History was straightway in every one’s mouth; and the bookseller, if he did not follow the advice à pied de la lettre, actually wasted, as the term is, or sold for waste paper, some hundred copies, and buried the rest of the impression in the profoundest depth of a damp cellar, as an article never likely to be called for, so that now hardly a copy can be procured undamaged by damp and mildew. It has been for some time, however, rising,—is rising,—and the more it is read and known, the more it ought to rise in public estimation and demand.—Harmonicon.
ITALIAN, AT THE KING’S THEATRE
A Liberal and sensible correspondent of the Harmonicon writes thus:
Mrs. Wood is not the first of our countrywomen who has attained the same rank; the names of Billington, Cecilia Davies (called Inglesina,) and in remoter times, that of Anastasia Robinson, (afterwards Countess of Peterborough,) will immediately occur to the musical reader; but, with the exception of the latter, who lived at a time when the Italian opera in England was in its infancy, Mrs. Wood is, if I mistake not, the first Englishwoman who has achieved that distinction without a certificate of character from Italy. Even Billington was not thought worthy of our opera stage until she had delighted the audiences of San Carlo, the Scala, and the Fenice. Mrs. Wood, on the other hand, is our own, and wholly our own; she has not basked in the suns of Naples, nor breathed the musical atmosphere of Venice or Milan; yet I, who am an old stager, like Iago, “nothing if not critical,” and have heard every prima donna from Billington down to this present writing, have seldom uttered any brava with more unction than when listening to Mrs. Wood’s Angelina and Ottavia.
My intent is to hail Mrs. Wood’s appearance and success at the opera as an auspicium melioris ævi, as the dawn of a coming day, when the staple commodity of our Italian opera shall be furnished by our own island, instead of being imported from a country which, I boldly assert, does not produce either superior voices, or better educated musicians than our own—nay, so well educated. Has Italy ever furnished us with such a tenor singer as Braham; the Braham that I am, per mia disgrazia, qualified, by age, to remember; the Braham of 1801? Has Italy ever sent us a prima donna, considered as a singer only, like Billington? On the contrary, do we not, in gauging our progressive musical importations, subject them to immediate comparison with Billington and Braham? And who, except Catalani and Fodor, Siboni and Donzelli, would bear that comparison? The French, the Germans, cultivate assiduously native talent, and we import, now a Fodor, and now a Sontag; we English alone persist in the sapient policy of making the exclusion of the native artist from the highest point to which his ambition could be directed, the rule; and his admission, the exception which the grammarians say (though my grammar-master never could drive it into my head why) proves the rule.
But I shall be told that few of our native artists can speak the Italian language, or sing Italian music, and more especially recitative. My answer is, let them once know that the mere circumstance of their being English born does not shut the stage-door of the King’s Theatre against them, all will look up to its boards as the goal of their ambition, and the study of Italian and recitative will form an important part of every singer’s education. Another common objection is, that we cannot acquire the purity of pronunciation required by the refined audience of the King’s Theatre. I trust it is no heresy to say that I am somewhat sceptical as to the powers of euphoniacal criticism which that audience possesses. If one in ten, even of the box company, can really distinguish the true bocca romana from the patois of the Venetian gondolieri or the Neapolitan lazzaroni, it is, I am persuaded, as much as the truth will justify. In fact it is not the audience that is so critical: it is the associated band of foreign parasites who attach themselves to our aristocracy with the tenacity of leeches, as purveyors des menus plaisirs, and whose interests are vitally concerned in excluding English talent, and negotiating the concerns of foreign artists, that raise the cry of “pronunciation.” It is these gentry who, in phrase that a Tuscan would spurn at, and in a brogue from which a Roman, ear would be averted with disgust, assure our fashionable opera goers that we poor Englishers cannot learn to pronounce Italian.
But, after all, do we, by employing only foreigners—for we are not particular, so they be foreigners, as to whether they were born and bred beyond, or on this side the Alps,—do we, by employing only foreigners, secure this essential purity of Italian pronunciation? Will these super-delicate critics favour a plain man, by informing me which of the great singers I have heard for the last thirty years I should select as my canon of true Italian pronunciation—Catalani and Camporese, or Garcia the Spaniard and Begrez the Fleming? There is not more difference between the English, whether we look to phraseology or pronunciation, of a Londoner, a Gloucestershire man, or a Northumbrian, than there is between the Italian of a Tuscan, a Venetian and a Neapolitan. Have the stage lamps of Drury Lane or Covent Garden the virtue of curing the Northumbrian’s burr, or correcting the Gloucestershireman’s invincible abhorrence of h’s and w’s? If not, can we expect that even the theatres of Rome and Florence will neutralize at once the provincial accent of a Neapolitan or Venetian? Was it in Morelli, the stable-boy, or Banti, the street ballad-singer, that the beau ideal of pure Italian pronunciation was to be recognised?
But, to be serious. I will venture to affirm that, on this side the Alps, there is no country in Europe whose natives have so little to learn, or to unlearn, in acquiring a good Italian pronunciation, as the English. We have neither the gutturals of the German and the Spaniard, nor the mute vowels and nasal n’s of the French to get rid of; there is scarcely a sound in the Italian language which we are not in the daily habit of uttering, and nearly our whole task would be confined to the learning that certain conventional alphabetical symbols, which represent one sound in English, represent another in Italian. Away, then, with the jargonal pretence that English singers cannot acquire a good and pure Italian pronunciation; make it worth their while, open the stage-doors of the King’s Theatre to the native artist, and you will soon find talent more than enough.
