He had stuck the Twenty First of June next to the Twenty Second of December, and the former looked like a Maypole siding a marrow-bone. Ash Wednesday got wedged in (as was concerted) betwixt Christmas and Lord Mayor's Days. Lord! how he laid about him! Nothing but barons of beef and turkeys would go down with him-to the great greasing and detriment of his new sackcloth bib and tucker. And still Christmas Day was at his elbow, plying him with the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and hiccup'd, and protested there was no faith in dried ling, but commended it to the devil for a sour, windy, acrimonious, censorious, hypo-crit-crit-critical mess, and no dish for a gentleman. Then he dipt his fist into the middle of the great custard that stood before his left-hand neighbour, and daubed his hungry beard all over with it, till you would have taken him for the Last Day in December, it so hung in icicles. At another part of the table, Shrove Tuesday was helping the Second of September to some cock broth, which courtesy the latter returned with the delicate thigh of a hen pheasant so there was no love lost for that matter. The Last of Lent was spunging upon Shrovetide's pancakes; which April Fool perceiving, told him he did well, for pancakes were proper to a good fry-day. In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of January, who, it seems, being a sour puritanic character, that thought nobody's meat good or sanctified enough for him, had smuggled into the room a calves' head, which he had had cooked at home for that purpose, thinking to feast thereon incontinently; but as it lay in the dish, March Manyweathers, who is a very fine lady, and subject to the megrims, suddenly screamed out there was a "human head in the platter," and raved about Herodias' daughter to that degree, that the obnoxious viand was obliged to be removed; nor did she recover her stomach till she had gulped down a Restorative, confected of Oak Apple, which the merry Twenty Ninth of May always carries about with him for that purpose. The King's health being called for after this, a notable dispute arose between the Twelfth of August (a zea lous old Whig gentlewoman), and the Twenty Third of April (a newfangled lady of the Tory stamp), as to which of them should have the honour to propose it. August grew hot upon the matter, affirming time out of mind the prescriptive right to have lain with her, till her rival had basely supplanted her; whom she represented as little better than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, while she (the legitimate BIRTHDAY) had scarcely a rag, &c. April Fool, being made mediator, confirmed the right in the strongest form of words to the appellant, but decided for peace' sake that the exercise of it should remain with the present possessor. At the same time, he slily rounded the first lady in the ear, that an action might lie against the Crown for bi-geny. It beginning to grow a little dusk❤ ish, Candlemas lustily bawled out for lights, which was opposed by all the Days, who protested against burning day-light. Then fair water was handed round in silver ewers, and the same lady was observed to take an unusual time in washing herself. May Day, with that sweetness which is peculiar to her, in a neat speech proposing the health of the founder, crowned her goblet (and by her example the rest of the company) with garlands. This being done, the lordly New Year from the upper end of the table, in a cordial but somewhat lofty tone, returned thanks. He felt proud on an occasion of meeting so many of his worthy father's late tenants, promised to improve their farms, and at the same time to abate (if any thing was found unreasonable) in their rents. At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days involuntarily looked at each other, and smiled; April Fool whistled to an old tune of "New Brooms;" and a surly old rebel at the farther end of the table (who was discovered to be no other than the Fifth of November), muttered out, distinctly enough to be heard by the whole company, words to this effect, that, "when the old one is gone, he is a fool that looks for a better.' Which rudeness of his the guests resenting, unanimously voted his expulsion; and the male-content was thrust out neck and heels into the cellar, as the properest place for such a boutefeu and firebrand as he had shown himself. Order being restored-the young lord (who, to say truth, had been a little ruffled, and put beside his oratory) in as few, and yet as obliging words as possible, assured them of entire welcome; and, with a graceful turn, singling out poor Twenty Ninth of February, that had sate all this while mum-chance at the side-board, begged to couple his health with that of the good company before him-which he drank accordingly; observing, that he had not seen his honest face any time these four years, with a number of endearing expressions besides. At the same time, removing the solitary Day from the forlorn seat which had been assigned him, he stationed him at his own board, somewhere between the Greek Calends and Latter Lammas. Ash Wednesday, being now called upon for a song, with his eyes fast stuck in his head, and as well as the Canary he had swallowed would give him leave, struck up a Carol, which Christmas Day had taught him for the nonce; and was followed by the latter, who gave "Miserere" in fine style, hitting off the mumping tones and lengthened drawl of Old Morti fication with infinite humour. April Fool swore they had exchanged conditions: but Good Friday was observed to look extremely grave; and Sunday held her fan before her face, that she might not be seen to smile. Shrove-tide, Lord Mayor's Day, and April Fool, next joined in a glee Which is the properest day to drink? in which all the Days chiming in, made a merry burden. They next fell to quibbles and conundrums. The question being proposed, who had the greatest number of followers-the Quarter Days said, there could be no question as to that; for they had all the creditors in the world dogging their heels. But April Fool gave it in favour of the Forty Days before Easter; because the debtors in all cases out-numbered the creditors, and they kept lent all the year. All this while, Valentine's Day kept courting pretty May, who sate next him, slipping amorous billets-doux under the table, till the Dog Days (who are naturally of a warm constitution,) began to be jealous, and to bark and rage exceedingly. April Fool, who likes a bit of sport above measure, and had some pretensions to the lady besides, as being but a cousin once removed,-clapped and halloo'd them on; and as fast as their indignation cooled, those mad wags, the Ember Days, were at it with their bellows, to blow it into a flame; and all was in a ferment: till old Madam Septuagesima (who boasts herself the Mother of the Days) wisely diverted the conversation with a tedious tale of the lovers which she could reckon when she was young; and of one Master Rogation Day in particular, who was for ever putting the question to her, but she kept him at a distance, as the chronicle would tell-by which I apprehend she meant the Almanack. Then she rambled on to the Days that were gone, the good old Days, and so to the Days before the Flood-which plainly showed her old head to be little better than crazed and doited. Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks and great coats, and took their leaves. Lord Mayor's Day went off in a Mist, as usual; Shortest Day in a deep black Fog, that wrapt the little gentleman all round like a hedge-hog. Two Vigils-so watchmen are called in heaven-saw Christmas Day safe home-they had been used to the business before. Another Vigil-a stout, sturdy patrole, called the Eve of St. Christopher-seeing Ash Wednesday in a condition little better than he should be, e'en whipt him over his shoulders, pick-a-back fashion, and Old Mortification went floating home, singing On the bat's back do I fly, and a number of old snatches besides, between drunk and sober, but very few Aves or Penitentiaries (you may believe me) were among them. Longest Day set off westward in beautiful crimson and gold-the rest, some in one fashion, some in another; but Valentine and pretty May took their departure together in one of the prettiest silvery twilights a Lover's Day would wish to set in. ELIA'S GHOST. OF EXAGGERATION AND MATTER-OF-FACT PEOPLE. THE truth should be spoken undoubtedly, and always spoken-that is, when we do speak. Silence may be a lie, under circumstances; but ordinary moralists will scarcely think it cognizable under the head of "telling lies." Not to perplex myself with fine distinctions, how few there are of those who open their mouths, that, with any kind of certainty and constancy, speak the pure truth. I have nothing to say just now of grave and pondered lies of the devil's colour; I advert only to that general laxity and inaptitude of expression in familiar discourse or description, which, with no great dishonesty of meaning, do violence in various degrees to things as they are, and are known to be. Exaggeration strikes one in a moment as the most common among colloquial misdemeanors, though, providing it at once come from the heart, and have some" method in it," I think it by no means unpleasant, nor, with all its boldness, so apt to mislead as many figures of a more cold and balancing character. If a man give me the right spirit of things, I can allow him a little harmless licentiousness in piling up of quantities. If he do not distort and disguise, he may magnify, and will not deceive or offend me. Let him not confound black with white, and I will not quarrel with him about very black, and very white. I should stipulate literally and formally for the "true stuff;" but, secure of this, a man may intensify it as he pleases: I understand him; I know his ardent ways and liberal measures, and can at any time dilute him down to proof. There is an inborn tendency in the human mind (where there is mind,) to amplification-to swell out beyond the limits of nature and truth. Our souls are too big for our bodies, and our perceptions and impressions pitched too high for the scale and circumstances of the physical world in which we live. Our middle-size belies us: we are all Patagonians in our hearts and our tongues-little creatures with our fifteen hundred steps to a mile, who nevertheless find this earth, with its spare desarts and untrodden forests, too circum scribed for our free elbow-room. Our language, our descriptive phrases, however they may be tamed down in signification by common use, have been framed as for a race of giants in a giant world. The more moderate among us, in describing the wonders of a gale of wind at sea, would scarcely be so narrow-minded as to talk of waves rising thirty or forty feet, instead of "mountains high." How should you credit that a man could be wet through two coats, unless he asseverated that it rained 66 as if heaven and earth were coming together," at the least? When the louse feeds," says Buffon, "the blood is seen to rush like a torrent into the stomach." Could one have said more, in severe justice, of a lion? This sublimity of style will not bear to be tried by the nice weights and measures of truth, yet it is not always adopted with the simple intention to deceive. The difficulty, as well as the desire, of exciting attention, urges us into dishonest vehemence and magnificent misstatements. The world is sufficiently fastidious not to feel curiosity about familiar appearances, common forms, and trite opinions. The only resource then is in the extraordinary: the object is not to inform but to surprise; and for this purpose we are driven, not to our experience, but to our invention. We must create: the Alps will not do we must pile Pelion upon Ossa. 』 Considerable art, however, is necessary in these daring efforts, or they may fail to produce the notice which they aim at, or any notice at all. Mere over-grown exaggeration will not astonish us; if its gross bulk be not quickened with a due proportion of liveliness, it is only so much waste and darkness. Some of our modern dramatists give us heroes and heroines of a monstrous size and shape; but, in their anxiety to make them big, they forget to make them men and women. As a ranting actor will tear a passion to rags, one of these improvident poets will blow it up till it is almost choked, and cannot speak to be understood. In their improvements upon the littleness of nature, they not only exceed her limits, but disfigure all her forms and proportions: they are faithful to neither the measure nor the pattern of her works. Their greatness is nothing but corpulency, uninformed with any principle of life and activity. We might bear a Cupid seven feet high, if he retained his accustomed beauty and sprightliness; but it is cruel to see our little favourite tumefied into a dull, unwieldy lump, a sort of anasarcous, or Daniel Lambert fairy, with no compensation for the change but in his increased dimensions and stone-weight. This style of exaggeration is frequently employed by persons of tame and unimpassioned spirits, and in their hands it is certainly a most deadening and overwhelming instrument. I know not how minds of such a temperament should deviate into such unsuitable vices; but so it is; we often see profound dulness troubled with a strange, lumbering ambition for the great and the wonderful. We do not complain of these heavy fabulists, that they strain, pervert, or obscure the truth: they convey no likelihood of it-no sign-no shadow; their uninspired exuberance falling upon you with the dead weight of sheer impossibility. There is often a perfidious solemnity and decorum in the general manner of the sort of persons I allude to, that adds greatly to the perplexity of their hearers. When a vivacious enthusiast bursts out into some violent description, his spirit, his look, tone, and gestures, at once alarm our watchfulness, and put us upon our guard. He has no sly and indirect means of lulling our suspicions and cheating us into belief. He may have his lies, but they are lies which wear their hearts on their sleeves. Not so with your slow, prosing hyperbolist, who with a steady eye doles out his cold extravagance and dull excess. You can come to no squares with him, yet you look at him and know not how to understand him. Nothing can be more puzzling. This anomalous variety excepted, I have rather a kindness than otherwise for a little honest exaggeration; and every species of it, leaden or mercurial, is preferable, I am ready to maintain, to its opposite-coldblooded and penurious exactness. The whole host of long-bow-men, light troops and heavy, are far less annoying, and, paradoxical as it may appear, less hostile to the more essential parts of truth, than the little teasing tribe-the minute, higgling worshippers of matter-of-fact. man who in a transport of passion gives an undue extension to any determinate quantity of time, or space, or any thing else, does not exaggerate in any ill sense; he deceives nobody except those without passion, the posts of the human race. His object is not to define a frigid reality as established by law, but to describe it according to the impression which it made, and was likely to make, upon his mind, under a particular state of excitement. He has no thought about "stubborn facts;" he makes them, and very fairly, I think, malleable to his will, and susceptible of any variations of form that his feelings require. People were cool and collected when they set about making facts; and it is very hard that a man in a fury should be bound by them. Ready-made facts will not suit him; they must be all purely his own. He is above statutes and tables, and will own no allegiance to common rules and measures. Surely he must be a very heartless person who will not admit, that an hour is not always neither more nor less than sixty minutes, and that a mile is not invariably only a mile. A matter-of-fact man has no conception of such an extravagance: he grants no indulgences; law is law with him, and he will abide by it to death. A mile, he will have it, is a mile; and the worst of it is, he has certain odious proofs and literal standards in his favour, which, backed by his oath, he will quote against a liberal adversary, till there seems nothing left for it but to own that the blockhead is correct. In vain you strive to move him from his position by appealing to his passions or his imagination, these gifts in him, (if he have them at all,) being under such certain controul, that he carries them about with him as securely and ceremoniously as his gloves and his stick. Never hope to exasperate him into a thought of apostacy from absolute Cocker, London measure, or avoirdupois. He stands out for a fact; and though it be stripped to positive nakedness, or robbed of its living marrow, he will still cling to it-still hug his bit of barren dryness, if it be but according to book and "his bond." I look upon these miserable fribblers as the most intolerable plagues that go about to disturb the ease, cordiality, and trusting freedom, of familiar conversation. One of these, among a company of lively men, is as bad as the "Six Acts." There is no speaking before him; he lies in wait for every trivial lapse, and is ready to arrest on the spot every unimportant misnomer of time, or place, or person. He will stop a good anecdote, just before its finest moment, to ask for its credentials; and cut off the dénouement of a pathetic tale to question its parish. To pun in his presence would be as bad as to deny his existence: he and equivoque (the name is enough) could never be brought together but to fight. The humour of the thing too is, that these poor starvelings, with their bigoted strictness and peddling precision, set themselves up for lovers of truth. But the truth is not in them, nor for them. A little niggardly truth, perhaps, a crumb of certainty, they may pick up; but of truth, in its entire spirit of "the whole truth," they have no notion. They will discriminate between John and Thomas, and authenticate a day of the month with fatal accuracy, and, to secure such points, will let the whole interest of a story, catastrophe and all, pass by them, "like the wind which they regard not." All that is warm, fluent, and animating in discourse, is husk and chaff to them, if there be not something that they can swear to: when the joke is complete, and the laugh has gone round, "Now," they will say, steadying themselves in their chairs, and collecting their powers, "let us come to particulars." With all their professed antipathy to exaggeration, they are themselves exaggerators of the most contemptible description-those who attach extravagant importance to trifles, and busy themselves to demonstrate circumstances that are not worth a thought. There is something noble at least in the error of a man who exaggerates only what is in itself great and exalted; but he that would measure a He hair, or weigh a feather, is guilty of an hyperbole (if so generous a term is not too good for him) that admits of no excuse. These scrupuliststhese baters down, are themselves far more remote from truth generally than those whom they are so pleased to charge with incorrectness. A man overpowered with thirst says, that he could drink the Thames dry-and I believe him-that is, I very distinctly apprehend that he is excessively thirsty. A matter-of-fact man would receive such an assertion as an insult, and would take upon himself to prove, if he could keep from passion, that it was, from the nature of things, an absolute falsehood. would lay down the maximum of a possible draught, and the way would be clear before him. He has no allowance for the natural language of an eager appetite; but summons up his soul, with all its experience, to justify the capacity of a quart pot. A lover about to be separated for a few weeks from his mistress affirms that he shall not see her again for ages-and he is perfectly rightor what man of spirit would condescend to fall in love? Who shall put definite limits to the duration of a week, a day, or an hour, spent in the absence or the presence of a mistress? The lover, with his weeks a century long, tells you pretty plainly that he is desperately impatient-tells you the truth, I contend, in contempt of any little huckster in matter-of-fact, who would compute the ardours of a lover with the same beggarly exactness with which he would measure a yard of tape, or compare the dates of a butcher's bill. I was walking once in company with two persons, one of whom was a fine, precipitate, ad libitum fellow, warm of heart, and hasty of tongue; the other, a simple, direct man, who looked at things in their just proportions, and was nice even to the smallest fractions in all his affirmations. Briefly, I was with an enthusiast and a matter-of-fact man. The former was miserable, and had every reason to be so, in regard both to his existing condition and his future prospects. He suddenly broke forth, "I never expect to be in any way better off than the wretched beggar there before us." "Yes |