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THE SCRIBBLER.

Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coute, is a saying, the truth of which, I almost always experimentally feel, when sitting down to write a number of the Scribbler. Generally bewildered amidst a heap of letters, and a multiplicity of subjects, more time is taken up in endeavouring to make a proper selection, and put my matters in rank and file order, than is requisite for the penning of an elaborate essay; and I have frequently found myself more happy in the execution of my work, when I have rushed slap-dash into it, than when I have been putting on, and putting off, my considering cap, a dozen times. So, gentlefolks, although I have been nearly the whole morning, revolving and re-revolving the subjects which presented themselves to my attention, without being able to arrange any systematic plan, or rather having arranged three or four different ones, without being able to make choice of one; I will dash headlong on, and

Primo: give you the postscript of Jeremy Tickler’s letter, in my last, and a couple of notes upon his epistle, all which, were omitted for want of room.

P. S. I looked in the other evening, on a sparring club, lately established in this city, with the intention of sketching a few of its leading members, but their insignificance, (being a medley of taylors and counter-hoppers) determined me not to notice them, as being not worthy of the trouble, and much less of a place in your miscellany.^[1]

J. T.

To the Hudibrastic verse, quoted in his letter, I had appended the note^[2] at foot.

Next, I must do an act of justice in publishing the following letter.

Quebec, St. Lewis-Street 10th. Nov.

L. L. Macculloh, Esq.,

Since it has devolved upon Junius (amongst others) to dilate upon facts and other subjects, which your late correspondent Gratiano tacitly avows himself to be inadequate to, he has again taken up his two-edged sword^[3] to animadvert on the feeble efforts of a writer, who has, I trust, failed to depreciate, and prejudice the readers of your miscellany against, so able a competitor, as the person he has so grossly misrepresented; the more so, as his pen is devoted not against literary merits, but against unmerited misfortune.

Had Gratiano but perused the many publications emanating from the pen of the gentleman, whose name he has attempted to expose to public ridicule, he would be convinced, that neither Junius, Tom Brown, nor your readers in general, would countenance malice, unadorned with a shadow of wit, common sense, or truth^[4]; in a word the person designated under the appellation of Von Doctor, I am informed, is the one represented by you, as “the knight-errant against the quacks and empirics, those great desolators of the human race.”

Away with such an idle waste of time, but Gratiano, beware of

JUNIUS.

I have observed in the Quebec Mercury, of the 19th ult. two anecdotes, copied from No. 50 of the Scribbler, without acknowledgment; now, having borrowed them myself, (though I defy the editor of the Mercury, to point out, in any reasonable time, whence they were taken,) I should have considered them as fair game for any newspaper to avail of (not avail itself of, which is a barbarism, in the English language, which ought to be exploded,) had not one of them been of an indelicate description, the introduction of a few of which, became the occasion of the watch-yelp, with which the little curs once pestered the heels of my Pegasus. The editor of the Mercury, in his own attacks upon my paper, in May last, laid great stress on the alledged obscenity, impurity, and indelicacy of my writings, and now copies one of the most indelicate articles into his own columns. To be sure it is not very obscene, but then I contend it is one of the most so that can be found in the Scribbler, and comes with a very bad grace from the writer of the editorial paragraph of the Mercury, of the 7th May last. So much so, that it gives me a fair occasion of retorting upon him his own quotation from Cicero.

Qui sui hoc sumere ut mos corrigere alius, ac peccatum reprehendere, quis hic ignoscere, si quis in res ipse ab officium declinare.

“He that has taken this upon himself to correct the manners of others, and reprove sins, who would pardon him, if he himself should deviate from his duty in any thing?”

He did me the honour, on that occasion to liken me to Cleland, the reputed author of the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a book which few of my readers have not either heard of or seen: I doubt very much, the truth of the story as to Mr. Cleland, having received £100—per annum from government, in order to keep him from the necessity of again having recourse to similar means, in order to maintain himself, tho’ I have seen it recorded somewhere: but I have not at present any book at hand, in which that circumstance is related, and can not, therefore, either confirm or refute it. If he be the same Cleland, as the gentleman mentioned in the short biographical notice, added to his preface to the fourth edition of Pope’s Dunciad, which the reader may see below,^[5] it is evidently a very unlikely circumstance. As to the book itself, of which he is the supposed writer, the opinion that was given of it by the monthly reviewers, on its first publication, may from its being completely contradictory to the general sentiments relative to it, be considered as a literary curiosity. I copy it (in a note^[6]) from the 2d vol. of the Monthly Review, old series, page, 431. What would the society for the suppression of vice, of the present day say, if a character half as favourable were to be given to a publication half as lascivious as that is, by any modern critic?

I had made a memorandum for to-day’s Scribbler, to take the opportunity of fully replying to the whole of the attack, that was made on me in the Mercury of that date; but as I shall have occasion to take up the subject again, in defending, as I mean to do, in the preface to the present volume, (which will be completed after two more numbers,) the system of personal satire, I have resorted to; and as other objects call for my attention, I for the present take leave of Mr. Cary.

I am pleased to observe the dawnings of scientific research, appearing in Montreal, first, by the advertisement of the directors of the Montreal library, by which they acquaint the gentlemen at whose instance they undertook to receive into the library, donations for the formation of a PUBLIC CITY MUSEUM, that their arrangements are ready for the reception of articles of curiosity, that the public are willing to bestow, for so laudable a purpose, which may remain in the library, until a more suitable place of deposit can be provided for them. And secondly, by Mr. Tho. Del Vecchio’s advertisement of his intention of opening a museum of curiosities, shortly, (at No. 4, old market,) where he will purchase every curious article worthy of a place in his collection.

These are indeed laudable efforts to establish those auxiliaries of science, which are almost indispensable to the studies of natural history, geology, mineralogy, and history; & for which a most abundant harvest may be reaped, in the Canadas.

A botanic garden is the next desideratum for the benefit of colonial, agricultural, and domestic economy, as well as of science. If any gentleman, or society of gentlemen, should be inclined to propose an institution of that kind, the next spring, I beg leave to say, that I have a copy of the plan and rules of the Botanic Garden, at Liverpool, one of the best in England, and to the first establishment of which, I contributed, whilst resident there, which I am ready to communicate upon being applied to by letter.

L. L. M.

Mr. Scribbler,

In making a few cursory observations on the characteristics of the times, and the society we live in, I give vent to the feelings that my experience, young as I am, and my observation, confined as it has been, have awakened. Arrogance, and insolence, which are the constant attendants upon riches, when combined with ignorance, and the overbearing conduct of the lofty and the rich, towards the unpresuming and the poor, are to be combated on every side. Whether in public, or in private, no well regulated system, of conduct, will exempt any person from suffering by the tongue of slander, and the obloquy endeavoured to be thrown upon him, by the envious. If animated by a just and laudable ambition of shining in public life, then will the floodgates of the foulest calumny be let loose, and the most absurd, as well as the vilest, insinuations propagated against him. If, less aspiring, he is contented to remain in obscurity, he must suffer all those indignities, and insults, which such as wish to lord it over the creation in virtue of their wealth, or supposed rank, are in the habit of loading upon those whom they consider as their inferiors. In church or state, in law or physic, in civil court or party meeting, amongst legislators or religionists, all seem chiefly actuated by motives of self-interest,^[7] biassed by low prejudices, led astray by misrepresentations, and, what is worst of all, blinded by the most wilful ignorance.^[8] In a word, it may be said that justice is expelled the land. These evils you have, for a considerable time, faithfully endeavoured to stigmatise, holding the persons in whom they are exemplified, up to public ridicule, in hopes of being thereby able to bring about a reformation.—But, my dear sir, once nor twice, exposing such characters, will not accomplish an object, so devoutly to be wished for. No, it will require long and unceasing vigilance; it will require menace after menace, reprobation after reprobation; and even then, I fear, the attempt will prove fruitless, but fruitless as it may appear, we must always hope for the best. Those who can not take a joke, must have a kick. There is a maxim in the political world, and I believe it a very just one too, that “if you draw your sword against your sovereign, you must throw away the scabbard;” this maxim, I apprehend, equally applies to the moral satirist; and it is one, by the bye, to which you have pretty closely adhered, in contending with the wealthy and the wicked.

If these desultory remarks are of any service to you, it will be a satisfaction to

Yours &c.

HUGOLINUS.

Mr. Macculloh,

As your book is in such high repute as to be quoted even by the honourables, and all seem ready to obey the dictates therein laid down, I know of no better way than to address myself to you in the present instance. What I wish to lay before you, is the practice of borrowing books, and purposely forgetting to return them again, or rather, a polite manner of stealing them, which I find to be very much in vogue, in this place.—It is an evil, and a growing one; a practice so prevalent, Mr. Scribbler, that it is extremely difficult, and almost impossible, if you have any thing of a number of friends, to keep a few books; and you must either be content to lose many of your books, or most of your friends.—If you can devise any plausible method to remedy this evil, or pass an act to that effect, in your Edictum perpetuum, you will infinitely gratify, not a few of your most loyal adherents, and amongst others,

Yours truly,

SAM TINKER,

on behalf of himself and friends.

The above is an evil of universal extent, and immemorial existence, in the literary world.—Any edict, or order, on the subject, would be nothing but a brutum fulmen. The only plan that suggests itself to me, is this. That whoever possesses any books he is anxious to preserve, should, on lending them out, make an entry in a memorandum-book, of the time when, and person to whom lent, (for without such entry, the memory may be in error, both as to the person, and the book,) and, if not returned within a reasonable time, after three applications, I will, at the request of the lender, insert a gentle hint to the lendee, which if he does not, in another reasonable time, attend to, I will, if requested so to do by the lender, print the lendee’s name at length, in order to warn his other friends from also becoming the dupes of their good nature.

To begin,

The gentleman who borrowed from the Editor of the Scribbler, Le Pornographe, par Retif de-la-Bretonne, will oblige him by sending it in a parcel, carriage-paid, to him at Burlington, Vermont, by the mail-stage.

L. L. M.

Montreal Nov. 1822.

Mr. Macculloh,

By giving publicity to the following skeleton of a lecture, delivered at the General Hospital here, by the truly learned and enlightened Dr. M’Stephen, you will oblige, your constant reader,

PHILO-JONAH.

Dr. McStephen, addressing his pupils. Good morrow, my good students. This day has the appearance of being a very fine one; the atmosphere, however, continues cloudy. In sultry weather, my spirits are very much depressed, but that, you know, is easily accounted for, as it is indicated by the condensed (query whether the orator did not mean expanded,) state of the air. When I lectured on Tristomania, I had occasion to mention the various symptoms of that awful disease. Hypochondriasis is nothing more than condensed spiritus, as the learned call it: the spiritus is at all times seated in the attic regions of the caput; in misty weather it is condensed, and in fine weather it becomes more rarefied, and escapes through the perforations of the pericranium, leaving the head as empty as a base-viol. In misty weather, the capital membrane is considerably contracted, even so as not to permit the symptoms of risibility in a single muscle; the spiritus being thus confined within the limited precincts of the caput is forced volare per ora, sometimes to the great disgrace of the speaker. However, it acts very differently upon me, but I am an exception to the general rule. My head is at all times surrounded with such a quantity of hair, that it is impossible for the atmospheric air to affect my senses; and when I parade the streets, I generally keep stroking my head; sometimes turning it round to see if every one sees me; and these reiterated motions are partly a specific antidote against the attacks of that lamentable disease. I used to illustrate these things formerly upon the body of a louse, id est a body louse; but since my brother Charley, has left off the profession in which such insects abound, I am unable to explain myself so fully as I could wish. However, I expect to receive the corpus of the poor fellow that is shortly to be hung, and I shall then be able to perform wonders. I have been told that Dr. Carriole intends to apply for it, but I would as lief see Dr. Slack dissect his goose, or Dr. Spink his wooden leg; for as to anatomical ignorance, I am the man for it, I mean, that is to say, in the art of dissection, if he can slay, I can carve; but I have got rather too much into the profound; so all I will say is, that if do get this body, I will cut it up as neatly as if it were a pie of my brother’s making, and you Dr. O’Dodge shall certainly have the bladder for a bag pipe.

For the Scribbler.

DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCER, No. XVI.

Report says, that the calf-corps-adjutant, Mr. Jeo-pardy, is about establishing a singing school, at Chambly: from the specimen he gave last week in the episcopal church, he may be considered as peculiarly qualified for such an undertaking. N. B. He must beware of straining his voice as he did some nights ago, on his way home from mother Hellfire’s, as it may prove prejudicial to him in his new calling.

A correspondent from La Chine observes that, as clever as Sir Noodle M’Doodle thinks himself, as an engineer, and high as his talents are rated by the public, it is a matter of astonishment to many, that, after so long a siege, he has not as yet, obtained possession of the widow’s heart: it is whispered that he intends shortly, to try the effect of a coup-de-main.

The La Chine poet-laureate, having had an affair of honour, with a horsewhip lately, means to distribute a printed poetical address, among his numerous admiring friends, setting forth the hardships of his case, in not being allowed to lampoon a lady with impunity.

Communicated.—Modern Mount-Royal Gallantry. One of those new-created gentry, called bank-tellers did, on Saturday the 16th Nov. with that vulgar assumption of consequence that is every day to be seen in his phiz, behind the bank-counter, stop a young lady of one of the most respectable Canadian families in this place, in a caleche drove by a child: and turned the horse round, to lead them to the police-office, without assigning any reason to the lady, for so doing, or enquiring her name. Having seized the horse by the bridle, and taking the caleche on the way to the police, the good sense of a menial whispered better manners in his ear, and the lady gave him her name, which she was very ready to have done, without the unmanly threats with which he insisted upon knowing it. Query; had the caleche been driven by a man, would he have dared to show such impudence? I say

N. O.

Fashions for the ladies card-club. Light blue pelisses, trimmed with broad ribbon to match, round blue cloth turbands with a sweeping plume; tight laced corsets, and very small shoes to pinch the feet. This is all according to Hoyle.

The gentleman-clerk in the back store (he knows where) is advised when he goes to another ball with the servants, at a house not a great way from St. Mary’s foundry, to be cautious how he scales the walls on getting in to his bed chamber, lest he should be again discovered and exposed.

To be sold at auction on the Wednesday, after the next fire, at the bottom of the New Market, A quantity of live stock, and other articles, viz—

28 Students-at-law (these will go cheap, as the market is over stocked.)

A number of medical-students, who are tired of the profession; they will suit any trade in which thick sculls are useful.

18 rejected candidates for the editorship of the Mount Royal Gazette; they are generally speaking in good condition, bating their being a little ragged, but which is of no consequence.

A flock of between two and three hundred clerks, shop boys, and apprentices; some old hands, others newly imported, in varieties to suit all customers; persons desirous of supplying themselves for the winter will do well to attend. They will be sold a great bargain, in a lump, to any register office, to retail out.

A few old maids; which are sold for fear their noses should drop off by the frost during the winter. They are excellent for tea-parties, and card-tables.

The cork-screws and wine-glasses belonging to a certain regimental mess; the members of which consider them as superfluities, as in these hard times they can barely make out salt to their porridge, let alone black strap for the decency of the thing.

The genteel demeanour of a certain dandy-apothecary, who, having got a little above the world and himself, declares he has no further occasion for it.

Mr. Strutt’s consistency and patriotism, as he has provided himself with mock-articles of that description, that are much glossier than the true, at the store of Messrs. Loverule, Jarrett & Co.

With a great variety of other articles that will be detailed in future hand-bills.

HARRY-GO-NIMBLE, Auctioneer & Broker.

Continuation of the Domestic Intelligencer, in next No.

I now have to make an amende honorable for a very vexatious oversight, I find I committed in No. 45, (last volume). It is but very lately that I have been informed of a misconstruction that has unfortunately, and most unintentionally on my part, been applied to a part of the Report of the Quebec Agricultural Society, inserted in that number; which I should otherwise have instantly endeavoured to remove. In the communication of that report, there is the following passage, speaking of the pigs exhibited; “The third was ready for any body’s knife, of Irish breed, imported by one of the few emigrants from the Emerald isle, that have improved their condition here, and which is rather astonishing, considering his love for the crater.” The part in Italics, considering it as not very applicable to the gentleman in question, I left out, and thereby gave occasion to the phrase being supposed to allude to a lady instead of a gentleman; and to a lady too, whose unimpeachable propriety of conduct, rendered it incalculably worse: fortunately, however, this very circumstance has wholly destroyed the sting of such an inuendo, as every one who knew the lady became instantly sensible that it was as undeserved, as it would have been flagitious, had it been wilful. I know that nothing that I can say can be a proper atonement, yet as far as this explanation goes, I have been desirous of expressing my contrition, and making the best and only apology in my power.

L. L. M.

To Correspondents.  No Fiction, was already printed before it was countermanded. Belzebuth, and Entendez-vous, are received, and will partly be availed of; the want of a complete key will, however, cause their communications to be curtailed. Chambly Journal, No. 4. to hand, and will appear. The parody of Alonzo and Imogene also. Cut-up, Patrick, and Sancho, referred to Mr. Gossip. Ruth will be noticed, but there are some doubts as to the correctness of her statement.

BLACK LIST, No. II.

Persons who borrow the Scribbler, and constantly peruse it, but who are either too mean, too timid, or too prejudiced, to become subscribers, altho’ they are so situated in life as to be able very well to afford it.

Thomas Thain, Esquire.

Thomas A. Turner, proprietor of the Montreal Gazette, who, when he came into the management of that paper, contumeliously refused to continue the exchange which before regularly took place between Mr. Brown and the editor of the Scribbler, yet is a constant reader of it.—N.B. All the other papers in Montreal, exchange with the Scribbler.

John Ashworth, Esquire, D. A. C. G. formerly a subscriber; but who, notwithstanding his unceasing exclamations against it, now eagerly borrows it from the editor of the Herald, who receives it in exchange; and who regularly transmits it to his colleagues in the beef and pork-office.

N. B. I shall have no mercy upon subscribers who discontinue, and afterwards borrow it.

(To be continued.)

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of The Scribbler 1822-12-12 Volume 2, Issue 76 edited by Samuel Hull Wilcocke]