Page images
PDF
EPUB

A smack of the antique is an excellent ingredient in gentility. A gentleman, to be the beau ideal of his order, should live in an old house, (if haunted, so much the better,) well stocked with old books and old wine, and well hung with family-portraits and choice pieces of the old masters. He should keep all his father's old servants, (provided they did not turn modern philosophers,) and an old nurse, replete with legendary lore. His old horses, when past labour, should roam at large in his park; and his superannuated dogs should be allowed to dose out their old age in the sun, or on the hearth-rug. If an old man, his dress should be forty fashions out of date at least. At any rate, his face should have something of the cavalier cut,-a likeness to the family of Vandykes; and his manners, without being absolutely antiquated, should shew somewhat of an inherited courtesy. In all, he should display a consciousness, that he is to represent something historical, something that is not of to-day or yesterday,-a power derived from times of yore.

How venerable is the escutcheon of an ancient family! How richly it glows in the window of their parish-church! the stained light that gleams through it is reflected from distant centuries. How awful are its griffins and wiverns! How mysterious the terms of heraldry, gules, azure, or-dexter and sinister!— Apply the same to the newly purchased coat of a new gentleman, and they are rank jargon, and the coat itself an unmeaning daub.

Yet antiquity is not always genteel. The Jewish nation is the greatest antiquity upon earth. It is a remnant of a dispensation that has past away. The law and the prophets are their family-history. Their

rites and customs, their food, their daily life, are derived from times long anterior to all records but their own. But, alas ! it is not good for nations to be antiquities. They cannot but fall to ruin; and a human ruin is not a ruined temple.

The Gypsies, as a relic of the old Nomadic life, may be regarded with somewhat similar, but less melancholy feelings. We know not that they were ever better than they are, though certainly the tide of society is daily leaving them farther behind. In the list of retrograde nations we may mention the Abyssinians. All their laws, customs, and forms, declare that they must once have been a civilized people. At present they seem to be barbarians, with a few antique traditions of civilization,-like Indians, armed with the weapons and clothed in the garments of some murdered European crew.

An antiquity, in short, to conclude instead of beginning with a definition, is not that which is merely old, but that which has outlived its time,— which belongs to another state of society, another age of man or nature, than that in which it is contemplated. It must not be of the essence of universal nature, for she is ever renewing; nor of pure reason, for that is eternal. Neither must it be a mere whim, an arbitrary fancy or fashion, having no ground in either; but it must be a mode, an emanation of nature,,a form which she has assumed and laid aside.

PINS.

How many occasions of instruction do we daily omit, or pervert to the worst purposes! How seldom are we aware, that every atom of the universe is a text, and every article of our household an homily! Few out of the immense female population of these realms but in some way are beholden to pins; and yet how few, how very few, derive any advantage from them, beyond a temporary concinnity of garments, the support of an apron, or the adhesion of a neckkerchief: they stick them in at morning, and pull them out at night, daily, for years, without enlargement of intellect, or melioration of morals.

Yet there is not a pin in a tailor's arm, not one that contributes to the annual groat of a miser, but might teach the wise of the world a lesson.

Let us divide it into matter and form, and we shall perceive that it is the form alone that constitutes it a pin. Time was when it slumbered in the chaos of brazen wire, amid the multitude of concentric circles, cycles, and epicycles. Time was, too, when that wire was molten in the furnace,-when the solid brass became as water, and rushed from its ore with a glowing rapidity. When this took place we know not; what strange mutations the metals may have undergone we cannot conjecture. It may have shone on the

breast of Achilles, or ejected the spirit of Hector. Who knows but it may have partaken of the sacredness of Solomon's lavers, or have gleamed destruction in the mirror of Archimedes?

From form, then, is derived disgrace or dignity; of which the poor passive matter is but the involuntary recipient; yet forms are all fleeting, changeable creatures of time and circumstance, will and fancy: there is nothing that abides but a brute inert mass, and even that has no existence at any time, but in the form which then it bears.

Just like this pin is man. Once he was, while yet he was not, even in the earth, from whence the fiery spirit which pervades all nature, and contains in itself the forms and living principles of all things, summoned him to life and consciousness. How various his subsequent fates!-how high his exaltation!-how sacred his offices!-how brilliant his genius!-how terrible his valour! yet still the poor human animal is the same clod of earth, or the same mass of bullion, that is sown by the seeds that float in the atmosphere of circumstance, and stamped by the dies of education and example.

See him in the decline, in the super-civilization of social life. He is sunk to a pin. His sole solidity is brazen impudence. His outside mercurial glitter, a counterfeit polish, as deleterious as it is attractive; composed of changeable fashions, that glide away like quicksilver, and, like quicksilver, are excellent to denote the changes of the season.

Consider the head of a pin. Does it not resemble those royal personages which the English have been in the habit of importing from foreign parts to govern

them? For, observe, it is no part of the pin, but superinduced upon it, a mere exotic,-a naturalized alien; or, like the noses of Taliacotius, adopted to supply natural or contingent deficiencies. It is a common remark upon a person of moderate intellects, that he has a head, and so has a pin; but I believe it is to our national rather than our individual heads that this is meant to be applied; for what similarity can there exist between the silliest head that grows between a pair of shoulders and an adventitious nob, owing its elevation wholly to the caprice or convenience of a pin-maker? But if the public head be intended, the analogy is strong enough for a commentator on the Apocalypse. A foreign prince, by the wisdom of a British parliament, became united to the headless trunk of the nation; becomes part of us by force of time and adhesion; yea the very part from which the rest derive honour and usefulness.

But if the head be thus dignified, shall the point want respect, without which the head were no head, and the shaft of no value, though, in relation to these noble members, it is but as the tail? Is it not the operative artificer, the pioneer to clear the way, the herald to announce, the warrior to subdue opposition? How aptly does this little javelin typify the frame of human society! What the head of a pin would be without its point, and the point without the head,— that were the labourer without the ruler, or the ruler without the labourer.

There is one more resemblance I would fain suppress, did not truth call for its statement. That pin may long glitter in the orderly rank of the paper, or repose in the soft security of the cushion; it may fix

« PreviousContinue »