THE NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. RETROSPECTIONS AND ANTICIPATIONS. “Croyez le si voulez, si ne voulez, allez y voir.”— Rabelais. THERE is, in this season of the year, a something that predisposes a man to be grave; and is too apt to induce on the gayest temperaments "a lovely dejection of spirits and a delightful slow fever." Nor is this much to be wondered at. To say nothing of the fogs, and the winds, the sleets, and the cold thaws, and passing sub silentio, as things too awful to be trifled with, the Christmas bills, which even to a solvent debtor are by no means good for the digestion, the very fact of its being the close of the year is enough to shock nerves of any ordinary susceptibility. The end of anything (no matter what) is typical of mortality, and the bare sound of that dreary monosyllable "last" is pregnant with blue devils. But the end of the year, the closing of a solar revolution, bears so especially a resemblance to the end of life, that there is no resisting the suggestion. The tradesmen themselves, the least imaginative of the human race, whose ideas extend not beyond "you owe me," or " I owe you," are led by its memento to take stock, call in their monies, set "their house" in order, and prepare for a new life in the year to come. There was much wisdom, therefore, in the "wisdom of our ancestors" when they made the winter solstice the epoch of a high festival, in order that, by eating and drinking, they might keep up the radical heat, "drive dull care away," and set storms and duns at defiance. It is a pity the pious intention should so often be frustrated, that there should be no surmounting the depressing influence of the season, that beef and pudding should only be provocatives to somnolency, and that wine and wassail should stupify in place of elevating: but so it is. Do what you will with it, Christmas is inherently dull; and the family parties it assembles round" the festive board are as formal as a Dutch garden, and as dreary as cake and wine at a funeral. Perhaps, however, it will be said, that there is more of fancy than of fact in this picture, that Christmas has its cheerful frosts and its woodcock-shooting, that tradesmens' bills may be put in the fire, and that, as for the last day of the year, it is a mere matter of convention. As far at least as the glass can penetrate, no material boundary is discovered on the highway of time; there is no physical and corporeal turnpike in the heavens (if Mr. Herschell may be trusted) to separate old Anno Domini from his heir apparent. The year, it will be also urged, does not begin at the same season with all nations; and even in Old England, there is no lack of old-fashioned persons who have a mortal antipathy to the Jan.-VOL. XLIX. NO. CXCIII. B new style, for which, en passant, they ought to be sent to New-gate. We admit the force of this objection,-that is to say, stoically and cynically; but humanly and naturally, no. There is no arguing away a sensation, nor breaking up an inveterate association; so that, reason as we may, Christmas is, was, and ever will be a bore, and its kibed heels and rheums detestable. The only good thing about it (barring the school-boy's holidays, and the servant maid's misletoe) is, that it comes but once a year." But leaving this matter, as it respects mankind in general, to be carried out to a Q.E.D. by those whom it may concern, there is no denying that the beginning of a new year is a very serious piece of business to the editor of a magazine. It is at this season that he is especially called upon to conciliate his old customers, and to look out for new. Purchasers dislike to begin their subscriptions with a broken series, and disapprove of Horace's mode of rushing in medias_res; neither do they care to close with a journal in the middle of a volume. But, at the beginning of the year they are their own masters, perfectly free agents, released from the necessary cessation of titles and indexes, and they can drop you, or take you up, as whim, taste, or a desire for novelty may happen to dictate. This, then, is the season for magniloquent promises, and for ultra-active endeavours to carry such promises into execution, and to make head against the fascinating prospectus of new-born rivals, and renovated competitors. Woe to the periodical that opens the year with a bad number. On any other month, our Bonus Homerus may indulge in his nap with comparative impunity. In March, he may be cold as the east wind; in July, as languid and (as Horace Walpole calls it) as wet-paperish as St. Swithin himself, with all his sirocco vaporosity about him; or, in November, he may be as foggy and obscure as a back parlour in Milk-street,- that is, provided he takes up" in our next," and does not suffer his fault to grow into a habit. But in the January number, he must have all his wits about him. That is "the thing wherewith to catch" the countenance of the public, and he may well say with Hotspur, "sick now! droop now! This sickness doth infect the life-blood of our enterprize." To those of the craft, then, New Year's Day is no joke, and “ the compliments of the season" little better than a bitter irony-Heaven send us a good deliverance. Every recurrence of the season adds also to the difficulty of the task. We must not content ourselves with our average excellence, however high that may have been. We must "out-do our former out-doings," or folks will give us up as stale, flat, and unprofitable ;" and because they are satiated with good things, and have "supped full" of clever articles, they will call but the more loudly for fresh stimulation. Is there, then, such a thing in rerum naturâ as an infinite series in writing? and is everything sublunary to have its limits except Magazines? The devil take the wits of the last ten years; they have cracked our best jokes, told our best stories, and seized on our best subjects; and all this infernal plagiarism is suffered to pass without censure. Well, no matter; we must only make a virtue of necessity, and retaliate on the scoundrels, by serving them the same trick. Exchange is no robbery, and tit for tat is fair fighting; all we ask from the town is a clear stage and a short memory; and so, here goes. But before we open our account with the new year, it may be as well to wipe off old scores with its predecessor. Poor old 1836! rest its soul, for it had little rest enough while it was with us. Night and morning, late and early! it has an immensity to answer for! What with religion and politics, heresies and schisms; revolutions, and counter-revolutions; actions, and reactions; bad harvests and pecuniary crises; a rise in iron and a fall in stocks; and, above all, the eternal wrangling and jangling of newspaper editors (who, for want of other matter, are compelled to fill their overstretched columns with mutual abuse, till epithets have lost their vituperative force), it had scarcely one peaceable day in the 365. Oh! the misery of a modern newspaper! Formerly, a quick reader might finish one with his egg at breakfast; but now, the day is not long enough to skim through it; and all because the public insist upon purchasing by Mr. Spring Rice's superficial inches. The "Times" alone will exceed in quantity a moderate octavo volume. But, to return to 1836 and its concerns, the worst of the matter is, that this, its immoderate stir and bustle, was a mere much ado about nothing. For with all its note of preparation, its spirit-stirring promises, it left the world pretty nearly where it found it. Did it not lay itself under a formal obligation, in the shape of non-intervention, to put an end to the fighting in Spain? and are they not at it there, ding-dong, worse than ever? Did it not undertake to shoot King Louis Philippe flying? and "le petit bon homme vit encore." Did it not enter into an engagement with Mr. Bunn to revive the national theatre, and bring back the palmy days of play-going? and is not the stage more than ever dependent on foreign authors and foreign artists? and as for play-going, orders won't draw a house! But of all the broken promises of 1836, the most flagrant, is that concerning the march of intellect, and the schoolmaster abroad. We have looked over very attentively the annals of 1836, and must fairly own that, so far from progressing in intelligence, the condition of the defunct year afforded a good case for a writ de lunatico inquirendo. First we have to offer against the sanity of 1836, the doings in Exeter Hall, and the whole humbug of sectarian polemics which have filled the year! To what purpose has the last century passed over the heads of mankind-to what purpose have the great reformers lived and writtenand the lights of a brighter philosophy, and a purer religion, been shed upon the world, if it is still to be carried away by the "hypocrisy and nonsense" of the lowest mountebank pretenders to authority, and frightened from its propriety by knaves, fit only for the stocks and the whipping-post? To what purpose are peace on earth and good will towards men" revealed to mankind, if we are to suffer ourselves to be turned aside from the text of revelation by the comments of incendiaries; and professing tolerance, and protesting against human authority in matters of faith, to render ourselves the instruments of persecution, uncharitableness, and injustice. In Heaven's name, let us have our party politics and our party hates (if so it must be)-let us abuse O'Connell or decry Lyndhurst, ad libitum-but let us not brutalize ourselves and debase our intellects, by polemical disputes a propos des bottes, or stoop to the meanness of a lie, by passing our political wickedness under the respectable garb of religious zeal. If these things be not decisive against the sound reason of 1836, what shall we say of its dabbling in Homœopathy? What can be urged in behalf of intellects that can swallow the nonsense of infinitesimal doses? -doses that would not be felt in the economy of a microscopic waterion. Rochester is said to have once appeared as a mountebank in a country town, and to have sold empty phials, curiously sealed, as inclosing an invisible essence; but that was not in 1836. The patients of St. John Long had the satisfaction of visible and tangible evidence of the potency of his remedies, in the shape of a well-excoriated back. He, at least, did something for them, whether that something was profitable or not. They had some excuse, therefore, in believing in what they felt so acutely; but your gaping wonder-hunting Homœopathists believe in spite of evidence, and wisely look for effects in the precise inverse ratio of the causes. Credo quia impossibile est should be their motto. Most pregnant wiseacres-if one-millionth of a grain of anything works such miracles, what might you not expect from taking-nothing? How absurd, how farcical and extravagant is it, to boast of our universities and academies, of our professors, teachers, and education books, when the general intellect of the country is so cramped and unworked, that every charlatan-religious, political, medical, or scientific-is sure of an audience, and when no proposition is sufficiently monstrous to deprive its advocate of a following and a livelihood. We may know something of steam-engines; we may be able to calculate an eclipse, or to analyse a gas; but in everything that concerns a moral or metaphysical reasoning, we have an education to make; nay, we have retrograded considerably since the days of Locke, till we are scarcely capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood. It is almost useless, however, to pursue the proofs of insanity further. 'Tis "a mad world, my masters; "and evidence starts up at every turn, if the observer be himself sane enough to acknowledge it. What, for instance, will be thought of the balloon fancy of 1836?—as if the earth were not wide enough to hold our follies. What are we to think of the thousands who stood for the livelong day in the rain, and who paid their shillings for seeing that which might have been equally well seen for nothing, from any given point ten miles round the metropolis? But these were wise in their generation, when compared with him-" tribus Anticyris caput insanabile"-who volunteered to ascend, and paid a round sum for the very probable chance of breaking his neck, or, at best, for going up, like "John, King of France, with thirty thousand men,' merely to come down again. As for the poor devils who ascend for bread, there are numbers who earn theirs by means equally dangerous and disagreeable. We have no right to accuse the Romans of brutality, on the score of their gladiatorial shows, when we force our hungry fellowcitizens to risk themselves in a thousand different ways for the mere indulgence of our idle curiosity-when we make children dance upon ropes, men swallow swords, and women go up in balloons, in the hopes of their giving a sensation to the torpid spectators. We were once involuntary witnesses of Mme. Garnerin's descent in a parachute. When she cut the rope that fastened the machine to the balloon, the fall was for many seconds as rapid as that of a stone; and when the instrument expanded, and the fall was arrested in mid air, the vibrations were so extensive that it is wonderful how the poor woman preserved her situation and was not pitched headlong. Fortunately she reached the earth in safety; but no thanks to the hundred thousands of gobe-mouches who had urged her ascent, or to the government that permitted it. But to return to the Hero of Vauxhall, what delightful episodes were the umbrella and the money which he did not give to the poor sufferer! It is a pity she did not land his Highness on the moon to look for his lost Sovereignty and his no, there, twenty Astolfos could not have served him. All ballooning voyages, it might be said, are not thus purposeless; and the great balloon and the voyage to Coblentz may be cited as an instance to the contrary. We have heard people express a wish to have been of the party, in extacies at the pleasures of the voyage. Le joli chien de plaisir to pass the night in the clouds, and in darkness, with nothing visible beyond the car of the balloon, except an odd starwithout sense of motion, starving with cold, and with no sound to break the horrid silence, but the ticking of the watch, which marked the slow, slow passage of time;-and for what was all this encountered? To prove that a balloon will drive with the wind, and to frighten the poor citizens of Nassau out of their wits, who had never seen such an object in their lives! Inconceivable must have been the horror excited by the unwonted exhibition. Some mistook Mr. Mason for Faust, and his friend for Mephistopheles, bent on a trip to the Valpurgis; others thought it was the old gentleman in grey with Peter Schlemil's shadow; others mistook the whole thing for a cargo of transcendentals on its passage from vacuity to the university of Bonn; and even the Gross-Herzog himself thought at first that it was the French Revolution coming back again; and was much relieved when an old woman informed him it was only Lucifer in propriâ personâ. It is a strange thing that there should be truths, mathematically demonstrable, which mankind resolutely refuse to admit. The impossibility of a perpetual motion, for instance, and of the giving direction to balloons. It must be clear to intuition that no machinery can be applied to a balloon for altering its course, whose weight would not increase the bulk of the ball, and consequently the resistance to its own action, in a tenfold proportion. Yet the notion is working in a multitude of brains, to the ruin of their soundness and the spoiling of many a good night's rest. It is high time that this bubble were burst. Bubbles of another kind, but equally frail, are your temperance societies. How did it ever enter the head of man to talk down a natural appetite, or to reason man out of the beast that is within him? A room full of tea-drinking fanatics may look very pretty, but it proves nothing. Why, if there were any the slightest chance of putting down the vice of drunkenness, should we not have the revolt of the gin palaces, the agricultural interest in open arms, and its leaders in hysterics?— Nay, would not the very government itself take fright at so dreadfully revolutionary a symptom? to say nothing of the loss of revenue. Consols, however, are at 87, the revenue flourishes, and the distillers have nothing to fear. Talking of consols, leads to a more serious evil,-the state of the currency, and the prospect of pecuniary crisis. If there were one point on which men's sensibilities might be expected to be alive, and on which experience would be available, it is that of the pocket. Yet we very much fear that our retrospections for 1836 will not justify any very brilliant anticipations for the future. The lessons of the past will not be more serviceable now than formerly the; nation "will be ruined, |