Charles Lamb - The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb

Contemplating this natural safeguard, this fortified exterior, it is with pain I view the sleek, foppish, combed and curried, person of this animal, as he is transmuted and disnaturalized at Watering Places, &c. where they affect to make a palfrey of him. Fie on all such sophistications!—It will never do, Master Groom. Something of his honest shaggy exterior will still peep up in spite of you—his good, rough, native, pineapple coating. You cannot "refine a scorpion into a fish, though you rince it and scour it with ever so cleanly cookery." [55]

[55]Milton: from memory .

The modern poet, quoted by A. B., proceeds to celebrate a virtue, for which no one to this day had been aware that the Ass was remarkable.

One other gift this beast hath as his owne,

Wherewith the rest could not be furnished;

On man himselfe the same was not bestowne,

To wit—on him is ne'er engendered

The hatefull vermine that doth teare the skin

And to the bode [body] doth make his passage in.

And truly when one thinks on the suit of impenetrable armour with which Nature (like Vulcan to another Achilles) has provided him, these subtle enemies to our repose, would have shown some dexterity in getting into his quarters. As the bogs of Ireland by tradition expel toads and reptiles, he may well defy these small deer in his fastnesses. It seems the latter had not arrived at the exquisite policy adopted by the human vermin "between 1790 and 1800."

But the most singular and delightful gift of the Ass, according to the writer of this pamphlet, is his voice ; the "goodly, sweet, and continual brayings" of which, "whereof they forme a melodious and proportionable kinde of musicke," seem to have affected him with no ordinary pleasure. "Nor thinke I," he adds, "that any of our immoderne musitians can deny, but that their song is full of exceeding pleasure to be heard; because therein is to be discerned both concord, discord, singing in the meane, the beginning to sing in large compasse, then following on to rise and fall, the halfe note, whole note, musicke of five voices, firme singing by four voices, three together or one voice and a halfe. Then their variable contrarieties amongst them, when one delivers forth a long tenor, or a short, the pausing for time, breathing in measure, breaking the minim or very least moment of time. Last of all to heare the musicke of five or six voices chaunged to so many of Asses, is amongst them to heare a song of world without end."

There is no accounting for ears; or for that laudable enthusiasm with which an Author is tempted to invest a favourite subject with the most incompatible perfections. I should otherwise, for my own taste, have been inclined rather to have given a place to these extraordinary musicians at that banquet of nothing-less-than-sweet-sounds, imagined by old Jeremy Collier (Essays, 1698; Part. 2.—On Music.) where, after describing the inspirating effects of martial music in a battle, he hazards an ingenious conjecture, whether a sort of Anti-music might not be invented, which should have quite the contrary effect of "sinking the spirits, shaking the nerves, curdling the blood, and inspiring despair, and cowardice and consternation." "Tis probable" he says, "the roaring of lions, the warbling of cats and screech-owls, together with a mixture of the howling of dogs, judiciously imitated and compounded, might go a great way in this invention." The dose, we confess, is pretty potent, and skilfully enough prepared. But what shall we say to the Ass of Silenus (quoted by Tims), who, if we may trust to classic lore, by his own proper sounds, without thanks to cat or screech-owl, dismaid and put to rout a whole army of giants? Here was Anti-music with a vengeance; a whole Pan-Dis-Harmonicon in a single lungs of leather!

But I keep you trifling too long on this Asinine subject. I have already past the Pons Asinorum , and will desist, remembering the old pedantic pun of Jem Boyer, my schoolmaster:—

Ass in præsenti seldom makes a WISE MAN in futuro .

C. L.

Table of Contents

(1825)

For the Every-Day Book

What is gone with the Cages with the climbing Squirrel and bells to them, which were formerly the indispensable appendage to the outside of a Tinman's shop, and were in fact the only Live Signs? One, we believe, still hangs out on Holborn; but they are fast vanishing with the good old modes of our ancestors. They seem to have been superseded by that still more ingenious refinement of modern humanity—the Tread-mill; in which human Squirrels still perform a similar round of ceaseless, improgressive clambering; which must be nuts to them.

We almost doubt the fact of the teeth of this creature being so purely orange-coloured, as Mr. Urban's correspondent gives out. One of our old poets—and they were pretty sharp observers of nature—describes them as brown. But perhaps the naturalist referred to meant "of the colour of the Maltese orange," [56]which is rather more obfuscated than your fruit of Seville, or Saint Michael's; and may help to reconcile the difference. We cannot speak from observation, but we remember at school getting our fingers into the orangery of one of these little gentry (not having a due caution of the traps set there), and the result proved sourer than lemons. The Author of the Task somewhere speaks of their anger as being "insignificantly fierce," but we found the demonstration of it on this occasion quite as significant as we desired; and have not been disposed since to look any of these "gift horses" in the mouth. Maiden aunts keep these "small deer" as they do parrots, to bite people's fingers, on purpose to give them good advice "not to venture so near the cage another time." As for their "six quavers divided into three quavers and a dotted crotchet," I suppose, they may go into Jeremy Bentham's next budget of Fallacies, along with the "melodious and proportionable kinde of musicke," recorded in your last number of another highly gifted animal [ see page 358].

C. L.

[56]Fletcher in the "Faithful Shepherdess."—The Satyr offers to Clorin,

—grapes whose lusty blood

Is the learned Poet's good,

Sweeter yet did never crown

The head of Bacchus; nuts more brown

Than the squirrels' teeth that crack them.——

Table of Contents

(1826)

Apology will scarcely be required for introducing a character, who at this season of the year comes forth in renovated honours, and may aptly be termed one of its ever-blues —not a peculiar of either Farringdons, nor him of Cripplegate, or St. Giles in the Fields, or of any ward or precinct within the bills: not this or that "good man"—but the universal parish beadle . "How Christmas and consolatory he looks! how redolent of good cheer is he! He is a cornucopia—an abundance. What pudding sleeves!—what a collar, red, and like a beef steak, is his! He is a walking refreshment! He looks like a whole parish, full, important—but untaxed. The children of charity gaze at him with a modest smile. The straggling boys look on him with confidence. They do not pocket their marbles. They do not fly from their familiar gutter. This is a red letter day; and the cane is reserved for to-morrow."

For the pleasant verbal description we are indebted to an agreeable writer in the "London Magazine;" [57]his corporal lineaments are "borrowed" (with permission) from a new caricature, [58]if it may be given so low a name, wherein this figure stands out, the very gem and jewel, in a grouping of characters of all sorts and denominations assembled with "infinite fancy" and "fun," to illustrate the designer's views of the age. It is a graphic satire of character rather than caricatura; mostly of class-characters, not persons; wherein the ridicule bears heavily, but is broad and comprehensive enough to shift from one neighbour to another.