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JOHN DECASTRO: A QUAINT RÉCHAUFFÉ.

THERE is a notion abroad, not altogether unfounded, that the world will not willingly let a good book die. The world ought to know its own interests too well for that, and, far from willingly contributing to such a catastrophe, it frequently falls into the opposite extreme of maintaining the rickety offspring of weak or unsound brains in a kind of artificial life by dint of coddling and puffing. Nevertheless, it sometimes happens that some rare spark of genius, either from appearing at an unpropitious juncture, or from containing in itself some element hostile to existence, or from some other untoward cause, becomes extinct without having ever attracted the regard even of the discriminating few, far less of that immense court of judicature known as the reading public; and in its untimely end some sense, wit, or pathos, some images which might have occupied permanent niches in the language, or characters that might have become familiar to our regard as personal friends, are lost to the world for ever.

Nobody whose acquaintance with us is not (unfortunately for them) of considerable standing, would suspect that we had ever been a great reader. A more utterly illiterate person than we have been for several years past does not exist, the various causes of which have followed each other in such dire and unrelenting succession as to assume the appearance of fatality. The first of these causes was an idea which occurred to us that we could write a book, and which we immediately acted on, producing a work, of the religiousnovel class, so full of passion and pathos as to set all the impressionable females in England weeping. One of these Niobes conceived such an attachment to the author that she opened a correspondence with us, and as she possessed considerable charms of person and mind, we returned her passion with all the ardour of our impetuous temperament. Hence arose obstacle the second in the way of our reading;

for what with receiving and returning love-letters, carving her name on walls, trees, and articles of furniture; writing sonnets to her eyebrow, watching for her in shops and at street-corners, meditating deeply on what she had said to us at our last interview, and what we intended to say to her at the next one; quarrelling from jealousy and making it up from love, and the like engrossing occupations-our leisure was so completely monopolised that we remained utterly ignorant of all the most distinguished publications of the day. Our attachment coming suddenly to an unfortunate termination-viz., the marriage of her we loved with another person-we resolved to seek consolation and oblivion in travel, and have left a record of our passion, in the shape of the letters H. H. (the lady's former initials) on the tocador of the Alhambra, on a pillar of the temple at Belbek, on the Great Pyramid, and on a large iceberg at the mouth of Wellington Sound, where they were mistaken by a Polar navigator for a memorial of Franklin's party. Returning quite cured, with the intention of making up our leeway in literature, the war broke out, and our next age shifted into the soldier, "full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard;" and through the whole campaign we never looked at any works except those published by Todtleben, which we perused diligently every day through the medium of a telescope. The result of this longprotracted abstinence from books is an utter distaste for reading, and we have pretty nearly made up our mind never to peruse anything more, except our own articles in the Magazine. Meantime we have, of course, fallen altogether behind the age. Schools of religion and philosophy have sprung up, been discussed, opposed, and supplanted, of the principles of which we are unhappily ignorant; wonderful discoveries have been made, of which scarce the faintest echo has reached our ears; and the greatest modern works of fiction -Macaulay's History, Thackeray's

novels, and Dickens's later serials are as unknown to us as if they had been written in cuneiform characters on the walls of a Babylonian temple. So that in the field of modern literature, far from being a match for people of our own class, we should be easily defeated by the least intelligent of those operatives whose minds have been enriched by cheap literature, and by the addresses of Lord Carlisle, M. Kossuth, and other itinerant lecturers.

Though filled at present with this singular aversion to all printed matter, we cling with all the constancy of a first affection to those works which had the love of our youth-and what a reader we were in our boyhood, childhood-nay, in our very infancy! There are some books the first perusal of which we can by no effort of memory recall-a perfect acquaintance with them seems coeval with our birth. Between two and a half and three we remember meeting with a good many standard works for the first time we were at that time a profound critic, and we distinctly remember disliking, on artistic grounds, the catastrophe of the Yellow Dwarf, and demurring to the plot of Fortunatus; while on the other hand, we considered (as we do now) Hop-omy-Thumb, and Riquet with the Tuft, works of the highest genius. But, as we have said, there are some creations which seem to us mixed up with a still more remote epoch in our literary life and opinions; we can no more remember our first knowledge of them than our first glance at our wet-nurse. Two will we mention dearer than the rest, one (which every child has read) being the Arabian Nights; the other (which very few men, women, or children have read), the History of John Decastro.

It will perhaps be said that the deep undying regard we still enter tain for this latter work is owing to the immaturity of our judgment when we first took a liking to it, and that our persistence in admiring it is the obstinacy of a weak mind unable to free itself from first impressions. To this we reply, first, that we were born a critic-there was no period of our history when we

did not think Doctor Watt a worthy noodle-and had Dickens's works been read to us in the cradle, we should, in our first articulate syllables, have babbled the phrases of Pickwick, and expressed our utter disgust at Little Dorrit. Therefore we think of our infantile decisions with no less respect than a chancellor of the present day accords to the judgments of Burleigh. But another reason we have for believing that we are not blinded by early partiality is, that whenever we have quoted some favourite passage of Decastro to an ear and mind capable of appreciating it, applause has seldom failed to follow. Not easily shall we forget that summer morning, in another hemisphere, when, wandering through primeval woods with the chosen friend of our youth, we for the first time spoke to him of the book we had long ago loved; and sitting beside him on one of the prostrate fathers of the forest, while before us spread a painted carpet of lupins, trilia, and moccasin flowers, and through the pines flitted the yellow oriole, the scarlet tanager, like a spark of fire, the blue bird, and the gorgeous woodpecker; while, too, the bells from a distant church rung in the ears of us two Sabbath-breaking heathens, we summoned from the past some of the scenes, characters, and passages of the wellremembered chronicle. The pleasure and sympathy he evinced formed another link in our friendship; frequently he recurred to the subject; and when, years after, we met again in England, he drew us, within the first five minutes of interview, to a bookcase, and pointed exultingly to a row of volumes, lettered on the back, THE HISTORY OF JOHN DECASTRO. We learned afterwards that the search of Japhet for his father, and of Colebs for a wife, had been careless and desultory compared with the unresting eagerness with which he had sought these much desired volumes. He had microscopically inspected libraries; he had been regarded as insane by unsympathising bibliopolists; he had buried himself in museums, and had frequented bookstalls; till at one of these latter he had secured the prize. Since then he has frequently urged us most

movingly to say a good word for Brother Bat" (John Decastro's brother), much as if the said Bat were a real person under a cloud, and desirous of obtaining some small situation under Government; and with this request-urged, too, by the prickings of our conscience-we now somewhat tardily comply.

To begin at the beginning. Our first acquaintance with the book was episodical and fragmentary to an unusual extent, for we never remember it otherwise than in perfect tatters. It had descended to us through a line of seniors, all of them professors of apprehension, as Beatrice would say appreciators of humour and sense wherever met with-and who had so diligently perused the volumes, that backs, covers, and stitches had long since given way, and when we got hold of them, they were in the mutilated condition of the Elgin Marbles. Nevertheless, ex pede Herculem-a giant was visible in the scraps. The huge torso of Brother Bat, the grotesque lineaments of Old Comical, the magnificent proportions of Genevieve, all, though in ruins, told of power. But the annals were as fragmentary as the tale of Slawkenbergius-half the first volume, three-fourths of the third, and the whole of the fourth were wanting. To supply this muchto-be-deplored hiatus, we ransacked every corner of the house-cupboards, garrets, closets, and lumbercorners were explored; and when we lit upon a page or so, our soul burned within us, like Mr. Knight's when he finds a stray leaf of an early copy of Hamlet, or an aged miser's on discovering a five-pound note between the long-neglected leaves of the family bible. Gradually, and with enormous research, such as would have disinterred whole squadrons of winged bulls from the ruins of Nineveh-have deciphered all the arrowhead inscriptions in Assyria-and have discovered and put together the disjointed fragments of the Erebus and Terror, we completed three volumes of the history; but the fourth had vanished, without leaving a wrack behind. Many years afterwards, at so late a period of our literary career as our

third lustre, our parent, just setting out for London, asked us, like the beneficent fairy of a tale, to name some wish, that he might have the supreme satisfaction of gratifying it. "Bring us," we said, " O pater Æneas, the fourth volume of John Decastro,"

which we uttered in a half-sarcastic tone, as if we had been demanding the roc's egg of Aladdin, the lost volumes of Pliny, or the end of Macaulay's History. However, whether with or without the assistance of magical power, we know not, but the complete work was procured by this pearl of parents, and for the first time we traversed it from title-page to colophon. The title-page we transcribe, as being a quaint index to the work:-The History of Mr. John Decastro and his Brother Bat, commonly called Old Crab. In four volumes. The Merry matter written by John Mathers; the grave by a Solid Gentleman. London: Printed for T. Egerton, Whitehall-1815. After which the reader knows as much about the origin, authorship, and history of the work as we do.

To the lover of art in literature the plot of the book will appear partly trivial, partly preposterous. The merits which we imagine we perceive, and to which we mean to direct attention, are the style-quaint, direct, and thoroughly English; the humour, racy, genial, and Rabelaisian; and the characters, grotesque, yet clear and individual, and conveying a vivid idea of reality through a wildly and wilfully exaggerated medium, like the Wellington, Peel, and Brougham of Mr. Punch. Possessing such claims to attention as these, we have often wondered at the obscure destiny of the book; marvelling what offence against the gods had caused it to be consigned to oblivion; till one day the reason was suddenly revealed to us. The maiden of our love our own Musidora—was laughing, with the light musical laughter that belongs to her, sweeter to our ear than the song of the wren, over a volume she had lit on in the antique library we both frequent. Thus distracted, for a moment, from the grave pursuits that incessantly engross us, we looked up, and, stealing

!

gently behind her to see what pleased
our beloved, we saw it was Decastro.
Now, though our uniform practice is
to share with Musidora whatever
diverts us, thus quadrupling our
pleasure, yet somehow we had never
introduced this book of our affections
to her notice; and the same instinct
which we had then acted on, induced
us, now, gently to draw the volume
She looked up at us with
away.
some wonder in those eyes, where
still lingered the light of laughter,
till we whispered in her ear that
we would rather she read no more;
that perchance some wild witticism
or rough jest might pain her or bring
a blush to her cheek; and Musidora,
ever docile, submitted without a sigh.
But at the moment flashed across us
the reason why all this fun and sense
and humour have failed to secure po-
pularity. The author has some other
peculiarities, in common with Rabe-
lais, besides his humour, and the fas-
tidious, not to say squeamish, taste of
our times rejects all pleasantry in
which there is any tincture of impro-
priety. He was, we doubt not, some
bold unconventional spirit, careless of
forms, impatient of restraint-a plain
blunt man, who spoke right on-in-
different as to whose corns he trod
on; and therefore, though the moral-
ity of the book is perfectly unim-
peachable, yet we doubt not the
breadth of the humour has caused it
to be utterly ignored by the "damned
disinheriting countenance" of modern
decorum. All we can do, then, for
our old friend, under these circum-
stances, is what a man would do if
some virtuous sage and humourist,
who had known better days, but
whose not over clean linen now, in
his misfortunes, glimmered through
the looped and windowed raggedness
of his raiment, were to claim admis-
sion to his drawing-room--to patch
him up, and, throwing a decent veil
over his nakedness, to present him to
the public. But we must remind the
reader of what we said of the wild
and wilful exaggeration of the paint-
ing. The writer always takes the
shortest way to be graphic, and, if
he finds that a stroke of caricature
answers his purpose, he dashes it in
broadly. But for this caution, some
matter-of-fact reader, with too much

of the Solid Gentleman about him to fall readily into the Vein of Old Comical, might fancy the writer occasionally insane, and consider us, the sponsor, as mad as our eccentric godchild.

The first chapter begins thus:"How Mr. Decastro had a great Fortune, but too little Money." Now, we gather from the preface that the design of the book is to reprimand the extravagance of the epoch in which it appeared-that is, forty years ago; and it therefore very properly opens with a picture of the reckless squandering of Mr. and Mrs. Decastro. But

"His brother Bartholomew, a man of a sour turn, and upon that account called OLD CRAB, was one of another kidney; he had a little fortune and too much: so they did their best to keep up that variety which makes this world so very pleasant. Now be it known, that Old Crab took his brother's rents and paid his bills for him as far as money went, and no further, and that for a very good reason. 'Brother John,' quoth Old Crab one day to him, in a loud voice, 'thou'rt outrunning the constable.' Outrunning the devil! brother Bat,' quoth he.

'No,' quoth Old Crab, 'not the devil, but the constable: to outrun the devil will be no such easy matter: you will get his claws on your back one day, if you have not a care: you and your gang have been kicking up a fine dust here in London, this last year, with your balls, cards, and fiddles, and the devil knows what-I can't pay your bills.' 'Can't pay my bills, brother Bat!' said Mr. Decastro, with a great stare. 'No,' quoth Old Crab, rising upon his toes, as his manner was, as if he would fly at a man, I can't pay your Better bills, I say; art deaf, John?' be deaf than hear bad news,' quoth he. 'How stands the account, brother Bat?' 'Five thousand pounds upon the wrong side, brother John.' Upon which Mr. Decastro doubled his fist, gave a great knock upon the table, and swore seven great oaths that came out of his mouth as if he had taken an emetic: we would set the oaths down if we were not afraid to raise the devil, and frighten the old ladies. 'Don't you swear sometimes, brother John?' quoth Old Crab? I never swore an oath in my life, brother Bat.' No!' quoth Old Crab, what d'ye call G-d d- my blood?' 'An unguarded expression,' quoth Mr. Decastro, and fell to swearing again worse

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than before. 'Brother John,' quoth Old Crab, coming in between the claps of thunder, hard words pay no bills; it were well if you could swear yourself out of debt, but that is no such easy matter: a word with you by-and-by upon swearing: in the mean time, a word upon your worldly matters; you have an income of twenty thousand pounds a-year; and cannot make both ends meet; the devil is in it if this be not enough to buy meat, drink, and cloth, for a man's family, if he had a wife that bred like a rabbit:-you have only two children, brother John, and have got some gravel in your shoes already; you will get into jail, you blockhead. Mr. Decastro asked him, with an oath, if he got all the rents paid in the north, where his estates lay, 'Never made a better gathering, John,' quoth Old Crab; 'there was a little behind last time, but all's paid up to a penny, and that's more than your tradesmen can say, the worse luck for them, brother John.' You look at me as if I could help it, brother Bat; if there's no more money the rascals must wait' 'But they will not wait,' quoth Old Crab; they say you're a young man, and it will do you good to stop you in time.' 'They're devilish kind when their own interest lies in the way to serve a man; they will arrest me?" 'There are three of them that only wait to see me again, brother John, and if I come empty-handed they will put executions into your house; they bade me tell you so.' 'A civil message!' said Mr. Decastro. A civil fool's head!' quoth Old Crab; I tell you I have got no more money, what am I to do? drive the disease from one joint to another; borrow?' 'What's five thousand pounds to a man of my property?' said Mr. Decastro; it is but the prick of a pin, though it smarted a little at first; borrow the money, brother Bat, and pay the scoundrels directly.' I have done it,' quoth Old Crab; it was but to return it if you did not agree to it.' 'Why didn't you tell me so,' said Mr. Decastro; what is the good of making a man fret?' 'Some bad liquors get better by fretting; I had a mind to try the experiment upon your constitution,' quoth Old Crab. 'Now, look you, brother John, I have promised to pay this money back again next year with five per cent. interest; so that will come upon the shoulders of the next year, it will add to the weight of the next year's expenses-this by way of memorandum, be frugal.' Old Crab was a parson, so a little preaching

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came very well in character. 'Brother John,' said he, you have got a sad trick of swearing-leave it off, it is vulgar and wicked. 'It may be vulgar,' said Mr. Decastro, but as to being wicked, nobody knows what that word means but you parsons.' Dost know the reason? quoth Old Crab. 'No,' said Mr. Decastro, what is it?' 'Because, brother John, thou art an ass.' You parsons,' said Mr. Decastro, 'tell men they are wicked, as doctors tell men they are sick, and sell as much nauseous stuff for the soul as they do for the body, to answer the same end, videlicet, to pick people's pockets.' 'The more fool you, brother John,' quoth Old Crab, 'to call in both the physician and the parson when you lay sick of a fever: but more of this another time. I leave London to-morrow for the north, so give us thine hand, brother John: be careful;-and remember these words:' upon which Old Crab took a bit of chalk out of his pocket, and wrote the following short sentence upon a large mahogany door, in letters big enough for a man to creep through,

'BE FRUGAL,' and, shaking hands with his brother John, left the room.

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"As soon as Old Crab was gone out of the room, Mrs. Decastro came into it, for she heard him go, and so might any who could hear a clap of thunder; for his loud voice, his thick boots, and his heavy oaken towel, made altogether a monstrous noise. What is this?' said she, looking at the chalk on the door. Upon which Mr. Decastro explained matters. 'What a vulgar beast it is,' said she, which compliment was meant for Old Crab. 'I wish, my dear, you would get something in the likeness of a human being to do your business for you, and turn this huge bear out of the house.' Old Crab was a man of vast stature. Can you find an honest man, my dear,' said Mr. Decastro, that will take all the trouble for nothing as brother Bat does?' Well,' said she, I had rather pay and be cheated than be plagued with that great bear.'"

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Bat's exhortation has, however, very little effect, for we find next year that "if Mr. Decastro had played the devil the year before, he had played the devil and his dam in the last; that is to say, he and his wife together, who, instead of making the memorable sentence which Old Crab had chalked

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