ader, I am very near leaving him so for
good and all, and suspending these sketches indefinitely,--yea, even to
the time of the Mississippi dividends, or any other period beyond the
Greek Calends that your imagination can conjure up. For the wise
men--and the wise women, too--of Gotham are wroth with me, and one says
that I am writing on purpose to libel this man or puff that woman, and
another charges me with sketching my own life in _Fraser_, for
self-glorification, and a third holds up the last number of _Pendennis_
at me and says, "If you could write like _that_, there would be some
excuse for you, but you won't as long as you live." "Alas, no!" said I,
and was just going to burn my unfinished papers, and vow that I would
never again turn aside from my old craft of reviewing. But then came
reflection in the shape of a bottle of true Dutch courage--genuine
Knickerbocker Madeira--and said, "Why should you be responsible for
resemblances you never meant, if people will insist on finding them?
Consider how prone readers, and still more hearers who take their
reading at second-hand, are to suppose that the author, be he great or
small, must have represented himself in some one of his personages."
True enough, Mr. Bottle; for instance, any one of our fashionables will
tell you that "our _spirituel_ and accomplished friend" (as Slingsby
calls him), M. Le Vicomte Vincent Le Roi, is the hero of his thrilling
romance, _Le Chevalier Bazalion_--why they should, or what possible
resemblance they can find between the real man in New-York, and the
ideal one in the novel, it passeth my poor understanding to discover.
Bazalion is a stalwart six-footer, who goes about knocking people's
brains out, scaling inaccessible precipices, defending castles
single-handed against a regiment or two, and, by way of relaxation after
this hard work, victimizing all the fair dames and blooming damsels that
come in his way--breaking the hearts of all the women when he has broken
the heads of all the men. Le Roi is a nice gentlemanly man, of the
ordinary size, who sings prettily and talks well, and makes himself
generally agreeable, and not at all dangerous in society--much the more
Christian and laudable occupation, it seems to me. If ever he does bore
you, it is with his long stories, not with a long pike as Bazalion used
to do. Be the absurdity, then, on the head of him who makes it; _Qui
vult decipi decipiatur_: if any one chooses to think that I am