The Press. — London, England, 1854-05-13 00:00:00

MAY 13, 1854. It was a common practice with Haydn, like his Grace of Norfolk, to order a dinner for the or six, and then eat the whole himself. He once ordered such a dinner to be ready by a stated hour, at which time he alone appeared, and ordered the repast to be served. " But where is the company ? " respectfully inquired the headwaiter. "Oh !" exclaimed Haydn, " / am de gompany ! " From these specimens our readers may judge that the book is an entertaining one. Dr. Doran has brought together a vast amount of curious details, and, though his book makes no pretension to medical science, yet his sportive allusions and sensible hints are per haps as likely to prove useful in restricting ex miss, and indicating the path to health and longevity, as books of more pretending but less lively character. The Dodd Family Abroad. By Charles Lever. With Illustrations by Phiz. London: Chap man and Hall. THOSE of our readers who dislike the bustle of the stage may, thanks to Mr. Lever, while tarrying at home, have an opportunity of amusing themselves with a Hibernian ex travaganza, in which the Dodds burlesque the character of the Irish gentry on their travels, in the style of " screaming farce." Fastidious readers, indeed, will be apt to decry the his tory of the Dodds as too absurd, and those blessed with good memories will hint that " Harry Lorrequer " has taken to repeating himself. For our parts, we have laughed at the Dodds, and we do not suppose that the author had any other design than to set his readers giggling, like a literary " Mr. Merry man." There is nothing new in the style of the book. It exhibits talents with which their lively and versatile owner might do much more. The perusal of Mr. Lever's novels is like a kind of literary steeplechasing. He drags us along at a tremendous pace, in a neck-or nothing style, of composition : never stopping, like another novelist, when a diffi culty presents itself, he clears it at a bound, and comes in with his reader and himself panting at the last panting page. We are afraid that it is now too late for Mr. Lever to adopt a higher style of composition, and we must only accept his boisterous humour and laughable caricature as we find them. In " The Dodd Family Abroad" the reader is often reminded of " The Adventures of Humphrey Clinker" and Tom Moore's 'Fudges.' We are made to feel that we have laughed before at the same kind of droll situa tions, ridiculous mistakes, confounding sharp ere with statesmen, and mistaking ladies with tine clothes and sullied fame for specimens of "female aristocracy." To criticise the charac ters or the incidents in this style of writing would be like looking for genteel comedy at the Adelphi. We shall give one or two speci mens of the kind of persons described in it. Our readers will probably recognise the ori ginal of the following picture : She is Spanish, by the mother's side; "Las Caldenhas," I think the name, whose father was a grandee of the first class. Her own falter was the General Count de St. Amend, who commanded in the celebrated battle of Aus terlitz in the retreat from Moscow. I'm sure, dearest, you'll be amazed at my familiarity with these historical events, but the truth is, she is a perfect treasury of such knowledge, and I must needs gain some little by the con tact. I am at a loss how to give you any correct notion of one whose universality seems to impart to her character all the semblance of contradictory qualities. She is, for instance, proud and haughty, to a degree little short of insolence. She exacts from men a species of deference little less than a slavish submission. As she herself says, " Let them do homage." All her ideas of life and society are formed on the very grandest scale. She has known, in fact, but one "set," and that has been one where royalties moved as private individuals. Her very trinkets recal such memo ries ; and I have passed more than one morning admiring pearl canines with the cipher of the Czarawitsch ; brace lets with the initials of an Austrian archduke ; and a dia- mond cross which she forgot whether it was given her by Prince Metternich or Mehemet Ali. If you only beard her, too, how she talks of that " dear old thing, the ex King of Bavaria," and with what affectionate regard she alludes to " her second self—the Queen of Spain," you'd feel at once, dearest Kitty, that you were moving amidst crowns and sceptres. with the rustle of royal purple beside and the shadow of a thronely canopy over you. In one sense, this has been for us the very rarest piece of good fortune ; for, accustomed as she has been to only one sphere—and that the very highest—she does not detect many little peculiarities in papa's and mamma's habits, and censure them as vulgar, but rather accepts them as the ways and customs among ordinary nobility. In fact, she thinks the prince, as she calls papa, the very image of L 'Pozzo di Borgo;" and mamma she can scarcely see with- THE PRESS. out saying " Your Majesty," she is so like the Queen Dowager of Piedmont. Miss Mary Anne Dodd, in a letter to Miss Boolam, of Ballydoolan, describes how she was coaxed by the lady just portrayed to smoke her first cigar:— I accepted the invitation, and, after exchanging my even ing robe for a dressing•gown, hastened to the chamber. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I entered ! She was seated on a richly-embroidered cushion on the floor,dressed in Turkish fashion, loose trousers of gold•sprigged with a small fez of scarlet cloth on her head, and *jacket of the same coloured velvet almost concealed beneath its golden embroidery ; a splendid scimitar lay beside her, and a must oostly pipe, in pure Turkish taste, which, however, she did not make use of, but smoked a small paper cigarette instead. " Come, dearest," said she, " turn the key in the door, and light your cigar: here we are at length free and happy." It was in vain that I assured her I never had tried to smoke. At drat she wouldn't believe, and then she actu ally streamed with laughter at me. "One would fancy," said she, "that you had only left England yesterday. Why, child, where have you lived, and with whom?' I cannot go over all she said ; nor need I repeat the efl'orts I made to palliate my want of knowledge of life, which she really appeared to grieve over. " I should never think of asking your sister here," said she ; " there is a frivolity in all her gaiety—a lightheartedness, without sentimeut—that I cannot abide ; but you, ma chore, you hate a nature akin to my own. You ought, and indeed must, be one of us." We are also presented to another personage in this book—a certain Mrs. Gore Hampton. She figures oftener in the story than is either agreeable or improving. Mr. James Dodd thus describes her : Our progress was slow, for the crush was tremendous ; but, as we went, her recognitions were frequent. Still, I could not but remark, not with women. All, or nearly all, her acquaintances were of, I was going to say the harder, but upon my life I believe the real epithet would be the softer sex. They saluted her with an easy, almost too easy, familiarity. Some only smiled; and one, a swim drel,—l shall know him again, however,—threw up his eyes with a particular glance towards me, as plainly iks possible implying, " Oh, another victim, eh ?" As for the ladies, some stared Mil at her, and then turned abruptly away ; some passed without looking; one or two made her low and formal curtsies; and a fewput up their glasses to scan her lace flounce or her lappets, as if they were really the great objects to be admired. At last we came to a knot of men talking in a circle, Sound a very pretty woman, whose jet-black eyes and ringlets, with a high co lour, gave her a must brilliant appearance. The dramatis persona of this burlesque is composed of English swindlers, Irish fools, and continental impostors. His countrymen have often complained of the gross injustice done to them by Mr. Lever caricaturing them, and we once heard from the Conservative benches of the House of Commons an eloquent commentary on the injury done to the Irish character by novelists of this school. It is possible, however, that the evil is greatly over rated ; but of one thing we are very certain. that English readers a►e getting rather tired of farces being offered them for novels ; and in his future performances we think that Mr. Lever ought to aim at variety along with his vivacity, and introduce us to more rational company than he compelled us to travel with in " The Dodd Family Abroad." The Modern Mystery; or, Table• Tapping. By - - J. G. Mac Walter. London: Shaw. A SMALL, cheap book, exhibiting learning, argument, and humour. The author believes that many of the phenomena of spirit-rappings, &,c., actually occurred, and have been truly described. With much industry, he brings a ludicrous collection of these cases together. From the following it will be seen that Faust on Walpurgis Night was scarcely in a more exciting situation than was the Rev. Mr. Ham mond, of Rochester, U.S., when visiting a family favoured by spiritual manifestations. He says : In the meantime the demonstrations grew louder and louder. The family commenced and sung the " spirit song " and several other pieces of sacred music, during which accurate time was marked on the table, causing it to vibrate ; a transparent hand, resembling a shadow, pre sented itself before my face ; I felt angers taking hold of a lock of hair on the left side of my head, causing an incli nation of several inches, then a cold deathlike hand was drawn designedly over my face, three gentle raps over my left knee, my right limb forcibly pilled, against strong re sistance, under the table, a violent shaking, as though two hands were applied to my shoulders, myself and chair up lifted and moved back, and several slaps as with a band on the sides of the head, which were repeated on each one of the company. During these manifestations • piece of pasteboard, nearly a foot square. was swung with such velo city before us as to throw a strong current of air into our faces, a paper curtain attached to one of the windows was rolled up and enrolled twiet, a lounge immediately 449 behind me was shaken violently ; two small drawers in bureau played back and forth with inconceivable rapidity; a sound resembling a man sawing boards and planing them was heard under the table ; a common spinning wheel seemed to be in motion, making a very natural buzz of the spindle ; a reel articulated each knot wound upon it, while the sound of a rocking-cradle indicated maternal cares for the infant's slumbers. I felt a perfect selfposees• sion, except a momentary chill when the cold hand was applied to my face, similar to a sensation 1 have realised when touching a dead body. After mentioning many peculiarities attend ant on these spiritual mauitestations, such as that the spirits like to be civilly spoken to, and that " all excess of politeness is never " thrown away " upon them—that one gentle man, doubting the veracity of the raps, put the spirit on its oath, and swore it to the truth of its statement—describes the modes of rapping : Now the alphabetical order of rapping is not only well known, but its tediousness has been experienced and commented upon in many a daily journal. The progress made in this roundabout manner gives some 240 letters in an hour. Consequently, as the method is difffise, and time is exhausted, the most momentous revelations— none of the remotest consequences have as yet been re corded—can never be made unless the communion can, like chapters iu a serial, be "continued iu our next." Whilst, by another and an improved method, these letters are spelt with immense rapidity for the most part, and the words, as spelt, are called out ; and it is said that an expert penman would be puzzled to follow the dictation when the " steam " is really ou. The author then proceeds to account for the many singular manifestations of a latent power which have unquestionably occurred ; and ho adopts the theory of Mr. E. C. Rogers, who credits the existence of a newly-discovered physical agent, " distinct from electricity, but closely allied with animal magnetism," and which is identical with the ud or (tyli° force of Baron Reichenbach This force can be traced in two distinct forms of operation ; one is totally independent of a presiding intelligence—the other exhibits the phe nomena of intelligence ruling and guiding it. It thus be comes prevision—intelligent clairvoyance--acts at a dis tance through matter and space, and thus produces all the phenomena that have been attributed to direct spiritual agency. We are led on by a series of the nicest deductions through a whole mass of attested physical phenomena, in which electricity can be clearly discovered as primary causation, until we arrive at that point where the hue divides the in visible and the impalpable from the material and the actual—that transition boundary where spirit and body blend, where the one becomes in a manner the other, and the positive characteristic* of both are undistinguishable and undefinable by any technology yet invented. We have been much pleased with this little work ; and, if any one should think that learn ing and logic are misapplied in dispelling a delusion so absurd, let him remember that spirit-rapping in America counts its believers by hundreds of thousands; that a newspaper, lately described in the Pawls, well supported and respectably conducted, is devoted to it ; and that this exciting delusion has been followed by a great Increase of insanity amongst our naturally excitable transatlantic cousins. The following, with which we close, is, says Mr. Mat:Walter, only a type of an enormous multitude of equally deplorable cases. The superintendent of the Hospital for the Insane in Indianopolis, Indiana, says, in the report for 1 M52 " An elderly gentleman, who had previously enjoyed good health, now an inmate of this institution. was living in peace and harmony with his family until the ' spirit rappers ' visited the neighbourhood. He attended their exhibitions and believed their revelations ; but, unfortu nately for the old gentleman, it was revealed to him by one of the mediums' that his second wife. with whom he was then living, had caused the death of his formercompanion. The old man believed all to be a direct and truthful reve lation from the spirit world, and from that hour his domestic happiness was at an end. Sleep forsook him and be became a maniac, whieh be still continues to be, with but dim prospects of recovery." RECENT RELIGIOUS TRACTS. WE must be cursory in our notices of the numerous tracts that have recently appeared. In The Jews, their Past History, and Future Prospects (Seeleys), Lord Arthur Hervey reviews the chief events in the annals of the Jewish nation. The Dead Sea, and Its Explorers (Freeman), forms the third number of a new cheap series called "The Library of Biblical Literature." It is illustrated with en gravings, and epitomise" the knowledge to be found in recent works on the Dead Sea. Papery in the Third Century (Triibner) exhibits some literary cleverness. It is an attempt to represent a Roman ist writing an "epistle" and preserving consistency with his Church, while he uses scriptural language ; the endeavour, of course, resulting in logical in congruity and historical contradiction. God's Providential Care of Children (Seeleys) is a sermon