The Sun.
London, England, 1856-12-08 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Art and Nature, at How and Abroad. By George
W. Thornbury. Hurst and Blackett, Great
Marlborough-street.
As usual at this season, we have heaps of books
lying en our table for trial and judgment ; and we
have taken up work after work in hopes of meeting
with something to cheer and expand our wintry,
gas-dried brain. The first was a ponderous tome
on "Political Economy," the second, on " Eliptic
Integrals ;" the third, on " Spherical Conic Sec-
tions ;" the fourth, a fashionable Novel, redolent
of a diabolically wicked young lord, and an emeti-
cally weak young lady ; the fifth, a fashionable
Poem, teeming with attempts to give the Pandean
pipes the importance of au archangel's trumpet,
and affording numerous directions touching the
most romantic way to Hanwell, via Parnassus. The
sixth, was on the " Trigonometry of the Parabola,"
the removal of which exposed a tumid pamphlet on
"Chancery Cases."
Under the influence of a touch of the bile, a first-
class chilblain, and a foggy, freezy atmosphere, we
conscientiously abstained from discussing any of
these books ; feeling that however beneficial and
just it may be for a critic to exercise the rod, he has
no right to use it when saturated with the pungent
pickle of his individual and private concocting—
whether that pickle be formed of the subtle poisons
of mental malice, or the sharp drastics of physical
irritability ; so we were about to vacate the chair
of office when one of Caxton's Satanic retinue,
guiltless of soap and water as the walls of
Newgate, made his appearance, swiftly and
silently placed Mr. Thonsbury's volumes be-
fore us, and flitted, in a style that proved him fully
competent to " double" the parts of Caliban and
Ariel. We glanced into the pages with a dogged
sort of indifference, but were roused from our
apathy by the first sentences we lighted on, and we
-lipped into the various chapters with as much re-
freshing sense of enjoyment as a bird of the desert
experiences when it bathes and laves in the gushing
tide of unexpected waters.
The contents of Mr. Thornbury's work are the
result of tramping-artist tours, and, allowing for a
not unpleasant degree of Claude Loraine colouring,
a more charming set of tinted etchings have seldom
been presented to the public portfolio.
The author has taken rapid sketches on his
thumb nail, and worked them into genial and
graphic pictures. " Beggars," as treated by his
pencil, though in a prominent foreground, are most
agreeable company, winning our sympathy and
admiration, whether we will or no. He delineates
"Fountains," with a free and sparkling touch ;
from t he limpid stream that murmurs in the gorgeous
Alhambra, and the crystal dribble from the lion's
mouth in the Roman market place, to the trickling
run in the Temple Gardens ; flinging, however, a
denouncing shadow on the Trafalgar-square absur-
dities. He gives us outlines of French and Eng-
lish manners, without offending the self-love of
either Frog or Bull. He introduces us in a most
judicious manner to " The Schools of Painting,"
pointing out their separate characteristics with
earnest ability. He handles " Cromwell in Long-
acre" historically and daintily ; and his " Forty
Winks in the Colosseum" will induce no looker-on
to participate in the drowsy indulgence. His
starry bit on " Fire Flowers" is brilliantly amusing
and sedately suggestive ; and "Nature in Old Bal-
lads," " Five Cities," " The Witchery of London,"
and numerous other chapters, are as entertaining
as instructive. But lat us take a sample colour or
two from his palette, though we are aware that we
shall not do justice to his charming sketches by
picking out a solitary cerulean light or neutral
shadow. There is some truth in this
Observe London, its houses jostling each other, no
space even round its cathedral, its dense noisome alleys and
its choked up river, that is the city of trade. Observe Paris
with its fountains and arches, its hugepublic gardens, that
is the city of the people of public spirit and national
vanity. Pride is rich, and content with private reality,
vanity must have every building an altar to its own
glory. Pride is the idol of London, vanity of Paris.
Two or three Wellingtons, Sir Robert Peel, a king or two,
a duke, and a queen, are almost all that London can set
against all the records of national glory that adorn the city
of the Seine.
And in this also :
Like most Englishmen, I have been educated in a
pro-
per horror of foreigners as a race. I looked upon one as
something between A bravo of Venice, a black-legged bil-
liard marker, and the Wandering Jew. They never wore
shirts, or wore them too much, objected, on principle, to
washing, eat with their knives, played at cards night and
day, were fond of stabbing you, lived on frogs and oil, and
were, the whole pack of them, infidels, duellists, and
swindlers. Those who were not counts, were barons ;
they wore massy thumb rings of uncertain gold, on un-
doubtedly dirty fingers, hated the English, smoked, and
wore beards. In spite of this, lam ashamed to say I like
them ; and have found the French intelligent and pulite,
the Germans hearty and honest.

• •
•
• •
•
English politeness to be seen in full bloom, requires fine
weather, a holiday, a full purse, and contentment. French
sentimental politeness blossoms in the roughest weather.
At a great railway station English travellers taking re-
freshment, are mere cattle feeding, trampling and goring
each other to get to the manger. French voyageurs are
noisy, and hustling, but still smiling and considerate.
The two hungers have a different character one is that of
a northern, sharp air, eager, and a little wolfish ; the other
anxious but discursive, and choice. A hot sun takes off the
keen edge of appetite, drives you to Nebuchadnezzar
salads and playful experiments with :Tice and saueo.

Hogartt comes under the brush of his disciple,
and a most interesting portrait is produced. Mr.
Thornbury says :

Hogarth was what Johnson would call a good hater,
but he had heart enough to like a joke, and to love chil-
dren. There is no great harm in a man who can do that.
He was the greatest physiognomist that ever lived, yet he
never heard of the scienca. Civilised life leaves certain
marks by which men may be read. The coppersmith has
green teeth, the shoemaker large knuckles, the cobbler
black thumbs, the groom a straddling gait, and the sailor a
rolling walk. All these, and some million other traits,
Hogarth knew. He seems to me always to paint as Juve-
nal wrote, in a fever of honest indignation, the scene is
acting below under his window. His pictures are healthy
bitter tonics that brace and strengthen our moral feeling.
His world is no barley-sugar and fairy world, but a dim,
terrible spot poised between earth and heaven.
Over his rivals, and even over Reynolds, of whom it is
said he was envious, he had one great advantage. He en-
graved his own pictures, roughly but boldly, perpetually
adding not merely touches but thoughts. Other pictures
strayed in saloons, his crept into inns and cottages. His
works teem with characters of his own day—Pitt and
Handel, Pope and Garrick ; he has Figg, the prize-fighter,
and even Whitfield. To realise his popularity, we must
imagine a painter, with the satirical power of Pope and
the fun of Leech. His scenes are London scenes, and the
actors were the spectators' own friends. All were amused,
of whatever age or rank. His mind was like a forest pool,
to which the lion and the wild bird came together to drink.
As he flew at all follies, so he struck at all professions,
from a quack doctor and hypocritical priest, down to brutal
drovers and cruel shoe-blacks. His pathos is rare, but
deep. When he sheds a tear, it moves us, because it is a
tear sullenly and reluctantly shed by a strong man. There
are always children to calm his crowds, and his deepest
vice has some touch of innocence to keep up our faith in
the possibility of goodness. His madman laughs, but the
nurses sorrow ; his idle apprentice curses, bat the broken-
hearted mother weeps. When the sea of beggary and vice
seethes and roars about the wretched praying man in the
hangman's cart, there is one woman to shed tears on his
coffin, the only mourner among ten thousand yelling devils.
For mere fun, was there ever anything so deafening and
uproarious as the scene of the "Enraged Musician?' the
dustman bawls, the milk-woman screams, the ballad-
singer yells, and the child cries, the drummer drums, the
pewterer hammers, the paviors thump, in the distance
bells are ringing, while cats squeal from the roof-top
' s.
No wonder the musician, with fingers in his ears, pulls up
the window and roars out loud for peace.
Hogarth's minute touches of humour aro innumerable.
What can be more admirable than his " Ten Command-
ments," with the crack running through them, the poor-
box with a cobweb over the slit, the miser's shoes soled
with pieces of the cover of a Bible, and his poor poet's
scheme for paying the national debt. Few things are more
felicitous than his speculator's complicated machine, all
wheels and pullies for drawing a cork, and the starved cat
looking wistfully for food in the open plate-chest.
Hogarth's works will laugh at the flight of centuries,
and set centuries of men laughing. A picture has one
advantage over a book. It appeals not to the head, which
is of one nation only, but to the eye, that speaks all lan-
guages. These works cannot grow old while man has the
old heart, and the old way of loving and hating.
Hogarth has had no imitators, because, he was iniuti-
'e • ho had no predecessors, therefore, he was original.
tan.
He tar.,'
•olit us all, painters or not, one lesson, that seeing
deeply on,' age is to know all ages. Of Hogarth alone of
said , tt e was t
painters, it I.2aY be a
always ha
in h never
earnest, alwaysmoninonous good'
never wearisom. •
,lish.
of Zaddon Hall" takes us dream-
humour, always Ent,
times of velvet-mantled
, of tapestried arris and
halls and Lincoln
" The Battery
ily back to the legendai,'
page and
portals bell-espy
Ps secret of e d antlered
Green. We can fancy such a IZledleY picture as
this when Haddon was in its palmy state :
Those were days when there were shotaiOgs over ale-
stoups, downstairs and up-stairs, songs and claw our, and
waiting-women are dancing to the tabor, with Ned Onaffle
the groom, and Will Martingale the huntsman, and al; the
house is busy with feasting. Three dead bucks have jot
been chosen for the spit, and the biggest cask of September
is deliberately broaching, and red-faced cooks are peering
into smoking pots, and serving-men are curling their hair
and fitting roses t• their shoes, and even Bob the odd
boy, is washing his face in the fountain, where thei sultan-
peacock stares and nods at hiaa from the marble urn of
flowers opposite. There are horses trampling in the court-
yard, and grooms hissing at their work, and Lady Alice is
putting on her blue and silver, intending to-night to be as
she always is, " queen of hearts." The old lord is at
bawls with the chaplain, who is quarrelling and quoting
Scripture; and the young lord is trying his new cross-bow
with Robert the falconer at the Dove cot, just by the
Mews ; and Will the warrener is snaring rabbits in the
sand-pit,
and Jack his boy setting a mole-trap, made of
springy hizel.
Those who luxuriate in a prime " Savannah
or bowl ''
0€ " Bird's-eye" will think our author a
capital fellow thus to give a " silver lining" to his
" Smoke Clouds" :
In spite of all the awful examples—the man at Gay's
who wasopened, and found to resemble, internally,
clean flue ; in spite of the youth at Camden Town,h
wo •
in
from a poisonous puff entering his gaping epiglottis t e
at
spite of the respecta individual fell down aa
Wilitechapol, and railble a ' yard of claywho' through hiss larynx ;

we think there may be much comfort in " the pipe of
peace."
From the feathered calumet smoked in the wigwam of
the Pawnee brave to the dudheen glowing in the White-
boy's lurking-place— from the narghileh of the Kurdish
chief to the bubble bubble of the Hindoo rajah, there is
but a step. The hag of St. Giles's thrusts a black cutty
between her shrivelled lips, and the Mbaican lady orna-
ments her rosy month with the, alas ! too transitory ciga-
retto (delicious and fondling diminutive). The pipe barna
sweetly in the black tent of the Arab, and lights the dim
cabin of the pirate of the Levant. It is kindled by the
Russian wolf-hunter, and its black ashes spot the white
snows of the Jungfrau.
There is something almost religious in this universality.
Every pipe is a censer in which we burnt fragrant incense
to propitiate the great azure devil. This Indian herb is
soul-soothing, dream-inspiring—it cheers and not inebri-
ates— delicious as opium, it is more harmless, and no less
vision-giving.

But tobacco has something to say for itself. The plant.
of God s earth are not given alone to blight and kill.
Every poison is a medicine to some animal or Ana*.
Prussia acid heals, and arsenic soothes. Tobacco is a sash,
aperient, detergent, expectorant, and diuretic. It abates
the cholic, and moderates the agonies of spasmodic asthma.
It stimulates the kidneys and diminishes dropsy. The
juice cleanses ulcers and is useful in cutaneous diseases. It
is given extensively in epilepsy, and has been used to ad-
vantage in cases of lock jaw and hydrophobia.
It is actually the base of one of the best cosmetics—the
Balm of Columbia; it cures the mange in dogs, and kills
the blight on plants.
A benevolent man, who proves his wish to save time by
throwing it away on foolish calculations, has discovered
that, in 411 years, a snuff-taker devotes 24 months to blow-
ing his nose. In the same time he has also spent, we have
calculated, 18 months in putting on his stockings and pull-
ing them off again. He proves that "snuff-takers form a
large portion of the inmates of all lunatic asylums !--but
so do greengrocers and costermongers.

The history of smoking is brief. It was invented by
savages, as the saw and the lyre were. Sir Francis Drake
brought the leaf first to Europe, in 1560, and Sir Walter
Raleigh introduced the practice of smoking it about 1584.
But long before this, Jean Nicot, the French ambassador
in Portugal, had carried it to France, and taught Marie de
Medicis to take it in snuff. From Nicot it derives its bo-
tanical designation, Nicotiana; and its alias, tobacco, comes
from the indian name of the island Tobago. That wonder-
ful people, the Chinese, however, seem to have always
smoked tobacco; and the Irish are known to have used
some herbs possessing similar properties, a dudheen being,
it is said, inserted in the helmet of an old monument of
one of their early kings. Raleigh smoked in his dungeon
in the Tower while the headsman was grinding his axe.
King James detested the " loathsome thing," and so did
his luckless son ; but Cromwell loved his pipe, and dic-
tated his despatches to Milton over some fine birniog
Trinidado, or pleasant smelling Nicotine.
Perhaps the most surprising thing in literature is that
no mention of tobacco is found in all Shakspere, although
the earlier Spenser mentions it several times, and the
later Ben Jonson actually founded plays upon the prac-
tice.

Ben describes hie gallants smoking on the stage, and
sending their pages for a light. He describes theta learn-
ing smoking tricks of distinct professors ; and one of hie
best characters, Abel Drugger, is a tobacconist. He has
jokes on the shape of pipes ; though Shakspere, equally
fall of the manners of his age, is quite silent. Was it some
feeling of conventional propriety ? Yet he who drew Pie•
tol, the alehouse bully, Falstaff, the wit at the ordinary.
and Sir Andrew Agnecheek, the creature of the court, could
have had no such scruple. We leave the question to
puzzle future ages of antiquarians, thinking it quite enough
for a man to ask a difficult question without being coal•
pelled to answer it.

_
We could go on extracting with prodigal free-
dom, but we are obliged to content ourselves and
our readers with only two or three more crayon
scraps from "The Englander's Note-book" :

The genii granted Hassan two wishes ; the first was to
know the future ; his second, to forget what he had
known.

To look too long and intently on any of the three faces
of time, the past, the present, or the future, is to grow
mad.

A sneer is the easiest mode I know of asserting s supe-
riority over the rest of mankind.
For a pretty woman to wear too many jewels, is as
foolish as to put three feet of gilt frame to one foot of
picture.
We shake hands with Mr. Thornbury in a spirit
of impulsive sympathy and grateful obligation ;
inasmuch that our bilious indication has materially
subsided ; our ferocious chilblain offers less tempta-
tion to volunteer the Tarantula dance ; and the
atmosphere appears to have a positive gleam of
sunlight playing about the tallest chimney-pots.
We conclude by avowing that the man or woman
who is not somewhat wiser and happier after look-
ing on these cabinet pictures of " Art and Nature,
need never evince any anxiety to be " entered on
our list of friends."