The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1833-09-20 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

THE PLAYS- AND POEMS OF SHAKSPEAEE. Valpy. London.
The eleventh volume of this beautiful edition has j ustbcen pub-
lished. Its contents are Pericles, Prince of Tyre—Corio-
lanus—and Julius Caesar. Notwithstanding all the attempts
that have been made to saddle Shakspeare with the author-
ship of " Pericles," we still cling to our doubts as to the 4sessi-
bility of his having written anything so inferior to and unlike
his other works. The frontispiece, from Westall, reminds us
of Fuseli. This number is in nu respect inferior to its pre-
decessors.

THE FAMILY CLASSICAL LIBRARY. No. XLV. Vaipy.
London.

The contents of this number are the Rev. R. Potter's tran-
slation of " iEschylus," to which is prefixed an Essay on the
Grecian Drama, with a Biographical Memoir of /Eschylus, by
Mr. Harford, of Bristol, by whose permission it has been re-
printed. This is one of the most useful works that has issued
from the Valpy press.

VALPY'S NATIONAL GALLERY OF PAINTING AND SCULPTURE.
Valpy. London.

The third part of this work has just been published, con-
taining twelve engravings, from Guercino's Dead Christ with
Angels—Landscape, with the story of Niobe, by Richard Wil-
son—Susanna and the Elders, Lodovico Caracci—Pylades and
Orestes, Benjamin West—Portraits of Ferdinand de Medicis
and his Lady, Velasquez—the Market Cart, Gainsborough—
Road Scene, Gaspar Poussin—Madonna and Child; Il Parme-
giano ; Holy Family, Rubens—the Banished Lord, Reynolds—
and Marriage-h-la-Mode, No. 3, Hogarth. This number does
great credit to Mr. Starling's taste and judgment, both in his
selection of subjects, and in the execution of them.

ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE POETICAL `WORKS OF SIR WALTER

SCOTT. Part I. Tilt. London.

This beautiful work is announced for completion in twelve
monthly parts, each part containing five plates, from the pen-
cils and gravers of the most eminent artists of the day.

The contents of the number now before us are Branksome
Tower—Ben Venue—lona—Metehill--and Lord Marmion's
Armour, and the Heraldry of the Heroes of Flodden. To
the admirers of Scott's poetry, these illustrations of the locali-
ties so graphically sketched by his magic pen must be almost
invaluable.

THE BORES OF MY ACQUAINTANCE.

[FROM THE DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE.]

Your bore knows an easy man by instinct. A good temper
is the natural prey of the species. They flock about it as wasps
about a sugar-bowl, vultures round a gibbet, or Whigs in place
round the abuses they rail at in opposition. As to me, lam a
banquet for them, such as the racy talents of Burgess never
prepared, 'such as Heliogabalus would have thought cheaply
purchased with half his empire. Town or country- makes no
difference. Winter or summer, it is the same thing. At home
or abroad, no remission. The true bore is no respecter of times,
places, or seasons : by sea or by land to escape him is impossi-
ble. He is omnipresent. He exists in every point of space
and every moment of time. Go down into the deep and you
meet him in the cabin of the steam-packet. Go up into the air
in a baloon and you are sure to meet him descending in a
parachute. Go with Parry to the polar waters, and though you
miss the north-west passage, you will find, in all human proba-
bility, looking out for you from the top of an ice-berg, the
Bore—the identical Bore—to escape from wh..)se mortal clutches
you have jeopardied your life amongst the white bears and
Esquimaux. Ay ! and he is not only omnipresent but im-
mortal. When did death ever carry off a bore ? A dead bore
is as rare a phenomenon as a dead donkey or a dead attorney.
No, sir, your true bore possesses the elixir vita. The typhus
will rage and carry off all the worthy inoffensive people in a
district—l have known it—yet it shall not come nigh him. No;
though the whole faculty be called in, the recovery of a bore is
as certain as the succession of day to night. It was the same
with the cholera. The bore was the only member of the com-
munity who was safe: every body else laid in a stare of cajcput
and French brandy; he kept his money in his purse, and
-walked abroad, even through noisome alleys, in perfect security.
I watched with the most intense anxiety to -observe the effects
of that pestilence upon the bores of my acquaintance. Not a
death; not the slightest blue tinge on one of their hateful
physiognomies. I have no doubt the two plagues had a mutual
understanding, or were influenced by an esprit de corps. It
would have been as unhandsome in the cholera to kill a bore, as
in one highwayman to blow out the brains of another.
Allow me to introduce first to your notice the gentleman who
holds the post of musical bore in my establishment—a sad mis-
creant—a fellow who would have softened the heart of Pharoah
better than all the vermin in the insect kingdom. Du I say too
much? Not three weeks since, he had an appointment with
his music-master, Signor Tantaracini, to give him a lesson on
the bassoon—think for an instant of the bassoon!—three times
a week at my lodgings, without asking my permission, and with
the thorough knowledge of the fact, that I abominate music of
all kinds, vocal and instrumental, as devoutly as a Jew does
swines' flesh. While the weather remained tolerably fine, the
thing was supportable, for I could take my hat the moment the
Signor arrived, and saunter through the street, or ramble into
the country; but latterly it was raw, wet, and cold, and then
the lessons on the bassoon we3te, as old Dogherry says, " most
tolerable and not to be endured." I had no alternative but to
stay within doors and submit to be practised and dinned almost
to death. The infernal bassoon ! The trump of discord was
nothing to it. Yet I have reason to think that worse tortures
are being prepared for me. It was but yesterday that I heard
a hint dropped about the establishment of a catch club at my
quarters. The members reside, it appears, in remote corners
of the town, and are in want of some central place to hold their
meetings. My lodgings are just the thing to suit them ; and
as to any objection on my part to the arrangement, that is
what, I will venture to say, not one of the songsters will ever
trouble his head about. I must succumb or migrate; and the
latter is out of the question, for I have taken my lodgings by
the year, and have no pretence whatever for a quarrel with my
landlady. Doctor Adam Clarke, one, day, took a troublesome
young ensign up by the waistband of his pantaloons and flung
him out of a three-pair-of-stairs window. That was the proper
way to deal with a bore; and there is only one thing prevents
me from adopting the Doctor's way of proceeding towards
Signor Tantaracini's pupil. lam unhappily what the Doctor
was not—an easy man.

Thev spare labour, grudge no cost, there is no sacrifice
they do not make to get at me. One individual—l call him
my Valetudinarian bore—will travel post, three successive days
and nights for no discoverable purpose on earth save to inform
me of the state of hits alimentary canal,' or acquaint me with
the superabundant energy of his ' muscular system,' or give
me a history as long as Sir Charles Grandison, and about as in-
teresting, of the progress of a certain pain or ache, which ori-
ginated under his midriff, and gradually proceeded to the great
toe of his right foot, from whence it took a spring, precisely at'
five minutes past three in the morning, into the corresponding
digit of the lett, and then ascended again, until it got back, he
assures me upon his honour, to the precise spot under the mid-
riff, from whichit first started. Would it had travelled to
better purpose and given him his quietus. But to give you a
further idea of this worthy, (who, by the bye, is as fat as Mr.
B—o G -n and as robust as Hercules,) he is literally
an ambulatory medicine-chest, or walking druggist's shop. He
is never an instant unprovided with James's powders, effer-
vescent magnesia, salts of all liLalas, concentrated essence of
Jamaica ginger, soluble Cayenne, and twenty other things,
which, not having a pharmacopeia at hand, 1 cannot now enu-
merate. He never takes an excursion, were it only to Bray
or Kingstown, without a box of Abernethy's pills in his waist-
coat pocket, and many a time I have carried 'Buchan's Domestic
and ' Paris on Diet' for him, through the streets of
London, (where I have frequently had the mishap to meet my
• malade imaginaire,' ) and thought myself well off that he did not
saddle me likewise with his 'Accum on Culinary Poisons,' and
the works of Mr. St. John Long.'
•

" My literary bore is one of the most efficient officers on my
staff. 'He is worse than a rack or wheel; Phalaris would have
made him his prime minister. How shall I give an adequate
idea of this living instrument of torture ? I call him literary,
merely because he styles himself so, for of all the endowments
of a writer I never could discover that he was gifted with more
than three—to wit, pen, ink, and paper. With these, however,
he has achieved prodigies: and if not the most luminous, he is
perhaps the most vo!urninous author extant. To be sure he
never appears in print—the publishers and editors take care of
that; but it is so much the worse for me. If a dull book is a
nuisance, imagine the honors of dull manuscripts; and then

conceive the felicity of my situation who am compelled to read
every line that this blockhead is pleased to write. I must peruse
all his repudiated pamphlets; I must wade through all his re-
jected articles; not a paragraph or letter of his inditing is
kicked out of a newspaper-office with contumely, but I must
pore over at hiS discretion. His papers make a tour of all the
periodicals in the kingdom; but you, Editors, have an easy life
of it; you see at a glance that a contribution of half a ton
weight will not do, and you forthwith cattier it with one of those
cant observations you rejoice in, such as Profundus is too deep
for our pages,' or • Lacon must excuse us; we never insert ar-
ticles that we can scarcely lift.' This done, you throw your-
selves hack in your easy chairs, and pair your nails, or perhaps
slumber; but it is then that my tribulations commence :—what
you reject I must read ; nor will either indisposition or business
excuse me_. 11, is easy to say, why not pretend to read, and
send the nonsense back pencilled here and there in the margin.
I have tried it without any success. I must read or I must
listen. The law of the Medes and Persians was not more
fixed. Nor will a cursory perusal serve; for lam actually ex-
amined, and if found deficient in his execrable trash, woe is me !
Never did schoolboy, dubious of a concord, so quail before the
rod of an Etonian potentate, as Ido on these occasions. Ima-
gine the being-asked your opinion, seriatim, of every line of an
ode as long as Chevy Chase, and as leaden as Blackmore's Job,
or one of Bob Montgomery's epics, with the certainty staring
you in the face of being punished for everymistake by a decla-
mation of the whole passage by the inexorable author. Imagine
too the monthly recurrence of this martyrdom; and no security
against a still more rapid return of such inflictions. What shall
I do when the sphere of his toils embraces the Penny Maga-
zines, in which event my sufferings will be hebdomadal?
• • • •

" The next plague on my list is my political bore, and little
less truculent -he is than his literary confederate. You shall
have a few hasty touches :—he prattles for ever of his political
career, and never gives an opinion without staking his reputa-
tion as a public man upon his correctness. His talk is of pro-
tocols and plenipotentiaries, and he is not five minutes in your
company without hoping and trusting that his principles are too
well known to need explanation ; a fellow, I protest solemnly,
without talents to administer the affairs of Ireland's Eye—who
could not tell you the difference between a Jacobin and a Ja-
cobite, and who once, in my own hearing, expressed his belief
that the American tariff was a species of opossum. A few years
ago he was called to the chair at a county meeting, where, in
consequence of a tremendous hurricane, not half a dozen per-
sons were present; some wag, acquainted with his extraordinary
asinine endowments, complimented him on the fervour of his
patriotic zeal, which a ride of twenty miles in a pelting snow-
storm hail failed to cool; the dunce's ambition took fire, and he
has ever since considered himself as a public character, and
spoken of himself as the property of his country. Althoug;h,
perhaps, no cabinet minister is more profoundly ignorant, ho
looks on himself as nothing less than a statesman, and laments
daily the want of " a master mind," an expression always in
his mouth,. at the helm of affairs. He prefaces remarks that
would discredit Lord Althorp with—" to take an enlarged view
of the question,"—or, "to go to the bottom of the subject,"—
or, " to look at the matter with the eve of a philosopher ;" and
I am, of course, the•favoured individual to whom be imparts his
vast views ; nor do I get my enlightenment gratis; every new
ray costs me a coat-button, or a fee to the doctor. He will de-
tain me an hour on a gusty day on Carlisle-bridge, or at the
convergence of half a dozen streets, to inform me that, by put-
ting things together, and looking sharply into passing events,
he has arrived at the conclusion—he should not wonder if I was
startled at. the boldness of it—that the Whigs have sunk into
contempt, or that Lord Anglesea's talents for government are
not of the first-rate order, or that Lord John Russell is not a
great man, or some other observation equally original, and
beyond the reach of ordinary intellects. The last piece of in-
formation, relative to the noble Paymaster of the Forces, cost
me a rheumatic fever.

" Such, Sir, are a few specimens of the bores of my acquaint-
ance; such the daily life, or rather the daily dying of an easy
man. Many interesting members of the same horrid family
remain unpourtrayed. If lam lucky enough not to bore yeur
readers with the present article, I shall resume next month my
sad story, always provided that I survive the Catch Club, or
that the present parliament does not go off suddenly."