The Miss Lambs might now be seen flaunting along the streets in French bonnets, with unknown beaux; and talking and laughing so loud that it distressed the nerves of every good lady within hearing. They even went so far as to attempt patronage, and actually induced a French dancing-master to set up in the neighborhood; but the worthy folks of Little Britain took fire at it, and did so persecute the poor Gaul that he was fain to pack up fiddle and dancing-pumps, and decamp with such precipitation that he absolutely forgot to pay for his lodgings. I had flattered myself, at first, with the idea that all this fiery indignation on the part of the community was merely the overflowing of their zeal for good old English manners, and their horror of innovation; and I applauded the silent contempt they were so vociferous in expressing, for upstart pride, French fashions, and the Miss Lambs. But I grieve to say that I soon perceived the infection had taken hold; and that my neighbors, after condemning, were beginning to follow their example. I overheard my landlady importuning her husband to let their daughters have one quarter at French and music, and that they might take a few lessons in quadrille. I even saw, in the course of a few Sundays, no less than five French bonnets, precisely like those of the Miss Lambs, parading about Little Britain. I still had my hopes that all this folly would gradually die away; that the Lambs might move out of the neighborhood; might die, or might run away with attorneys' apprentices; and that quiet and simplicity might be again restored to the community. But unluckily a rival power arose. An opulent oilman died, and left a widow with a large jointure and a family of buxom daughters. The young ladies had long been repining in secret at the parsimony of a prudent father, which kept down all their elegant aspirings. Their ambition, being now no longer restrained, broke out into a blaze, and they openly took the field against the family of the butcher. It is true that the Lambs, having had the first start, had naturally an advantage of them in the fashionable career. They could speak a little bad French, play the piano, dance quadrilles, and had formed high acquaintances; but the Trotters were not to be distanced. When the Lambs appeared with two feathers in their hats, the Miss Trotters mounted four, and of twice as fine colors. If the Lambs gave a dance, the Trotters were sure not to be behindhand: and though they might not boast of as good company, yet they had double the number, and were twice as merry. The whole community has at length divided itself into fashionable factions, under the banners of these two families. The old games of Pope-Joan and Tomcome-tickle-me are entirely discarded; there is no such thing as getting up an honest country dance; and on my attempting to kiss a young lady under the mistletoe last Christmas, I was indignantly repulsed; the Miss Lambs having pronounced it "shocking vulgar." Bitter rivalry has also broken out as to the most fashionable part of Little Britain; the Lambs standing up for the dignity of Cross-Keys Square, and the Trotters for the vicinity of St. Bartholomew's. Thus is this little territory torn by factions and internal dissensions, like the great empire whose name it bears; and what will be the result would puzzle the apothecary himself, with all his talent at prognostics, to determine; though I apprehend that it will terminate in the total downfall of genuine John Bullism. The immediate effects are extremely unpleasant to me. Being a single man, and, as I observed before, rather an idle good-for-nothing personage, I have been considered the only gentleman by profession in the place. I stand therefore in high favor with both parties, and have to hear all their cabinet councils and mutual backbitings. As I am too civil not to agree with the ladies on all occasions, I have committed myself most horribly with both parties, by abusing their opponents. I might manage to reconcile this to my conscience, which is a truly accommodating one, but I cannot to my apprehension if the Lambs and Trotters ever come to a reconciliation, and compare notes, I am ruined! I have determined, therefore, to beat a retreat in time, and am actually looking out for some other nest in this great city, where old English manners are still kept up; where French is neither eaten, drunk, danced, nor spoken; and where there are no fashionable families of retired tradesmen. This found, I will, like a veteran rat, hasten away before I have an old house about my ears; bid a long, though a sorrowful, adieu to my present abode, and leave the rival factions of the Lambs and the Trotters to divide the distracted empire of LITTLE BRITAIN. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. INTRODUCTION. WITH a single exception the prose writings of Longfellow all belong to that period of his life which was connected with his early travels in Europe and the beginning of his professional career as a teacher of modern literature. In 1833 he published a translation of a paper on Ancient French Romances by Paulin Paris, and an Essay on the Moral and Devotional Poetry of Spain. A little later appeared Outre-Mer. Between the publication of OutreMer and Hyperion, which appeared in 1839, he contributed several papers to periodicals which are included in the first volume of his collected prose works under the title of DriftWood, papers on Frithiof's Saga, Hawthorne's TwiceTold Tales, The Great Metropolis, Anglo-Saxon Literature, and Paris in the Seventeenth Century. A period of six years includes these writings, and it was not until it closed that he began the publication of original verse, his poetic work before this having been in the form of translation from the French and Spanish. His prose writings thus precede, in time, his poetry, and they are intimately connected with his personal experience and observation as a traveller and student. He came back from Europe freighted with memories of the Old World, and at once began pouring from a full cup the generous wine of foreign vineyards. Within the shelter of academic life, and under the impulse of a catholic zeal for literature, he eagerly offered the treasures of art, legend, and history, which had been made his own by the appropriating power of an appreciative taste, and he inclosed most of his work within forms of literary art which served to give continuity without involution. Thus Outre-Mer is a record of travel, continuous in its geographical outline, but separated from ordinary itineraries by noting less the personal accidents of the traveller than the poetic and romantic scenes which, whether in the present or in the past, marked the journey and transformed it into the pilgrimage of a devotee to art. In Hyperion a more deliberate romance is intended, but the lights and shades of the story are heightened or deepened by the passages of travel and study, which form the background from which the human figures are relieved. It is interesting to observe how, as the writer was more withdrawn from the actual Europe of his eyes, he used the Europe of his memory and imagination to wait upon the movements of a profounder study, the adventures of a human soul. These two books and the occasional critical papers are characterized by a strong consciousness of literary art. Life seems always to suggest a book or a picture, and nature is always viewed in its immediate relation to form and color. There is a singular discovery of the Old World, and while European writers, like Chateaubriand for example, were turning to America for new and unworn images, Longfellow, reflecting the awaking desire for the enduring forms of art which his countrymen were showing, eagerly disclosed the treasures to which the owners seemed almost indifferent. It is difficult to measure the influence which his broad, catholic taste and his refined choice of subjects have had upon American culture, through the medium of these works and that large body of his poetry which draws an inspiration from foreign life. In one of his prose works he makes a character say, in answer to a demand for a national literature: |
