Nuts and Nutcrackers
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Lever Charles James. Nuts and Nutcrackers
AN OPENING NUT
A NUT FOR MEN OF GENIUS
A NUT FOR CORONERS
A NUT FOR “TOURISTS.”
A NUT FOR LEGAL FUNCTIONARIES
A NUT FOR “ENDURING AFFECTION.”
A NUT FOR THE POLICE AND SIR PETER
A NUT FOR THE BUDGET
A NUT FOR REPEAL
A NUT FOR NATIONAL PRIDE
A NUT FOR DIPLOMATISTS
A NUT FOR FOREIGN TRAVEL
A NUT FOR DOMESTIC HAPPINESS
A NUT FOR LADIES BOUNTIFUL
A NUT FOR THE PRIESTS
A NUT FOR LEARNED SOCIETIES
A NUT FOR THE LAWYERS
A NUT FOR THE IRISH
RICH AND POOR-POUR ET CONTRE
A NUT FOR ST. PATRICK’S NIGHT
A NUT FOR “GENTLEMAN JOCKS.”
A NUT FOR YOUNGER SONS
A NUT FOR THE PENAL CODE
A NUT FOR THE OLD
A NUT FOR THE ART UNION
A NUT FOR THE KINGSTOWN RAILWAY
A NUT FOR THE DOCTORS
A NUT FOR THE ARCHITECTS
A NUT FOR A NEW COLONY
A “SWEET” NUT FOR THE YANKEES
A NUT FOR THE SEASON – JULLIEN’S QUADRILLES
A NUT FOR “ALL IRELAND.”
A NUT FOR “A NEW COMPANY.”
A NUT FOR “POLITICAL ECONOMISTS.”
A NUT FOR “GRAND DUKES.”
A NUT FOR THE EAST INDIA DIRECTORS
A FILBERT FOR SIR ROBERT PEEL
“THE INCOME TAX.”
A NUT FOR THE “BELGES.”
A NUT FOR WORKHOUSE CHAPLAINS
A NUT FOR THE “HOUSE.”
A NUT FOR “LAW REFORM.”
NUT FOR “CLIMBING BOYS”
A NUT FOR “THE SUBDIVISION OF LABOUR.”
A NUT FOR A “NEW VERDICT.”
A NUT FOR THE REAL “LIBERATOR.”
A NUT FOR “HER MAJESTY’S SERVANTS.”
A NUT FOR THE LANDLORD AND TENANT COMMISSION
A NUT FOR THE HUMANE SOCIETY
Отрывок из книги
If Providence, instead of a vagabond, had made me a justice of the peace, there is no species of penalty I would not have enforced against a class of offenders, upon whom it is the perverted taste of the day to bestow wealth, praise, honour, and reputation; in a word, upon that portion of the writers for our periodical literature whose pastime it is by high-flown and exaggerated pictures of society, places, and amusements, to mislead the too credulous and believing world; who, in the search for information and instruction, are but reaping a barren harvest of deceit and illusion.
Every one is loud and energetic in his condemnation of a bubble speculation; every one is severe upon the dishonest features of bankruptcy, and the demerits of un-trusty guardianship; but while the law visits these with its pains and penalties, and while heavy inflictions follow on those breaches of trust, which affect our pocket, yet can he “walk scatheless,” with port erect and visage high who, for mere amusement – for the passing pleasure of the moment – or, baser still, for certain pounds per sheet, can, present us with the air-drawn daggers of a dyspeptic imagination for the real woes of life, or paint the most commonplace and tiresome subjects with colours so vivid and so glowing as to persuade the unwary reader that a paradise of pleasure and enjoyment, hitherto unknown, is open before him. The treadmill and the ducking-stool, “me judice” would no longer be tenanted by rambling gipsies or convivial rioters, but would display to the admiring gaze of an assembled multitude the aristocratic features of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the dark whiskers of Disraeli, the long and graceful proportions of Hamilton Maxwell, or the portly paunch and melodramatic frown of that right pleasant fellow, Henry Addison himself.
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The magistrate, who was eloquent on the occasion, called him an impostor; designating by this odious epithet, a highly-wrought and well-conceived work of imagination. Unhappy Defoe, your Robinson Crusoe might have cost you a voyage across the seas; your man Friday might have been a black Monday to you had you lived in our days. 964 is a severer critic than The Quarterly, and his judgment more irrevocable.
We have never heard of any one who, discovering the fictitious character of a novel he had believed as a fact, waited on the publisher with a modest request that his money might be returned to him, being obtained under false pretences; much less of his applying to his worship for a warrant against G. P. R. James, Esq., or Harrison Ainsworth, for certain imaginary woes and unreal sorrows depicted in their writings: yet the conduct of the lady towards Mr. Cavanagh was exactly of this nature. How did his appetite do her any possible disservice? what sins against her soul were contained in his sausages? and yet she must appeal to the justice as an injured woman: Cavanagh had imposed upon her – she was wronged because he was hungry. All his narrative, beautifully constructed and artfully put together, went for nothing; his look, his manner, his entertaining anecdotes, his fascinating conversation, his time – from ten in the morning till eight in the evening – went all for nothing: this really is too bad. Do we ask of every author to be the hero he describes? Is Bulwer, Pelham, and Paul Clifford, Eugene Aram, and the Lady of Lyons? Is James, Mary of Burgundy, Darnley, the Gipsy, and Corse de Leon? Is Dickens, Sara Weller, Quilp, and Barnaby Rudge? – to what absurdities will this lead us! and yet Bernard Cavanagh was no more guilty than any of these gentlemen. He was, if I may so express it, a pictorial – an ideal representation of a man that fasted: he narrated all the sensations want of food suggests; its dreamy debility, its languid stupor, its painful suffering, its stage of struggle and suspense, ending in a victory, where the mind, the conqueror over the baser nature, asserts its proud and glorious supremacy in the triumph of volition; and for this beautiful creation of his brain he is sent to the treadmill, as though, instead of a poet, he had been a pickpocket.
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