FullReads

I don’t like–I declare to you I do not like–saying these things; it smacks of vanity. Now for my plan. I purpose to put these my gifts at your disposal The year before us will doubtless be an eventful one. What between Danes, Poles, and Italians, there must be a row somewhere. The French are very eager for war; and the Austrians, as Paddy says, “are blue-moulded for want of a beatin’.” There will be grand “battle-pieces” to paint; but, better than these, portraits, groups, “tableaux de genre”–Teniers bits, too, at the porch of an ale-house, and warm little interiors, in the style of Mieris. I shall be instructive at times–very instructive; and whenever I am very nice and dull, be assured that I’m “full of information, and know my subject thoroughly.”

As “your own correspondent,” I am free to go wherever I please. I have left Mrs O’D. in Ireland, and I revel in an Arcadian liberty. These are all my credentials; and if with their aid I can furnish you any amusement as to the goings-on of the world and its wife, or the doings of that amiable couple in politics, books, theatres, or socialities, I seek for nothing more congenial to my taste, nor more adapted to my nature, as a bashful Irishman.

If I will not often obtrude, I will not altogether avoid, my personal experiences; for there is this to be said, that no testimony is worth much unless we know something of the temper, the tastes, and the character of the witness. We have all heard, for instance, of the gentleman who couldn’t laugh at Munden’s drolleries on the stage for thinking of a debt of ten pounds that the actor owed him: and this same spirit has a great deal to do–far more than we like to own–with our estimate of foreign countries. It is so hard to speak well of the climate where we had that horrible rheumatism, or laud the honesty of a people when we think of that rascally scoundrel of the Hotel d’Odessa. For these reasons I mean to come into the witness-box occasionally, and give you frankly, not merely my opinions, but the way they were come by. I don’t affect to be superior to prejudices; I have as many of these as a porcupine has bristles. There’s all the egotism I mean to inflict on you, unless it comes under the guise of an incident–“a circumstance which really occurred to the author”–and now, en route.

I wonder am I right in thinking that the present race of travelling English know less about the Continent and foreigners generally than their predecessors of, say, five-and-twenty years ago. Railroads and rapid travelling might be one cause; another is, that English is now more generally spoken by all foreigners than formerly; and it may be taken as a maxim, that nothing was ever asked or answered in broken phraseology that was worth the hearing. People with a limited knowledge of a strange language do not say what they wish, but what they can; and there is no name for the helplessness of him who is tied up in his preter-pluperfect tense. Now we English are not linguists; even our diplomatists are remarkable for their little proficiency in French. I’m not sure that we don’t benefit by this in the long-run. “Reden ist silber, aber Schweigen ist gold”–“Speech is silver, but silence is gold,” says the German adage; and what a deal of wisdom have I seen attributed to a man who was posed by his declensions into a listener! One of the only countrymen of my own who has made a great career lately in public life is not a little indebted to deafness for it. He was so unlike those rash, impetuous, impatient Irish, who would interrupt–he listened, or seemed to listen, and he even smiled at the sarcasms that he did not hear.