6 'that Misery of any kind, is not the cause of Immorality, bat 'the effect thereof! Among individuals, it is true, so with is the empire of Chance, poverty and wealth go all at hap'hazard; a St. Paul is making tents at Corinth, while a Kaiser Nero fiddles, in ivory palaces, over a burning Rome. 'Nevertheless here too, if nowise wealth and poverty, ye 'well-being and ill-being, even in the temporal economic 'sense, go commonly in respective partnership with Wisdom and with Folly: no man can, for a length of time, be wholly • wretched, if there is not a disharmony (a folly and wicked'ness) within himself; neither can the richest Croesus, and never so eupeptic (for he too has his indigestions, and dies 'at last of surfeit), be other than discontented, perplexed, 'unhappy, if he be a Fool.' - This we apprehend is true. O Sauerteig, yet not the whole truth: for there is more than day's-work and day's-wages in this world of ours: which, as thou knowest, is itself quite other than a Workshop and Fancy-Bazaar,' is also a 'Mystic Temple and Hall of Doom.' Thus we have heard of such things as good men struggling with adversity, and offering a spectacle for the very gods.'But with a nation,' continues he, where the multitude of the 'chances covers, in great measure, the uncertainty of Chance, 'it may be said to hold always that general Suffering is the 'fruit of general Misbehaviour, general Dishonesty. Con'sider it well; had all men stood faithfully to their posts, 'the Evil, when it first rose, had been manfully fronted, and 'abolished, not lazily blinked, and left to grow, with the foul 'sluggard's comfort: "It will last my time." Thou foul sluggard, and even thief (Faulenzer, ja Dieb)! For art 'thou not a thief, to pocket thy day's-wages (be they counted in groschen or in gold thousands) for this, if it be for any thing, for watching on thy special watch-tower that God's City (which this His World is, where His children dwell) 'suffer no damage; and, all the while, to watch only that thy 'own ease be not invaded, — let otherwise hard come to hard 'as it will and can? Unhappy! It will last thy time: thy 6 'worthless sham of an existence, wherein nothing but the 'Digestion was real, will have evaporated in the interim; it will last thy time: but will it last thy Eternity? Or what if it should not last thy time (mark that also, for that also 'will be the fate of some such lying sluggard); but take fire, and explode, and consume thee like the moth!' The sum of the matter, in any case, is, that national Poverty and national Dishonesty go together; that continually increasing social Nondescripts get ever the hungrier, ever the falser. Now say, have we not here the very making of Quackery; raw-material, plastic-energy, both in full action? Dishonesty the raw-material, Hunger the plastic-energy: what will not the two realise? Nay observe farther how Dishonesty is the raw-material not of Quacks only, but also in great part of Dupes. In Goodness, were it never so simple, there is the surest instinct for the Good; the uneasiest unconquerable repulsion for the False and Bad. The very Devil Mephistopheles cannot deceive poor guileless Margaret: it stands written on his front that he never loved a living soul!' The like too has many a human inferior Quack painfully experienced; the like lies in store for our hero Beppo. But now with such abundant raw-material not only to make Quacks of, but to feed and occupy them on, if the plastic-energy of Hunger fail not, what a world shall we have! The wonder is not that the eighteenth century had very numerous Quacks, but rather that they were not innumerable. In that same French Revolution alone, which burnt up so much, what unmeasured masses of Quackism were set fire to; nay, as foul mephitic fire-damp in that case, were made to flame in a fierce, sublime splendour; coruscating, even illuminating! The Count Saint-Germain, some twenty years later, had found a quite new element, of Fraternisation, Sacred right of Insurrection, Oratorship of the Human Species, wherefrom to body himself forth quite otherwise: Schröpfer needed not now, as Blackguard undeterred, have solemnly shot himself in the Rosenthal; might have solemnly sacrificed himself, as Jacobin half-heroic, in the Place de la Révolution. For your quack-genius is indeed born, but also made; eircumstances shape him or stunt him. Beppo Balsamo, born British in these new days, could have conjured fewer Spirits; yet had found a living and glory, as Castlereagh Spy, Irish Associationist, Blacking-Manufacturer, Book-Publisher, Able Editor. Withal too the reader will observe that Quacks, in every time, are of two sorts: the Declared Quack; and the Undeclared, who, if you question him, will deny stormfully, both to others and to himself; of which two quack-species the proportions vary with the varying capacity of the age. If Beppo's was the age of the Declared, therein, after all French Revolutions, we will grant, lay one of its main distinctions from ours; which is it not yet, and for a generation or two, the age of the Undeclared? Alas, almost a still more detestable age; yet now (by God's grace), with Prophecy, with irreversible Enactment, registered in Heaven's chancery, where thou too, if thou wilt look, mayst read and know, That its death-doom shall not linger. Be it speedy, be it sure! And so herewith were our philosophical reflection, on the nature, causes, prevalence, decline and expected temporary destruction of Quackery, concluded; and now the Beppic poetic Narrative can once more take its course. 6 Beppo then, like a Noah's Raven, is out upon that watery waste of dissolute, beduped, distracted European Life, to see if there is any carrion there. One unguided little Raven, in the wide-weltering Mother of dead Dogs:' will he not come to harm; will he not be snapt up, drowned, starved and washed to the Devil there? No fear of him,- for a time. His eye (or scientific judgment), it is true, as yet takes-in only a small section of it; but then his scent (instinct of genius) is prodigious: several endowments, forgery and others, he has unfolded into talents; the two sources of all quacktalent, Cunning and Impudence, are his in richest measure. As to his immediate course of action and adventure, the foolish Inquisition-Biographer, it must be owned, shows himself a fool, and can give us next to no insight. Like enough, Beppo fled to Messina ;' simply as to the nearest city, and to get across to the mainland: but as to this certain Althotas' whom he met there, and voyaged with to Alexandria in Egypt, and how they made hemp into silk, and realised much money, and came to Malta, and studied in the Laboratory there, and then the certain Althotas died, of all this what shall be said? The foolish Inquisition-Biographer is uncertain whether the certain Althotas was a Greek or a Spaniard: but unhappily the prior question is not settled, whether he was at all. Superfluous it seems to put down Beppo's own account of his procedure; he gave multifarious accounts, as the exigencies of the case demanded: this of the certain Althotas,' and hemp made into false silk, is as verisimilar as that other of the sage Althotas,' the heirship-apparent of Trebisond, and the Scherif of Mecca's "Adieu, unfortunate Child of Nature." Nay the guesses of the ignorant world; how Count Cagliostro had been travelling-tutor to a Prince (name not given), whom he murdered and took the money from; with others of the like, — were perhaps still more absurd. Beppo, we can see, was out and away, knew whither. Far, variegated, painful might his roamings be. A plausible-looking shadow of him shows itself hovering over Naples and Calabria; thither, as to a famed highschool of Laziness and Scoundrelism, he may likely enough have gone to graduate. Of the Malta Laboratory, and Alexandrian hemp-silk, the less we say the better. This only is clear: That Beppo dived deep down into the lugubriousobscure regions of Rascaldom; like a Knight to the palace of his Fairy; remained unseen there, and returned thence armed at all points. - the Devil If we fancy, meanwhile, that Beppo already meditated becoming Grand Cophta, and riding at Strasburg in the Cardinal's carriage, we mistake much. Gift of Prophecy has been wisely denied to man. Did a man foresee his life, and not merely hope it, and grope it, and so, by Necessity and Freewill, make and fabricate it into a reality, he were no man, but some other kind of creature, superhuman or subterhuman. No man sees far; the most see no farther than their noses. From the quite dim uncertain mass of the future, which lies 'there,' says a Scottish Humorist,' uncombed, uncarded, like a 'mass of tarry wool proverbially ill to spin,' they spin out, better or worse, their rumply, infirm thread of Existence, and wind it up, up, till the spool is full; seeing but some little half-yard of it at once; exclaiming, as they look into the betarred entangled mass of Futurity, We shall see! The first authentic fact with regard to Beppo is, that his swart squat figure becomes visible in the Corso and Campo Vaccino of Rome; that he lodges at the Sign of the Sun in the Rotonda,' and sells pen-drawings there. Properly they are not pen-drawings; but printed engravings or etchings, to which Beppo, with a pen and a little Indian ink, has added the degree of scratching to give them the air of such. Thereby mainly does he realise a thin livelihood. From which we infer that his transactions in Naples and Calabria, with Althotas and hemp-silk, or whatever else, had not turned to much. Forged pen-drawings are no mine of wealth: neither was Beppo Balsamo anything of an Adonis; on the contrary, a most dusky, bull-necked, mastiff-faced, sinister-looking individual: nevertheless, on applying for the favour of the hand of Lorenza Feliciani, a beautiful Roman donzella, dwelling near the Trinity of the Pilgrims,' the unfortunate child of Nature prospers beyond our hopes. Authorities differ as to the rank and status of this fair Lorenza: one account says, she was the daughter of a Girdle-maker; but adds erroneously that it was in Calabria. The matter must remain suspended. Certain enough, she was a handsome buxom creature; both pretty and lady-like,' it is presumable; but having no offer, in a country too prone to celibacy, took-up 6 |