Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 1

Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces.

by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.

PREFACE

WITH WHICH I WAS OBLIGED TO PUT JACOB OEHRMANN, GENERAL DEALER, TO SLEEP, BECAUSE I WISHED TO NARRATE THE "DOG POST DAYS"[4] AND THESE PRESENT "FLOWER-PIECES," &C., &C., TO HIS DAUGHTER.

On Christmas Eve of 1794, when I came from the publishers of the two works in question, and from Berlin, to the town of Scheerau, I went straight from the mail coach to the house of Mr. Jacob Oehrmann (whose law affairs I had formerly attended to), having with me letters from Vienna which might be of considerable service to him. A child can see at a glance that at that time there was no idea of anything connected with such a matter as a Preface in my head. It was very cold--being the 24th of December--the street lamps were lighted, and I was frozen as stiff as the fawn which had been my fellow-pa.s.senger (a "blind" one[5]), by the coach. In the shop itself, which was full of draughts and other kinds of wind, it was impossible for a preface-maker of any sense, such as myself, to set to work, because there was a young lady preface-maker--Oehrmann's daughter and shop-girl--already at work making oral prefaces to the little books she was selling--Christmas almanacs of the best of all--kinds duodecimo books, printed on unsized paper indeed, but full of real fragments of the golden and silver ages--I mean, the little books of mottoes, all gold and silver leaf, with which the blessed Christmas gilds its gifts like the autumn, or silvers them over like the winter. I don't blame the poor shop-wench that, besieged as she was by such a crowd of Christmas Eve customers, she hardly had a nod to throw at me, old acquaintance as I was; and, although I had only that moment arrived from Berlin, she showed me in to her father at once.

All was in a glow in there, Jacob Oehrmann as well as his counting-house. He, too, was sitting over a book, not as a preface-maker, however, but as a registrator and epitomator; he was balancing his ledger. He had added up his balance-sheet twice over already, but, to his horror, the credit side was always a Swiss oertlein (that is, 13 kreuzers, Zurich currency) more than the debit side. The man's attention was wholly fixed upon the driving-wheel of the calculating machine inside his head; he hardly noticed me, well as he knew me, and though I had Vienna letters. To mercantile people, who, like the carriers they employ, are at home all the world over, and to whom the remotest trading powers are daily sending amba.s.sadors and envoyes, namely, commercial travellers--to them, I say, it makes little difference whether it be Berlin, Boston, or Byzance, that one happens to arrive from.

Being well accustomed to this commercial indifference to fellow mortals, I stood quietly by the fire, and had my thoughts, which shall here be made the reader's property.

I cogitated, as I stood at the fire, on the subject of the public in general, and found that I could divide it, like man himself, into three parts--into the Buying-public, the Reading-public, and the Art-public, just as speculative persons have a.s.sumed that man consists of Body, Soul, and Spirit. The Body, or Buying-public, which consists of scholars by trade, professional teachers, and people engaged in business--that true _corpus callosum_ of the German empire--buys and uses the very biggest and most corpulent books (works of _body_), and deals with them as women do with cookery books, it opens them and consults them in order to be guided by them. In the eyes of this cla.s.s the world contains two kinds of utter idiots, differing from each other only in the direction taken by their crack-brained fancies, those of the one going too much downward, those of the other too much upward; in a word, philosophers and poets. Naudaeus, in his 'Enumeration of the Learned Men who were supposed to be Necromancers in the Middle Ages,'

has admirably remarked that this never was the case with jurists or theologians, but always with philosophers. It is the case to this day with the wise of the world, only that, the n.o.ble idea of "wizard" and "witchmaster,"--whose _spiritus rector_ and grand master seems to have been the devil himself--having got degraded to a name applied to great and clever men and conjurors, the philosopher must be content to put up with the latter signification of the term. Poets are in a more pitiable case still; the philosopher is a member of the fourth faculty, has recognised official positions can lecture on his own subjects; but the poet is nothing at all, holds no state appointment--(if he did he would no longer be "born," he would be "made" by the Imperial Chancery), and people who can criticise him and pa.s.s their opinions upon him throw it in his teeth without ceremony that he makes plentiful use of expressions which are current neither in commerce, nor in synodal edicts, nor in general regulations, nor in decisions of the high court of justiciary, nor in medical opinions or histories of diseases--and that he visibly walks on stilts, is turgid and bombastic, and never _copious_ enough or _condensed_ enough. At the same time, I at once admit that, in the rank thus a.s.signed to the poet, he is treated very much as the nightingale was by Linnaeus, which (as he was not taking its song into account) he, no doubt properly, cla.s.sed among the funny, jerking water-wagtails.

The second part of the public, the Soul, the Reading-public, is composed of girls, lads, and idle persons in general. I shall praise it in the sequel; it reads us all, at any rate, and skips obscure pages, where there's nothing but talk and argument, sticking, like a just and upright judge, or historical inquirer, to matters of pure fact.

The Art-public, the Spirit, I might, perhaps, leave altogether out of consideration; the few who have a taste, not only for all kinds of taste, and for the taste of all nations, but for higher, almost cosmopolitan beauties, such as Herder, Goethe, Lessing, Wieland and one or two more--an author has little need to trouble himself about _their_ votes, they are in such a minority, and moreover, they don't read him.

At all events, they don't deserve the dedication with which I, at the fireside, came to the conclusion that I would bribe the great Buying-public, which is, of course, what keeps the book trade going. I resolved, in fact, regularly to dedicate my 'Hesperus,' or the 'Kuhschnappler Siebenkaes,' to Jacob Oehrmann; and through him, as it were, to the Buying-public. To wit, in this way:--

Jacob Oehrmann is not a man to be despised, I can tell you. He served as porter of the Stock Exchange in Amsterdam for four years, and rang the Exchange bell from 11.45 till 12 o'clock. Soon after this, by sc.r.a.ping and pinching, he _became_ a "pretty rich house" (though he _kept_ a very poor one), and rose to the dignity of seal-keeper of a whole collection of knightly seals pasted on to n.o.ble, escheated, promises to pay. True, like celebrated authors, he a.s.sumed no munic.i.p.al offices, preferring to do nothing but write; but the town militia of Scheerau, whose hearts are always in the right place (that is to say, the safest), and who bravely exhibit themselves to pa.s.sing troops as a watchful corps of _observation_, insisted upon making him their captain, though he would have been quite content to have been nothing but their cloth contractor. He is honest enough, particularly in his dealings with the mercantile world; and, far from burning the laws of the Church, like Luther, all he burns even of the munic.i.p.al law is a t.i.tle or two of the Seventh Commandment, indeed, he only _makes_ a _beginning_ at burning them, as the Vienna censorship does with prohibited books; and even this only in the cases of carriers, debtors, and people of rank. Before a man of this stamp I can, without any qualms of conscience, burn a little sweet-smelling incense, and make his Dutch face appear magnified, to some extent, like a spectre's through magic vapour.

Now I thought I should portray, in his likeness, some of the more striking features of the great Buying-public; for he is a sort of portable miniature of it--like itself, he cares only for bread-studies, and beer-studies, for no talk but table-talk, no literature but politics--he knows that the magnet was only created to hold up his shop-door key if he chooses to stick it on to it--the tourmaline only to collect his tobacco ashes, his daughter Pauline to take the place of both (although she attracts stronger things, and with greater attractive power than either)--he knows no higher thing in the world than bread, and detests the town painter, who uses it to rub out pencil marks with. He and his three sons, who are immured in three of the Hanse towns, read or write no other, and no less important, books than the waste-book and the ledger.

"May I be d--d," thought I, as I was warming myself at the stove, "if I can paint the Buying-public to greater perfection than under the name of Jacob Oehrmann, who is but a twig, or fibre, of it; but then it couldn't possibly know what I meant" it occurred to me; and on account of this error in my calculations, I have to-day hit upon quite another plan.

Just as I had committed my error the daughter came in, rectified her father's, and brought out the balance correctly. Oehrmann looked at me now, and became to some extent conscious of my existence; and, on my presenting the Vienna epistles by way of credentials (epistles of this kind are more to him than poetical, or St. Pauline, epistles)--from being a mere fresco figure on the wall, as I had been up to that time, I became a something possessed of a mind and a stomach, and I was asked (together with the latter) to stay to supper.

Now, although the critics may set all the cliques and circles of Germany about my ears--aye, and have a new Turkish bell cast specially for the purpose--I mean to make a clean breast of it here, and state in plain words that it was solely on account of the daughter that I came, and that I stayed, there. I knew that the darling would have read all my recent books, if the old man had given her time to do it; and for that very reason it was impossible for me to blink the fact that it was inc.u.mbent upon me as a simple duty to talk, if not to sing, her father to sleep, and then tell his daughter all that I had been telling the world, though the agency of the press. This, as of course you perceive, was why I usually came there to have a talk on the evenings of his foreign mail days, when it didn't take much to put him to sleep.

On the Christmas Eve, then, what I had to do was to condense and abridge my "45 Dog Post Days" into the s.p.a.ce of about the same number of minutes; a longish business, rendering a sleep of no brief duration necessary.

I wish Messrs. the Editors and Reviewers, who find much to blame in this proceeding of mine, could have just sat down, for once in their lives, on the sofa beside my namesake Johanna Paulina; they would have related to her most of my biographical histories in those cleverly epitomised forms in which they communicate them in their magazines and papers to audiences of a very different type. They would have been beside themselves with rapture at the truth and felicity of her remarks, at the natural, unaffected, simplicity and sincerity of her manner, at the innocence of her heart, and at her lively sense of humour, and they would have taken hold of her hand, and cried "let the author treat us to comedies half as delicious as this one which is sitting beside us now, and he is the man for us." Indeed, had these gentlemen, the editors and reviewers, got to know a little more than they do about the art of briefly extracting the pith and marrow of a book, and had they been able to move Pauline just a little more than I think such great critical functionaries could be expected to do; and had they then seen, or more properly, nearly _lost_ sight of, that gentle face of hers as it melted away in a dew of tears (because girls and gold are the _softer_ and the more _impressionable_ the _purer_ they are), and had they, as of course they would have done, in the heavenliness of their emotion, well-nigh clean forgotten themselves, and the snoring father----

Good gracious! I have got into a tremendous state over it myself, and shall keep the preface till to-morrow. It is clear that it must be gone on with in a calmer mood.

I thought I might take it for granted that the master of the house would have tired himself so much with letter-writing on the Christmas Eve, that all that would be wanted to put him to sleep would be some person who should hasten the process by talking in a long-winded and tedious style. I considered myself to be that person. However, at first, while supper was going on, I only introduced subjects which he would understand. While he was plying his spoon and fork, and till grace had been said, a sleep of any duration was more than could be expected of him. Wherefore I entertained him with matter of interest and amus.e.m.e.nt, such as my blind fellow-pa.s.senger (the fawn), one or two stoppages of payment--my opinions on the French War, and the high prices of everything--that Frederick Street, Berlin, was half a mile in length--that there was great freedom, both of the press and of trade, in that city. I also mentioned that in most parts of Germany which I had visited, I had found that the beggar boys were the "revising barristers" of and "lodgers of appeals" against the newspaper writers; that is to say, that the newspaper makers bring to life, with their ink, the people who are killed in battle, and are able to avail themselves of these resurrected ones in the next "affaire;" whilst the soldiers' children, on the other hand, like to kill their fathers and then beg upon the lists of killed: they shoot their fathers dead for a halfpenny each, and the newspaper evangelists bring them to life again for a penny. And thus these two cla.s.ses of the community are, in a beautiful manner, by reciprocity of lying, the one the antidote to the other. This is the reason why neither a newspaper writer, nor an orthographer, can strictly adhere to Klopstock's orthographical rule, only to _write_ what you _hear_.

When the cloth was off, I saw that it was time for me to set my foot to work at the rocking of Captain Oehrmann's cradle. My 'Hesperus' is too big a book. On other occasions I should have had time enough. On these occasions all I had to do to get the great Dutch tulip to close its petals in sleep was, to begin with wars and rumours of wars--then introduce the Law of Nature, or rather the _Laws_ of Nature, seeing that every fair and every war provides a fresh supply--from this point I had but a short step to arrive at the most sublime axioms of moral science, thus dipping the merchant before he knew where he was into the deepest centre of the health-giving mineral well of truth. Or I lighted up sundry new systems (of my own invention), held them under his nose, attacked and refuted them, benumbing and narcotising him with the smoke till he fell down senseless. Then came freedom! Then his daughter and I would open the window to the stars and the flowers outside, while I placed before the poor famished soul a rich supply of the loveliest poetical honey-bearing blossoms. Such had been my process on previous occasions. But this evening I took a shorter path. As soon as grace was said, I got as near as I could to complete unintelligibility, and proposed to the house of business of Oehrmann's soul (his body) the following query: whether there were not more Kartesians than Newtonists among the princes of Germany. "I do not mean as regards the animal world," I continued slowly and tediously. "Kartesius, as we know, is of opinion that the animals are insentient machines, and consequently, man, the n.o.blest of animals, would be improperly comprehended in this dictum; what my meaning is, and what I want to know, is this--do not the majority (of the princes of Germany) consider that the essentiality of a realm consists in EXTENSION, as Kartesius holds that of matter to do, only the minority of them holding, as Newton (a greater man) does of matter, that its essentiality consists in SOLIDITY."

He terrified me by answering with the greatest liveliness, and as broad awake as you please, "There are only two of them that can pay their way--the Prince of Flachsenfingen and the Prince of----"

At this point his daughter placed a basket of clothes come from the wash upon the table, and a little box of letters upon the basket, and set to work printing her brothers' names at full length upon their shirts. As she took out of the basket a tall white festival tiara for her father, and took away from him the base Sat.u.r.day cowl which he had on, I was incited to become as obscure and as long-winded as the night-cap and my own designs called upon me to be.

Now, as there is nothing about which he is so utterly indifferent as my books, and polite literature in all its branches, I determined to settle him, once for all, with this detested stuff. I succeeded in pumping out what follows.

"I almost fear, Captain, that you must have rather wondered that I have never enabled you to make acquaintance in anything like a very detailed or explicit manner with my two latest _opuscula_, or little works; the elder of the two is, curiously enough, called 'Dog Post Days,' and the later 'Flower-pieces.' Perhaps, if I just give you a slight idea to-night of the princ.i.p.al points of my forty-five Dog Post Days, and then fetch up with the Flower-pieces this day week, I shall be doing a little towards making amends for my negligence. Of course, it's my fault alone, and n.o.body else's, if you find you don't quite know what the first of the two may be _about_--whether you are to suppose it to be a work on heraldry or on insects--or a dictionary of some particular dialect--or an ancient codex--or a Lexicon Homeric.u.m--or a collection of inaugural disputations--or a ready reckoner--or an epic poem--or a volume of funeral sermons. It really _is_ nothing but an interesting story, with threads of all the above subjects woven into it, however. I should be very glad myself, Captain, if it were better than it is; and particularly I wish it were written with that degree of lucidity that one could half read it, and half compose it even, in his sleep. I do not know, Captain, quite what your canons of criticism may be, and hence I cannot say whether your taste is British or Greek. I must admit that I shrewdly suspect that it is not much in the book's favour that there are parts of it to be found--I hope not very many--in which there are more meanings than one, of all kinds of metaphors and flowery styles hashed up together, or an outside semblance of gravity with no reality behind it, but only mere fun (you see Germans insist upon a businesslike style), and (which I am most of all afraid is the case), though the book is of some considerable extent, my attempts at imitating the romances of chivalry so popular in the present day (which so often _seem_ as if they really must have been written by the old _artless_ knights themselves, fellows who were better at wielding the heavy two-handed sword than the light goose quill)--that my attempts, I say, at imitating these romances have scarcely been attended with that amount of success at which I have aimed at attaining. Perhaps, too, I might oftener have offended the modesty and the ears of the ladies, as many men of the world have thought I might; for, indeed, books which do not offend the ears of the great--but only those of the chaste--are not considered the most objectionable."

I saw here, when too late, that I had struck on a subject which enlivened him up prodigiously. I did, indeed, instantly make a jump to a quite different topic, saying, "it is probably the safest way of all, to have improper books deposited in _public_ libraries, where the librarians are of the usual type, because the rudeness of their manners and their disagreeable behaviour, does more to prevent these books from being read than an edict of the censorship." But Jacobus would speak out his thought, "Pauline, don't let me forget that the woman Stenzin hasn't paid her fine yet."

It was uncommonly annoying that, just when I got sleep lured on to within a step or two of him, the Captain should all of a sudden draw his trigger and let off a thing calculated to blow all my sleeping powder to the four winds of heaven. There is n.o.body more difficult to weary than a person who wearies everybody else. I would rather undertake to weary out a lady who happens to have nothing to do in five minutes' time, than a man of business in as many hours.

Pauline, the darling, anxious to hear the stories which I had accompanied in ma.n.u.script to Berlin, put slowly into my hand one by one the following letters from her letterbox: "STORY"--i. e. she wanted to be told the "Dog Post Days" that evening.

So I set to work again, and, with a sigh, began in this way: "The fact is, Mr. Oehrmann, that your humble servant here will soon be setting letters of this sort flying about in Berlin, by his new book, and my 'Post Days' may be printed on shirts quite as fine as those your sons'

names are being printed upon, if the people happen to have made their paper from such. But, indeed, I must admit to you that as I was sitting on the coach on my way to Berlin, with my right foot under my ma.n.u.scripts, and my left beneath a bale of pet.i.tions on their way to the Prince of Scheerau, with the army, the only thing I had in the way of a comforting thought was this very natural one, 'Devil make a better of it all!' Only he's just the very last person to _do it_. For, good heavens! in an age like this present age of ours, when the instruments of universal world history are only _being tuned_ in the orchestra before the concert begins, that is to say, are all grumbling and squeaking together in confusion (which was why on one occasion the tuning of the orchestra pleased a Morocco Amba.s.sador at Vienna much better than the opera itself)--in such an age, when it is so hard to tell the coward from the brave man--him who lets everything go as it pleases from him who strives to do something great and good--those who are withering up from those who are flourishing and promising fruit, just as in winter the fruit-bearing trees look much the same as the dead ones--in such an age, there is only one consolation for an author, one which I have not yet spoken of to-night, and it is this: that, after all, though it be an age in which the n.o.bler kinds of virtue, love, and freedom, are the rarest of Ph[oe]nixes and birds of the sun, he can manage to put up with it, and can go on drawing vivid pictures and writing lively descriptions of all the birds in question, until they wing their way to us in the body. Doubtless, when the originals of the pictures _have_ fairly come and taken up their abode here on earth, then will all our panegyrics of them be out of place, and loathsome to the palate, and a mere threshing of empty straw. People who are _incapable of business_ can work for the press."

"There's work, and there's work," the merchant, wide awake, struck in; "it all depends---- Now TRADE keeps a man; but book-writing isn't much better than spinning cotton, and spinning is next door to begging--not meaning anything personal to yourself. But all the broken-down book-keepers and bankrupt tradesmen take to the making of books--arithmetic books, and so on."

The public sees what a poor opinion this shopkeeper-captain had of me, because _my_ business was only the making of books, though in old days I had been continually running in to him day and night, as notary depute, for the protesting of bills. I know the sort of view many people take of the _convenances_ of society; but I think anyone on earth will consider that, after being treated in this style, I was to be excused for going quite wild on the spot, and responding to the fellow's impertinence, although he was no longer quite in his five senses, in no less formidable a manner than by repeating, accurately and without abridgment, my "extra leaflets" from my 'Hesperus.'

This, of course, was bound to put him to death--sleep, I mean.

And then thousands of propitious stars arose for the daughter and the author--then commenced our feast of unleavened bread--then I could sit down with her at the front window, and tell her all that which the public has for some time had in its hands. Truly there can be nothing sweeter than to some kind tender heart, hemmed in on all sides and besieged by sermons--which cannot refresh itself at so much as a birthday ball, were it only the superintendent's and his wife's, nor with a novel, though its author be the family legal adviser: to such a beleaguered famishing heart, I say, it is more delicious than virgin honey to march up with a strong army of relief, and, taking hold of some mesh in the nun's veil which is over the soul, tear it wider, let her peep through and look out at the glimmer of some flowery eastern land--to wile the tears of her dreams to her waking eyes--to lift her beyond her own longings, and at a stroke set free the fond tender heart, long heavy with yearning, and bound in bitter slavery--to set it free, and to rock it softly up and down in the fresh spring breeze of poesy, while the dewy warmth gives birth to flowers therein of fairer growth than those of the country round.

I had just finished by one o'clock. I had taken only three hours to the three volumes of my story, because I had torn out all the "extra leaves." "If the father is the Buying-public, the daughter is the Reading-public, and we must not plague her with anything that's not purely historical," I said, and sacrificed my most precious digressions, for which, moreover, such an enchanting neighbourhood is not quite the proper soil.

Then the old man coughed, got up from his chair, asked what o'clock it was, wished me good night, and opening the door saw me out (thereby depriving me of a good one), and saw me no more till that night week, on New Year's Eve.

My readers will remember that I had promised to come on that evening, because I had to make a brief report to my client concerning my "Flower-pieces"--this very book.

I a.s.sure the gentle reader that I shall report the events of the evening exactly as they occurred.

I appeared again, then, on the last evening of the year 1794, on the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to the Ocean of Eternity. My client received me with a coldness which I attributed partly to that of the temperature outside (for both men and wolves are most ferocious in hard frost), partly to the Vienna letters which I had--NOT with me; and on the whole, I had but little to say to the fellow on this occasion. As, besides, I was going to leave Scheerau on the New Year's Day by the Thursday coach, and was very anxious to lay before my dear Pauline some more _Paulina_, namely these sketches, because I knew that whatever other wares she might find upon her counter, these wouldn't be among them--I consider that no editor who has any principles whatever can possibly get into a pa.s.sion at my _having_ duly appeared. Let any hot-headed person of the sort just listen to the plan I had. I wanted first to give to this silent soul-flower the FLOWER-PIECES, two dreams made of flowers put together mosaic-fashion--next the Thorn-pieces,[6] from which I had to break away the thorns, that is, the satires, so that nothing remained but a mere curious story and lastly, the Fruit-piece was to be served up last, as it is in the book itself, by way of dessert; and in this ripe fruit (from which I had previously orally expressed all the chilling ice-apple juice of philosophy, which the press has, however, left in) I meant to appear at the end of the day, myself as Appleworm. This would have led by easy steps to my departure or farewell; for I did not know whether I should ever again see or hear of Pauline, this flower-polypus, stretching out eyeless, palpitating, tentacula, from mere INSTINCT towards the LIGHT. With the old decayed wood on which the polyp was blooming I, of course, having no Vienna letters, had little to do.

But near as it was to the time for wishing new year's wishes, the old year was doomed to end with wishes unfulfilled.

Yet I have little to blame myself about; for, as soon as ever I came in, I did my best to tire out the live East India House and put him to sleep, and I continued to do so while he sat there. The only agreeable remarks I made to him were, that when he had said some insulting things about my successor, his present legal adviser, I extended them so as to apply them to the legal profession in general, thus elevating the mere pasquinade into the n.o.bler satire: "I always picture lawyers and clients as two strings of people with buckets or purses near a kind of engine for quenching money thirst--the one row, the clients, always pa.s.sing away with their buckets, or purses, empty, and the other row standing and handing each other buckets or purses full," said I.

I think it was not otherwise than on purpose, that I painted to him the great Buying-public with lineaments much like his own--for he is a small Buying-public, only a few feet long and broad. In fact, I made on him an experiment to ascertain what the Buying-public itself would say to the following ideas.

"The public of the present day, Captain, is gradually getting to be a flourishing North India Company, and, it seems to me, it will soon rival the Dutch, amongst whom b.u.t.ter and books are articles of _export_ trade only; the attic salt _they_ have a taste for, is that which BENKELSZOON used for pickling fish with. Though they have provided Erasmus, in consideration of _his_ salt (of a better quality), with a statue (he never _ate_ salt, by the way), yet I think this was excusable in them, when we remember that they first had one erected to the fish-curer in question. Even CAMPE, who by no means cla.s.ses the inventors of the spinning-wheel and of Brunswick beer beneath the constructors and brewers of epic poems, will coincide with me when I say that the German is really being made something of at the present day; that he is positively becoming a serious, solid, well-grounded fellow--a tradesman, a man of business; a man getting past his youthful follies, who knows _edible_ from _cogitable_ matter (when he sees it), and can winnow out the latter from the former; who can distinguish the printer from the publisher, and the bookseller (as the more important) from both; he is becoming a speculative individual who, like the hens who run from a harp string with fox-gut, can't bear the noise of any poet's harp whatever, were it strung with the harper's own heart-strings--and who will soon come to suffer no pictorial art to exist, except upon bales of merchandise,[7] nor any printing except calico-printing."

Here I saw, to my amazement, that the merchant was asleep already, and had shut the window-shutters of his senses. I was a good deal annoyed that I had been standing in awe of him, as well as talking to him, all this time unnecessarily; I had been playing the part of the Devil, and he that of King Solomon, supposed by the evil one to be alive when he was dead.[8]

Meantime, with the view of not waking him up by means of a sudden change of key, I went on talking to him as if nothing had happened, speaking to him all the time I was slipping away from him further and further towards the window with an exceedingly gradual _diminuendo_ of my tone, as follows:--"And of such a public as this, I quite expect that a time will come when it will value shoe leather much above altar-pieces,[9] and that, when the moral and philosophical credit of any philosopher chances to be in question, its first inquiry of all will be, 'is the fellow _solvent_?' And further, my beloved listener (I continued in the same tone, so as not to run the risk of waking the sleeper by any change in the _kind_ of sound), it is to be hoped and expected that I shall now have an opportunity of going through, for your entertainment, my Flower-pieces, which have not even been committed to paper as yet, and which I can quite easily finish this evening, if _he_ (father Jacobus) will have the goodness to sleep long enough."

I commenced, accordingly, as follows:--