Modest offer of service from Mr. Bonmot to the editor of the "London Magazine"
Sir,—Hearing it whispered that a luminary, in the form of a new magazine, is about to shew itself above our literary horizon, I hereby tender my powers of elevation to bring it, with trump and timbrel-clang and general shout, to the zenith of triumphant popularity. I imagine not, for an instant, that you will misconstrue this overture into a solicitation for employment:—no, it is a gracious offer of assistance. Yes, gracious is the epithet, of which you will the better judge, when I shall have rendered you an account of my great qualifications. Without fear of controversy, then, I affirm myself to be Sir Oracle; I am the immortal Passado, the invincible Ah ha! fit for every thing, prepared for all accidents: ready to pass from grave to gay, from lively to severe; to sigh in concert with the woods that wave o'er Delphi's steep; or laugh with Momus and his train:—in a word, Sir, I hereby pronounce myself to be, not one, but all mankind's epitome.
From mere experiment, therefore, of my potencies, your work must derive an infinite advantage; for, Sir, in addition to what I have said, I would have you know, that it is to me
—— no more difficile,
Than for a blackbird 'tis to whistle,
to discourse in terms, comprehensible only to the initiate few, about the wits of Elizabeth's reign; nay, to describe self-evident beauties in Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and all the poets that have ever lived:—dead things with inbreathed sense I am able to pierce, and, by windy suspiration of oracular breath, pour into any reader's mind the genuine characteristics of the great and good of every kindred and nation under heaven. I know how to apply sententious opinions in the mode of modern infallibility. As, for instance, in noticing the poet of the Inferno, I should say—there's Dante mingling the bitterness of satire with the gloomy grandeur of his sublime genius: if I would be ringing changes upon other great ones of the olden time, who blazed, the comets of their season, I should talk of the elegant licentiousness of Boccacio; the delightful varieties of Ariosto; the tender querulence of laureate Petrarch's erotic conceits; of Tasso's misfortunes, and the harmonious spirit and majesty of his numbers. Then, there's the poetical and linked sweetness, and (as alliteration sometimes tells) the mighty magic of the majestic Michael Angelo: nor would I omit to press into my service the divine grace of Raphael, the costume-loving precision of N. Poussin, the happy imagination of Camoens, nor the sixty thousand verses of Ferdousi: besides, there's Hafiz, with his such a thing, and, not least in our dear love, **** (whose name I have forgotten), to say nothing of a hundred others, quos nunc perscribere longum est, with their various so-and-so's—all excellent. But—sat sapienti: you will see what I mean; and I need hardly mention the extraordinary faculty I have, as occasion may require, of praising or reviling Voltaire; admiring the purity, amidst pity for the sensitiveness, of Racine; giving way before the passionate force of Corneille; pitching a steepy flight with Eschylus; being wildly enthusiastic with Schiller: running mad with Nat Lee;—and, to jump at once to our own days (chronology being nothing to genius, which is not for an age, but for all time), trilling a love-song with the young Catullus of our day; or playing the devil with Don Juan! Yet I must needs let you into the secret of my competency to emulate, nay to out-Herod those who hold their rushlights to the sun, and spend such quantities of panegyrical breath upon the beauties of the admirable and infinite Shakspeare. Ohe, jam satis! methinks you exclaim here. It is even so; and I could detail ten thousand other qualities of fitness; but I content myself with a word or two as to my style, on which the very ecce sigmum testimony of this letter leaves little occasion to dilate; yet I must not omit to mention my very peculiar adroitness in all the mechanism of authorship. To me the mysteries of emphatic innuendo are open: the application of apt and eloquent parentheses is as the air I breathe; I know where to shake my head in italics; utter a MEGA THAUMA in capitals; and, by the mere force of appropriate collocation, make a word, nay sometimes even a syllable, express a start, or a shrug, or a casting up of eyes, sympathizing with a wonder; while for a frown, dark as ten furies, terrible as hell, I am your only penman.
With all this concentration of faculties in myself, I am not less enviable in my friends. All are jewels of the first water, and their aid is at my command for furthering any scheme in which I profess to be interested. Certain comical cousins also form parts of my talented phalanx; and there is not a hue in all the varied brightness of the Nine, but finds a correspondent ray among those of whom I have most meritoriously been dubbed the Musagetes.
Your penetration must, from all this, instantly discover the absolute, the ineffable advantage of taking me into your PAY: but the resolution must be made with haste, post-haste speed, for I am noised abroad, and e'er another hour shall have mingled itself with the past eternity, I may be flying on the swift wings of my new reputation, to the north, the east, the south, or west; for, from all quarters, am I receiving momentarily embassies, courting the countenance of my transcendent talents: some imploring a prop for works already born; others for those whose birth is delayed only until the decisive yet delicate powers of my literary obstetricism may be at hand to produce them to the admiring world in the full perfection of grand and beautiful proportion! But, Sir, my unwillingness, not to say absolute inability, to desert the city of my adoption, induces me to give you the preference: you may therefore, direct for me at once:—not Mister, but Egomet Bonmot, Esquire, London, will find me.
I have written you at some length, but I will not bid adieu without warning you against imagining that a word has been written without purpose; for not the eloquent shake of Lord Burleigh's head was half so pregnant with meaning as this epistolary specimen of auto-adulation. Indeed, as the Lakiest of bards might say, beneath the plain and simple sincerity of the foregone observations, there lies a moral far too deep for the fathom-lines of uninformed minds; and it is this single circumstance which bids me recommend its insertion in the pages of a magazine, which will enrol none among its readers by whom such matters of occult significance, however disguised in open simplicity, are not easily appreciated. I wish your work good speed; and for me towis success is to confer it. Your friend,
P.S.—To distinguish contributions by the signature of my name, will henceforth be useless, except on particular occasions. Suffice it, that in your richest numbers, whatever is wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best, may safely be attributed to the pen of Bonmot.
- ↑ ["London Magazine," January, 1820. Ascribed to Wainwright conjecturally.]