formerly a barber in West-Broadway, and still redolent of Cologne water and relics of his stock-in-trade there—a sentimental darky, fond of reading "Charlotte Temple," and carrying a lock of frizzled hair in his waistcoat pocket, which he volunteers to show you, with his handkerchief to his eyes. Mr. Melville is perfectly au fait in nautical characterisation of this kind, and as thoroughly vapid when essaying revelations of English aristocratic life, and rhapsodies about Italian organ-boys, whose broken English resembles a mixture of "the potent wine of Oporto with some delicious syrup," and who discourse transcendentally and ravishingly about their mission, and impel the author to affirm that a Jew's-harp hath power to awaken all the fairies in our soul, and make them dance there, "as on a moonlit sward of violets;" and that there is no humblest thing with music in it, not a fife, not a negro-fiddle, that is not to be reverenced[1] as much as the grandest organ that ever rolled its flood-tide of harmony down a cathedral nave! What will Mr. Melville think of our taste, when we own to a delight in the cathedral organ, but also to an incurable irreverence towards street-organ, vagrant fiddle, and perambulatory fife?—against which we have a habit of shutting the window, and retiring to a back room. That we are moved by their concord of sweet sounds, we allow; but it is to a wish that they would "move on," and sometimes to a mental invocation of the police. Whence, possibly, Mr. Melville will infer, on Shakspearian authority, that we are meet only for
Treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
and will demand, quoad our critical taste,
Let no such man be trusted.
Next came "White Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War." The hero's soubriquet is derived from his—shirt, or "white duck frock," his only wrap-rascal—a garment patched with old socks and old trouser-legs, bedarned and bequilted till stiff as King James's cotton-stuffed and dagger-proof doublet—provided, moreover with a great variety of pockets, pantries, clothes-presses, and cupboards, and "several unseen recesses behind the arras,"—insomuch, exclaims the proud, glad owner, "that my jacket, like an old castle, was full of winding stairs, and mysterious closets, crypts, and cabinets; and like a confidential writing-desk, abounded in snug little out-of-the-way lairs and hiding-places, for the storage of valuables." The adventures of the adventurous proprietor of this encydopædic toga, this cheap magazine of a coat, are detailed with that easier vivacity, and sometimes that unlicensed extravagance, which are characteristic of the scribe. Some of the sea-pictures are worthy of his highest mood—when a fine imagination over-rides and represses the chaos of a wanton fancy. Give him to describe a storm on the wide waters—the gallant ship labouring for life and against hope—the gigantic masts snapping almost under the strain of the top-sails—the ship's bell dismally tolling, and this at murk midnight—the rampant billows curling their crests in triumph—the gale flattening the mariners against the rigging as they toil upwards, while a hurricane of slanting
- ↑ No parallel passage is that fine saving of Sir Thomas Browne in "Religio Medici," ii., 9.
