Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 403, May, 1849 — John Shaqi
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 403, May, 1849Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 403, May, 1849
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
remediless distress; but a disciplined humanity, in face of a kindly
nature whose bounty had not yet been too severely taxed.
A charming ideal! which here and there is faintly and transiently
realised. Here and there we catch a description of this simple,
exhilarating, innocuously enterprising life, either in some Canadian
settlement, or in the forests of America, or even in _the Bush_ of
Australia. There is rude health in all the family; housekeeping is a
sort of perpetual pic-nic, full of amusing make-shifts; there is
rudeness, but not barbarism; little upholstery, but wife and child are
caressed with as much amenity and gentle fondness as in carpeted and
curtained drawing-rooms. If the tin can should substitute the china
cup, the tea is drunk with not the less urbanity. Such scenes we have
caught a glimpse of in this or that writer. But alas! that which
generally characterises the young settlement, let it be young as it
may--that which would so wofully disappoint our pastoral and romantic
emigrant, is precisely this: that, instead of leaving care behind
them, the care to get rich, _to get on_, as it is disgustingly
called--our colonists take a double portion of this commodity with
them. Comparatively few seem to emigrate simply to live then and there
more happily. They take land, as they would take a shop, to get a
profit and be rich. And then, as for the little community and its
public or common interests, it is the universal remark that, if
politics in England are acrid enough, colonial politics are bitterness
itself. The war is carried on with a personal hatred, and attended by
personal injuries, unknown in the old country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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