Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VII, December 1850, Vol. IIVarious
General
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VII, December 1850, Vol. II
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
On inquiry, we were told that this patient was a London literary lady.
Her mania, like Morose in Ben Jonson's Epicure, was against noise. She
constantly prayed for deafness. She walked in list shoes, and spoke in a
whisper as an example to others. The immediate cause of her confinement
had not been ascertained, but we have no doubt that she had been driven
stark mad by the street discord of the metropolis. We firmly believe her
case is not singular. Judging from our own experience of the extremest
brink of insanity, to which we have been occasionally driven by the
organic and Pandean persecutions to which we have been subjected, we
should say that much of the madness existing and wrought in this county
of Middlesex originates in street music. If Dr. Connolly can not bear
us out in this opinion, we shall be rather astonished.
A man of thoughtful habit, and of a timid, or nervous temperament, has
only to take apartments in what lodging-house-keepers wickedly call, in
their advertisements, "a quiet neighborhood," to be tolerably sure of
making his next move in a strait waistcoat to an asylum for the insane.
In retired streets, squares, terraces, or "rows," where the more
pleasing music of cart, coach, and cab wheels does not abound, the void
is discordantly filled up by peripatetic concerts, which last all day
long. You are forced, each morning, to shave to the hundredth psalm
groaned out from an impious organ; at breakfast you are stunned by the
basses of a wretched waltz belched forth from a bass trombone; and your
morning is ruined for study by the tinkling of a barrel piano-forte; at
luncheon acute dyspepsia communicates itself to your vitals in the
stunning _buldering_ of a big-drum; tuneless trumpets, discordant
cornets, and blundering bass-viols form a running accompaniment of
discord to your afternoon walk; hurdy-gurdies, peradventure, destroy
your dinner; fiddles and harps squeak away the peace of your whole
evening; and, when you lay your distracted head on your pillow you are
robbed of sleep by a banditti of glee singers, hoarsely croaking, "Up
rouse ye then, my merry, merry men!"
Yet this is a land of liberty, and every man's house is his castle!
A man may have every comfort this world can afford--the prettiest house,
the sweetest wife, the most unexceptionable cook, lovely children, and a
good library--but what are these when the enjoyment they afford is
destroyed by an endless _charivari_; when domestic happiness is made
misery by street discord; when an English gentleman is denied what is
insured to every Pentonville prisoner--peace; when a wise legislation
has patented the silent system for convicts only, and supplies no
free-born Briton with a defense from hideous invasions of his inmost
privacy: a legislature which, here, in London, in the year of grace
eighteen hundred and fifty, where civilization is said to have made some
advances--permits bag-pipes!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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