The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore HookHook, Theodore Edward
General
The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore Hook
Hook, Theodore Edward
English wit and humor
tottering, trembling, reeling, and dejected, to repose apparently
in peace; but ah! another torment, the cord, the weight, the
pulley, day o'er day, and week after week, to keep the lips of
the gaping, throbbing, aching wounds asunder, to close no more
for ever. Enough! enough! our country's shame, for cruelty is not
our natural character, our country's vice."
We by no means intend to ridicule Mr. Ward's humanity; but, we
confess, as throwing lights upon an allegorical picture of the Duke
of Wellington's triumphs, we do not consider the passage quite as
much to the purpose as it might be.
At page 29, Mr. Ward states (and with every appearance of believing
it) that "Cicero was once a lisping infant, and Sampson, at one
period, could not go alone;"--to which assertions we must beg to add,
for Mr. Ward's satisfaction, that "Rome was not built in a day."
In his simple style, at page 30, Mr. Ward, speaking of ignorance,
says,--
"Loose veins of thought, imaginative intellects, evaporation. As
the school-boy's frothy bubble, rising from the turbid elements"
soap and water, "its inflated globule exhibits in proud mimicry
the Rainbow's gaily painted hues, and calls rude mirth to dance
upon its glittering surface, when suddenly it bursts, and all is
gone!"
We shall conclude our extracts from this explanatory pamphlet with
the following:--
"SHAPELESS FORMS OF DEATH.--Perhaps no part of picturesque
representation is so difficult as this. The poet here has much
the advantage. Ossian may, by a language all understand, throw
the imagination into a delirium, and there leave it bewildered
and wandering, in all the confusion of material immateriality;
but in painting it is necessary to give a substantial shape
to a shapeless form, and substance to a vision. It is not for
him to give the ghost of my father as a misty cloud covering
a whole mountain, or enlarging itself to the broad expanse of
the capacious plain, like the flaky layers of a thick fog, on
the opening dawn of a mist-dispersing sunbeam. But the painter
must embody disembodied beings, and give 'to airy nothingness a
local habitation and a name.' Here the various shapes of blood
and carnage are to be contemplated, in the imagery depicted, as
cannon-balls, bomb-shells, fiery rockets, swords, spears, and
bayonets, with all the horrible effects of their operations;
as moving in the conflicted elements; from the head of death's
gloomy tribes, the large death-bat, under the arm of the fell
monster Death, who is grinning with savage pleasure at the havoc
he is making. The monsters are breathing fire, and from their
pestiferous dugs dropping streams of blood, as the milk of their
nourishment."
Having given some of Mr. Ward's ideas as they were written, we leave
those who have not seen his picture to judge what such ideas must be,
upon canvas, with a clumsy hand, and the worst possible taste.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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