Читать книгу The Essays of Douglas Jerrold онлайн

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We regret that we cannot wholly acquit our intelligent Mandarin of the taint of ingratitude. It is evident that his views of English history—at least of that portion in which Falstaff conspicuously appears, for the writer suffers no subject to escape in any way involved in the character of the immortal knight—have been gathered from one of our fellow countrymen; he has, if we may be allowed to say it, sucked the brain, as a “weasel sucks eggs,” of some enlightened but obscure supercargo whom he has left unhonoured and unthanked. How different, in a similar case, was the conduct of an Englishman: our deep veneration of the national character will not, at this happy moment, suffer us to be silent on the grateful magnanimity of Mr Nahum Tate, who, in his preface to his improved version of King Lear, returns his “thanks to an ingenious friend who first pointed out the tragedy” to his condescending notice! The silence of the Mandarin towards his instructor is the more strange, as ingratitude is not the vice of the barbarian. An ingenious friend points out a skulking, unarmed straggler to a Cossack; the soldier makes him prisoner, cuts off his ears, slits his nose, bores his tongue, and having mounted the captive behind him, in the cordial spirit of Nahum Tate, “thanks his ingenious friend” for his information! But it is so; in this particular our mandarin fails in comparison with the Cossack and with Nahum Tate.