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THE SCRIBBLER.

It is a duty which every man owes to himself, and to the circle of society in which he lives or with which he communicates, to take a review, from time to time, of his relations towards mankind, both what he expects to derive from his connections in society, and what is expected at his hands, whether as a matter of pecuniary debt, voluntary obligation, moral duty, or implied promise. The man of business occasionally looks over his ledger, his bill-book, his letter-book and his order-book to see what provision he must make to sustain his reputation for punctuality of payment and mercantile dealing; the lawyer reflects from time to time, upon the causes that will require his attention the ensuing term, the advice he has to give his clients, and not unfrequently, how he is to get paid for his exertions; the man of pleasure has his memorandum-book of engagements, parties, bets, and perhaps also a leaf of assesskin on which his assignations are minuted to be rubbed out with a wet finger as occasion serves; and there is no class of men who will not find it serviceable to take recurring periods for considering what duties unperformed, or promises unfulfilled, are required from them. A periodical writer is as much or more bound than others to take such an occasional retrospect, especially where, as I feel both pride and gratification is the case with me, the increasing patronage of the public imposes upon him the greater obligation to fulfil, to the utmost of his ability, the expectations he may have held out. I have, with this object, been passing in review my essays from the beginning, and find a number of promises that have been either only partially performed, or remain to be redeemed.

Of the performance of the general professions made at the out-set of the Scribbler, the public will best judge after time and experience have set their seal upon my labours. I have in some measure endeavoured, by variety, to fulfil the expectations held out, and it is only with respect to a review of literary works published in, or relative to the Canadas, and perhaps also to a more full and minute perquisition into the dress, manners and amusements of both sexes, that I have any twinges of conscience for neglect or arrears.

But, registering the promises I have made, I find also that I owe:

Besides which it may be implied that I mean to argue some, if not all, of the paradoxes enumerated in No. 6; that I am engaged to celebrate more pointedly than I have done the mental excellencies of the sex; and that the criticisms on Massinger’s plays, and other old dramatic writers, will be occasionally continued.

Here is undoubtedly a large accumulation of debt, and I perceive by my almanack that this is the actual pay-day for one of my promissory notes. In the Catholic calendar for Canada the festival of St. Gertrude occurs on the 15th of November; in the Protestant Episcopal calendar that virgin saint is superseded by St. Machutus, yet why the latter has at all been introduced into the ceremonial of a reformed church, or why St. Gertrude, has not been allowed her station as well as St. Agnes, St. Agatha, and other canonised ladies celebrated in the Romish legends, does not appear in any authorities I have had an opportunity of consulting.

St. Gertrude was illustrious for her faith and constancy, her purity of mind, and inviolate innocence, and her name imports as much. It is of german origin, and compounded of Gar, entire or complete, and Trau, or Trüd, (whence our English Truth,) faith, constancy, truth. She was the daughter of Pepin de Landin, mayor of the palace under Dagobert, and was dedicated to a religious life from her twelfth year. All the Gertrudes in Montreal and its vicinity are respectfully requested to accept the following effort as an oblation at their shrine.

So far therefore I have redeemed my pledge to that portion of my fair readers who expect their bouquets on St. Gertrude’s day; whilst the Cecilias may now reckon that I shall not forget them next Thursday. With regard to my other engagements: The continuation of the letters from Pulo Penang, which have been much enquired for, will appear with as little delay as possible, but some of them are so worn, and parts obliterated by having got wet, that it will be necessary to leave some blanks. There will probably be no necessity for any judicial decision of the case of the widow, the matter having, I believe, been compromised extra curiam, which, by the bye, is not fair, as I had expected a bride’s favour, and a pair of white gloves on the occasion. I have had the following letter about my promised folio of anecdotes:

This funny gentleman and his club may rely that before this quarter is out their wishes shall be gratified; and easy would it be for the Scribbler if all other readers were as readily satisfied, for nothing is less laborious than to collect a number of scraps of the kind which have been neglected or forgotten, or to invent bonmots and compose extempore afterthoughts.

My other promises must remain till time and opportunity permit me to fulfil them, as I can not resist the temptation of translating the following short history from a very scarce book, which I have just read (Nicephorus hist. Rom. tit. de Scythica muliere,) for I am a great admirer, as George Stevens said of a well known bibliomaniac, of all such reading, as is never read; and to which I was induced to resort by a reference made to this story in the Relationes Curiosæ of Happelius, who quotes also Justus Lipsius, as relating it.

In the reign of the emperor Andronicus Paleologus the younger, an irruption of the Tartars into the Byzantine dominions took place, in the course of which a Thracian of note, after seeing his wife violated by the invading barbarians, was carried away by them into slavery. When he reached the Scythian deserts, a Tartar woman, whose husband had been killed, and who was also childless, was induced, either by compassion or by the personal qualifications of the Thracian, to avail of the custom prevalent amongst those people, and redeem him from the hard and public slavery to which he would have been subjected, to be her own servant, by the payment of a considerable sum of money. She then married him according to their customs, but after she had had one child by him and was pregnant of another, his depression of spirits and anxiety of mind, arising from his despair of again seeing his native country, became so evident to her, that she determined upon gratifying his wishes for revisiting Greece, and giving way at the same time to her love for his person and her devotion to his happiness, after exacting a solemn oath from him that he would never abandon her, promised him to accompany him home, and to become a Christian. No immediate opportunity of getting away, however, occurred, and in the second year it so happened that in another incursion of the Tartars, the Thracian’s Grecian wife was brought in as a slave to the same spot where he was, after having suffered fresh indignities from her captors. He was much affected by the sight of her, and when his Tartarian wife found this, she went, unknown to him, redeemed the other, for another large sum of money, and brought her home, made her her housekeeper, and permitted the most intimate intercourse, reserving only to herself a priority in the performance of the conjugal rite. Soon after this an opportunity presenting itself, the trio left the Scythians, and repaired to Constantinople where the Tartarian woman was baptized. They had not been long, however, in the Eastern metropolis of Christendom, before the first wife preferred a complaint to the patriarch of the Greek church against the Tartar woman for the abduction of her husband. They were summoned before the synod, where the Tartar woman defended herself with so much ability that the ecclesiastics were struck silent: but she again took up the word, and pronounced her own sentence saying, “If my husband whom I right dearly love, and so dearly that, rather than he should suffer uneasiness, I shared his person with his first wife, who, by the bye, is not, like me, spotless to all but him, but has been a victim to the lust of almost numberless Tartars; if he, I say, clings so much to her, as to prefer her by herself, to her and me together, let it be so. For the sake of the love I bear him, and the two children I have by him,—and he has none by her—I will forego all claim to reimbursement of the large sum of money I paid for his ransom, when he was an abject and miserable slave to tyrannical and barbarous taskmasters. Gladly too would I do the same for his sake by this ungrateful woman, whom I redeemed from a state still worse, a state of daily and nightly compulsive prostitution to the meanest soldiers of the camp, but my reduced means forbid me. I am a stranger in a foreign land, with two young children; let her therefore repay me the amount I paid for her ransom, and she is free. May they be happy together!” It is needless to describe the impression which this woman’s exalted generosity produced. But fate decreed that she should not be separated from the man whom she thus disinterestedly loved; for his other wife going into Thrace, to procure money from her relations to make up her ransom, was again seized upon by a band of predatory Tartars, and carried away into a second captivity from which she never returned; so that the Tartarian woman had her Thracian husband again.

I am desirous of calling the attention of the public to an excellent communication, under the signature of “un Solitaire” and a reply under that of “Elvire Leger,” on the subject of the frivolity of female education in Canada, and in particular the prevalent and exclusive preference that is given to music in the instruction of young ladies. These letters which are to be found in the “Spectateur Canadien” of last week and the week before, are too long for translation, otherwise I scarcely know what I could present to my serious readers more worthy of their attention, or to the volatile, more amusing and entertaining whilst they are also instructive.

Though, as may have been perceived, I look upon music as a frivolous and unprofitable amusement, the best praise of which is that it may keep those who practice it from doing worse, I have nevertheless both an ear for melody and a taste for the art when it be made the hand-maid of poetry and sentiment. If my space to day would have allowed it, the lines by Erieus, entitled “Music hath charms” would have appeared in this number, but I am compelled to reserve them for the next.

L. L. M.

MUNICIPAL CONTRACT.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of The Scribbler 1821-08-09 Volume 1, Issue 21 edited by Samuel Hull Wilcocke]