REMINISCENCES OF AN OLD BOHEMIAN.*

WE can recommend these pleasant volumes very warmly to the 4' eternal reader," as he is quaintly termed in the preface to Troilus and Cressida. They will, we are well assured, leave him, as they have left ourselves, con la bocca dolce. The anony- mous author, whose secret, though it must be an open one, we shall respect, has chosen for one of his mottoes, " Senex garrulus : Old age is garrulous ;" and for the other, " I write what's uppermost without delay." And garrulous, indeed, this Old Bohemian is, garrulous and, in the strict etymological sense of the word, desultory. But what then ? Was not Montaigne a desultory writer, and a garrulous one to boot ? The garrulity of the Old Bohemian is never tedious, and his discursiveness is never bewildering. His volumes do not challenge criticism. We should as soon think of criticising, "across the walnuts and the wine," the pleasant chit-chat of an old friend who had, like Ulysses, "seen the customs and cities of many men l" We pose, therefore, to follow Grandgoustier's golden rule, " de com- mencer par le commencement," and to take a bird's-eye view of this Bohemian pilgrim's zigzag progress. Born at Trois- Rivieres, in Lower Canada, in the year which Austerlitz and 'Trafalgar have made so memorable, he was brought by his parents to Europe in 1812. They had business of importance to transact in Russia, but Napoleon's carriage stopped the way for them as for so many others, and it was not till the Waterloo year that our " Wandering Jew," for such was the nickname which he acquired at a very early period of his life, found him- self at Moscow, just slowly rising from its ashes. He was going on for eight then, and there he first met her, who, had he or she been but ten years older, might have proved his fate. " She was a little fairy of seven, with golden hair, a milk-and-rose com- plexion, sweet hazel eyes, with long silken lashes, and an audaciously impertinent turn-up nose, Her tiny feet were eased in dainty fur boots that might have put to the blush Cinderella's famous fur slipper." It must be admitted that the Old Bohemian has not without reason been " credited with an ex- cellent memory ;" and apropos de sooners, we may quote his remark that "rain is the word, in Perault's tales, not yarn ; glass-slipper is simply a blundering mistranslation." Early, however, as he began to make acquaintance with the art of love, the Old Bohemian has even earlier made ac- quaintance with the art of cookery. This he learnt from his father's cook, Thusnelda Irma, and his sketch of the

dear old woman " who loved to inculcate, in his 'receptive young mind the processes of boiling, roasting, frying, &c., leads

* Rettinisostloos at' en Old Bolunniitn. 2 vols. London : Tinsley Brother.. 1882.

him naturally enough into his first digression. It is, so far as it goes, as full of " wrinkles " as Brillat-Savarin's immortal work, dud for its obvious use, in certain emergencies, to campers- out and to dwellers in " lodgings for single men," we shall tran- scribe one of these wrinkles. " Charles Sala," says our author, who, to do him justice, takes the humble haddock with as frolic a welcome as the lordly turhot, " Charles Sala showed me how to cook a bloater to perfection by a new system invented by him, which had only the trifling drawback of being a trifle ex- pensive. It is easy to do ; you take a large soup-plate, and pour a quartern of the best whisky into it ; you then lay two fine bloaters on the plate, set fire to the spirit, and turn the bloaters over and over again in the burning whisky. When the spirit is consumed, the bloaters are done to perfection. A good. dish, but noi economical—price of two bloaters, twopence, quartern of eightpeuce—an expensive luxury :"

We must pass over the events which landed the Old Bohemian, when he came of age, on the brink of that impecuniosity which is the badge of all his tribe. We must not, however, omit to quote the well-merited tribute which he pays to his earliest schoolmaster. "Herr Meier," says his grateful scholar, and the readers' heart cannot but warm towards a man who can speak so warmly of a benefactor across the gulf of well nigh three More years and ten,- " Herr Meier was a thoroughly good man, and an excellent teacher. He was gentle, patient, and indulgent. He treated the children en- trusted to his care as beings endowed with mind and soul, to be ten- derly nurtured and intelligently trained, and with faculties to be developed, not us mere creatures with bodies to be tortured and temper to be broken. He possessed in the highest degree the rare art of imparting knowledge to children. His moral influence over his pupils was surprising. It was based entirely on love and respect. Ho was a vied race and blackboard teacher. The wildest and most recalcitrant urchin would keep quiet under him, and but for the voice of the master, you might have hoard a pin drop in his class I was by no means a bright boy, nor a very paintaking one. I was naturally inclined to indolence, and loved play and idling and roaming about much better than learning. Yet, under the intelligent guidance of good Herr Meier—my warmest blessing on his memory—the elements• of knowledge fell to me, almost without trouble, like ripe fruit, and I readily acquired the inestimable art of learning. Later on, I was introduced to the Latin tongue, not to the Latin grammar, mind, for Herr Meier, like the sensible man he was, held it to be most irrational to burthen and bother a child with long strings Of unintelligible grammatical rules governing the mechanical construc- tion of a foreign tongue, ore the child's immature mind had yet bad time and opportunities given it to grasp even the most elementary conception of the language itself. Ho used to compare thid way of trying to teach the classic and foreign tongues to the transparent folly of beginning the building of a church at the steeple."

Herr Meier, in fact, was a born schOolmaster ; and school- masters, to an extent not dreamt of in the philosophy of the majority of mankind, are like poets, born and not made.. The Old Bohemian, after leaving Herr Meier, was placed under a set of shallow, pedantic prigs at Burg, and the pages in which he gives his scathing and yet amusing account of these mum.- factured articles are among the most valuable in his book. And here seems as good a place as we are likely to find for mentioning a fact, which speaks volumes not merely for the great acquire- ments and abilities, but also for the high character which this soi- (Mani Bohemian has preserved unblemished through so many years of 'a struggle fraught with all the dangers which have so often proved fatal to able and honourable men of restless disposi- tions less highly tempered than his own. In. the autumn of life, he was appointed an Inspector of Schools in Prussia by Bismarck, and although the ingrained Bohemianism of his nature com- pelled him to throw this appointment up after a very, brief trial, he is none the less entitled to all the credit which such an appointment must be held to confer on its recipient. Without bating a jot of heart and hope, he plunged once more into the struggle for existence under the old conditions, neither ohne Bast nor ohne Haat, as may be imagined from one who ever loved, in due season, to take his ease in his inn, and who, when close upon his sixtieth year, achieved within twenty-four hours a pamphlet extending over some fifty pages in print, with the aid of a tub of water to keep his feet in, and about half-a-gallon of coffee made from his own mixture, and prepared after his own receipt. In the end this brave old follow succumbed so far to time and fate as to have to owe his life to aid worthily extended to him in his direst need by the Committee of the Royal Literary Fund, and to accept with manly gratitude an admission to the Charterhonse, upon nomination by her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen. Of the result of that admission we shall have to speak directly ; but, before doing so, we shall enumerate as .best we can the many points of interest which we have been forced to

leave unnoticed in this remarkably interesting book. And here, for the first and last and only time, we have to complain of the Old Bohemian; and if he finds fault with any omission iu our catalogue of his good things, he must, we would courteously intimate to him, blame himself. Not only has he given us no index to a book which both requires and deserves an index, he has given us no table of contents, no running heading,—no aid, in fact, of any description for making such a catalogue either full or satisfactory. All that we can say, therefore, is, that his volumes abound in anecdotes worth telling and well told, and abound in hints and " wrinkles " about diet, medielue, and other means of attaining that longevity which all men wish for, and which the author has attained in spite of sick- ness, toil, and pranks like those which shortened Schiller's life. If we cannot particularise their merits with more pre- cision than by saying that curious duels form the subject of one of the Old Bohemian's interesting digressions, curious poisoning cases of another, and curious calculations of a third ; and finally, that lively sketches of Freuch and English actors and actresses of the past and present generations are mixed up largely with equally lively sketches of the distinguished men

and undistinguished " originals " with whom the author has rubbed shoulders during his long and many-sided career ; the

fault, we repeat, must lie at his own door quite as much as at ours. .

And now for the result of the Old Bohemian's admission into the Charterhouse, before we bid laim'a hearty and grateful fare- well. The half-hour for dinner given at that noble institution was not half time enough for a veteran, who for the last forty- seven years of his life had been compelled to be most careful in the choice, preparation, and taking of his food ; and, as a rule, had been his own cook, wherever practicable, and had always taken his time over his meals. A grievous and well-nigh lethal illness compelled him to resign his residential position in the Charterhouse, and to apply for an out-pension, which the governors of that most beneficent institution were, he gratefully says, most indulgently pleased to grant him. It is a curious fact that the Old Bohemian's always animated narrative is nowhere more animated than when he is describing this illness and its all but fatal issue. Especially good, and not at all unworthy of Dickens himself, is the description of his first visit to Birchington, a small village on the Kentish Coast, between Herne Bay and Margate. Here he recovered rapidly, but returning to the Charterhouse was seized with a fierce attack of gastrorhcea, " the most distressing malady I had yet experi- enced in the course of a long life." A prompt removal to his old quarters saved him by the skin of his • teeth, but how long and hard the struggle was may be inferred from the fact that in August, 1879, when the Old Bohemian entered the Charterhouse he weighed very close upon fourteen stone, while on March 14th, 1881, he weighed only nine stone nine pounds. We shall let

him state in his own words, and at what he calls unconscionable length, the means whereby he cured himself, because we believe,

as he does, iu all, sincerity, that his experience may serve in cer- tain apparently desperate cases of dyspepsia :—

" By a happy inspiration," he says, " as shown by the result, I suddenly took it into my noddle to drop soups and fish and fowl, on which I had desperately striven to subsist, but which would not stay on my stomach, and to take of all dishes in the world, to galantine in vinegar brine (solution of salt in vinegar), alternately with devilled sardines. Vinegar brine I firmly believe to be the most perfect sub- stitute for the natural gastric juice. It may sound strange, but it is, nevertheless, a great fact, that these two, apparently so curiously un- suitable, wore taken to so kindly by my hard tried and much.suffering digester, that they literally dragged me back from out of the jaws of death. In May, 1881, I weighed just upon 10 stone, and measured 35 inches round the waist ; I have now reached again e, little above 13 stone, and measure 45 inches round the waist."

Old Bohemian ! Old Bohemian ! " Who understandeth thee not, loveth thee not!" May your shadow never grow less ! May you soon find the party, "with a small capital and sound sense," who is to " realise a princely fortune," and gain your gratitude, by bringing out that splendid mustard for the table,—that super-

excellent, veritable Bismarck of table-mustard, which you have invented ! May you soon find an enterprising publisher to go in for your Fancy Flight over the Fairy Field of Figures, and your Thugneldit -renter Gooken-Book I May your present Reminis- cences meet with the success which they richly deserve ! May

they soon be, as they ought to be, in every circulating library in

the kingdom, and in the hands of every lazy or industrious man, who wants a spell of pleasant reading at the seaside, or by the fireside, over his after-dinner coffee and cigar, or over his after- supper pipe and toddy ! Vicas, valeas