University of Virginia Library

BREAKFAST ON NEW YEAR'S DAY.

Astor house, No. 184 — nine o'clock in the morning —
breakfast for two on the table — enter the brigadier.

Brig. (Embracing “us”). — Mi-boy! GOD BLESS
YOU!!!

“We.” (With his hand to his forehead.) — With
what a sculptured and block-y solidity you hew out
your benedictions, my dear general! You fairly
knock a man over with blessing him! Sit down and
wipe your eyes with that table-napkin!

Brig. — Well — how are you?

“We.” — Hungry! I'll take a wing of the chicken
before you — killed probably last year. How many
“friends, countrymen, and lovers,” are you going to
call on to day?

Brig. — I wish I knew how many I shall not call on!
What is a — (pass the butter if you please) — what is
a pat of butter, like me, spread over all the daily bread
of my acquaintance?

“We.” —

I'll tell you what I have done, general. Here is a list
of all my circle of pasteboard. It begins with those
I love, and ends with those with whom I am ceremonious.
Those whom I neither love nor am ceremonious
with, form a large betweenity of indifference;
and though you may come to love those with whom
you are ceremonious, you never can love those you
are wholly indifferent to. I have crossed out this betweenity.
Life is too short to play even a game of
acquaintance in which there is no possible stake.

Brig. — How short life is, to be sure!

“We.” — Shorter this side the water than the other!
In Europe a man is not bowed out till he is ready to
go! Here, he is expected to have repented and made
his will at thirty-seven! I shall pass my “second
childhood” in France, where it will pass for a continuation
of the first!

Brig. — My dear boy, don't get angry! Eat your
breakfast and talk about New Year's. What did the
Greeks used to do for cookies?

“We.” — Well thought of — they made presents of
dates covered with gold leaf! Who ever gilds a date
in this country? No! no! general! You will see
dozens of married women to-day who have quietly
settled down into upper servants with high-necked
dresses — lovely women still — who would be belles for
ten years to come, in France! Be a missionary,
brigadier! Preach against the unbelievers in mulie
brity! It's New Year and time to begin something?
Implore your friends to let themselves be beautiful
once more! (Breast-bone of that chicken, if you
please!) I should be content never to see another
woman under thirty — their loveable common-sense
comes so long after their other maturities!

Brig. — What common-place things you do say, to
be sure! Well, mi-boy, we are going to begin another
year!

“We.” — Yes — prosperously, thank God! And,
oh, after the first in-haul of rent from these well-tenanted
columns, what a change we shall make in
our paper! Let us but be able to afford the outlay
of laborious aid, which other editors pay for, and see
how the Mirror will shine all over! I have a system
in my brain for a daily paper — the fruit of practical
study for the last three months — which I shall begin
upon before this month has made all its icicles; and
you shall say that I never before found my true vocation!
The most industriously edited paper in the
country is but the iron in the razor; and though it is
not easy to work that into shape, anybody can hire it
done, or do it with industry. The steel edge, we shall
find time to put on, when we are not, as now, employed
in tinkering the iron!

Brig. — Black-and-white-smiths — you and I!

“We.” — No matter for the name, my dear general!
— one has to be everything honesty will permit, to
get over the gulf we have put behind us. Civilized
life is full of the most unbridged abysses. Transitions
from an old business to a new, or from pleasure to
business, or from amusing mankind to taking care of
yourself, would be supposed, by a “green” angel, to
be good intentions, easy enough carried out, in a
world of reciprocal charities. But let them send
down the most popular angel of the house of Gabriel
& Co., to borrow money for the most brilliant project,
without bankable security! And the best of it is, that
though your friends pronounce the crossing of a business-gulf,
on your proposed bridge of brains, impossible
and chimerical, they look upon it as a matter of
course when it is done! You and I are poets — if the
money and fuss we have made will pass for evidence
— yet nobody thinks it surprising that we have taken
off our wings, and rolled up our shirt-sleeves to carry
the hod! Not to die without having experienced all
kinds of sensations, I wish to be rich — though it will
come to me like butter when the bread is gone to
spread it on. Heigho!

Brig. — How you keep drawing similitudes from
what you see before your eyes! Let me eat my
breakfast without turning it into poetry! It will sour
on my stomach, my dear boy!

“We.” — So you are ordered out to smash the Helderbergers,
general!

Brig. — Ordered to hold myself in readiness — that's
all at present. I wish they'd observe the seasons, and
rebel in pleasant weather! Think of the summit of
a saddle with the thermometer at zero! Besides, if
there is any fighting to do one likes an enemy. This
campaign to help the constable, necessary as it is, goes
against my stomach.

“We.” — Fortify it, poor thing! What say to a
drop of curacoa before you begin your New Year's
round? (Pouring for the general and himself.) Burke
states, in his “Vindication of Natural Society,” that
your predecessor, Julius Cesar, was the means of
killing two millions one hundred thousand men! How
populous is Helderberg — women and all?

Brig. — Twelve o'clock, my dear boy, and time to
be shaking hands and wishing. Take the first wish
off the top of my heart — a happy New Year to you,
and —

“We.” — Gently with that heavy benediction!

Brig. — God bless you, mi-boy!

(Exit the brigadier, affected.)

Themes for the Table. — Among the “upper
ten thousand,” there are, of course, many persons, not
only of really refined taste, but of practical common
sense, and to them we wish to proffer a hint or two,
touching the usages just now in plastic and manageable
transition among the better classes. The following
note, received a day or two since, suggests one of
the improvements that we had marked down for comment:
—

There is another very burthensome matter, the
annoyance of which might be transferred to the penny-post
— card leaving! When men are busy and ladies
ill (the business and the illness equally unlikely to be
heard of by way of apology) it would often be a most
essential relief to commit to envelopes a dozen cards,
and, with an initial letter or two in the corner,[1] expressive
of good-will but inability to call in person,
make and return visits without moving from counting
house or easy-chair. This, in a country where few
keep carriages, and where every man worth knowing
has some business or profession, should be an easy
matter to bring about; and, if established into a usage
that gave no offence, would serve two purposes — relieving
the ill or busy, and compelling those, who
really wish to keep up an acquaintance, at least to
send cards once in a while, as reminders.

We wish that common sense could be made fashionable
among us — vigorously applied, we mean, to the
fashions of the best style of people. Why should not
the insufferable nuisance of late parties be put down
in this country by a plot between a hundred of our
sensible and distinguished families? In England they
are at the dinner-table between six and ten; but why
should we, who seldom dine later than three or four,
yawn through a long unoccupied evening before going
out, merely because they go to parties at eleven in
London? Why should it not be American, to revise,
correct, and adapt to differences of national character,
the usages we copy from other countries? The subject
of late parties is constantly talked over, however,
and as all are agreed as to the absurdity of the fashion,
a hint at it, here, is enough.

There are other usages which require remodelling
by this standard, but while we defer the mention of
them at present, we wish to allude to another argument
(in favor of common sense applied to fashion)
remoter and perhaps weightier than mere convenience.
It is simply, that, if an aristocracy is to be formed in
this country, the access to its resorts must be kept
convenient for men of sense, or society will be left exclusively
to fools. Believers in the eternity of de
mocracy might wish fashion kept inconvenient, for this
very purpose; but our belief is, that there is no place
like a republic for a positive and even violent aristocracy,
and, if inevitable, it is as well to compound it
of good elements in the beginning. Simply, then, no
intellectual man, past absolute juvenility, would consent
to enfeeble his mind by fashionable habits injurious
to health. Late hours and late suppers (in a
country where we can not well sleep till noon as they
do in Europe) are mental suicide. Hours and usages,
therefore, which are not accommodated to the convenience
of the best minds of the country, will drive
those minds from the class to which they form the
objection, and the result is easily pictured. We
shall resume the topic.

Liveries and Opera-Glasses. — There is really no
way of foreseeing what the Americans will stand and
what they will not. An aristocratic family or two,
unwilling to compete with the working-classes in personal
attire, choose to transfer the splendors of their condition
to the backs of their servants. They dress plainly
themselves and set up a liveried equipage — as they
have an absolute and (one would think) an unoffending
right to do. This, however, the American public
will not bear — and the persons so doing are insulted
by half the presses in the country.

But what they will bear is much more remarkable.
In the immense theatres of Europe, where the upper
classes are all in private boxes, with blinds and curtains
to shut out observation if they please, the use of opera-glasses
has gradually become sanctioned. It is found
convenient for those classes to diminish the distance
across the house, since they have the choice of seclusion
behind curtains — which those in the pit have not.
Abstractly, of course, the giving to a vulgarian the
power to draw a lady's face close to him for a half-hour's
examination, would be permitting a gross license.
This being the custom in Europe, however,
it is adopted with no kind of comparisons of reasons
why, in New York. We build an opera-house, scarce
larger than a drawing-room, and light it so well, and
so arrange the seats, that people are as visible to each
other as they would be in a drawing-room; and in
this cosy place, allow people to coolly adjust their
opera-glasses and turn them full into the faces of those
they wish to scrutinize. So near as the glass is, too,
it is utterly impossible not to be conscious of being
looked at, and the embarrassment it occasions to very
young ladies is easy enough shown. We have used
this impertinence ourself (because in Rome we do as
Romans do), but we never yet have levelled a glass
upon a face without seeing that the scrutiny was at
once detected. Since we have preached on the subject,
however, we shall “go and sin no more.”

“We ask for information:” — is the difference of
reception, for these two European customs, explainable
on the ground that opera-glasses are a luxury
within the reach of most persons, and liveries are not?
Do republicans only object to exclusive impertinences?

Opera last night. — We presume we are safe in
saying that no four inhabitants in New York gave as
much pleasure last night as Pico, Borghese, Perozzi,
and Valtellina. We certainly would not
have missed our share for any emotion set down
among the pleasures of Wall street — well as we know
the let-up of an opportune discount! That emperor
of Rome who poisoned Britannicus because he was
a better tenor than himself, and slept in his imperial
bed with a plate of lead on his stomach to improve
his voice, knew where music went to, and of what

recesses, within his empire, he was not monarch without
it. (We suggest a meeting of gentlemen up-town
to erect a monument to Nero, now for the first time
appreciated!)

Let us tell the story of Semiramide — and we must
take the liberty, for clearness' sake, to use the names
of the performers without the Siamese-ry of the names
of the characters.

Borghese is queen of Babylon. She and Valtellina,
who is an old lover of hers, have killed her former
husband, a descendant of Belus by whom she had a
child. This child is Pico, rightful heir to the throne.
At the time the curtain rises, Borghese and Valtellina
suppose that Pico also is killed, and the throne
vacant for a new husband to Borghese. Valtellina
wishes to be that husband; but Borghese, partly from
dislike of him, and partly from having had enough of
matrimony, takes advantage of a thunder-storm to put
off her expected decision. Meantime Pico arrives
(acquainted only with Mr. Meyer, apparently, who is
a high-priest of Belus), and Queen Borghese, not
knowing that it is her own child, falls in love with
him! There is a Miss Phillips who is a descendant
of this same Belus, and who is to have the throne if
Borghese does not marry Valtellina. Pico loves Miss
Phillips for some reason only hinted at, and has come
to Babylon to see her. Mr. Meyer, who is the only
one aware that Pico is the prince supposed to be lost,
takes him down into the tomb of the dead king, tells
him who he is, gives him his father's “things” in a
box, and leaves him there to have a conversation with
his mother who happens to drop in. It is all cleared
up between them, and they sing a duet together, and
go out for a little fresh air. Valtellina, mousing about
after the queen, comes afterward to the tomb and
meets the high-priest there; and one after another
drops in, till the tomb is full, and the ghost of the old
king takes the opportunity to get up and mention
what he died of. Great confusion of course; and,
soon after, Pico, feeling called upon to kill the murderer
of the sleepless old gentleman, stabs at somebody
in the dark and kills his mother! Valtellina is
led off by the police, Pico faints in the arms of Mr.
Meyer, the satraps and Babylonians rush in, and the
curtain falls — leaving Pico to marry Miss Phillips and
succeed to the throne. All this of course took place
in a city built two generations after Ham (brother of
Shem and Japhet) but what with the look of the
“tombs,” and the way people were stabbed and poisoned,
it was impossible not to wonder what Justice
Matsell would have done in the premises.

We shall hear Semiramide again to-night, and speak
more advisedly of the music on Monday. At present,
we can not convince ourself that Grisi and Persiani
sang any better when we heard them in London. We
can never hope for — and we need not wish — a better
opera. Borghese is a most accomplished creature,
with (among other things) an intoxicating way of
crushing her eyes up to express passion (in a way that
none but people of genius do) and she does nothing
indifferently. Pico, with her wonderful at-home-ativeness
anywhere between the lowest note and the highest,
faultless in her science, and personally of the kind
of women most loveable, is enough, of herself, to keep
a town together. Perozzi, with his sweet, pure
voice, and gentlemanly taste (he was king of Egypt
last night, by the way, and a candidate for Borghese's
hand), is worthy to be a third star in any such Orion's
belt, and the fourth may well be Valtellina, whose
thorough base, we have no doubt, first suggested the
idea of the forty-horse excavator lately patented by
congress.

But what shall we say of the scenery? We were
taken completely by surprise, with the taste as well as
splendor of it, and we think Stanfield himself, the
great artist who produces occasionally such marvels
in the spectacles of Drury Lane, would have taken a
pride in claiming it. Certainly no comparable scenery
has been exhibited, to our knowledge, in this
country. The costumes were also admirable.

Abstaining as we do, for to-day, from musical
criticism, we can not help alluding to the electric effect,
upon the audience, of the duet between Pico
and Borghese — the well-known “Giorno d'orrore.”
The house was uncomfortably crammed, but a pin
might have been heard to drop, at any moment during
the singing of it. It was a case of complete musical
intoxication. The applause was boundless, but
unluckily the encore (which we trust will not be foiled
again to-night) was defeated by an evident fear on the
part of the audience of interrupting a part of the duet
not yet completed. If you love your public, dear
Semiramide, nod, to-night, to the orchestra, after the
bouquets have descended!