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Anna Katherine Green - "The Filigree Ball"

Algernon Charles Swinburne - "Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards"

ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN - "New Forces in Old China"

Edward Lear - "Book of Nonsense"

A Story

W >> William Makepeace Thackeray >> A Story




And, thank Heaven, this effect HAS been produced in very many
instances, and that the "Catherine" cathartic has acted most
efficaciously. The author has been pleased at the disgust which his
work has excited, and has watched with benevolent carefulness the
wry faces that have been made by many of the patients who have
swallowed the dose. Solomons remembers, at the establishment in
Birchin Lane where he had the honour of receiving his education,
there used to be administered to the boys a certain cough-medicine,
which was so excessively agreeable that all the lads longed to have
colds in order to partake of the remedy. Some of our popular
novelists have compounded their drugs in a similar way, and made
them so palatable that a public, once healthy and honest, has been
well-nigh poisoned by their wares. Solomons defies anyone to say
the like of himself--that his doses have been as pleasant as
champagne, and his pills as sweet as barley-sugar;--it has been his
attempt to make vice to appear entirely vicious; and in those
instances where he hath occasionally introduced something like
virtue, to make the sham as evident as possible, and not allow the
meanest capacity a single chance to mistake it.

And what has been the consequence? That wholesome nausea which it
has been his good fortune to create wherever he has been allowed to
practise in his humble circle.

Has anyone thrown away a halfpennyworth of sympathy upon any person
mentioned in this history? Surely no. But abler and more famous
men than Solomons have taken a different plan; and it becomes every
man in his vocation to cry out against such, and expose their errors
as best he may.

Labouring under such ideas, Mr. Isaac Solomons, junior, produced the
romance of Mrs. Cat, and confesses himself completely happy to have
brought it to a conclusion. His poem may be dull--ay, and probably
is. The great Blackmore, the great Dennis, the great Sprat, the
great Pomfret, not to mention great men of our own time--have they
not also been dull, and had pretty reputations too? Be it granted
Solomons IS dull; but don't attack his morality; he humbly submits
that, in his poem, no man shall mistake virtue for vice, no man
shall allow a single sentiment of pity or admiration to enter his
bosom for any character of the piece: it being, from beginning to
end, a scene of unmixed rascality performed by persons who never
deviate into good feeling. And although he doth not pretend to
equal the great modern authors, whom he hath mentioned, in wit or
descriptive power; yet, in the point of moral, he meekly believes
that he has been their superior; feeling the greatest disgust for
the characters he describes, and using his humble endeavour to cause
the public also to hate them.

Horsemonger Lane: January 1840.

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