Originally published in The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor (George Manners) vol.1 #5 (01 Feb 1808).
Letter IV.
The inhabitants of Mormonia, my dear brother, are very partial to certain public assemblies, called coffee-houses, where the natives meet to take snuff, swallow a liquid like our punch; advise the minister, whether to make peace or war, and speculate upon the weather. Curiosity led me a few days ago into one of these temples of reason, where I beheld a grave elderly gentleman, with a very large sheet of paper opened before him, upon which several cabalistical characters were imprinted. He seemed to peruse these cyphers with a melancholy earnestness, and ever and anon muttered to himself, in a style of great apparent devotion. I at first supposed that he was petitioning his Gods for some favour, and was about to leave him to himself, when he put his prayer into my hands, assuring me with a bow, that "he had done with it." Upon my answering, as well as my confined knowledge of the language would permit, that I knew nothing of the matter; "Indeed Sir!" replied he, "then I will tell you all about it." He then placed me on the same seat with himself, but prudently contrived to station himself on the outside of the bench so as to prevent my escape, after which he thus began:
"This invaluable sheet, Sir, which I hold in my hand, is called a newspaper: it contains a chronicle of all the remarkable events which take place in Mormonia, such as marriages, births, deaths, opposition coaches, and opposition dinners, new plays, and old jokes; nothing is too great or too little for its columns, and though it is sure to give me the bile, I read it every morning with the greatest eagerness. When I first took to that paper, Sir, I was as florid and healthy looking a man, as ever stuck elbow into stomach. I am a glover, Sir, and shall be delighted with your custom. Well, Sir, the writer proved to me twelve years ago, that Mormonia could not exist another week; and by these comfortable prognostics has gradually tinged my cheeks with the bilious hue they now possess." Here he looked into the mirror which hung over the chimney-piece, and shook his head. "But notwithstaading all that, Sir," continued he, "gloom is so congenial to the temper of a Mormonian, that I cannot look into any other paper. My wife, Sir, a fine fat woman—I'll introduce you—my wife tells me, that my studies will bring me to the grave at last, and that she means to bury me in a shroud of stitched chronicles in terrorem: but I put little faith in her prophecies. It is natural for people to foretel, what they hope will prove true."
At this moment, a smart looking little man, with a cast in his eye, a mulberry nose, and a scarlet waistcoat, edged with sable fur, entered the room, and shaking the vender of kid leather by the gouty left hand, "A ha! old croaker!" cried he, "are you alive yet? Why you take as much killing as an old fox!" The shopkeeper did not seem much to admire this salutation, and calling for the waiter, paid his bill and abruptly retreated. The red-breasted gentleman, whose business it seemed to be to make himself agreeable, soon gained my confidence; and, at my request, gave me a specimen of the contents of that paper.
It seems, that the government of Mormonia is somewhat embroiled with the natives of a large uncultivated continent, called Columbia; men of common morals and common understandings would, in such a case, certainly aid the efforts of their own country—but great genius is eccentric. This journal has thought fit to take up the cudgels for the aforesaid Columbia, and draws up three close columns per diem, to shew that those foreigners are possessed of every virtue under the sun, though from all that I can learn, it seems that the Columbians are remarkable for nothing but hearts without valour, heads without honesty, and legs without calves. My new friend having read to me the disquisition of the day—Well, said he, what do you think of that, eh? It seems to me, answered I, that the writer is a humane good sort of man, who may be mistaken as to the character of that people, but whose motive is a desire to spare the effusion of blood--Effusion of a fiddlestick, replied he; why, he would not spare sixpence to save every smoke-dried man John of them from the maw of their cannibal neighbours. Now, Sir, I will let you into a secret; then lowering his voice, the fellow, Sir, has two reasons for what he does: In the first place, he thinks the Columbians in the-sight, because the king's ministers think them in the wrong; that may be called his every day reason. His holiday reason is, that some of his best friends, as he calls them (I should rather denominate them his worst enemies) whom he must not disoblige, have withdrawn their money from Mormonia, and invested it in the funds of Columbia; and, should a war take place, will deservedly have outwitted themselves by their short-sighted cunning. "Hac fonte derivata clades!" this is the key to that gentleman's Cabinet of Philanthropic Effusions!
The waiter now spread half a dozen more newspapers upon the table at which we sat, the chief contents of which my fur-clad associate, whose breath and good breeding seemed inexhaustible, read over to me: and truly, my dear brother, if variety in morals, politics, taste, and talent, be a pleasure in life, these journals are most admirably calculated to afford it. Figure to yourself a large mirror hung up for sale at a shop door in a public street, which reflecting every passing object, exhibits almost at the same moment, a motley mixture of jews and gentiles, saints and street-walkers, carts, coaches, quakers and quack-doctors, and you will have a faint idea of the contents of our coffee-room table. One journal comforted me with a certain cure for every disease incident to human nature; another made me beware of medical impostors: one roused my indignation at the bombardment of a foreign city; another proved to me that the bombardment was justified upon every principle of political morality. This made me plume myself on my critical sagacity, in my admiration of a new play; that called upon me to hiss the object of my short-lived applause from the stage, assuring me, upon the honor of an editor, that the piece was not worth the expence of lamp-oil. One writer harrows up my soul with murders committed in a sister island; another assures me that it is all false, the natives of that isle being as remarkable for humanity as they are for modesty. I was in the very act of admiring a song in a new comedy, when one paper told me, that it was a theft from Theocritus: a second, that it was pilfered from the wine cellar of old Anacreon: a third, that the author never meant to conceal that he had it from Anacreon: a fourth, that he did mean to conceal that circumstance; and a fifth, that all his co-journalists were ignorant blockheads, the ditty in question being parodied from a Grub-street madrigal, penned by a rhyming parson, who flourished a century ago.
Such, my dear brother, are the waters of instruction which the natives of Mormonia are in the daily habit of pouring down their throats. Nor are the names of these journals less appropriate than their contents. We have Monitors, whose advice is not worth the blotting of a sheet of foolscap: Auroras, who, while they open the gates of the East, shut the eyes of their readers; Chronicles, fit only to "chronicle small beer;" Oracles, whose ingenious ambiguity rivals that of Delphos; and Weekly Messengers, so weakly as to be inferior in value to those messengers, which schoolboys are in the habit of detaching along the string of a flying kite. Adieu.
M. Brownrigg.