ON THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE."*

[Edinburgh Review, October, 1806.]

THIS terrific title, with the subjoined catalogue of pitiable exclamations, would lead a native of any country but England to expect a heart-rending tale of accumulated wo. A Frenchman would prepare to shake his head, and shrug up his shoulders at the unobserved calamities of some love-sick heroine; a German would instantly feel his heart expand with all the sensitiveness of philanthropy, and the tear would stand ready to start from his eye, at the thought of beholding all the hopeless errors and unalloyed misery of man, feelingly depicted by the nervous hand of sentimental philosophy. But to a thorough indigenous independent Briton, the word "misery" does by no means convey an idea of such extreme discomfort. He feels the satisfaction of grumbling over his misfortunes, to be, on many occasions, so much greater than the pain of enduring them, that he will beg, borrow, steal, or even manufacture calamities, sooner than suffer under any unusual scarcity of discontent. He knows, indeed, that miseries are indeed necessary to his happiness, and though perhaps not quite so pleasant at the moment as his other indispensable enjoyments, roast beef and beer, would, if taken away, leave just as great a craving in his appetites as would be occasioned by the privation of these national dainties.

The Englishman alone, we think, occupies himself seri

*The Miseries of Human Life; or, the Groans of Timothy Testy, and Samuel Sensitive; with a few Supplementary Sighs from Mrs. Testy. In Twelve Dialogues.—Had extraordinary success—passing through nine editions within a year. This admirable jeu d'esprit was written by a respectable clergyman, the Rev. JAMES BERESFORD, A. M. of Merton College, Oxford, and its success, as is usual in such cases, called forth abundance of imitations.

ously in this manafacture of unhappiness; and seems to possess, almost as exclusively, the power of afterwards laughing at his own misfortunes; which, however, during their immediate existence, gave him as much torment as ever the crushing an earwig, or beating a jackass, inflicted on the sensibility of a lachrymose German. It is the English only who submit to the same tyranny, from all the incidental annoyances and petty vexations of the day, as from the serious calamities of life. In Ben Jonson's time, it was an unmeaning humour "to be gentleman-like and melancholy." We believe it is since those days that a cause for that melancholy has been invented. It is only by the present race that the drawing on tight boots, or the extinguishing a candle under your nose, has been found entirely to embitter life. These trifling uneasinesses, are now dwelt and commented upon, in conversation, as of the highest importance; are considered an excuse for spleen or ill nature, and, sometimes, almost a reason for doubting the beneficence of Nature altogether. These restless concomitants of life are only valued and cultivated in our gloomy atmosphere. The lively Frenchman either passes them unnoticed, or, if he does perceive them, only moulds them into a pleasantry to amuse his next companion. The haughty Spaniard will not suffer his gravity and grandeur to be broken in upon by such paltry considerations. The quiet Scotchman patiently endures them without knowing them to be evils; or if he by chance receives annoyance, hereafter goes round about to avoid them. The violent Irishman either passionately throws them off in an instant, or persuades himself it is comfort and amusement to him to let them continue. The phlegmatic Dutchman hides them from his view by the smoke of his pipe; while the philosophizing German, who only feels for all mankind, thinks everything a trifle that affects himself. The sombre Englishman alone contents himself with grumbling at the evils, which he takes no steps to avoid; and perhaps the proneness to suicide, that is objected to John Bull by foreigners, might more reasonably be attributed to this indulgence in unhappiness, and domestication of misery, than to the influence of fogs, or the physical effects of sea-coal fires.

These are the miseries of which the author before us treats; and it is a subject which, in some point or other,

must come home to every Englishman. He enters upon this rich field, in an address, inviting the miserable (but, we must remark, inviting nobody else), the "children of misfortune, wherever found, and whatever enduring,-ye who, arrogating to yourselves a kind of sovereignty in suffering, maintain, that all the throbs of torture, all the pungency of sorrow, all the bitterness of desperation, are your own. Take courage to behold a pageant of calamities, which calls you to renounce your sad monopoly!" We are then presented with Samuel Sensitive and Timothy Testy. Any formality of introduction is dispensed with; for the author knew that he could meet with no reader, who was not before acquainted with one or other of these gentlemen. For though Mr. Sensitive be of a family comparatively modern (not being naturalized in this country, apparently in the days of the Duchess of Bedford, who declared that "she was born before nerves were invented"), yet there can be nobody, of any age, who has not often met with a branch of the stock of Testy; which we believe, indeed, flourished in this island even before the Conqueror. Indeed, the gentleman himself is so often to be met with, equally in the worst as in the best company, that it is no wonder the author, in his subsequent delineation of the character of Mr. Sensitive, should forget "all those finer disquietudes, those quivering susceptibilities, that feverish fastidiousness, and those qualmish recoiling disgusts which constitute at once the pride and the plague of his gossamer frame." We are not surprised that Testy's gross form and active dislikes were continually present to the author, and entirely obliterated the meek agitations of Sensitive. For this has certainly been the case; and, however strongly the distinction may strike us at setting out, in a little time we perceive Sensitive to be a complete fac-simile of Testy, and can sometimes hardly persuade ourselves that they are not both one and the same man. We entirely lose the distinction between the mentally miserable man, whose whole frame is jarred and thrown into a state of tremulous incapability by the falling of a dish, and him who, gross and violent under calamity, instantly knocks down the servant who dropped it.

'This distinction is perhaps better exemplified by the conduct of the parties under vexation, than by any positive dif

ference in the nature of the accidents that disorder each of them. Thus, Mr. Sensitive declares to Testy, "I, indeed, by the painful privilege of my nature, am as it were ambidexter in misery, being no less exquisitely sensitive to those grosser annoyances, or tangible tribulations, of which you are the victim, than to those subtler and elegant agonies which are my own peculiar inheritance." Testy, we think, might have made a declaration of the same sort; for as we go on, we find the vexations of both to be precisely the same, only the agonies when they fix upon Testy, necessarily lose the elegance which graces his friend's tribulations. For this reason, we wish that these two gentlemen had hit upon some more lively shape in which to convey their miseries to the world, than the wearisome sameness of dialogue. Had they permitted Tom Testy, who appears in the second dialogue, or some third person, to form their misfortunes into a narrative, we have no doubt that his feeling description of all the torments they endured-of all the tears, contortions, and violent gesture by which they expressed their sense of them, would have attracted the notice of the world much more than their own complacent vaunting of pre-eminence in misery. Particularly, too, as we see all the while, that their tortures, however pungent, still left them calmness enough to enter their calamities regularly in memorandum books, though, certainly, not sufficient coolness of thought to correct the language and style in which they are related. We think that even Mrs. Testy, though she is guilty of some vulgar expressions, might, if consulted, have remarked and amended several colloquial barbarisms, manufactured words, and incorrect phrases, which have been suffered to remain, and which, though perhaps in conversation no vexation to the most nervous hearer, are a considerable misery to the grossest and most sensual reader.

These two gentlemen having agreed to meet frequently, and contend for the crown of calamity, by reciting their unhappinesses in a sort of Amabean prose, we are, in the second dialogue, introduced to young Tom Testy, who comes in for the purpose of enlivening the conversation every now and then with a whimsically-applied, or more frequently, a punning quotation. The reader now perceives his own "misery," in the prospect of pursuing the rest of his journey with these unvarying and discontented comrades.

Now and then, indeed, a slight relief is afforded, when Mrs. Testy puts in a word; but, upon the whole, she is a very quiet, well-behaved woman, and seldom speaks but when spoken to. However, there is no hope for it; the door of the conveyance is shut, the reader is boxed up with these companions; the coachman is inexorable; and, unless he has powers of self-denial to give up the journey altogether, he must, thus accompanied, and thus only, immediately enter upon the "Miseries of the Country." Here he indeed wants companions of a more cheerful and patient disposition; for the miseries he meets with at his outset are really no laughing matter. Here, as in many other places, Messrs. Sensitive and Testy quite lose their captiousness and causeless irritability, and only complain of misfortunes that would vex, and that very effectually, any man of the greatest reason and equanimity.

"10. (T.) While you are out with a walking-party, after heavy rains-one shoe suddenly sucked off by the boggy clay; and then, in making a long and desperate stretch (which fails), with the hope of recovering it, leaving the other shoe in the same predicament:-the second stage of ruin is that of standing, or rather tottering, in blank despair, with both feet planted, ancle-deep, in the quagmire. The last (I had almost said the dying) scene of the tragedy that of deliberately cramming first one, and then the other clogged polluted foot into its choaked-up shoe, after having 'scavengered' your hands and gloves in slaving to drag up each, separately, out of its deep bed, and in this state proceeding on your walk-is too dreadful for representation. The crown of the catastrophe is, that each of the party floundering in his, or her, own gulf, is utterly disabled from assisting, or being assisted by, the rest."

"17. (T.) On paying a visit to your garden in the morning for the purpose of regaling your eye and nose with the choice ripe fruit with which it had abounded the day before, finding that the whole produce of every tree and bush has been carefully gathered -in the night!

"18. (S.) The delights of hay-time! as follows:-After having cut down every foot of grass upon your grounds, on the most solemn assurances of the barometer that there is nothing to fearafter having dragged the whole neighbourhood for every man, woman, and child, that love or money could procure, and thrust a rake, or a pitch-fork, into the hands of every servant in your family, from the housekeeper to the scullion-after having long overlooked and animated their busy labours, and seen the exuberant produce turned and re-turned under a smiling sun, till every blade is as dry as a bone, and as sweet as a rose-after having exultingly counted one rising haycock after another, and drawn to the spot every seizable horse and cart, all now standing in readi