36G The Jew Slopseller. [APRIL, 



It is not the face alone of our hero which needs delineation : the painter 

 who would simply pourtray the visage of the Slopseller, and afterwards trust 

 to his general observance of other men whereby to supply the absent mem- 

 bers, would err most criminally. Horace himself never imagined such a 

 monster ; it would be the head of a fox on the body of a mastiff of a 

 cat, fixed on the neck of an antelope. There is such a subtle and con- 

 stant communing between his features and every other part ; such a con- 

 tinual, and yet repressed agitation, from his eyelids to his toes; such a 

 catching-up of the fingers and acting of the vertebrae, that it would seem 

 some spirit of gain inhabited his every tendon and nerve, and that his 

 body echoed and throbbed throughout with their clamour and their stir- 

 ring. If nature has ever placed the least principle within him, like Ariel 

 in the pine, it requires more than mortal power to bring it to the light. 

 There is no looking at the face of the Slopseller the eye can take no hold 

 of his features ; they do not, as the old poet says of amber, " stroke the 

 sight" but evade, actually slip from it. He is only to be rightly viewed 

 whilst asleep when the flaccid lineaments, untenanted by the thousand 

 antics which inhabit the waking lines, have retreated back, and lie, like 

 gorged spiders in their webs, in the modicum of brain which engendered 

 and sustains them. Then, and then only, might the limner take the 

 features of our subject, and thus the likeness could only be known to a few 

 of his creed and craft for never yet did customer hear a Slopseller snore. 

 The whole life of our Israelite is a long game of verbal and practical lies 

 of substitution and of sycophancy. His prime god is made at hia 

 Majesty's mint ; a bank-note is to him the glorious sky and the sum it 

 carries, either moon, sun, or star, according to the amount. If he can give 

 to second-cloth the passing freshness of superfine, he is, in his own 

 esteem, a second Descartes ; if he can replace copper for gold, another 

 Newton. He has no love of nature, animate or still : if ever he stay to 

 look at a bullfinch, it is simply to reflect on the possibility of painting its 

 hues on a sparrow ; if ever he gaze at the veins of a pebble, it is to see if it 

 will pass for an agate or a cornelian. Shew him Mount Vesuvius in full 

 eruption, and he will speculate on getting it up in a raree-show ; point 

 out to him, by the glare of lightning, a ship's crew struggling in the 

 billows, and he will instantly ponder on what the men have in their 

 pockets. 



We must picture a seaman about to pass the door of our Slopseller : he 

 is in a moment captured, and, although pennyless, becomes a ready prey 

 to the Israelite, who buys the next three years 1 pay of the reckless tar. 

 The seaman laughs within himself aye, and when he gets aboard, his 

 mates laugh with him at the certain trick practised on the Jew ; for 

 when did a sailor ever think of time ? Did he ever think it possible for 

 the day three years to arrive ? If he have money in one hand, he thinks 

 he holds the skirts of Time with the other. The Slopseller, like his brother 

 crocodile, is amphibious, and can snap up a mouthful of unwary huma- 

 nity ashore, as well as in his native deep. However, it must, we think, 

 be owned, that the Slopseller is more potent at sea. By sea, we mean 

 the waste or forecastle of a man-of-war. His peculiarities become more 

 startling. Like Charles Brandon's armorial bearings, the gold cloth and 

 frize strike out a contrast sufficiently powerful to awaken the poetry of 

 thought philosophy. To the proof. 



We have before us a sailor, who hath felt the swn in every region of the 

 world : heat, wind, and rain have so worked upon his face have here 



