40 The Club-Room. [JAN. 



and some new exhumator, born for the purpose ; some coxcomb-gatherer ; 

 some compiler of the labours of the idle, and the intelligence of the 

 ignorant, Horace- Walpoled them once more out of their dust, and gib- 

 betted them into a sinister fame. 



Culverin. They are gone out, like the light of their own cigars ; 

 and, luckily for the country they leave, gone off, too. For creatures 

 of their supreme refinement, the manly manners of England are too 

 harsh ; for their responsive delicacy of frame (the appropriate case 

 of an instrument so exquisite as their sensitive souls) the climate is 

 too horrid ; their finely-tuned ears cannot abide even the sound of the 

 English language ; so off they go, to spend the next twenty years in 

 the land of soul and scoundrelism, to lisp Italian, languish to guitars, 

 sigh the slip-shod nonsense of the most miserable and mindless race that 

 burthens the globe; and be the worthy payers and prey of a herd of opera 

 singers, professed gamblers, and fictitious titles. 



It has more than once stirred up my indignation, idle as it may be to 

 be moved by such things, to see a great, lubberly, seven-foot-high 

 Yorkshire clown, a fellow modelled on one of his own bullocks, play 

 the foreigner with no more sensibility than a dumpling, or grace than a 

 dromedary, subduing his tally-ho throat into " Ah che gusto ;" or Idol mio 

 sinking in agonies of clumsy rapture at the flourishes of a figurante, or 

 a prima donna ; and, in the midst of the filth, the intolerable and innu- 

 merable disgusts of foreign habits, with fever in every puff of wind, 

 foulness in every thing that he eats, drinks, or sees, pestilence in his 

 bed, and poison in his dish ; protesting against the country that gave 

 him birth, and supplied the means of his useless being ; lauding the 

 tainted society of a gang of fiddlers, swindlers, and buffoons ; and 

 surrounded by a groupe of titled harlots, and ribboned, and laced 

 impostors, who are picking his pockets at the moment, uttering, with 

 the sigh of an expiring dray horse, his homage to " Bella Italia," 

 and his shuddering abhorrence of the hyperborean climate and gothic 

 habits of England. 



The Chairman. Why, George, you seem very angry on the subject. 

 Have your Spanish recollections left nothing to soften your wrath 

 against those poor devils of Italians ? 



Culverin. Quite the contrary. It is impossible to have lived among 

 the general population of Spain, without seeing in them the materials of 

 a great people : courage, constancy in arms, fidelity to their word, and 

 generosity to all. The Spaniard has in him still every quality that 

 three centuries ago made him the first soldier, the first discoverer, the 

 first statesman, and the first poet of Europe. That all those noble attri- 

 butes have been stripped of their use have been made worse than use- 

 less have been so often embittered and envenomed into fierce prejudice, 

 sullen bigotry, and cruel superstition, is the work, not of Nature, nor 

 of time, but of a government of monks. Popery has chained the limbs 

 of the strong man, either to rack them, or to force them to rack others. 

 Ignorance not passive, but malignant ; fear turned into the fury of the 

 coward ; arid superstition, not droning over its altars and censers, but 

 lighting the firebrand at them, and scattering it in civil ruin and misery 

 over the land, are the palpable gifts of popery to Spain. 



Ringlet. Treason, George ! Egad, your description spoils one's curls ; 

 it makes the hair stand on end. 



Culverin. I hate the name, and say so, as we are here in confidence* ; 



