COLMAN'S RANDOM RECORDS.*
"RANDOM RECORDS"—a very pretty jingle, which contains the secret of its author's pretensions to wit. We could show, we think, without any great trouble, that the fame a GEORGE COLMAN the Random Records, By George Colman the Younger. Vols. 1 and 2. London, 1830 Younger has 'sprung from a pretty taste he has for alliteration, whe. ther of letters or syllables ; joined, perhaps, to a dexterity in using established phrases in new senses, or newly-coined ones in the place of others better known. We will give one example of each of these three sources of fun—for as .such, it seems, the world is pleased to receive it ; and we do not think that our readers will find any diffi- culty in classifying all GEORGE COLMAN'S flights after our method.
1. Alliteration. 11/1% COLMAN thus enlarges upon the difficulty which elderly gentlemen retired from business experience in disposing of their time.
" Pray, Sir, are you a banker or a tallow-chandler ?—a dealer in cash or in candles!? If, Sir, you be either of these, you will find that when you have retired from business, carrying into the country with you that sort of under- standing which we designate by the term solid, to crumble into gradual decay —which is the character of a cheshire cheese—you will soon find, Sir, that you don't know what is the matter with you; and a little after, you will discover what the matter is, you have nothing to do ; and forthwith, Sir, you will begin to have a hankering after the settling-days or the melting-days. But if you should have had any foresight—any turn for remote objects (which is the character of a telescope) you will have retained some kind of control over your successors in trade—enough to fortan excuse for your making a peddling bustle in your late concern. Then, Sir, you will, if a banker, roll up once a week in a chariot from your villa ; or if a tallow-chandler, hebdo- madally, in a buggy from your box, or mutatis mutandis, as it may happen to be,—just to look after the money or the moulds, and to keep your mind and body alive, leaving all the drudgery to the underlings."—Random Records, vol. I. p. 5.
In this page, at the end of which the author assuredly rubbed his hands in an ecstasy of satisfaction, may be seen, in addition to the elaboration of similar sounds, a kind of see-saw for the ear, which is one of the arts of writers who are better at balancing words than creating ideas ; every member of a sentence has a brother to match, such is the author's love of symmetry,—like the gardener of the story, who would have everything to correspond, and put his son a prisoner in a garden-house because another boy was imprisoned in the oppo- site building for stealing apples. The gardener had, unluckily, but one criminal. Mr. COLMAN has often only one idea ; but he always takes care to match it with something he thinks will do as well. • It was very easy, and not at all new, to tellthe world that a person who has long been occupied in business, feels at a loss to dispose of his time when he has given up all interest in it. COLMAN takes up pre- cisely the same idea, but he works it after his own recipe,—see-saws the banker and the chandler, weighs money against moulds, settling- days and melting-days, chariot and villa against buggy and box, until he has got over a page or two, in a state, as he considers it, of high effervescence. This passes for wit ; and the author, be he dull, servile, ignorant, hypocritical, or what not, passes for a man of genius.
2. Applying old phrases to new uses. "My man Geordy, though not foot-sore like his master, was what the knowing ones call dead beat. I looked at him while he was plodding along, and perceived that he was actually walking in his sleep. . . . The fellow's eyes were fixed, glassy, and half sunk in their sockets, while he stepped for- ward as if unconscious of his progress. I might have fancied myself followed by a corpse upon board wages."—Vol. p. 142.
"A corpse on board wages" is, when considered gravely, an idea utterly devoid of common, sense ; nevertheless, the extraordinary ap- plication of the kitchen phrase to a churchyard subject, produces a momentary risibility, and the purpose of the writer is served. Sur- prise at least is the essence of this kind of wit. 3. Newly coining phrases or words in lieu of more familiar ones.
"We tramped over the rugged horrors of the road, and accomplished full sixteen miles from Old Aberdeen, without stopping except for five minutes, at a mean road-side tenement, where postboys and waggoners watered their horses and whiskey'd themselves."—H. p. 139.
If this exercise of the invention occasions much amusement, and may be considered an intellectual effort demanding high powers, then may GEORGE COLMAN the Younger be deemed a valuable writer. To us, with the exception of occasional scintillations arising out of the bizarrerie of many of his expressions and sometimes of his ideas, his works afford but little pleasure. His Plays sometimes contain well-conceived or well-observed characters ; and they have a bustle agreeable enough to those that like it. His Tales in Verse are out- rageous extravagances, which have certainly pleased the taste of nu- merous readers. The versifier's chief credit, however, is, that he has not spoiled the originals by clumsy and prolix metres. These Random Records, as far as may be judged from the two first volumes, will add little to his fame. That which he tells of himself, is usually so over- laid with affectation and conceit, that it will inspire no other feeling than ennui or disgust ; that which he tells of others, is sometimes well said, in spite of an evident determination to colour for stage- effect, which takes away the remotest idea_ of placing confidenee in the author's accuracy of representation. Mr. CormAiv, after a great deal of roundabout trifling, which he hopes will be mistaken for wit, comes to the confession that he writes his life because the publisher has offered him a considerable sum for it. In point of fact, we do not believe that Mr. COLMAN'S materials for autobiography at all abound: he appears to be labouring to write up to the amount of his check, by making the most of every trivial circumstance he can recollect. It is the public who are to blame : why should they suppose that a play- wright, a pun-filer, a dealer in claptraps and points, has more to say of himself than other men? The events in his life are rarely of a more important character than a damned play or a jovial dinner. It is imagined that because these people are engaged in the perpetual study of character and of wit, that they are themselves persons of a remarkable turn, whose conversation is courted by all the world : but authors of this description usually enter society rather as auditors than actors—they are artists, not historical characters; conse- quently, when they do write their lives, the contents consist of dull histories of theatrical squabbles, the worthless or unused- up bon mots and ideas of characters they have not been able to bring into play, together with ridiculously exaggerated sketches of their friends and the events of their own lives. Of late, DiuniN, KELLY, O'KEEFE, and others of that stamp, have endeavoured to convert this recollec- tion into cash ; and it would seem that the public is not already con- vinced that nothing good is to be expected from such quarters. If, however, the disappointment in COLMAN, which will probably prove the greatest of all, fails to set the world right, the case is hopeless. Mr. COLMAN disclaims a collection of mecdotes and bon mots which has been attributed to him: now, though he disdains the oc- cupation of invented, together the jests he may have remembered, dis- covered, or it is our opinion that this form of publication is one which would have saved a great deal of space, and 'would have much better suited his genius than all the wretched stuff he has written about his residence at Aberdeen, his journey in Scotland, his trip to France, his father's illness at Worthing, 8cc. The only things we find worth printing are, in truth, a few anecdotes of the Joe Miller kind, some of which we shall extract. It is a pity that Mr. COLBURN'S passion for autobiography misled him into so generous an offer for COLMAN'S Memoirs ; for he should not have been di- verted from an employment in which he would have shone,—we mean, a new edition of some popular jest-book : " Joe Miller, by the author of the Broad Grins," might have suited the bookseller's ideas of a goodtitle-page as well as ".Rundom Record,,"—which, being in- terpreted in G. C. 's own alliterative way, means, Wretched Rubbish. The few following trifles would grace a book of jests Or anecdotes, and there are more of them in the original.
A DEBAUCHEE'S DhaTaBED.—When Thornton was on his deathbed, his relations surrounding it, he told them he should expire before he had counted twenty ; and, covering his head with the bedclothes, he began to count :— " One, two—eighteen, nineteen, twenty." He then thrust out his head, exclaiming, "By 'od I it's very strange ! but why aren't you all crying ?"— " Teach my son,' said he to the bystanders, "teach him, when I am gone, his A, B, C. I know mine in several languages; but I perceive no good that the knowledge has done me ;—so, if you never teach him his A, B, C, at all, it don't much signify." Within an hour after this, poor Bonnell Thornton breathed his last.
A YOUNG SPORTSMAN'S EnucaTION.—The above-mentioned Baronet had many amiable qualities. His successor and son, the last Sir Charles, not many years deceased, was a child, on my juvenile visit to Kirkleatham ;—he was educating according to his father's principles of making him a fine clash- ing fellow, but under excellent control. When I first saw him, he ran into a drawing- room, full of company, with a live mouse in his hand :—" Bite off his head, Charles," said his father. The subordinate boy obeyed the word of command ;—his white dental guillotine fell upon the condemned vermin, and poor mousey was instantly executed.—{This same young Baronet broke his neck in hunting.] A SAVAGE'S IDEA OF GOING OUT' TO Si-tom—One day, while he carried his gun, I was out with him in a stubble field, at the beginning of September ; when he pointed to some object at a distance, which I could not distinguish. His eyes sparkled, he laid down his gun mighty mysteriously, and put his finger on my mouth, to enjoin silence ;—he then stole onwards, crouching along the ground for several yards ; till, on a sudden, he darted forward like a cat, and sprang upon a covey of partridges ; one of which he caught, and took home alive, in great triumph. '
FOOTE'S NOTIONS OF SCOTCH ONE-POUND NOTES AND PORT.—In giving sumptuous dinners to the first society in Edinburgh, his mode of preparing for these entertainments was a strange kind of satire, by contrast, upon "Scotch economy." Jewell told me that while Foote remained there, he papered up the curls of his wig, every night before he went to bed, with the one-pound notes of Scotland, to show his contempt for promissory paper of so little value, which was not then in English circulation ; and that when his cook attended him, next morning, for orders—not orders for the play, but orders for dinner—he unrolled the curls on each side of his head, giving her the one-pound notes to purchase provisions ad libitum, and then sent her to market in a sedan-chair.
MATHEWS'S SINGLE-SPEECHED FELLOW TaavELLEsa—Mathews, "whose eye begets occasion for his wit," once told me of his going a day's journey
with an asthmatic passenger, not dangerously ill, although muffled up in a night-cap and flannels, who never attempted to utter, except when the stage stopped at an inn ; but at every house of call where the waiter came to the coach-door with the usual "Please to alight, gemmen," the gasping invalid breathed out to him as well as he could, " Butter-milk!" The pen can pro- duce no effect from so simple an incident ; but Mathews, with one touch of his extraordinary talent, can give you the very man,—can present him to your eyes and ears, stuck up in the corner of a coach, and butter-milking it to the very life.
A playwright is a peculiarly unfit person for a play-licenser: the absurdities of Mr. COLMAN in that office may be taken as an ex- ample. There are few men of narrower prejudices, or more limited knowledge, than the individuals who usually devote themselves to writing for the stage. Living from hand to mouth, dangling upon the patrons of the stage, and hanging upon the skirts of society on the look-out for straggling oddities of character, their lives are usually as dissolute as their sentiments are servile. Their whole circle of serious thought see-saws between a stage-struck devotion and claptrap loyalty: their political creed is an absurd compound of "God save the King" and "Britannia rules the waves :" their morals are the strangest compound of inconsistencies ; names alone guide them—under different appellations, seduction, honour, murder, extravagance, avarice, and every other vice or virtue, are alternately applauded and condemned. When such an individual takes up, he usually becomes a methodist : when he is made a licenser, he is at sea, without a single principle to guide him; and, living in terror of being visited for his former sins, he plays the hypocrite, and adds servility to hypocrisy. We wish Mr. COLMAN had finished his public career with his last comedy: it was no great effort, but it was at least in his walk, and we should not have been tempted to write of an old man with what may be deemed harshness. Any thing, however, that we may have said, will give no pain to the subject of it : he has cultivated with in- stinctive prudence a most particular and wholesome contempt of those whom he denominates "ephemeral critics ;" and if he should conde- scend to notice us, it would assuredly only be to class to with the I creatures he despises.
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