MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE. BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON. BOOK I. INITIAL CHAPTER: Showing how my novel came to be written. SCENE, The Hall in Uncle Roland's Tower Night-SEASON, Winter. - TIME, Mr. Caxton is seated before a great geographical globe which he is turning round leisurely, and "for his own recreation," as, according to Sir Thomas Browne, a philosopher should turn round the orb, of which that globe professes to be the representation and effigies. My mother having just adorned a very small frock with a very smart braid, is holding it out at arm's-length, the more to admire the effect. Blanche, though leaning both hands on my mother's shoulder, is not regarding the frock, but glances towards PISISTRATUS, who, seated near the fire, leaning back in his chair, and his head bent over his breast, seems in a very bad humour. Uncle Roland, who has become a great novel reader, is deep in the mysteries of some fascinating Third Volume. Mr. Squills has brought My Novel. 1 The Times in his pocket for his own special profit and delectation, and is now bending his brows over "the state of the money market," in great doubt whether railway shares can possibly fall lower. For Mr. Squills, happy man! has large savings, and does not know what to do with his money; or, to use his own phrase, "how to buy in at the cheapest, in order to sell out at the dearest." MR. CAXTON, musingly. "It must have been a monstrous long journey. It would be somewhere hereabouts, I take it, that they would split off." My MOTHER, mechanically, and in order to show Austin that she paid him the compliment of attending to his remarks "Who split off, my dear?" "Bless me, Kitty," said my father, in great admiration, "you ask just the question which it is most difficult to answer. An ingenious speculator on races contends that the Danes, whose descendants make the chief part of our northern population, (and indeed, if his hypothesis could be correct, we must suppose all the ancient worshippers of Odin,) are of the same origin as the Etrurians. And why, Kitty - I just ask you, why?" My mother shook her head thoughtfully, and turned the frock to the other side of the light. "Because, forsooth," cried my father, exploding"because the Etrurians called their gods 'the Esar,' and the Scandinavians called theirs the Æsir, or Aser! And where do you think he puts their cradle?" "Cradle!" said my mother, dreamily - "it must be in the nursery." MR. CAXTON. · "Exactly in the nursery of the just here," and my father pointed to the globe; "bounded, you see, by the River Halys, and in that region which, taking its name from Ees or As, (a word designating light or fire,) has been immemorially called Asia. Now, Kitty, from Ees or As our ethnological speculator would derive not only Asia, the land, but Æsar or Aser, its primitive inhabitants. Hence he supposes the origin of the Etrurians and the Scandinavians, But, if we give him so much, we must give him more, and deduce from the same origin the Es of the Celt and the Ized of the Persian, and — what will be of more use to him, I dare say, poor man, than all the rest put together-the Æs of the Romans, that is, the God of Copper-Money a very powerful household god he is to this day!" My mother looked musingly at her frock, as if she were taking my father's proposition into serious consideration. "So, perhaps," resumed my father, "and not unconformably with sacred records, from one great parent horde came all these various tribes, carrying with them the name of their beloved Asia; and whether they wandered north, south, or west, exalting their own emphatic designation of 'Children of the Land of Light' into the title of gods. And to think, (added Mr. Caxton pathetically, gazing upon that speck in the globe on which his forefinger rested,) — to think how little they changed for the better when they got to the Don, or entangled their rafts amidst the icebergs of the Baltic so comfortably off as they were here, if they could but have stayed quiet!" "And why the deuce could not they?" asked Mr. Squills. |