THE LAST OF THE FOOLS. "This fellow's wise enough to play the fool, He must observe their mood on whom he jests, And like the haggard, check at every feather For Folly, that he wisely shows, is fit, And wise men, folly-fallen, taint their wit.”—Twelfth Night. THE reader is requested not to be under any apprehensions; nothing personal is intended either to himself or his friends; there is no fear that stultiloquence shall be hushed, or of the race of fools becoming extinct-Heaven forefend! for in that case our occupation would be gone indeed, and we periodicalists, who live to shoot folly as it flies, might cease to extract quills from one goose in order to point them against another. The last man of the genus can never be ascertained until the conclusion of the world; it is of the last of a species that we are about to speak, of one who still lives, and will close in his person a race and a profession long since thought to have been extinct; of one who, in the pride of his former office and of his octogenarian survival of all his competitors, has ordered this inscription to be engraved upon his tombstone" Here lies THE LAST OF THE COURT FOOLS." A court is altogether such a factitious and unnatural piece of business, its monotony is productive of such an awful and overwhelming ennui, that men have been obliged to devise various expedients as a recreation whereby they might strengthen themselves to undergo a new infliction of the old stiff, solemn, ceremonious, stately stupidity. These relaxations have assumed different modifications according to the characteristics of age and country. Having a plebeian penchant for republics, the ancient Greeks had no necessity for courtly amusements, and contented themselves with exalting the glory of their country by advancing the arts and sciences, and imitating the unaccomplished homeliness of Themistocles, who, though he could not play upon the fiddle, knew how to convert a small town into a great state. When Pericles was disposed to unbend, he invited Socrates, Plato, and other philosophers, to such a symposium as Xenophon has described; and passed his hours of dalliance with Aspasia, the most learned woman of her age, from whom he took lessons in oratory and literature as well as love. The Roman Emperors diversified their satiety of enjoyment in a more courtly manner, by a succession of pleasant and piquant pastimes, from the laceration of flies to the butchering of gladiators. In the days of chivalry it was a sport of the great to case themselves in armour, hammer at one another's heads with battle-axes to try which was the thickest, roll the rider and his horse in the dust, or endeavour to drive their lance through the bars of the visor into the bull's eye of their friend's sconce, as Sir James Montgomery served the French king; not that they were ever in earnest, but that these exploits were reckoned hugely comical, furiously frolicsome, and so irresistibly entertaining, that, whatever happened, the parties were bound to look upon the whole proceeding as raillery and badinage. Over these practical jokes presided the ladies, (bless their tender hearts!) "whose bright eyes rain influence and judge the prize" for every infliction, from a broken leg, a sliced cheek, or a luxated shoulder, to an adversary slain outright. It may be questioned whether our modern belles know half so much of carving, with all the assistance of the plates in Mrs. Rundle's Cookery-book. Seated in a circle with their legs crossed, smoking their hookahs or drinking coffee, the caliphs and grandees of Arabia relieve the tedium of greatness by listening to professional story-tellers: a practice to which we owe the Thousand and One Nights, and the delightful tales of the inexhaustible Princess Scheherazade. The Grand Signior and his Mufti recreate themselves by chewing opium and gazing upon the stimulating symmetry of dancing girls, until they have at the same time intoxicated both the senses and the imagination. Upon every stateday, levee, and drawing-room in some of the old Scandinavian courts, there was no amusement so much in vogue, and reckoned such established bon ton, as drinking wine out of the skulls of their enemies. Many of the sable sovereigns of Africa employ the same material in architecture, which, if the averments of travellers may be credited, forms capital pyramids, pillars, and obelisks, in front of which the whole court sometimes indulge in the royal game of leap-frog, not even excepting his woolly majesty himself. According to the authentic statements of Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, a somewhat similar practice obtained at the court of Lilliput, where the courtiers who were to be rewarded by any peculiar mark of favour were accustomed to leap over or crawl under a stick, of which the Emperor sometimes held one end and the minister the other; and whoever performed the best was rewarded with a thread of blue, red, or green silk, which the successful candidates wore about their middle. A process so unmanly and a reward so contemptible will hardly gain credence among so rational a people as ourselves; but at the same time the relations of respectable travellers ought not to be discountenanced upon slight grounds. His Majesty of China, the lord of the celestial empire, monarch of the earth, brother to the sun, and uncle to the moon, (which destroys the mythological relationship between Apollo and Diana,) cousin-german to the stars, and protector of the firmament, can find no better sport than sitting under an umbrella of yellow silk, surrounded with banners of the dragon, phoenix, tyger, and flying tortoise, to be fanned by a handsome boy while he is sipping sherbet and playing cup and ball. The Great Mogul, according to Voltaire, indulges his courtiers by condescending to talk; and his faithful omras, whenever he utters any thing that possesses common sense, testify their loyalty by exclaiming Karamot! karamot!-A miracle! a miracle! These are the pastimes of uncivilized courts or barbarous æras; but we are indebted to royal lassitude for more rational amusements. Cards were invented about the year 1390, to divert the melancholy of Charles VI. of France, the four classes of whose subjects were intended to be represented by the four suits. By the cœurs (hearts) were signified the gens de chaur, choir-men or ecclesiastics; the pike heads or ends of lances, which we ignorantly term spades, typified the nobles or military part of the nation; the carreaux, (square stones or tiles,) by us designated diamonds, figured the citizens and tradesmen; the trefoil, (our clubs,) alludes to the husbandmen and peasarts; and the court cards have all their appropriate significations. Upon what trivial chances do the happiness of whole classes and the employment of entire years sometimes depend! If a king of France had not been attacked with blue devils four hundred years ago, how would all the intermediate dowagers, and old maids, and nabobs, and hypochondriacs, and whist-players, have contrived to shuffle and cut away time? What must have become of Bath, and of the long winter evenings, from the days of ombre and piquet down to the present reign of short whist and écarté? The city must have been swallowed up in a mouth-quake of yawns, and the inhabitants have all perished of ennui. Chess is another recreation, or rather a study, which also owes its origin to courts, having been devised for one of the brothers to the sun and uncles to the moon of China, who could not be brought to understand any thing of political economy until these hieroglyphics were placed before him, and all the various estates of his empire, together with their attributes and privileges, were shadowed forth in the figures and powers of these wooden representatives. We have not availed ourselves of an expedient devised for one of the young French princes, who being too indolent or stupid to acquire his alphabet by the ordinary process, twenty-four servants were placed in attendance upon him, with each a huge letter painted upon his stomach; and, as he knew not their names, he was obliged to call them by their letter whenever he had occasion for their services, which in due time gave him the requisite degree of literature for the exercise of the royal functions. In private families this experiment might be somewhat too costly, but it is well worth the serious attention of Lancaster and Bell. Unquestionably the most sprightly of all inventions which we owe to the dulness of courts is that of the professional jester or fool, than which nothing could have been more expressly and admirably adapted to its end. If not witty himself, he was at least the cause of wit in others—the butt at which the shafts of their ridicule were shot, and through whom they sometimes launched them at their neighbours. The jokes might be poor, quibbling, bald, bad; but the contest was at all events mental; not so sparkling, perhaps, as the fight between Congreve's intellectual gladiators, but still preferable to what it displaced, for a play upon words is more comical than a play upon the ribs; it is better to elicit bad puns from one another's sculls than to be drinking wine out of them; it is quite as facetious to smoke a quiz as a segar; a quibble in the head is as comical as a bump upon it; and cutting jokes, however common-place, is assuredly as sprightly as cutting cards, and as humorous as cutting capers. Besides, the court fool frequently availed himself of his offices for nobler purposes. He was a moralist in a motley coat, a fabulist in a cap and bells, a Pilpay or an Esop, who, promulgating the boldest truths to the most arbitrary sovereign, by making his own mouth the medium of wisdom instead of that of animals, might avail himself of his reputed irrationality for conveying the most rational admonitions. Look at Shakspeare's fools; they are either wits in disguise or philosophers in masquerade: and we may be assured, that for the court pantomime, as well as for that at the theatre, the cleverest was generally chosen as clown; for it was necessary that he should be nimble in mind as well as person, that, like Mercury, he should have wings to his head as well as his heels. It must have been a flattering unction to the wounded self-respect of the cour. tiers, and have reconciled them to the weight of royal superiority, to find that there was at least one man among them as good as the king, and that man a fool; that there was a professor of equality who could set his arms a-kimbo and wag his head with its cap and bells against that which wore a crown-who would familiarly offer his own to the hand which wielded a sceptre-flout the idol which they were constrained to worship, and irreverently jeer and jibber at the Lord's anointed. Whoever first established these chartered merry-andrews, we ought to wear his name in our heart's core, if it be only on Shakspeare's account. Strange that these omniloquent professors of Facetiæ should have left so few names upon the rolls of fame. Brutus was only an amateur fool, who assumed the character for a political object. We should have known nothing of Yorick, the Danish king's jester, had not the gravedigger in Hamlet knocked him about the mazzard with a spade. Killigrew was a sort of court jester to Charles the Second; but, not content with saying good things, he ventured upon publishing them; and as his pen was very inferior to his tongue, in which he afforded a contrast to Cowley, Sir John Denham took occasion to exclaim "Had Cowley ne'er spoke-Killigrew ne'er writ, Many others may be recorded to whose memorials I have no present 66 Considering how few offices and sinecures are abolished now-a-days, one cannot help regretting that this should have been selected for extinction, and we are tempted to enquire Why, pray, of late do Europe's kings No jester in their courts admit ? They're grown such stately solemn things Perhaps it may be urged that the Laureate is retained to perform both functions, a surmise to which I should be happy to add the weight of my authority, but that I stand in awe of the retort fulminated against Ned: Whatever may have been the motive, certain it is, that the professional jester was suppressed in France by Louis the Fourteenth, who at the same time, with equal bad taste, revived the cumbersome, puerile, costly and preposterous mummery of justs and tournaments in the court of the Tuileries, of the gorgeous absurdity of which no one can form a perfect idea who has not seen the paintings of the whole raree-show preserved in the city library at Versailles. Every friend to the foolscap, whose bells were perpetually shaking out peals of laughter, must think the worse of the pompous pretender and fustian hero who banished it from his court. We may judge of the degree of familiarity allowed by this solemn personification of stiffness and etiquette, when it is recorded that Racine died of chagrin because the monarch took no notice of his profound bow as he marched through the room called the Bull's Eye at Versailles. I have stood under the ponderous gilding of that chamber, and, acknowledging with all humility my immeasurable inferiority to Racine, I have reflected with an honest pride that I needed not, even if I could hope to find, a patron more munificent than my bookseller; and that the only monarch whose power or smile could excite in me the smallest emotion was the "sovereign people." "To content and fill the eye of the understanding, the best authors sprinkle their works with pleasing digressions, with which they recreate the minds of their readers." So says Dryden; and if it be admitted that what the best writers do, the worst may attempt, I may, perhaps, stand excused for having so long wandered from the "Last of the Fools." His title, however, would not allow me to take him first; and having ended every thing else, it is high time that I should begin to notice my subject. Be it known, then, to all admirers of the motley coat, that although the office and dignity of court fool were abolished by Louis Quatorze, his successor had the good sense to be fond of fools, and re-appointed an honorary jester, on whom he conferred at the same time a post and a pension. Louis the Fifteenth died in 1774; but in the warm and genial airs of summer, when the swallows are skimming along the ground, and the butterflies fluttering overhead, the "Last of the Fools," who has so often played his antics before the monarch when Versailles was in its glory, is still occasionally seen toddling along the sunny side of its streets, or tottering forth from one of the portals of the palace, as if he had stepped out of some grave of the last century, or walked down from the framework of some ancient picture. His whole appearance presents a singular compound of contradictions and anomalies. Old and decrepit as he is, he endeavours to preserve a youthful jerk in his short steps, to give the skirts of his coat a swing as if he still retained his elasticity of walk, and to crawl along with the jauntiness of his juvenile foolery. His carriage is not more inconsistent with his own age than his dress is with that of the world. He wears in public a complete court suit, the remains apparently of former splendour; his venerable white locks arranged in the antique stile by a coiffeur, a black silk bag behind, and his hat always in his hand or carried beneath his arm. With a bustling inanity in his motions, and a bantering or sheepish smile upon his features, he gazes at the passengers, makes them a most gracious bow, or salutes them with a grimace, as the humour strikes him, and then half hobbles and half flourishes away with a grave enjoyment of the stranger's utter amazement. Casual encounterers of this unique character, judging from the expression of his countenance and the buffoonery of his actions, might set him down for a natural simpleton ; but this would be an egregious mistake; he is by no means deficient in un |