NOCTES AMBROSIANAE

Weather has sent me indoors, chance to an old book.  I have been reading Noctes Ambrosianae again.  Bad buffoonery as much of it is and full to the throttle of the warm-watery optimism induced by whisky, yet as fighting literature it is incalculably better than its modern substitute in Blackwood.  The sniper who monthly tries to pinch out his adversaries there—­Mrs. Partington’s nephew, in fact—­wants the one quality which will make that kind of thing intolerable—­that is, high spirits.  The Black Hussars of Maga both had them, and drank them, frequently neat.  I judge that the Nephew has to be more careful.  Eupepsy is not revealed in his writing; but Christopher North and his co-mates must have had the stomachs of ostriches.  The guzzling and swilling which were the staple of the Noctes were remarked upon at the time as incredible as well as disgusting; but it is to be presumed that they wouldn’t have been there if, to the majority at least, they had not been a counsel of perfection.  “I wasn’t as drunk as I should have liked to be, your Worship, but I was drunk.”

As well as that, most people thought it exceedingly funny.  Dickens and his readers thought it funny too.  Christmas would not have been Christmas unless somebody got beastly drunk.  We have moved on since then, and carried the Nephew with us, multum gementem.  One can see him kicking violently under the arm of the Zeitgeist as he is borne down the ringing grooves of change.  Now, therefore, he is tart in his musings, chastises rather with fleas than with scorpions.

When the Noctes can stand away from Politics and Literature—­for the two were always involved in those days, so that unless you approved a man’s party you couldn’t allow that he wrote tolerable verse—­they can wile away a winter evening very pleasantly.  Christopher North had an eye for character, a sense of humour, and knew and loved the country.  He was country bred.  He is at his best when he combines his loves, as he does in the person of the Shepherd.  Keep the Shepherd off (a) girls, (b) nursing mothers, (c) the Sabbath, (d) eating, (e) drinking, (f) his own poetry, and he is good reading.  Knowing and loving Ettrick Forest as I do, I need no better guide to it than North’s Shepherd.  Having fished all its waters from Loch Skene downwards, I should ask no better company, evenings, at Tibbie Shields’ or the Tushielaw Inn.  Edward FitzGerald could have made a good book out of the Noctes, cutting it down to one volume out of four.  As it is mainly, it will stand or fall by its high spirits.  The really funny character in it is Gurney, the shorthand writer, who is kept in a cupboard, and at the end of the last uproarious chapter, when the coast is cleared of the horseplaying protagonists, “comes out like a mouse, and begins to nibble cheese.”  That is imagination.