Devereux — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (best interesting books to read txt) 📕

A UNIVERSAL GENIUS.—PERICLES TURNED BARBER.—NAMES OF BEAUTIES IN 171-.—THE TOASTS OF THE KIT-CAT CLUB.

As I was riding with Tarleton towards Chelsea, one day, he asked me if I had ever seen the celebrated Mr. Salter. “No,” said I, “but I heard Steele talk of him the other night at Wills’s. He is an antiquarian and a barber, is he not?”

“Yes, a shaving virtuoso; really a comical and strange character, and has oddities enough to compensate one for the debasement of talking with a man in his rank.”

“Let us go to him forthwith,” said I, spurring my horse into a canter.

“Quod petis hic est,” cried Tarleton, “there is his house.” And my companion pointed to a coffee-house.

“What!” said I, “does he draw wine as well as teeth?”

“To be sure: Don Saltero is a universal genius. Let us dismount.”

Consigning our horses to the care of our grooms, we marched into the strangest-looking place I ever had the good fortune to behold. A long narrow coffee-room was furnished with all manner of things that, belonging neither to heaven, earth, nor the water under the earth, the redoubted Saltero might well worship without incurring the crime of idolatry. The first thing that greeted my eyes was a bull’s head, with a most ferocious pair of vulture’s wings on its neck. While I was surveying this, I felt something touch my hat; I looked up and discovered an immense alligator swinging from the ceiling, and fixing a monstrous pair of glass eyes upon me. A thing which seemed to me like an immense shoe, upon a nearer approach expanded itself into an Indian canoe; and a most hideous spectre with mummy skin, and glittering teeth, that made my blood run cold, was labelled, “Beautiful specimen of a Calmuc Tartar.”

While lost in wonder, I stood in the middle of the apartment, up walks a little man as lean as a miser, and says to me, rubbing his hands,—

“Wonderful, Sir, is it not?”

“Wonderful, indeed, Don!” said Tarleton; “you look like a Chinese Adam surrounded by a Japanese creation.”

“He, he, he, Sir, you have so pleasant a vein,” said the little Don, in a sharp shrill voice. “But it has been all done, Sir, by one man; all of it collected by me, simple as I stand.”

“Simple, indeed,” quoth Tarleton; “and how gets on the fiddle?”

“Bravely, Sir, bravely; shall I play you a tune?”

“No, no, my good Don; another time.”

“Nay, Sir, nay,” cried the antiquarian, “suffer me to welcome your arrival properly.”

And, forthwith disappearing, he returned in an instant with a marvellously ill-favoured old fiddle. Throwing a penseroso air into his thin cheeks, our Don then began a few preliminary thrummings, which set my teeth on edge, and made Tarleton put both hands to his ears. Three sober-looking citizens, who had just sat themselves down to pipes and the journal, started to their feet like so many pieces of clockwork; but no sooner had Don Saltero, with a degage air of graceful melancholy, actually launched into what he was pleased to term a tune, than a universal irritation of nerves seized the whole company. At the first overture, the three citizens swore and cursed, at the second division of the tune, they seized their hats, at the third they vanished. As for me, I found all my limbs twitching as if they were dancing to St. Vitus’s music; the very drawers disappeared; the alligator itself twirled round, as if revivified by so harsh an experiment on the nervous system; and I verily believe the whole museum, bull, wings, Indian canoe, and Calmuc Tartar, would have been set into motion by this new Orpheus, had not Tarleton, in a paroxysm of rage, seized him by the tail of the coat, and whirled him round, fiddle and all, with such velocity that the poor musician lost his equilibrium, and falling against a row of Chinese monsters, brought the whole set to the ground, where he lay covered by the wrecks that accompanied his overthrow, screaming and struggling, and grasping his fiddle, which every now and then, touched involuntarily by his fingers,