The Mirror

A Good Fellow.—When we hear of a person who takes a pride in "setting the table in a roar"—whose whole thoughts, his day-dreams, and his night visions, are fixed upon guzzling, and swilling ‘healths five fathoms deep’—whose belly is his god—who lives, moves, and has his being in dinner and supper parties,—who can swallow six bottles, and take his share of the seventh, and after all, floor his companions with as much ease as the champion of England—who gets drunk every night, and has the blues every morning—we invariably say, ‘This is such a man whom the world calls a good fellow.’ We never think of such a one, but we form ‘in our mind’s eye,’ the embodiment of a tosspot, with a face like a ‘nor’west’ moon, a nose like a carrot smothered in radishes, large saucer eyes, staring from the head, surrounded with a peculiar sort of rheum, resembling, as much as it is possible for such eyes to resemble, an antiquated castle of the twelfth century, surrounded with a moat,—a mouth decorated in front with several small tusks or particles of snuff, of that particular sort, called blackguard—and lined within with two rows of tusks, which have evidently fallen into ‘the sere and yellow leaf,’—a chin, bearded like the pard, garnished with several cuts, whose summits are crowned with a putrescent greenness, like the surface of a standing pool. His linens might once have been white, but when, is lost in the remoteness of antiquity. His cloth—originally sable—is now neither black, nor blue, nor brown, but partakes so much of the hue of these different colours, that it would puzzle an antiquary to discover which was the original. Such a picture, ‘disguise it as thou wilt,’ is associated with our ideas of ‘a good fellow,’ or ‘a good soul.’ When the husk is so ‘villainously unclean,’ what must the kernel be? We would hesitate to say that such a man had a soul at all; why call him, then, ‘a good soul?’ If people would only examine into the appropriateness of the title for those who, in common parlance, are styled good fellows, they would perhaps give them a name directly opposite. We, who are in the habit of probing names, as well as causes, to the bottom, and take a delight in ‘calling things by their right names,’ would do so at once; and certainly the habitual toper—the sneaking tippler—the forenoon dram-drinker—the seducer of men’s wives and daughters—the breaker of the Sabbath—the dissolute and the idle, et hoc genus omne, are not those to whom we should choose to give the name of ‘good fellows.’—Edinburgh Weekly Chron.