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Title: The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2

Author: Charles Lamb

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THE WORKS OF CHARLES AND MARY LAMB, VOLUME 2

ELIA; and THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA

BY

CHARLES LAMB

EDITED BY

E.V. LUCAS





[Illustration]





WITH A FRONTISPIECE



INTRODUCTION


This volume contains the work by which Charles Lamb is best known and
upon which his fame will rest--_Elia_ and _The Last Essays of Elia_.
Although one essay is as early as 1811, and one is perhaps as late as
1832, the book represents the period between 1820 and 1826, when Lamb
was between forty-five and fifty-one. This was the richest period of
his literary life.

The text of the present volume is that of the first edition of each
book--_Elia_, 1823, and _The Last Essays of Elia_, 1833. The principal
differences between the essays as they were printed in the _London
Magazine_ and elsewhere, and as they were revised for book form by
their author, are shown in the Notes, which, it should be pointed out,
are much fuller in my large edition. The three-part essay on "The Old
Actors" (_London Magazine_, February, April, and October, 1822), from
which Lamb prepared the three essays; "On Some of the Old Actors,"
"The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," and "The Acting of
Munden," is printed in the Appendix as it first appeared. The absence
of the "Confessions of a Drunkard" from this volume is due to the fact
that Lamb did not include it in the first edition of _The Last Essays
of Elia_. It was inserted later, in place of "A Death-Bed," on account
of objections that were raised to that essay by the family of
Randal Norris. The story is told in the notes to "A Death-Bed." The
"Confessions of a Drunkard" will be found in Vol. I.

In Mr. Bedford's design for the cover of this edition certain Elian
symbolism will be found. The upper coat of arms is that of Christ's
Hospital, where Lamb was at school; the lower is that of the Inner
Temple, where he was born and spent many years. The figures at the
bells are those which once stood out from the façade of St. Dunstan's
Church in Fleet Street, and are now in Lord Londesborough's garden in
Regent's Park. Lamb shed tears when they were removed. The tricksy
sprite and the candles (brought by Betty) need no explanatory words of
mine.

E.V.L.




CONTENTS

APPENDIX
                                                     TEXT    NOTE
                                                     PAGE    PAGE

The South-Sea House                                     1     342
Oxford in the Vacation                                  8     345
Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago            14     350
The Two Races of Men                                   26     355
New Year's Eve                                         31     358
Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist                        37     361
A Chapter on Ears                                      43     363
All Fools' Day                                         48     367
A Quaker's Meeting                                     51     367
The Old and the New Schoolmaster                       56     369
Valentine's Day                                        63     370
Imperfect Sympathies                                   66     370
Witches, and other Night-Fears                         74     372
My Relations                                           80     373
Mackery End, in Hertfordshire                          86     375
Modern Gallantry                                       90     377
The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple                   94     379
Grace Before Meat                                     104     384
My First Play                                         110     385
Dream-Children; A Reverie                             115     388
Distant Correspondents                                118     389
The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers                        124     390
A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis 130     392
A Dissertation upon Roast Pig                         137     395
A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married
  People                                              144     397
On Some Old Actors                                    150     397
On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century          161     399
On the Acting of Munden                               168     400


THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA
                                                     TEXT    NOTE
                                                     PAGE    PAGE

Preface, by a Friend of the late Elia                 171     402
Blakesmoor in H----shire                              174     405
Poor Relations                                        178     408
Stage Illusion                                        185     408
To the Shade of Elliston                              188     409
Ellistoniana                                          190     410
Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading                195     411
The Old Margate Hoy                                   201     415
The Convalescent                                      208     416
Sanity of True Genius                                 212     416
Captain Jackson                                       215     416
The Superannuated Man                                 219     417
The Genteel Style in Writing                          226     420
Barbara S----                                         230     421
The Tombs in the Abbey                                235     423
Amicus Redivivus                                      237     424
Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney                     242     426
Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago                      249     428
Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the
    Productions of Modern Art                         256     433
Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age          266     436
The Wedding                                           271     436
The Child Angel: a Dream                              276     437
A Death-Bed                                           279     437
Old China                                             281     438
Popular Fallacies--
    I. That a Bully is always a Coward                286     440
   II. That Ill-gotten Gain never Prospers            287     440
  III. That a Man must not Laugh at his own Jest      287     440
   IV. That such a One shows his Breeding.--That
          it is Easy to Perceive he is no Gentleman   288     440
    V. That the Poor Copy the Vices of the Rich       288     440
   VI. That Enough is as Good as a Feast              290     440
  VII. Of Two Disputants, the Warmest is Generally
          in the Wrong                                291     440
 VIII. That Verbal Allusions are not Wit, because
          they will not Bear a Translation            292     440
   IX. That the Worst Puns are the Best               292     440
    X. That Handsome is that Handsome does            294     441
   XI. That We must not look a Gift-horse in the
          Mouth                                       296     441
  XII. That Home is Home though it is never so
          Homely                                      298     442
 XIII. That You must Love Me, and Love my Dog         302     442
  XIV. That We should Rise with the Lark              305     443
   XV. That We should Lie Down with the Lamb          308     443
  XVI. That a Sulky Temper is a Misfortune            309     443


APPENDIX
                                                         TEXT  NOTE
                                                         PAGE  PAGE

On Some of the Old Actors (_London Magazine_, Feb., 1822) 315   444
The Old Actors (_London Magazine_, April, 1822)           322   444
The Old Actors (_London Magazine_, October, 1822)         331   444

                                                   NOTES  337
                                                   INDEX  447


FRONTISPIECE

ELIA

From a Drawing by Daniel Maclise, now preserved in the Victoria and
Albert Museum.




ELIA

(_From the 1st Edition, 1823_)

THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE


Reader, in thy passage from the Bank--where thou hast been receiving
thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant
like myself)--to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or
Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly,--didst thou
never observe a melancholy looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice,
to the left--where Threadneedle-street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare
say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide,
and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars, with
few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out--a desolation something
like Balclutha's.[1]

This was once a house of trade,--a centre of busy interests. The
throng of merchants was here--the quick pulse of gain--and here some
forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since
fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticos; imposing staircases;
offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces--deserted, or thinly
peopled with a few straggling clerks; the still more sacred interiors
of court and committee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles,
door-keepers--directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a
dead dividend,) at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany,
with tarnished gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver
inkstands long since dry;--the oaken wainscots hung with pictures
of deceased governors and sub-governors, of queen Anne, and the
two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty;--huge charts, which
subsequent discoveries have antiquated;--dusty maps of Mexico, dim as
dreams,--and soundings of the Bay of Panama!--The long passages hung
with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might
defy any, short of the last, conflagration;--with vast ranges of
cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight once lay,
an "unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart
withal,--long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of
the breaking of that famous BUBBLE.--

Such is the SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. At least, such it was forty years ago,
when I knew it,--a magnificent relic! What alterations may have been
made in it since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I
take for granted, has not freshened it. No wind has resuscitated the
face of the sleeping waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates
upon it. The moths, that were then battening upon its obsolete ledgers
and day-books, have rested from their depredations, but other light
generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork among their single
and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfoetation
of dirt!) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save
by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore the
mode of book-keeping in Queen Anne's reign; or, with less hallowed
curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous
HOAX, whose extent the petty peculators of our day look back upon with
the same expression of incredulous admiration, and hopeless ambition
of rivalry, as would become the puny face of modern conspiracy
contemplating the Titan size of Vaux's superhuman plot.

Peace to the manes of the BUBBLE! Silence and destitution are upon thy
walls, proud house, for a memorial!

Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living
commerce,--amid the fret and fever of speculation--with the Bank,
and the 'Change, and the India-house about thee, in the hey-day of
present prosperity, with their important faces, as it were, insulting
thee, their _poor neighbour out of business_--to the idle and merely
contemplative,--to such as me, old house! there is a charm in thy
quiet:--a cessation--a coolness from business--an indolence almost
cloistral--which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy
great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spoke of the past:--the
shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit
by me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle
me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which
scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from
their enshrining shelves--with their old fantastic flourishes, and
decorative rubric interlacings--their sums in triple columniations,
set down with formal superfluity of cyphers--with pious sentences at
the beginning, without which our religious ancestors never ventured to
open a book of business, or bill of lading--the costly vellum covers
of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some _better
library_,--are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can look
upon these defunct dragons with complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped
ivory-handled penknives (our ancestors had every thing on a larger
scale than we have hearts for) are as good as any thing from
Herculaneum. The pounce-boxes of our days have gone retrograde.

The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House--I speak of
forty years back--had an air very different from those in the public
offices that I have had to do with since. They partook of the genius
of the place!

They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of superfluous
salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not much to do) persons
of a curious and speculative turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reason
mentioned before. Humorists, for they were of all descriptions; and,
not having been brought together in early life (which has a tendency
to assimilate the members of corporate bodies to each other), but,
for the most part, placed in this house in ripe or middle age, they
necessarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities,
unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a common stock. Hence they
formed a sort of Noah's ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Domestic
retainers in a great house, kept more for show than use. Yet pleasant
fellows, full of chat--and not a few among them had arrived at
considerable proficiency on the German flute.

The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton. He had
something of the choleric complexion of his countrymen stamped on his
visage, but was a worthy sensible man at bottom. He wore his hair, to
the last, powdered and frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember
to have seen in caricatures of what were termed, in my young days,
_Maccaronies_. He was the last of that race of beaux. Melancholy
as a gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I see him,
making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if
he feared every one about him was a defaulter; in his hypochondry
ready to imagine himself one; haunted, at least, with the idea of
the possibility of his becoming one: his tristful visage clearing
up a little over his roast neck of veal at Anderton's at two (where
his picture still hangs, taken a little before his death by desire
of the master of the coffee-house, which he had frequented for the
last five-and-twenty years), but not attaining the meridian of its
animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The
simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke
of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the
families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence.
Then was his _forte_, his glorified hour! How would he chirp, and
expand, over a muffin! How would he dilate into secret history! His
countryman, Pennant himself, in particular, could not be more eloquent
than he in relation to old and new London--the site of old theatres,
churches, streets gone to decay--where Rosamond's pond stood--the
Mulberry-gardens--and the Conduit in Cheap--with many a pleasant
anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures
which Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of _Noon_,--the worthy
descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country,
from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive
the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hog-lane,
and the vicinity of the Seven Dials!

Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air and stoop of a
nobleman. You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of
the passages leading to Westminster-hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle
bending of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed
to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the
applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you
felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over,
you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of
the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the
shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was
in its original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have posed
him. What was it then? Was he rich? Alas, no! Thomas Tame was very
poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear
all was not well at all times within. She had a neat meagre person,
which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in
its veins was noble blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth
of relationship, which I never thoroughly understood,--much less can
explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day,--to the
illustrious, but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was the
secret of Thomas's stoop. This was the thought--the sentiment--the
bright solitary star of your lives,--ye mild and happy pair,--which
cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your
station! This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead
of glittering attainments: and it was worth them altogether. You
insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive
armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. _Decus et
solamen._

Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. He neither
pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the
matter. He "thought an accountant the greatest character in the world,
and himself the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without
his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly,
with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream
and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in
Threadneedle-street, which, without any thing very substantial
appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's notions of himself
that lived in them, (I know not who is the occupier of them now)
resounded fortnightly to the notes of a concert of "sweet breasts,"
as our ancestors would have called them, culled from club-rooms and
orchestras--chorus singers--first and second violoncellos--double
basses--and clarionets--who ate his cold mutton, and drank his punch,
and praised his ear. He sate like Lord Midas among them. But at the
desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that
were purely ornamental, were banished. You could not speak of any
thing romantic without rebuke. Politics were excluded. A newspaper was
thought too refined and abstracted. The whole duty of man consisted in
writing off dividend warrants. The striking of the annual balance in
the company's books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of last
year in the sum of 25_l._ 1_s._ 6_d._) occupied his days and nights
for a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of
_things_ (as they call them in the city) in his beloved house, or did
not sigh for a return of the old stirring days when South Sea hopes
were young--(he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most
intricate accounts of the most flourishing company in these or those
days):--but to a genuine accountant the difference of proceeds is
as nothing. The fractional farthing is as dear to his heart as the
thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether
his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity.
With Tipp form was every thing. His life was formal. His actions
seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart.
He made the best executor in the world: he was plagued with incessant
executorships accordingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his
vanity in equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little
orphans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of
the dying hand, that commended their interests to his protection. With
all this there was about him a sort of timidity--(his few enemies used
to give it a worse name)--a something which, in reverence to the dead,
we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroic.
Nature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a sufficient
measure of the principle of self-preservation. There is a cowardice
which we do not despise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in
its elements; it betrays itself, not you: it is mere temperament; the
absence of the romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion in the
way, and will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find quarrel in a straw,"
when some supposed honour is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a
stage-coach in his life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or
walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked down a precipice; or let
off a gun; or went upon a water-party; or would willingly let you go
if he could have helped it: neither was it recorded of him, that for
lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle.

Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom common
qualities become uncommon? Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit,
the polished man of letters, the _author_, of the South-Sea House?
who never enteredst thy office in a morning, or quittedst it in
mid-day--(what didst _thou_ in an office?)--without some quirk that
left a sting! Thy gibes and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive
but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue
from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse,
fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these
fastidious days--thy topics are staled by the "new-born gauds" of the
time:--but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles,
upon Chatham, and Shelburne, and Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne,
and Clinton, and the war which ended in the tearing from Great Britain
her rebellious colonies,--and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge,
and Bull, and Dunning, and Pratt, and Richmond,--and such small
politics.--

A little less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, was fine
rattling, rattleheaded Plumer. He was descended,--not in a right line,
reader, (for his lineal pretensions, like his personal, favoured a
little of the sinister bend) from the Plumers of Hertfordshire. So
tradition gave him out; and certain family features not a little
sanctioned the opinion. Certainly old Walter Plumer (his reputed
author) had been a rake in his days, and visited much in Italy, and
had seen the world. He was uncle, bachelor-uncle, to the fine old whig
still living, who has represented the county in so many successive
parliaments, and has a fine old mansion near Ware. Walter flourished
in George the Second's days, and was the same who was summoned before
the House of Commons about a business of franks, with the old Duchess
of Marlborough. You may read of it in Johnson's Life of Cave. Cave
came off cleverly in that business. It is certain our Plumer did
nothing to discountenance the rumour. He rather seemed pleased
whenever it was, with all gentleness, insinuated. But, besides
his family pretensions, Plumer was an engaging fellow, and sang
gloriously.--

Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sangest, mild, child-like, pastoral
M----; a flute's breathing less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian
melodies, when, in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst chant that song
sung by Amiens to the banished Duke, which proclaims the winter wind
more lenient than for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly
M----, the unapproachable church-warden of Bishopsgate. He knew not
what he did, when he begat thee, like spring, gentle offspring of
blustering winter:--only unfortunate in thy ending, which should have
been mild, conciliatory, swan-like.--

Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but they must
be mine in private:--already I have fooled the reader to the top of
his bent;--else could I omit that strange creature Woollett, who
existed in trying the question, and _bought litigations_?--and still
stranger, inimitable, solemn Hepworth, from whose gravity Newton might
have deduced the law of gravitation. How profoundly would he nib a
pen--with what deliberation would he wet a wafer!--

But it is time to close--night's wheels are rattling fast over me--it
is proper to have done with this solemn mockery.

Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this
while--peradventure the very _names_, which I have summoned up before
thee, are fantastic--insubstantial--like Henry Pimpernel, and old John
Naps of Greece:--

Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their
importance is from the past.

[Footnote 1: I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were
desolate.--Ossian.]




OXFORD IN THE VACATION


Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article--as the
wary connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, while it reads,
seems as though it read not,) never fails to consult the _quis
sculpsit_ in the corner, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a
Vivares, or a Woollet--methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader, _Who is
Elia?_

Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-forgotten
humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long
since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your
mind as one of the self-same college--a votary of the desk--a notched
and cropt scrivener--one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick
people are said to do, through a quill.

Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my
humour, my fancy--in the forepart of the day, when the mind of your
man of letters requires some relaxation--(and none better than such
as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies)--to
while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos,
cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first
place ******* and then it sends you home with such increased appetite
to your books ***** not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste
wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally,
the impression of sonnets, epigrams, _essays_--so that the very
parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an
author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among
the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its
ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation.--It
feels its promotion. ***** So that you see, upon the whole, the
literary dignity of _Elia_ is very little, if at all, compromised in
the condescension.

Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities incidental
to the life of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain
flaws, which a cunning carper might be able to pick in this Joseph's
vest. And here I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret
the abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, of those consolatory
interstices, and sprinklings of freedom, through the four
seasons,--the _red-letter days_, now become, to all intents and
purposes, _dead-letter days_. There was Paul, and Stephen, and
Barnabas--

  Andrew and John, men famous in old times

--we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as I was at
school at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the same token,
in the old _Baskett_ Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy
posture--holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flaying, after the
famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti.--I honoured them all, and could almost
have wept the defalcation of Iscariot--so much did we love to keep
holy memories sacred:--only methought I a little grudged at the
coalition of the _better Jude_ with Simon-clubbing (as it were) their
sanctities together, to make up one poor gaudy-day between them--as an
economy unworthy of the dispensation.

These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's life--"far
off their coming shone."--I was as good as an almanac in those days.
I could have told you such a saint's-day falls out next week, or the
week after. Peradventure the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity,
would, once in six years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better
than one of the profane. Let me not be thought to arraign the wisdom
of my civil superiors, who have judged the further observation of
these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious.

Only in a custom of such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses
the Bishops had, in decency, been first sounded--but I am wading out
of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and
ecclesiastical authority--I am plain Elia--no Selden, nor Archbishop
Usher--though at present in the thick of their books, here in the
heart of learning, under the shadow of the mighty Bodley.

I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a one as
myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of
academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle
weeks at, as one or other of the Universities. Their vacation, too, at
this time of the year, falls in so pat with _ours_. Here I can take
my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I
please. I seem admitted _ad eundem_. I fetch up past opportunities.
I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for _me_. In
moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock
vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, I
proceed Master of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike
that respectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and
bed-makers in spectacles, drop a bow or curtsy, as I pass, wisely
mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black, which
favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle, I can
be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor.

The walks at these times are so much one's own,--the tall trees of
Christ's, the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open
doors, inviting one to slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some
Founder, or noble or royal Benefactress (that should have been ours)
whose portrait seems to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, and
to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peep in by the way at
the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality: the
immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial recesses;
ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits which
have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but
is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a
Manciple.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing,
art every thing! When thou _wert_, thou wert not antiquity--then thou
wert nothing, but hadst a remoter _antiquity_, as thou called'st it,
to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself
flat, _jejune, modern_! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or
what half Januses[1] are we, that cannot look forward with the same
idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as
nothing, being every thing! the past is every thing, being nothing!

What were thy _dark ages_? Surely the sun rose as brightly then as
now, and man got him to his work in the morning. Why is it that we can
never hear mention of them without an accompanying feeling, as though
a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our
ancestors wandered to and fro groping!

Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride and solace
me, are thy repositories of mouldering learning, thy shelves--

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the
souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these
Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state.
I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets.
I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking
amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings
is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew
amid the happy orchard.

Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS.
Those _variæ lectiones_, so tempting to the more erudite palates, do
but disturb and unsettle my faith. I am no Herculanean raker. The
credit of the three witnesses might have slept unimpeached for me. I
leave these curiosities to Porson, and to G.D.--whom, by the way, I
found busy as a moth over some rotten archive, rummaged out of some
seldom-explored press, in a nook at Oriel. With long poring, he is
grown almost into a book. He stood as passive as one by the side of
the old shelves. I longed to new-coat him in Russia, and assign him
his place. He might have mustered for a tall Scapula.

D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats of learning. No
inconsiderable portion of his moderate fortune, I apprehend, is
consumed in journeys between them and Clifford's-inn--where, like a
dove on the asp's nest, he has long taken up his unconscious abode,
amid an incongruous assembly of attorneys, attorneys' clerks,
apparitors, promoters, vermin of the law, among whom he sits, "in calm
and sinless peace." The fangs of the law pierce him not--the winds of
litigation blow over his humble chambers--the hard sheriffs officer
moves his hat as he passes--legal nor illegal discourtesy touches
him--none thinks of offering violence or injustice to him--you would
as soon "strike an abstract idea."

D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a course of laborious years,
in an investigation into all curious matter connected with the two
Universities; and has lately lit upon a MS. collection of charters,
relative to C----, by which he hopes to settle some disputed
points--particularly that long controversy between them as to
priority of foundation. The ardor with which he engages in
these liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met with all the
encouragement it deserved, either here, or at C----. Your caputs,
and heads of colleges, care less than any body else about these
questions.--Contented to suck the milky fountains of their Alma
Maters, without inquiring into the venerable gentlewomen's years, they
rather hold such curiosities to be impertinent--unreverend. They have
their good glebe lands _in manu_, and care not much to rake into the
title-deeds. I gather at least so much from other sources, for D. is
not a man to complain.

D. started like an unbroke heifer, when I interrupted him. _A priori_
it was not very probable that we should have met in Oriel. But D.
would have done the same, had I accosted him on the sudden in his own
walks in Clifford's-inn, or in the Temple. In addition to a provoking
short-sightedness (the effect of late studies and watchings at the
midnight oil) D. is the most absent of men. He made a call the other
morning at our friend _M.'s_ in Bedford-square; and, finding nobody at
home, was ushered into the hall, where, asking for pen and ink, with
great exactitude of purpose he enters me his name in the book--which
ordinarily lies about in such places, to record the failures of
the untimely or unfortunate visitor--and takes his leave with many
ceremonies, and professions of regret. Some two or three hours after,
his walking destinies returned him into the same neighbourhood again,
and again the quiet image of the fire-side circle at _M.'s_--Mrs.
_M._ presiding at it like a Queen Lar, with pretty _A.S._ at her
side--striking irresistibly on his fancy, he makes another call
(forgetting that they were "certainly not to return from the country
before that day week") and disappointed a second time, inquires
for pen and paper as before: again the book is brought, and in the
line just above that in which he is about to print his second name
(his re-script)--his first name (scarce dry) looks out upon him
like another Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly encounter his
own duplicate!--The effect may be conceived. D. made many a good
resolution against any such lapses in future. I hope he will not keep
them too rigorously.

For with G.D.--to be absent from the body, is sometimes (not to speak
it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very time when,
personally encountering thee, he passes on with no recognition--or,
being stopped, starts like a thing surprised--at that moment, reader,
he is on Mount Tabor--or Parnassus--or co-sphered with Plato--or, with
Harrington, framing "immortal commonwealths"--devising some plan of
amelioration to thy country, or thy species--peradventure meditating
some individual kindness or courtesy, to be done to _thee thyself_,
the returning consciousness of which made him to start so guiltily at
thy obtruded personal presence.

D. is delightful any where, but he is at the best in such places as
these. He cares not much for Bath. He is out of his element at Buxton,
at Scarborough, or Harrowgate. The Cam and the Isis are to him "better
than all the waters of Damascus." On the Muses' hill he is happy, and
good, as one of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains; and when he
goes about with you to show you the halls and colleges, you think you
have with you the Interpreter at the House Beautiful.

[Footnote 1: Januses of one face.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE.]




CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO


In Mr. Lamb's "Works," published a year or two since, I find a
magnificent eulogy on my old school,[1] such as it was, or now appears
to him to have been, between the years 1782 and 1789. It happens,
very oddly, that my own standing at Christ's was nearly corresponding
with his; and, with all gratitude to him for his enthusiasm for the
cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring together whatever can be
said in praise of them, dropping all the other side of the argument
most ingeniously.

I remember L. at school; and can well recollect that he had some
peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not.
His friends lived in town, and were near at hand; and he had the
privilege of going to see them, almost as often as he wished, through
some invidious distinction, which was denied to us. The present worthy
sub-treasurer to the Inner Temple can explain how that happened. He
had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while we were battening upon
our quarter of a penny loaf--our _crug_--moistened with attenuated
small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack
it was poured from. Our Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless,
and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched
for him with a slice of "extraordinary bread and butter," from the
hot-loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat less
repugnant--(we had three banyan to four meat days in the week)--was
endeared to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack of
ginger (to make it go down the more glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon.
In lieu of our _half-pickled_ Sundays, or _quite fresh_ boiled beef
on Thursdays (strong as _caro equina_), with detestable marigolds
floating in the pail to poison the broth--our scanty mutton crags on
Fridays--and rather more savoury, but grudging, portions of the same
flesh, rotten-roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays (the only dish which
excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal
proportion)--he had his hot plate of roast veal, or the more tempting
griskin (exotics unknown to our palates), cooked in the paternal
kitchen (a great thing), and brought him daily by his maid or aunt! I
remember the good old relative (in whom love forbade pride) squatting
down upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters, disclosing the
viands (of higher regale than those cates which the ravens ministered
to the Tishbite); and the contending passions of L. at the unfolding.
There was love for the bringer; shame for the thing brought, and the
manner of its bringing; sympathy for those who were too many to share
in it; and, at top of all, hunger (eldest, strongest of the passions!)
predominant, breaking down the stony fences of shame, and awkwardness,
and a troubling over-consciousness.

I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who should care for
me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could
reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced
notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival
in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them
to recur too often, though I thought them few enough; and, one after
another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred
playmates.

O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The
yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years!
How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back,
with its church, and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and
in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire!

To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the
recollection of those friendless holidays. The long warm days of
summer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting
memory of those _whole-day-leaves_, when, by some strange arrangement,
we were turned out, for the live-long day, upon our own hands, whether
we had friends to go to, or none. I remember those bathing-excursions
to the New-River, which L. recalls with such relish, better, I think,
than he can--for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not much care
for such water-pastimes:--How merrily we would sally forth into the
fields; and strip under the first warmth of the sun; and wanton like
young dace in the streams; getting us appetites for noon, which
those of us that were pennyless (our scanty morning crust long since
exhausted) had not the means of allaying--while the cattle, and the
birds, and the fishes, were at feed about us, and we had nothing to
satisfy our cravings--the very beauty of the day, and the exercise
of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a keener edge upon
them!--How faint and languid, finally, we would return, towards
nightfall, to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant, that
the hours of our uneasy liberty had expired!

It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets
objectless--shivering at cold windows of printshops, to extract a
little amusement; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a little
novelty, to pay a fifty-times repeated visit (where our individual
faces should be as well known to the warden as those of his own
charges) to the Lions in the Tower--to whose levée, by courtesy
immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission.

L.'s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the
foundation) lived in a manner under his paternal roof. Any complaint
which he had to make was sure of being attended to. This was
understood at Christ's, and was an effectual screen to him against the
severity of masters, or worse tyranny of the monitors. The oppressions
of these young brutes are heart-sickening to call to recollection. I
have been called out of my bed, and _waked for the purpose_, in the
coldest winter nights--and this not once, but night after night--in
my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with eleven
other sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has
been any talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six
last beds in the dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept,
answerable for an offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the
power to hinder.--The same execrable tyranny drove the younger part of
us from the fires, when our feet were perishing with snow; and, under
the cruelest penalties, forbad the indulgence of a drink of water,
when we lay in sleepless summer nights, fevered with the season, and
the day's sports.

There was one H----, who, I learned, in after days, was seen expiating
some maturer offence in the hulks. (Do I flatter myself in fancying
that this might be the planter of that name, who suffered--at Nevis,
I think, or St. Kits,--some few years since? My friend Tobin was the
benevolent instrument of bringing him to the gallows.) This petty Nero
actually branded a boy, who had offended him, with a red hot iron; and
nearly starved forty of us, with exacting contributions, to the one
half of our bread, to pamper a young ass, which, incredible as it may
seem, with the connivance of the nurse's daughter (a young flame of
his) he had contrived to smuggle in, and keep upon the leads of the
_ward_, as they called our dormitories. This game went on for better
than a week, till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but he must
cry roast meat--happier than Caligula's minion, could he have kept
his own counsel--but, foolisher, alas! than any of his species in the
fables--waxing fat, and kicking, in the fulness of bread, one unlucky
minute would needs proclaim his good fortune to the world below;
and, laying out his simple throat, blew such a ram's horn blast, as
(toppling down the walls of his own Jericho) set concealment any
longer at defiance. The client was dismissed, with certain attentions,
to Smithfield; but I never understood that the patron underwent any
censure on the occasion. This was in the stewardship of L.'s admired
Perry.

Under the same _facile_ administration, can L. have forgotten the cool
impunity with which the nurses used to carry away openly, in open
platters, for their own tables, one out of two of every hot joint,
which the careful matron had been seeing scrupulously weighed out for
our dinners? These things were daily practised in that magnificent
apartment, which L. (grown connoisseur since, we presume) praises so
highly for the grand paintings "by Verrio, and others," with which it
is "hung round and adorned." But the sight of sleek well-fed blue-coat
boys in pictures was, at that time, I believe, little consolatory to
him, or us, the living ones, who saw the better part of our provisions
carried away before our faces by harpies; and ourselves reduced (with
the Trojan in the hall of Dido)

  To feed our mind with idle portraiture.

L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to _gags_, or the fat
of fresh beef boiled; and sets it down to some superstition. But
these unctuous morsels are never grateful to young palates (children
are universally fat-haters) and in strong, coarse, boiled meats,
_unsalted_, are detestable. A _gag-eater_ in our time was equivalent
to a _goul_, and held in equal detestation.--suffered under the
imputation.

  --'Twas said
  He ate strange flesh.

He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather up the remnants
left at his table (not many, nor very choice fragments, you may credit
me)--and, in an especial manner, these disreputable morsels, which
he would convey away, and secretly stow in the settle that stood at
his bed-side. None saw when he ate them. It was rumoured that he
privately devoured them in the night. He was watched, but no traces
of such midnight practices were discoverable. Some reported, that, on
leave-days, he had been seen to carry out of the bounds a large blue
check handkerchief, full of something. This then must be the accursed
thing. Conjecture next was at work to imagine how he could dispose
of it. Some said he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally
prevailed. He went about moping. None spake to him. No one would play
with him. He was excommunicated; put out of the pale of the school.
He was too powerful a boy to be beaten, but he underwent every
mode of that negative punishment, which is more grievous than many
stripes. Still he persevered. At length he was observed by two of his
school-fellows, who were determined to get at the secret, and had
traced him one leave-day for that purpose, to enter a large worn-out
building, such as there exist specimens of in Chancery-lane, which are
let out to various scales of pauperism with open door, and a common
staircase. After him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth
up four flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened by
an aged woman, meanly clad. Suspicion was now ripened into certainty.
The informers had secured their victim. They had him in their toils.
Accusation was formally preferred, and retribution most signal was
looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then steward (for this happened a little
after my time), with that patient sagacity which tempered all his
conduct, determined to investigate the matter, before he proceeded to
sentence. The result was, that the supposed mendicants, the receivers
or purchasers of the mysterious scraps, turned out to be the parents
of ----, an honest couple come to decay,--whom this seasonable supply
had, in all probability, saved from mendicancy; and that this young
stork, at the expense of his own good name, had all this while been
only feeding the old birds!--The governors on this occasion, much
to their honour, voted a present relief to the family of ----, and
presented him with a silver medal. The lesson which the steward read
upon RASH JUDGMENT, on the occasion of publicly delivering the medal
to ----, I believe, would not be lost upon his auditory.--I had left
school then, but I well remember ----. He was a tall, shambling youth,
with a cast in his eye, not at all calculated to conciliate hostile
prejudices. I have since seen him carrying a baker's basket. I think
I heard he did not do quite so well by himself, as he had done by the
old folks.

I was a hypochondriac lad; and the sight of a boy in fetters, upon the
day of my first putting on the blue clothes, was not exactly fitted
to assuage the natural terrors of initiation. I was of tender years,
barely turned of seven; and had only read of such things in books, or
seen them but in dreams. I was told he had _run away_. This was the
punishment for the first offence.--As a novice I was soon after taken
to see the dungeons. These were little, square, Bedlam cells, where a
boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket--a mattress,
I think, was afterwards substituted--with a peep of light, let in
askance, from a prison-orifice at top, barely enough to read by. Here
the poor boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of any
but the porter who brought him his bread and water--who _might not
speak to him_;--or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him
out to receive his periodical chastisement, which was almost welcome,
because it separated him for a brief interval from solitude:--and here
he was shut up by himself of _nights_, out of the reach of any sound,
to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves, and superstition incident
to his time of life, might subject him to.[2] This was the penalty for
the second offence.--Wouldst thou like, reader, to see what became of
him in the next degree?

The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and whose
expulsion was at this time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, as
at some solemn _auto da fe_, arrayed in uncouth and most appalling
attire--all trace of his late "watchet weeds" carefully effaced, he
was exposed in a jacket, resembling those which London lamplighters
formerly delighted in, with a cap of the same. The effect of
this divestiture was such as the ingenious devisers of it could
have anticipated. With his pale and frighted features, it was
as if some of those disfigurements in Dante had seized upon
him. In this disguisement he was brought into the hall (_L.'s
favourite state-room_), where awaited him the whole number of his
school-fellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was thenceforth to
share no more; the awful presence of the steward, to be seen for the
last time; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state robe for the
occasion; and of two faces more, of direr import, because never but
in these extremities visible. These were governors; two of whom, by
choice, or charter, were always accustomed to officiate at these
_Ultima Supplicia_; not to mitigate (so at least we understood it),
but to enforce the uttermost stripe. Old Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter
Aubert, I remember, were colleagues on one occasion, when the beadle
turning rather pale, a glass of brandy was ordered to prepare him for
the mysteries. The scourging was, after the old Roman fashion, long
and stately. The lictor accompanied the criminal quite round the hall.
We were generally too faint with attending to the previous disgusting
circumstances, to make accurate report with our eyes of the degree
of corporal suffering inflicted. Report, of course, gave out the
back knotty and livid. After scourging, he was made over, in his
_San Benito_, to his friends, if he had any (but commonly such poor
runagates were friendless), or to his parish officer, who, to enhance
the effect of the scene, had his station allotted to him on the
outside of the hall gate.

These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as to spoil
the general mirth of the community. We had plenty of exercise and
recreation _after_ school hours; and, for myself, I must confess,
that I was never happier, than _in_ them. The Upper and the Lower
Grammar Schools were held in the same room; and an imaginary line only
divided their bounds. Their character was as different as that of the
inhabitants on the two sides of the Pyrennees. The Rev. James Boyer
was the Upper Master; but the Rev. Matthew Field presided over that
portion of the apartment, of which I had the good fortune to be a
member. We lived a life as careless as birds. We talked and did just
what we pleased, and nobody molested us. We carried an accidence, or
a grammar, for form; but, for any trouble it gave us, we might take
two years in getting through the verbs deponent, and another two in
forgetting all that we had learned about them. There was now and then
the formality of saying a lesson, but if you had not learned it, a
brush across the shoulders (just enough to disturb a fly) was the sole
remonstrance. Field never used the rod; and in truth he wielded the
cane with no great good will--holding it "like a dancer." It looked
in his hands rather like an emblem than an instrument of authority;
and an emblem, too, he was ashamed of. He was a good easy man, that
did not care to ruffle his own peace, nor perhaps set any great
consideration upon the value of juvenile time. He came among us, now
and then, but often staid away whole days from us; and when he came,
it made no difference to us--he had his private room to retire to, the
short time he staid, to be out of the sound of our noise. Our mirth
and uproar went on. We had classics of our own, without being beholden
to "insolent Greece or haughty Rome," that passed current among
us--Peter Wilkins--the Adventures of the Hon. Capt. Robert Boyle--the
Fortunate Blue Coat Boy--and the like. Or we cultivated a turn for
mechanic or scientific operations; making little sun-dials of paper;
or weaving those ingenious parentheses, called _cat-cradles_; or
making dry peas to dance upon the end of a tin pipe; or studying the
art military over that laudable game "French and English," and a
hundred other such devices to pass away the time--mixing the useful
with the agreeable--as would have made the souls of Rousseau and John
Locke chuckle to have seen us.

Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest divines who affect
to mix in equal proportion the _gentleman_, the _scholar_, and the
_Christian_; but, I know not how, the first ingredient is generally
found to be the predominating dose in the composition. He was engaged
in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at some episcopal levée, when
he should have been attending upon us. He had for many years the
classical charge of a hundred children, during the four or five first
years of their education; and his very highest form seldom proceeded
further than two or three of the introductory fables of Phædrus. How
things were suffered to go on thus, I cannot guess. Boyer, who was the
proper person to have remedied these abuses, always affected, perhaps
felt, a delicacy in interfering in a province not strictly his own.
I have not been without my suspicions, that he was not altogether
displeased at the contrast we presented to his end of the school.
We were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans. He would sometimes,
with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the Under Master, and
then, with Sardonic grin, observe to one of his upper boys, "how neat
and fresh the twigs looked." While his pale students were battering
their brains over Xenophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as that
enjoined by the Samite, we were enjoying ourselves at our ease in our
little Goshen. We saw a little into the secrets of his discipline, and
the prospect did but the more reconcile us to our lot. His thunders
rolled innocuous for us; his storms came near, but never touched us;
contrary to Gideon's miracle, while all around were drenched, our
fleece was dry.[3] His boys turned out the better scholars; we, I
suspect, have the advantage in temper. His pupils cannot speak of him
without something of terror allaying their gratitude; the remembrance
of Field comes back with all the soothing images of indolence, and
summer slumbers, and work like play, and innocent idleness, and
Elysian exemptions, and life itself a "playing holiday."

Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were
near enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his system.
We occasionally heard sounds of the _Ululantes_, and caught glances
of Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His English style was crampt to
barbarism. His Easter anthems (for his duty obliged him to those
periodical flights) were grating as scrannel pipes.[4]--He would
laugh, ay, and heartily, but then it must be at Flaccus's quibble
about _Rex_--or at the _tristis severitas in vultu_, or _inspicere in
patinas_, of Terence--thin jests, which at their first broaching could
hardly have had _vis_ enough to move a Roman muscle.--He had two wigs,
both pedantic, but of differing omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh
powdered, betokening a mild day. The other, an old discoloured,
unkempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. Woe to
the school, when he made his morning appearance in his _passy_, or
_passionate wig_. No comet expounded surer.--J.B. had a heavy hand. I
have known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling child (the
maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips) with a "Sirrah, do you presume
to set your wits at me?"--Nothing was more common than to see him make
a head-long entry into the school-room, from his inner recess, or
library, and, with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, "Od's
my life, Sirrah," (his favourite adjuration) "I have a great mind to
whip you,"--then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into
his lair--and, after a cooling lapse of some minutes (during which
all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context) drive headlong
out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been some
Devil's Litany, with the expletory yell--"_and I WILL, too._"--In
his gentler moods, when the _rabidus furor_ was assuaged, he had
resort to an ingenious method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to
himself, of whipping the boy, and reading the Debates, at the same
time; a paragraph, and a lash between; which in those times, when
parliamentary oratory was most at a height and flourishing in these
realms, was not calculated to impress the patient with a veneration
for the diffuser graces of rhetoric.

Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known to fall ineffectual
from his hand--when droll squinting W---- having been caught putting
the inside of the master's desk to a use for which the architect had
clearly not designed it, to justify himself, with great simplicity
averred, that _he did not know that the thing had been forewarned_.
This exquisite irrecognition of any law antecedent to the _oral_ or
_declaratory_, struck so irresistibly upon the fancy of all who
heard it (the pedagogue himself not excepted) that remission was
unavoidable.

L. has given credit to B.'s great merits as an instructor. Coleridge,
in his literary life, has pronounced a more intelligible and ample
encomium on them. The author of the Country Spectator doubts not to
compare him with the ablest teachers of antiquity. Perhaps we cannot
dismiss him better than with the pious ejaculation of C.--when he
heard that his old master was on his death-bed--"Poor J.B.!--may all
his faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub
boys, all head and wings, with no _bottoms_ to reproach his sublunary
infirmities."

Under him were many good and sound scholars bred.--First Grecian of
my time was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kindest of boys and men, since
Co-grammar-master (and inseparable companion) with Dr. T----e. What
an edifying spectacle did this brace of friends present to those who
remembered the anti-socialities of their predecessors!--You never met
the one by chance in the street without a wonder, which was quickly
dissipated by the almost immediate sub-appearance of the other.
Generally arm in arm, these kindly coadjutors lightened for each
other the toilsome duties of their profession, and when, in advanced
age, one found it convenient to retire, the other was not long in
discovering that it suited him to lay down the fasces also. Oh, it
is pleasant, as it is rare, to find the same arm linked in yours
at forty, which at thirteen helped it to turn over the _Cicero De
Amicitia_, or some tale of Antique Friendship, which the young heart
even then was burning to anticipate!--Co-Grecian with S. was Th----,
who has since executed with ability various diplomatic functions at
the Northern courts. Th---- was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing
of speech, with raven locks.--Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed him
(now Bishop of Calcutta) a scholar and a gentleman in his teens. He
has the reputation of an excellent critic; and is author (besides
the Country Spectator) of a Treatise on the Greek Article, against
Sharpe.--M. is said to bear his mitre high in India, where the _regni
novitas_ (I dare say) sufficiently justifies the bearing. A humility
quite as primitive as that of Jewel or Hooker might not be exactly
fitted to impress the minds of those Anglo-Asiatic diocesans with a
reverence for home institutions, and the church which those fathers
watered. The manners of M. at school, though firm, were mild, and
unassuming.--Next to M. (if not senior to him) was Richards, author of
the Aboriginal Britons, the most spirited of the Oxford Prize Poems; a
pale, studious Grecian.--Then followed poor S----, ill-fated M----! of
these the Muse is silent.

  Finding some of Edward's race
  Unhappy, pass their annals by.

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy
fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee--the dark pillar
not yet turned--Samuel Taylor Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician,
Bard!--How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand
still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion
between the _speech_ and the _garb_ of the young Mirandula), to hear
thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of
Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not
pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek,
or Pindar--while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the
accents of the _inspired charity-boy_!--Many were the "wit-combats,"
(to dally awhile with the words of old Fuller,) between him and C.V.
Le G----, "which two I behold like a Spanish great gallion, and an
English man of war; Master Coleridge, like the former, was built far
higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. C.V.L., with
the English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could
turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by
the quickness of his wit and invention."

Nor shall thou, their compeer, be quickly forgotten, Allen, with the
cordial smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which thou wert wont
to make the old Cloisters shake, in thy cognition of some poignant
jest of theirs; or the anticipation of some more material, and,
peradventure, practical one, of thine own. Extinct are those smiles,
with that beautiful countenance, with which (for thou wert the _Nircus
formosus_ of the school), in the days of thy maturer waggery, thou
didst disarm the wrath of infuriated town-damsel, who, incensed by
provoking pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly converted by
thy angel-look, exchanged the half-formed terrible "_bl----_," for a
gentler greeting--"_bless thy handsome face_!"

Next follow two, who ought to be now alive, and the friends of
Elia--the junior Le G---- and F----; who impelled, the former by
a roving temper, the latter by too quick a sense of neglect--ill
capable of enduring the slights poor Sizars are sometimes subject to
in our seats of learning--exchanged their Alma Mater for the camp;
perishing, one by climate, and one on the plains of Salamanca:--Le
G----, sanguine, volatile, sweet-natured; F----, dogged, faithful,
anticipative of insult, warm-hearted, with something of the old Roman
height about him.

Fine, frank-hearted Fr----, the present master of Hertford, with
Marmaduke T----, mildest of Missionaries--and both my good friends
still--close the catalogue of Grecians in my time.

[Footnote 1: Recollections of Christ's Hospital.]

[Footnote 2: One or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide,
accordingly, at length convinced the governors of the impolicy of
this part of the sentence, and the midnight torture to the spirits
was dispensed with.--This fancy of dungeons for children was a sprout
of Howard's brain; for which (saving the reverence due to Holy Paul)
methinks, I could willingly spit upon his statue.]

[Footnote 3: Cowley.]

[Footnote 4: In this and every thing B. was the antipodes of his
co-adjutor. While the former was digging his brains for crude anthems,
worth a pig-nut, F. would be recreating his gentlemanly fancy in the
more flowery walks of the Muses. A little dramatic effusion of his,
under the name of Vertumnus and Pomona, is not yet forgotten by the
chroniclers of that sort of literature. It was accepted by Garrick,
but the town did not give it their sanction.--B. used to say of it, in
a way of half-compliment, half-irony, that it was _too classical for
representation_.]




THE TWO RACES OF MEN


The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is
composed of two distinct races, _the men who borrow_, and _the men
who lend_. To these two original diversities may be reduced all those
impertinent classifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men,
black men, red men. All the dwellers upon earth, "Parthians, and
Medes, and Elamites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in with
one or other of these primary distinctions. The infinite superiority
of the former, which I choose to designate as the _great race_,
is discernible in their figure, port, and a certain instinctive
sovereignty. The latter are born degraded. "He shall serve his
brethren." There is something in the air of one of this cast, lean and
suspicious; contrasting with the open, trusting, generous manners of
the other.

Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all
ages--Alcibiades--Falstaff--Sir Richard Steele--our late incomparable
Brinsley--what a family likeness in all four!

What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower! what rosy gills!
what a beautiful reliance on Providence doth he manifest,--taking
no more thought than lilies! What contempt for money,--accounting
it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross! What a liberal
confounding of those pedantic distinctions of _meum_ and _tuum_!
or rather what a noble simplification of language (beyond Tooke),
resolving these supposed opposites into one clear, intelligible
pronoun adjective!--What near approaches doth he make to the primitive
_community_,--to the extent of one half of the principle at least!--

He is the true taxer who "calleth all the world up to be taxed:" and
the distance is as vast between him and _one of us_, as subsisted
betwixt the Augustan Majesty and the poorest obolary Jew that paid
it tribute-pittance at Jerusalem!--His exactions, too, have such a
cheerful, voluntary air! So far removed from your sour parochial or
state-gatherers,--those ink-horn varlets, who carry their want of
welcome in their faces! He cometh to you with a smile, and troubleth
you with no receipt; confining himself to no set season. Every day is
his Candlemas, or his Feast of Holy Michael. He applieth the _lene
tormentum_ of a pleasant look to your purse,--which to that gentle
warmth expands her silken leaves, as naturally as the cloak of the
traveller, for which sun and wind contended! He is the true Propontic
which never ebbeth! The sea which taketh handsomely at each man's
hand. In vain the victim, whom he delighteth to honour, struggles with
destiny; he is in the net. Lend therefore cheerfully, O man ordained
to lend--that thou lose not in the end, with thy worldly penny, the
reversion promised. Combine not preposterously in thine own person the
penalties of Lazarus and of Dives!--but, when thou seest the proper
authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it were half-way. Come,
a handsome sacrifice! See how light _he_ makes of it! Strain not
courtesies with a noble enemy.

Reflections like the foregoing were forced upon my mind by the death
of my old friend, Ralph Bigod, Esq., who departed this life on
Wednesday evening; dying, as he had lived, without much trouble. He
boasted himself a descendant from mighty ancestors of that name, who
heretofore held ducal dignities in this realm. In his actions and
sentiments he belied not the stock to which he pretended. Early in
life he found himself invested with ample revenues; which, with that
noble disinterestedness which I have noticed as inherent in men of the
_great race_, he took almost immediate measures entirely to dissipate
and bring to nothing: for there is something revolting in the idea of
a king holding a private purse; and the thoughts of Bigod were all
regal. Thus furnished, by the very act of disfurnishment; getting rid
of the cumbersome luggage of riches, more apt (as one sings)

  To slacken virtue, and abate her edge,
  Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise,

he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his great enterprise,
"borrowing and to borrow!"

In his periegesis, or triumphant progress throughout this island, it
has been calculated that he laid a tythe part of the inhabitants under
contribution. I reject this estimate as greatly exaggerated:--but
having had the honour of accompanying my friend, divers times, in his
perambulations about this vast city, I own I was greatly struck at
first with the prodigious number of faces we met, who claimed a sort
of respectful acquaintance with us. He was one day so obliging as to
explain the phenomenon. It seems, these were his tributaries; feeders
of his exchequer; gentlemen, his good friends (as he was pleased to
express himself), to whom he had occasionally been beholden for a
loan. Their multitudes did no way disconcert him. He rather took
a pride in numbering them; and, with Comus, seemed pleased to be
"stocked with so fair a herd."

With such sources, it was a wonder how he contrived to keep his
treasury always empty. He did it by force of an aphorism, which he had
often in his mouth, that "money kept longer than three days stinks."
So he made use of it while it was fresh. A good part he drank away
(for he was an excellent toss-pot), some he gave away, the rest he
threw away, literally tossing and hurling it violently from him--as
boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious,--into ponds, or
ditches, or deep holes,--inscrutable cavities of the earth;--or he
would bury it (where he would never seek it again) by a river's
side under some bank, which (he would facetiously observe) paid no
interest--but out away from him it must go peremptorily, as Hagar's
offspring into the wilderness, while it was sweet. He never missed
it. The streams were perennial which fed his fisc. When new supplies
became necessary, the first stranger, was sure to contribute to the
deficiency. For Bigod had an _undeniable_ way with him. He had a
cheerful, open exterior, a quick jovial eye, a bald forehead, just
touched with grey (_cana fides_). He anticipated no excuse, and found
none. And, waiving for a while my theory as to the _great race_, I
would put it to the most untheorising reader, who may at times have
disposable coin in his pocket, whether it is not more repugnant to the
kindliness of his nature to refuse such a one as I am describing, than
to say _no_ to a poor petitionary rogue (your bastard borrower), who,
by his mumping visnomy, tells you, that he expects nothing better;
and, therefore, whose preconceived notions and expectations you do in
reality so much less shock in the refusal.

When I think of this man; his fiery glow of heart; his swell of
feeling; how magnificent, how _ideal_ he was; how great at the
midnight hour; and when I compare with him the companions with whom I
have associated since, I grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and
think that I am fallen into the society of _lenders_, and _little
men_.

To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers
than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more
formidable than that which I have touched upon; I mean your _borrowers
of books_--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry
of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There is Comberbatch,
matchless in his depredations!

That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth
knocked out--(you are now with me in my little back study in
Bloomsbury, reader!)--with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side
(like the Guildhall giants, in their reformed posture, guardant of
nothing) once held the tallest of my folios, _Opera Bonaventuræ_,
choice and massy divinity, to which its two supporters (school
divinity also, but of a lesser calibre,--Bellarmine, and Holy Thomas),
showed but as dwarfs,--itself an Ascapart!--_that_ Comberbatch
abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I
confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that "the title
to property in a book (my Bonaventure, for instance), is in exact
ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the
same." Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves
is safe?

The slight vacuum in the left-hand case--two shelves from the
ceiling--scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser--was
whilom the commodious resting-place of Brown on Urn Burial. C. will
hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who
introduced it to him, and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to
discover its beauties--but so have I known a foolish lover to praise
his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her
off than himself.--Just below, Dodsley's dramas want their fourth
volume, where Vittoria Corombona is! The remainder nine are as
distasteful as Priam's refuse sons, when the Fates _borrowed_ Hector.
Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state.--There loitered
the Complete Angler; quiet as in life, by some stream side.--In yonder
nook, John Buncle, a widower-volume, with "eyes closed," I mourns his
ravished mate.

One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, like the sea,
sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as
rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small under-collection of
this nature (my friend's gathering's in his various calls), picked
up, he has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited with as little
memory as mine. I take in these orphans, the twice-deserted. These
proselytes of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. There they
stand in conjunction; natives, and naturalised. The latter seem as
little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am.--I charge
no warehouse-room for these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the
ungentlemanly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses.

To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. You are
sure that he will make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can give
no account of the platter after it. But what moved thee, wayward,
spiteful K., to be so importunate to carry off with thee, in spite of
tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely
woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle?--knowing at the time,
and knowing that I knew also, thou most assuredly wouldst never turn
over one leaf of the illustrious folio:--what but the mere spirit
of contradiction, and childish love of getting the better of thy
friend?--Then, worst cut of all! to transport it with thee to the
Gallican land--

  Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness,
  A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt,
  Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sex's wonder!

--hadst thou not thy play-books, and books of jests and fancies,
about thee, to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest all companies
with thy quips and mirthful tales?--Child of the Green-room, it was
unkindly done of thee. Thy wife, too, that part-French, better-part
Englishwoman!--that _she_ could fix upon no other treatise to bear
away, in kindly token of remembering us, than the works of Fulke
Greville, Lord Brook--of which no Frenchman, nor woman of France,
Italy, or England, was ever by nature constituted to comprehend a
tittle! _Was there not Zimmerman on Solitude?_

Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy
of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy
books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C.--he will return them
(generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with
annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are
these precious MSS. of his--(in _matter_ oftentimes, and almost in
_quantity_ not unfrequently, vying with the originals)--in no very
clerkly hand--legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas
Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas!
wandering in Pagan lands.--I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy
library, against S.T.C.




NEW YEAR'S EVE


Every man hath two birth-days: two days, at least, in every year,
which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his
mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he
termeth _his_. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this
custom of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or
is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor
understand any thing in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of
a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or
cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.
It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is
left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

Of all sounds of all bells--(bells, the music nighest bordering upon
heaven)--most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the
Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a
concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past
twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected--in
that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person
dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a poetical flight in a
contemporary, when he exclaimed

  I saw the skirts of the departing Year.

It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to be
conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all
felt it with me, last night; though some of my companions affected
rather to manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year,
than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I
am none of those who--

  Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces,
new years,--from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to
face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine
only in the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into
foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past
disappointments. I am armour-proof against old discouragements. I
forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again _for
love_, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so
dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and
events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the
incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks, it is better that I
should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall
to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W----n, than that so
passionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our
family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us
of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds _in
banco_, and be without the idea of that specious old rogue.

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon
those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skipping
over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love
_himself_, without the imputation of self-love?

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective--and
mine is painfully so--can have a less respect for his present
identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and
vain, and humorsome; a notorious ***; addicted to ****: averse
from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it;--*** besides;
a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I
subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay
at his door--but for the child Elia--that "other me," there, in the
back-ground--I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that
young master--with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid
changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other
house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at
five, and rougher medicaments I can lay its poor fevered head upon the
sick pillow at Christ's and wake with it in surprise at the gentle
posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had
watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least colour
of falsehood.--God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art
sophisticated.--I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it
was--how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I
not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself--and not some
dissembling guardian presenting a false identity, to give the rule to
my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such
retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or
is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or
family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself;
and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon
memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite? If
these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader--(a busy man,
perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am
singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under
the phantom cloud of Elia.

The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely
to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution; and the
ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of
peculiar ceremony.--In those days the sound of those midnight chimes,
though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to
bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce
conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that
concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty,
never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and,
if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but
he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can
appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now,
shall I confess a truth?--I feel these audits but too powerfully. I
begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the
expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser's farthings.
In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count
upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon
the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away "like a
weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the
unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the
tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the
inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the
face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the
sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am
content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my
friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to
be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the
grave.--Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging,
puzzles and discomposes me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed
foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek
Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and
breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of
fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and
the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and
innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony itself_--do these things go
out with life?

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant
with him?

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense
delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge
come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of
intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which
point me to them here,--the recognisable face--the "sweet assurance of
a look"--?

In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying--to give it its
mildest name--does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial
August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic.
At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality.
Then we expand and burgeon. Then are we as strong again, as valiant
again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips
and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to
the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness,
dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral
appearances,--that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister,
like that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles:--I am none of
her minions--I hold with the Persian.

Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into
my mind. All partial evils, like humours, run into that capital
plague-sore.--I have heard some profess an indifference to life. Such
hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge; and speak of
the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a
pillow. Some have wooed death--but out upon thee, I say, thou foul,
ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give
thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused
or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded,
proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest
thee, thou thin, melancholy _Privation_, or more frightful and
confounding _Positive!_'

Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether
frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfaction hath a man,
that he shall "lie down with kings and emperors in death," who in his
life-time never greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows?--or,
forsooth, that "so shall the fairest face appear?"--why, to comfort
me, must Alice W----n be a goblin? More than all, I conceive disgust
at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon
your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be
lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must
shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In
the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee.
Know thy betters! Thy New Years' Days are past. I survive, a jolly
candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine--and while that turn-coat
bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed,
with changed notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attune to
its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr.
Cotton.--

THE NEW YEAR

  Hark, the cock crows, and yon bright star
  Tells us, the day himself's not far;
  And see where, breaking from the night,
  He gilds the western hills with light.
  With him old Janus doth appear,
  Peeping into the future year,
  With such a look as seems to say,
  The prospect is not good that way.
  Thus do we rise ill sights to see,
  And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy;
  When the prophetic fear of things
  A more tormenting mischief brings,
  More full of soul-tormenting gall,
  Than direst mischiefs can befall.
  But stay! but stay! methinks my sight,
  Better inform'd by clearer light,
  Discerns sereneness in that brow,
  That all contracted seem'd but now.
  His revers'd face may show distaste,
  And frown upon the ills are past;
  But that which this way looks is clear,
  And smiles upon the New-born Year.
  He looks too from a place so high,
  The Year lies open to his eye;
  And all the moments open are
  To the exact discoverer.
  Yet more and more he smiles upon
  The happy revolution.
  Why should we then suspect or fear
  The influences of a year,
  So smiles upon us the first morn,
  And speaks us good so soon as born?
  Plague on't! the last was ill enough,
  This cannot but make better proof;
  Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through
  The last, why so we may this too;
  And then the next in reason shou'd
  Be superexcellently good:
  For the worst ills (we daily see)
  Have no more perpetuity,
  Than the best fortunes that do fall;
  Which also bring us wherewithal
  Longer their being to support,
  Than those do of the other sort:
  And who has one good year in three,
  And yet repines at destiny,
  Appears ungrateful in the case,
  And merits not the good he has.
  Then let us welcome the New Guest
  With lusty brimmers of the best;
  Mirth always should Good Fortune meet,
  And renders e'en Disaster sweet:
  And though the Princess turn her back,
  Let us but line ourselves with sack,
  We better shall by far hold out,
  Till the next Year she face about.

How say you, reader--do not these verses smack of the rough
magnanimity of the old English vein? Do they not fortify like a
cordial; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and
generous spirits, in the concoction? Where be those puling fears of
death, just now expressed or affected?--Passed like a cloud--absorbed
in the purging sunlight of clear poetry--clean washed away by a wave
of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for these hypochondries--And now
another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them,
to you all, my masters!




MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST


"A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game." This was
the celebrated _wish_ of old Sarah Battle (now with God) who, next
to her devotions, loved a good game at whist. She was none of your
lukewarm gamesters, your half and half players, who have no objection
to take a hand, if you want one to make up a rubber; who affirm that
they have no pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game,
and lose another; that they can while away an hour very agreeably at
a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will
desire an adversary, who has slipt a wrong card, to take it up and
play another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table.
One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said,
that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them.

Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from
her heart and soul; and would not, save upon a striking emergency,
willingly seat herself at the same table with them. She loved a
thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy. She took, and gave,
no concessions. She hated favours. She never made a revoke, nor
ever passed it over in her adversary without exacting the utmost
forfeiture. She fought a good fight: cut and thrust. She held not her
good sword (her cards) "like a dancer." She sate bolt upright; and
neither showed you her cards, nor desired to see yours. All people
have their blind side--their superstitions; and I have heard her
declare, under the rose, that Hearts was her favourite suit.

I never in my life--and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best years of
it--saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn to play; or
snuff a candle in the middle of a game; or ring for a servant, till it
was fairly over. She never introduced, or connived at, miscellaneous
conversation during its process. As she emphatically observed,
cards were cards: and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her fine
last-century countenance, it was at the airs of a young gentleman of a
literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand;
and who, in his excess of candour, declared, that he thought there was
no harm in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies,
in recreations of that kind! She could not bear to have her noble
occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that
light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the
world to do,--and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards--over a
book.

Pope was her favourite author: his Rape of the Lock her favourite
work. She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards)
his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how
far it agreed with, and in what points it would be found to differ
from, tradrille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant; and I
had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles: but
I suppose they came too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes
upon that author.

Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist
had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy
and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The uncertainty
and quick shifting of partners--a thing which the constancy of
whist abhors;--the dazzling supremacy and regal investiture of
Spadille--absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of
whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power above his
brother-nobility of the Aces;--the giddy vanity, so taking to the
inexperienced, of playing alone:--above all, the overpowering
attractions of a _Sans Prendre Vole_,--to the triumph of which there
is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the contingencies of
whist;--all these, she would say, make quadrille a game of captivation
to the young and enthusiastic. But whist was the _solider_ game:
that was her word. It was a long meal; not, like quadrille, a feast
of snatches. One or two rubbers might coextend in duration with an
evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate
steady enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever
fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she
would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the
little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel; perpetually changing
postures and connexions; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings
to-morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath;--but the wars of
whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational,
antipathies of the great French and English nations.

A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favourite game.
There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage--nothing
superfluous. No _flushes_--that most irrational of all pleas that
a reasonable being can set up:--that any one should claim four by
virtue of holding cards of the same mark and colour, without reference
to the playing of the game, or the individual worth or pretensions
of the cards themselves! She held this to be a solecism; as pitiful
an ambition at cards as alliteration is in authorship. She despised
superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things.--Suits
were soldiers, she would say, and must have a uniformity of array to
distinguish them: but what should we say to a foolish squire, who
should claim a merit from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets,
that never were to be marshalled--never to take the field?--She even
wished that whist were more simple than it is; and, in my mind, would
have stript it of some appendages, which, in the state of human
frailty, may be venially, and even commendably allowed of. She saw no
reason for the deciding of the trump by the turn of the card. Why not
one suit always trumps?--Why two colours, when the mark of the suits
would have sufficiently distinguished them without it?--

"But the eye, my dear Madam, is agreeably refreshed with the variety.
Man is not a creature of pure reason he must have his senses
delightfully appealed to. We see it in Roman Catholic countries, where
the music and the paintings draw in many to worship, whom your quaker
spirit of unsensualizing would have kept out.--You, yourself, have a
pretty collection of paintings--but confess to me, whether, walking
in your gallery at Sandham, among those clear Vandykes, or among the
Paul Potters in the ante-room, you ever felt your bosom glow with
an elegant delight, at all comparable to _that_ you have it in your
power to experience most evenings over a well-arranged assortment
of the court cards?--the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a
procession--the gay triumph-assuring scarlets--the contrasting
deadly-killing sables--the 'hoary majesty of spades'--Pam in all his
glory!--

"All these might be dispensed with; and, with their naked names upon
the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well, picture-less.
But the _beauty_ of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped
of all that is imaginative in them, they must degenerate into mere
gambling.--Imagine a dull deal board, or drum head, to spread them on,
instead of that nice verdant carpet (next to nature's), fittest arena
for those courtly combatants to play their gallant jousts and turneys
in!--Exchange those delicately-turned ivory markers--(work of Chinese
artist, unconscious of their symbol,--or as profanely slighting their
true application as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman that turned out
those little shrines for the goddess)--exchange them for little bits
of leather (our ancestors' money) or chalk and a slate!"--

The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic;
and to her approbation of my arguments on her favourite topic that
evening, I have always fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a
curious cribbage board, made of the finest Sienna marble, which her
maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated)
brought with him from Florence:--this, and a trifle of five hundred
pounds, came to me at her death.

The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with
religious care; though she herself, to confess a truth, was never
greatly taken with cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have
heard her say,--disputing with her uncle, who was very partial to
it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to pronounce "_go_"--or
"_that's a go_." She called it an ungrammatical game. The pegging
teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five dollar stake),
because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, which would
have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the disgraceful
tenure of declaring "_two for his heels_." There is something
extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a
gentlewoman born.

Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, though she
would ridicule the pedantry of the terms--such as pique--repique--the
capot--they savoured (she thought) of affectation. But games for two,
or even three, she never greatly cared for. She loved the quadrate,
or square. She would argue thus:--Cards are warfare: the ends are
gain, with glory. But cards are war, in disguise of a sport: when
single adversaries encounter, the ends proposed are too palpable.
By themselves, it is too close a fight; with spectators, it is not
much bettered. No looker on can be interested, except for a bet,
and then it is a mere affair of money; he cares not for your luck
_sympathetically_, or for your play.--Three are still worse; a mere
naked war of every man against every man, as in cribbage, without
league or alliance; or a rotation of petty and contradictory
interests, a succession of heartless leagues, and not much more hearty
infractions of them, as in tradrille.--But in square games (_she
meant whist_) all that is possible to be attained in card-playing is
accomplished. There are the incentives of profit with honour, common
to every species--though the _latter_ can be but very imperfectly
enjoyed in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a
participator. But the parties in whist are spectators and principals
too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not
wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist
abhors neutrality, or interest beyond its sphere. You glory in some
surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold--or even
an interested--by-stander witnesses it, but because your _partner_
sympathises in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph for
two. Two are exalted. Two again are mortified; which divides their
disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by taking off the invidiousness)
your glories. Two losing to two are better reconciled, than one to one
in that close butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying
the channels. War becomes a civil game.--By such reasonings as these
the old lady was accustomed to defend her favourite pastime.

No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any game, where
chance entered into the composition, _for nothing_. Chance, she would
argue--and here again, admire the subtlety of her conclusion!--chance
is nothing, but where something else depends upon it. It is obvious,
that cannot be _glory_. What rational cause of exultation could it
give to a man to turn up size ace a hundred times together by himself?
or before spectators, where no stake was depending?--Make a lottery
of a hundred thousand tickets with but one fortunate number--and what
possible principle of our nature, except stupid wonderment, could it
gratify to gain that number as many times successively, without a
prize?--Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in backgammon,
where it was not played for money. She called it foolish, and
those people idots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such
circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little to her fancy. Played
for a stake, they were a mere system of over-reaching. Played for
glory, they were a mere setting of one man's wit,--his memory, or
combination-faculty rather--against another's; like a mock-engagement
at a review, bloodless and profitless.--She could not conceive a
_game_ wanting the spritely infusion of chance,--the handsome excuses
of good fortune. Two people playing at chess in a corner of a room,
whilst whist was stirring in the centre, would inspire her with
insufferable horror and ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles,
and Knights, the _imagery_ of the board, she would argue, (and I think
in this case justly) were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard
head-contests can in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject form
and colour. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were the proper
arena for such combatants.

To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad passions,
she would retort, that man is a gaming animal. He must be always
trying to get the better in something or other:--that this passion can
scarcely be more safely expended than upon a game at cards: that cards
are a temporary illusion; in truth, a mere drama; for we do but _play_
at being mightily concerned, where a few idle shillings are at stake,
yet, during the illusion, we _are_ as mightily concerned as those
whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. They are a sort of dream-fighting;
much ado; great battling, and little bloodshed; mighty means for
disproportioned ends; quite as diverting, and a great deal more
innoxious, than many of those more serious _games_ of life, which men
play, without esteeming them to be such.--

With great deference to the old lady's judgment on these matters, I
think I have experienced some moments in my life, when playing at
cards _for nothing_ has even been agreeable. When I am in sickness, or
not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for the cards, and play a
game at piquet _for love_ with my cousin Bridget--Bridget Elia.

I grant there is something sneaking in it; but with a toothache, or a
sprained ancle,--when you are subdued and humble,--you are glad to put
up with an inferior spring of action.

There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as _sick whist_.--

I grant it is not the highest style of man--I deprecate the manes of
Sarah Battle--she lives not, alas! to whom I should apologise.--

At such times, those _terms_ which my old friend objected to, come in
as something admissible.--I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though
they mean nothing. I am subdued to an inferior interest. Those shadows
of winning amuse me.

That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her)--(dare I
tell thee, how foolish I am?)--I wished it might have lasted for ever,
though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade
of play: I would be content to go on in that idle folly for ever. The
pipkin should be ever boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive
to my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game was over:
and, as I do not much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble.
Bridget and I should be ever playing.




A CHAPTER ON EARS


I have no ear.--

Mistake me not, reader,--nor imagine that I am by nature destitute
of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and
(architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital.
Better my mother had never borne me.--I am, I think, rather delicately
than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition
to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness,
in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets--those indispensable
side-intelligencers.

Neither have I incurred, or done any thing to incur, with Defoe,
that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon
assurance--to feel "quite unabashed," and at ease upon that article.
I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them
aright, is it within the compass of my destiny, that I ever should be.

When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me
to mean--_for music_.--To say that this heart never melted at the
concourse of sweet sounds, would be a foul self-libel.--"_Water
parted from the sea_" never fails to move it strangely. So does "_In
Infancy_." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the
old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentlewoman--the
gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation--the sweetest--why
should I hesitate to name Mrs. S----, once the blooming Fanny
Weatheral of the Temple--who had power to thrill the soul of Elia,
small imp as he was, even in his long coats; and to make him glow,
tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the
day-spring of that absorbing sentiment, which was afterwards destined
to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite, for Alice W----n.

I even think that _sentimentally_ I am disposed to harmony. But
_organically_ I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising "_God
save the King_" all my life; whistling and humming of it over to
myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me,
within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been
impeached.

I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped faculty of
music within me. For, thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s
piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining
parlour,--on his return he was pleased to say, "_he thought it could
not be the maid_!" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched
in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his
suspicions had lighted on _Jenny_. But a grace, snatched from a
superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being,--technically
perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all
the fine arts,--had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all
her (less-cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them.
I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any
view of disparaging Jenny.

Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken
some pains) what a note in music is; or how one note should differ
from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a
tenor. Only sometimes the thorough bass I contrive to guess at, from
its being supereminently harsh and disagreeable. I tremble, however,
for my misapplication of the simplest terms of _that_ which I
disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to _say_ I
am ignorant of I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. _Sostenuto_ and _adagio_
stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and _Sol_, _Fa_, _Mi_,
_Re_, is as conjuring as _Baralipton_.

It is hard to stand alone--in an age like this,--(constituted to the
quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily
believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the
gamut)--to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to the magic
influences of an art, which is said to have such an especial stroke at
soothing, elevating, and refining the passions.--Yet rather than break
the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to you, that I have
received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up
faculty.

I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in
a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But
those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of
music. The ear is passive to those single strokes; willingly enduring
stripes, while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive.
It will strive--mine at least will--'spite of its inaptitude, to thrid
the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics.
I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and
inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of
the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not
obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless,
fruitless, barren attention! I take refuge in the unpretending
assemblage of honest common-life sounds;--and the purgatory of the
Enraged Musician becomes my paradise.

I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the
cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit
(what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience!) immoveable, or
affecting some faint emotion,--till (as some have said, that our
occupations in the next world will be but a shadow of what delighted
us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades,
where some of the _forms_ of the earthly one should be kept up, with
none of the _enjoyment_; or like that--

  --Party in a parlour,
  All silent, and all DAMNED!

Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as
they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension.--Words are
something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to
be long a dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up
languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar
upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound
with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty
frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a
book, _all stops_, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to
invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an
inexplicable rambling mime--these are faint shadows of what I have
undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty
_instrumental music_.

I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced
something vastly lulling and agreeable:--afterwards followeth the
languor, and the oppression. Like that disappointing book in Patmos;
or, like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth
music make her first insinuating approaches:--"Most pleasant it is
to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary
grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate
upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him
most, _amabilis insania_, and _mentis gratissimus error_. A most
incomparable delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to
themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose,
and strongly imagine, they act, or that they see done.--So delightsome
these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without
sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantastical
meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn
from them--winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and
still pleasing their humours, until at last the SCENE TURNS UPON A
SUDDEN, and they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary
places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and
distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, _subrusticus pudor_,
discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden,
and they can think of nothing else: continually suspecting, no sooner
are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on
them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to
their minds; which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions they
can avoid, they cannot be rid of it, they cannot resist."

Something like this "SCENE-TURNING" I have experienced at the evening
parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend _Nov----_; who, by
the aid of a capital organ, himself the most finished of players,
converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week days into Sundays,
and these latter into minor heavens.[1]

When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which
peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side
aisles of the dim abbey, some five and thirty years since, waking
a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young
apprehension--(whether it be _that_, in which the psalmist, weary of
the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings--or _that
other_, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth
by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind)--a holy calm
pervadeth me.--I am for the time

  --rapt above earth,
  And possess joys not promised at my birth.

But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul
prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in
her capacity to receive,--impatient to overcome her "earthly" with his
"heavenly,"--still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and
fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted _German_ ocean,
above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride those
Arions _Haydn_ and _Mozart_, with their attendant tritons, _Bach_,
_Beethoven_, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up
would but plunge me again in the deeps,--I stagger under the weight
of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wit's end;--clouds, as of
frankincense, oppress me--priests, altars, censers, dazzle before
me--the genius of _his_ religion hath me in her toils--a shadowy
triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so
ingenuous he is Pope, and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of
dreams, a she-Pope too,--tri-coroneted like himself!--I am converted,
and yet a Protestant;--at once _malleus hereticorum_, and myself grand
heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person:--I am Marcion,
Ebion, and Cerinthus--Gog and Magog--what not?--till the coming in of
the friendly supper-tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true
Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at
once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer faith; and restores
to me the genuine unterrifying aspects of my pleasant-countenanced
host and hostess.

[Footnote 1:
  I have been there, and still would go;
  'Tis like a little heaven below.--_Dr. Watts_.]




ALL FOOLS' DAY


The compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first
of April to us all!

Many happy returns of this day to you--and you--and _you_, Sir--nay,
never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know
one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch
of _that same_--you understand me--a speck of the motley. Beshrew
the man who on such a day as this, the _general festival_, should
affect to stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the
corporation, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in the forest
to-day, shall meet with no wise-acre, I can tell him. _Stultus sum_.
Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to yourself for your
pains. What, man, we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at
the least computation.

Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry--we will drink no wise,
melancholy, politic port on this day--and let us troll the catch of
Amiens--_duc ad me_--_duc ad me_--how goes it?

  Here shall he see
  Gross fools as he.

Now would I give a trifle to know historically and authentically, who
was the greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him in
a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I think I could without much
difficulty name you the party.

Remove your cap a little further, if you please: it hides my bauble.
And now each man bestride his hobby, and dust away his bells to what
tune he pleases. I will give you, for my part,

  --The crazy old church clock.
  And the bewildered chimes.

Good master Empedocles, you are welcome. It is long since you went a
salamander-gathering down Ætna. Worse than samphire-picking by some
odds. 'Tis a mercy your worship did not singe your mustachios.

Ha! Cleombrotus! and what salads in faith did you light upon at the
bottom of the Mediterranean? You were founder, I take it, of the
disinterested sect of the Calenturists.

Gebir, my old free-mason, and prince of plasterers at Babel, bring
in your trowel, most Ancient Grand! You have claim to a seat here at
my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. You left your work, if
I remember Herodotus correctly, at eight hundred million toises, or
thereabout, above the level of the sea. Bless us, what a long bell you
must have pulled, to call your top workmen to their nuncheon on the
low grounds of Sennaar. Or did you send up your garlick and onions by
a rocket? I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to show you our Monument on
Fish-street Hill, after your altitudes. Yet we think it somewhat.

What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears?--cry, baby, put its finger
in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as an orange, pretty
moppet!

Mister Adams--'odso, I honour your coat--pray do us the favour to read
to us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slipslop--the twenty and
second in your portmanteau there--on Female Incontinence--the same--it
will come in most irrelevantly and impertinently seasonable to the
time of the day.

Good Master Raymund Lully, you look wise. Pray correct that error.--

Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a paradox.
We will have nothing said or done syllogistically this day. Remove
those logical forms, waiter, that no gentleman break the tender shins
of his apprehension stumbling across them.

Master Stephen, you are late.--Ha! Cokes, is it you?--Aguecheek,
my dear knight, let me pay my devoir to you.--Master Shallow, your
worship's poor servant to command.--Master Silence, I will use few
words with you.--Slender, it shall go hard if I edge not you in
somewhere.--You six will engross all the poor wit of the company
to-day.--I know it, I know it.

Ha! honest R----, my fine old Librarian of Ludgate, time out of mind,
art thou here again? Bless thy doublet, it is not over-new, threadbare
as thy stories:--what dost thou flitting about the world at this
rate?--Thy customers are extinct, defunct, bed-rid, have ceased to
read long ago.--Thou goest still among them, seeing if, peradventure,
thou canst hawk a volume or two.--Good Granville S----, thy last
patron, is flown.

  King Pandion, he is dead,
  All thy friends are lapt in lead.--

Nevertheless, noble R----, come in, and take your seat here, between
Armado and Quisada: for in true courtesy, in gravity, in fantastic
smiling to thyself, in courteous smiling upon others, in the goodly
ornature of well-apparelled speech, and the commendation of wise
sentences, thou art nothing inferior to those accomplished Dons of
Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for ever, when I forget thy
singing the song of Macheath, which declares that he might be _happy
with either_, situated between those two ancient spinsters--when I
forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst make, turning now
to the one, and now to the other, with that Malvolian smile--as if
Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for his hero; and as if thousands
of periods must revolve, before the mirror of courtesy could have
given his invidious preference between a pair of so goodly-propertied
and meritorious-equal damsels, * * * * *

To descend from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fools'
Banquet beyond its appropriate day,--for I fear the second of April
is not many hours distant--in sober verity I will confess a truth to
thee, reader. I love a _Fool_--as naturally, as if I were of kith and
kin to him. When a child, with child-like apprehensions, that dived
not below the surface of the matter, I read those _Parables_--not
guessing at their involved wisdom--I had more yearnings towards
that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I
entertained for his more cautious neighbour; I grudged at the
hard censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent;
and--prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my
apprehension, somewhat _unfeminine_ wariness of their competitors--I
felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a _tendre_, for those five
thoughtless virgins.--I have never made an acquaintance since, that
lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had not some
tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest
obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall
commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will
not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable
hallucination warrants; the security, which a word out of season
ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool
told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of
folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his
composition. It is observed, that "the foolisher the fowl or
fish,--woodcocks,--dotterels,--cod's-heads, &c. the finer the flesh
thereof," and what are commonly the world's received fools, but such
whereof the world is not worthy? and what have been some of the
kindliest patterns of our species, but so many darlings of absurdity,
minions of the goddess, and, her white boys?--Reader, if you wrest my
words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are
the _April Fool_.

A QUAKER'S MEETING

  Still-born Silence! thou that art
  Flood-gate of the deeper heart!
  Offspring of a heavenly kind!
  Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind!
  Secrecy's confident, and he
  Who makes religion mystery!
  Admiration's speaking'st tongue!
  Leave, thy desert shades among,
  Reverend hermits' hallowed cells,
  Where retired devotion dwells!
  With thy enthusiasms come,
  Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb![1]

Reader, would'st thou know what true peace and quiet mean; would'st
thou find a refuge from the noises and clamours of the multitude;
would'st thou enjoy at once solitude and society; would'st thou
possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, without being shut
out from the consolatory faces of thy species; would'st thou be alone,
and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not desolate; singular, yet not
without some to keep thee in countenance; a unit in aggregate; a
simple in composite:--come with me into a Quaker's Meeting.

Dost thou love silence deep as that "before the winds were made?" go
not out into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the
earth; shut not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells
of thy ears, with little-faith'd self-mistrusting Ulysses.--Retire
with me into a Quaker's Meeting.

For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it
is commendable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery.

What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this place? what
the uncommunicating muteness of fishes?--here the goddess reigns and
revels.--"Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their
inter-confounding uproars more augment the brawl--nor the waves of the
blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds--than their opposite (Silence
her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers,
and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps.
Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would
seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight.

There are wounds, which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By
imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect
is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so
absolutely as in a Quaker's Meeting.--Those first hermits did
certainly understand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian
solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of
conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing
spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant
as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend
sitting by--say, a wife--he, or she, too, (if that be probable),
reading another, without interruption, or oral communication?--can
there be no sympathy without the gabble of words?--away with this
inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me,
Master Zimmerman, a sympathetic solitude.

To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral,
time-stricken;

  Or under hanging mountains,
  Or by the fall of fountains;

is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy, who come
together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude. This
is the loneliness "to be felt."--The Abbey Church of Westminster hath
nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches
of a Quaker's Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions,

  --sands, ignoble things,
  Dropt from the ruined sides of kings--

but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into
the fore-ground--SILENCE--eldest of things--language of old
Night--primitive Discourser--to which the insolent decays of
mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say,
unnatural progression.

  How reverend is the view of these hushed heads,
  Looking tranquillity!

Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod! convocation
without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a lesson dost
thou read to council, and to consistory!--if my pen treat of you
lightly--as haply it will wander--yet my spirit hath gravely felt the
wisdom of your custom, when sitting among you in deepest peace, which
some out-welling tears would rather confirm than disturb, I have
reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the sowings of the seed
by Fox and Dewesbury.--I have witnessed that, which brought before
my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and
serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist,
sent to molest you--for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions,
the out-cast and off-scowering of church and presbytery.--I have seen
the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with
the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of
the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye
as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remembered Penn before his accusers, and
Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells
us, and "the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet."

Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you,
above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers.
It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox, and the
primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than any
thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to
stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy,
no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here
read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps
hath been a by-word in your mouth,)--James Naylor: what dreadful
sufferings, with what patience, he endured even to the boring through
of his tongue with red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what
strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they
stigmatised for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could
renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet
keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still!--so different from
the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they
apostatize, _apostatize all_, and think they can never get far enough
from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of
some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated.

Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart; and love the early Quakers.

How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to
the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted
formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have
seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sate visibly
brooding. Others again I have watched, when my thoughts should have
been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect nothing but a
blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity,
and the absence of the fierce controversial workings.--If the
spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make
few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching.
It is seldom indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold
forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally _ancient_,
voice is heard--you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it
proceeds--with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying out a few words
which "she thought might suit the condition of some present," with a
quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that any
thing of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of
tenderness, and a restraining modesty.--The men, for what I observed,
speak seldomer.

Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the
old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth
phrases it, might have danced "from head to foot equipt in iron mail."
His frame was of iron too. But _he_ was malleable. I saw him shake
all over with the spirit--I dare not say, of delusion. The strivings
of the outer man were unutterable--he seemed not to speak, but to
be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his knees to
fail--his joints all seemed loosening--it was a figure to set off
against Paul Preaching--the words he uttered were few, and sound--he
was evidently resisting his will--keeping down his own word-wisdom
with more mighty effort, than the world's orators strain for theirs.
"He had been a WIT in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a
sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun
to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to
recall the striking incongruity of the confession--understanding the
term in its worldly acceptation--with the frame and physiognomy of the
person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levities--the
Jocos Risus-que--faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at
Enna.--By _wit_, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood
something far within the limits of an allowable liberty.

More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been
spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made
with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as
in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures,
the TONGUE, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and
captive. You have bathed with stillness.--O when the spirit is sore
fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings, and nonsense-noises
of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself,
for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among
the gentle Quakers!

Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil
and herd-like--as in the pasture--"forty feeding like one."--

The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil;
and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its
contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they come up in bands
to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the
metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like
troops of the Shining Ones.

[Footnote 1: From "Poems of all sorts," by Richard Fleckno, 1653.]




THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER


My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of
the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most
of my notions, and ways of feeling. In every thing that relates to
_science_, I am a whole Encyclopædia behind the rest of the world.
I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country
gentlemen, in king John's days. I know less geography than a
school-boy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as
authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into
Asia; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions;
nor can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South
Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a
very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terræ Incognitæ.
I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or
Charles's Wain; the place of any star; or the name of any of them at
sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness--and if the sun on
some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the West, I
verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension
about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity
and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some
vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of
miscellaneous study; but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle,
even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four
great monarchies; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian,
floats as _first_ in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures
concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend _M._, with great
painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in
Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely
unacquainted with the modern languages; and, like a better man than
myself, have "small Latin and less Greek." I am a stranger to the
shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers--not from
the circumstance of my being town-born--for I should have brought the
same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it
in "on Devon's leafy shores,"--and am no less at a loss among purely
town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes.--Not that I affect
ignorance--but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have
been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold
without aching. I sometimes wonder, how I have passed my probation
with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre
a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little
knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; every body is so
much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your
acquisitions. But in a _tête-à-tête_ there is no shuffling. The truth
will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left
alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man,
that does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma of this sort.--

In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shacklewell, the
coach stopped to take up a staid-looking gentleman, about the wrong
side of thirty, who was giving his parting directions (while the
steps were adjusting), in a tone of mild authority, to a tall youth,
who seemed to be neither his clerk, his son, nor his servant, but
something partaking of all three. The youth was dismissed, and
we drove on. As we were the sole passengers, he naturally enough
addressed his conversation to me; and we discussed the merits of the
fare, the civility and punctuality of the driver; the circumstance of
an opposition coach having been lately set up, with the probabilities
of its success--to all which I was enabled to return pretty
satisfactory answers, having been drilled into this kind of etiquette
by some years' daily practice of riding to and fro in the stage
aforesaid--when he suddenly alarmed me by a startling question,
whether I had seen the show of prize cattle that morning in
Smithfield? Now as I had not seen it, and do not greatly care for
such sort of exhibitions, I was obliged to return a cold negative. He
seemed a little mortified, as well as astonished, at my declaration,
as (it appeared) he was just come fresh from the sight, and doubtless
had hoped to compare notes on the subject. However he assured me that
I had lost a fine treat, as it far exceeded the show of last year. We
were now approaching Norton Falgate, when the sight of some shop-goods
_ticketed_ freshened him up into a dissertation upon the cheapness of
cottons this spring. I was now a little in heart, as the nature of my
morning avocations had brought me into some sort of familiarity with
the raw material; and I was surprised to find how eloquent I was
becoming on the state of the India market--when, presently, he dashed
my incipient vanity to the earth at once, by inquiring whether I had
ever made any calculation as to the value of the rental of all the
retail shops in London. Had he asked of me, what song the Sirens sang,
or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, I
might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have hazarded a "wide solution."[1] My
companion saw my embarrassment, and, the almshouses beyond Shoreditch
just coming in view, with great good-nature and dexterity shifted
his conversation to the subject of public charities; which led to
the comparative merits of provision for the poor in past and present
times, with observations on the old monastic institutions, and
charitable orders;--but, finding me rather dimly impressed with
some glimmering notions from old poetic associations, than strongly
fortified with any speculations reducible to calculation on the
subject, he gave the matter up; and, the country beginning to open
more and more upon us, as we approached the turnpike at Kingsland (the
destined termination of his journey), he put a home thrust upon me, in
the most unfortunate position he could have chosen, by advancing some
queries relative to the North Pole Expedition. While I was muttering
out something about the Panorama of those strange regions (which I had
actually seen), by way of parrying the question, the coach stopping
relieved me from any further apprehensions. My companion getting out,
left me in the comfortable possession of my ignorance; and I heard
him, as he went off, putting questions to an outside passenger, who
had alighted with him, regarding an epidemic disorder, that had been
rife about Dalston; and which, my friend assured him, had gone through
five or six schools in that neighbourhood. The truth now flashed upon
me, that my companion was a schoolmaster; and that the youth, whom he
had parted from at our first acquaintance, must have been one of the
bigger boys, or the usher.--He was evidently a kind-hearted man, who
did not seem so much desirous of provoking discussion by the questions
which he put, as of obtaining information at any rate. It did not
appear that he took any interest, either, in such kind of inquiries,
for their own sake; but that he was in some way bound to seek for
knowledge. A greenish-coloured coat, which he had on, forbade me to
surmise that he was a clergyman. The adventure gave birth to some
reflections on the difference between persons of his profession in
past and present times.

Rest to the souls of those fine old Pedagogues; the breed, long
since extinct, of the Lilys, and the Linacres: who believing that
all learning was contained in the languages which they taught, and
despising every other acquirement as superficial and useless, came to
their task as to a sport! Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed
away all their days as in a grammar-school. Revolving in a perpetual
cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies; renewing
constantly the occupations which had charmed their studious childhood;
rehearsing continually the part of the past; life must have slipped
from them at last like one day. They were always in their first
garden, reaping harvests of their golden time, among their _Flori_ and
their _Spici-legia_; in Arcadia still, but kings; the ferule of their
sway not much harsher, but of like dignity with that mild sceptre
attributed to king Basileus; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela
and their Philoclea; with the occasional duncery of some untoward
Tyro, serving for a refreshing interlude of a Mopsa, or a clown
Damætas!

With what a savour doth the Preface to Colet's, or (as it is sometimes
called) Paul's Accidence, set forth! "To exhort every man to the
learning of grammar, that intendeth to attain the understanding of
the tongues, wherein is contained a great treasury of wisdom and
knowledge, it would seem but vain and lost labour; for so much as it
is known, that nothing can surely be ended, whose beginning is either
feeble or faulty; and no building be perfect, whereas the foundation
and ground-work is ready to fall, and unable to uphold the burden of
the frame." How well doth this stately preamble (comparable to those
which Milton commendeth as "having been the usage to prefix to some
solemn law, then first promulgated by Solon, or Lycurgus") correspond
with and illustrate that pious zeal for conformity, expressed in a
succeeding clause, which would fence about grammar-rules with the
severity of faith-articles!--"as for the diversity of grammars, it
is well profitably taken away by the king majesties wisdom, who
foreseeing the inconvenience, and favourably providing the remedie,
caused one kind of grammar by sundry learned men to be diligently
drawn, and so to be set out, only everywhere to be taught for the use
of learners, and for the hurt in changing of schoolmaisters." What a
_gusto_ in that which follows: "wherein it is profitable that he can
orderly decline his noun, and his verb." _His_ noun!

The fine dream is fading away fast; and the least concern of a teacher
in the present day is to inculcate grammar-rules.

The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of every thing,
because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of any
thing. He must be superficially, if I may so say, omniscient. He is to
know something of pneumatics; of chemistry; of whatever is curious,
or proper to excite the attention of the youthful mind; an insight
into mechanics is desirable, with a touch of statistics; the quality
of soils, &c. botany, the constitution of his country, _cum multis
aliis_. You may get a notion of some part of his expected duties by
consulting the famous Tractate on Education addressed to Mr. Hartlib.

All these things--these, or the desire of them--he is expected to
instil, not by set lessons from professors, which he may charge in the
bill, but at school-intervals, as he walks the streets, or saunters
through green fields (those natural instructors), with his pupils.
The least part of what is expected from him, is to be done in
school-hours. He must insinuate knowledge at the _mollia tempera
fandi_. He must seize every occasion--the season of the year--the time
of the day--a passing cloud--a rainbow--a wagon of hay--a regiment of
soldiers going by--to inculcate something useful. He can receive no
pleasure from a casual glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an
object of instruction. He must interpret beauty into the picturesque.
He cannot relish a beggar-man, or a gipsy, for thinking of the
suitable improvement. Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the
sophisticating medium of moral uses. The Universe--that Great Book, as
it has been called--is to him indeed, to all intents and purposes, a
book, out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting
schoolboys.--Vacations themselves are none to him, he is only rather
worse off than before; for commonly he has some intrusive upper-boy
fastened upon him at such times; some cadet of a great family; some
neglected lump of nobility, or gentry; that he must drag after him to
the play, to the Panorama, to Mr. Bartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon,
or into the country, to a friend's house, or to his favourite
watering-place. Wherever he goes, this uneasy shadow attends him. A
boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is
boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.

Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but
they are unwholesome companions for grown people. The restraint is
felt no less on the one side, than on the other.--Even a child, that
"plaything for an hour," tires _always_. The noises of children,
playing their own fancies--as I now hearken to them by fits, sporting
on the green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave
speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell--by distance
made more sweet--inexpressibly take from the labour of my task. It is
like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They ought at
least to do so--for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of
poetry, far unlike the harsh prose-accents of man's conversation.--I
should but spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them,
by mingling in their pastime.

I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very
superior capacity to my own--not, if I know myself at all, from any
considerations of jealousy or self-comparison, for the occasional
communion with such minds has constituted the fortune and felicity of
my life--but the habit of too constant intercourse with spirits above
you, instead of raising you, keeps you down. Too frequent doses of
original thinking from others, restrain what lesser portion of that
faculty you may possess of your own. You get entangled in another
man's mind, even as you lose yourself in another man's grounds. You
are walking with a tall varlet, whose strides out-pace yours to
lassitude. The constant operation of such potent agency would reduce
me, I am convinced, to imbecility. You may derive thoughts from
others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are
cast, must be your own. Intellect may be imparted, but not each man's
intellectual frame.--

As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged upwards, as
little (or rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downwards
by your associates. The trumpet does not more stun you by its
loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility.

Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a
schoolmaster?--because we are conscious that he is not quite at his
ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place, in the society of his
equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he
cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours. He cannot meet
you on the square. He wants a point given him, like an indifferent
whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that he wants to be teaching
_you_. One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little
sketches of mine were any thing but methodical, and that I was unable
to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by
which young gentlemen in _his_ seminary were taught to compose English
themes.--The jests of a schoolmaster are coarse, or thin. They do
not _tell_ out of school. He is under the restraint of a formal and
didactive hypocrisy in company, as a clergyman is under a moral one.
He can no more let his intellect loose in society, than the other
can his inclinations.--He is forlorn among his co-evals; his juniors
cannot be his friends.

"I take blame to myself," said a sensible man of this profession,
writing to a friend respecting a youth who had quitted his school
abruptly, "that your nephew was not more attached to me. But persons
in my situation are more to be pitied, than can well be imagined. We
are surrounded by young, and, consequently, ardently affectionate
hearts, but _we_ can never hope to share an atom of their affections.
The relation of master and scholar forbids this. _How pleasing this
must be to you, how I envy your feelings_, my friends will sometimes
say to me, when they see young men, whom I have educated, return after
some years absence from school, their eyes shining with pleasure,
while they shake hands with their old master, bringing a present of
game to me, or a toy to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms
for my care of their education. A holiday is begged for the boys;
the house is a scene of happiness; I, only, am sad at heart--This
fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, who fancies he repays his master
with gratitude for the care of his boyish years--this young man--in
the eight long years I watched over him with a parent's anxiety, never
could repay me with one look of genuine feeling. He was proud, when
I praised; he was submissive, when I reproved him; but he did never
_love_ me--and what he now mistakes for gratitude and kindness for me,
is but the pleasant sensation, which all persons feel at revisiting
the scene of their boyish hopes and fears; and the seeing on equal
terms the man they were accustomed to look up to with reverence.
My wife too," this interesting correspondent goes on to say, "my
once darling Anna, is the wife of a schoolmaster.--When I married
her--knowing that the wife of a schoolmaster ought to be a busy
notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna would ill supply the
loss of my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who never sat still,
was in every part of the house in a moment, and whom I was obliged
sometimes to threaten to fasten down in a chair, to save her from
fatiguing herself to death--I expressed my fears, that I was bringing
her into a way of life unsuitable to her; and she, who loved me
tenderly, promised for my sake to exert herself to perform the duties
of her new situation. She promised, and she has kept her word. What
wonders will not woman's love perform?--My house is managed with a
propriety and decorum, unknown in other schools; my boys are well
fed, look healthy, and have every proper accommodation; and all this
performed with a careful economy, that never descends to meanness. But
I have lost my gentle, _helpless_ Anna!--When we sit down to enjoy an
hour of repose after the fatigue of the day, I am compelled to listen
to what have been her useful (and they are really useful) employments
through the day, and what she proposes for her to-morrow's task. Her
heart and her features are changed by the duties of her situation. To
the boys, she never appears other than the _master's wife_, and she
looks up to me as the _boys' master_; to whom all show of love and
affection would be highly improper, and unbecoming the dignity of her
situation and mine. Yet _this_ my gratitude forbids me to hint to
her. For my sake she submitted to be this altered creature, and can
I reproach her for it?"--For the communication of this letter, I am
indebted to my cousin Bridget.

[Footnote 1: Urn Burial.]




VALENTINE'S DAY


Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy
name in the rubric, thou venerable Archflamen of Hymen! Immortal
Go-between! who and what manner of person art thou? Art thou but a
_name_, typifying the restless principle which impels poor humans to
seek perfection in union? or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, with
thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, and decent lawn sleeves?
Mysterious personage! like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other
mitred father in the calendar; not Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril;
nor the consigner of undipt infants to eternal torments, Austin, whom
all mothers hate; nor he who hated all mothers, Origen; nor Bishop
Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with
thousands and ten thousands of little Loves, and the air is

  Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings.

Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors; and instead of
the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee.

In other words, this is the day on which those charming little
missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every
street and turning. The weary and all forspent twopenny postman sinks
beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely
credible to what an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in
this loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment
of knockers and bell-wires. In these little visual interpretations,
no emblem is so common as the _heart_,--that little three-cornered
exponent of all our hopes and fears,--the bestuck and bleeding heart;
it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affectations
than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology
for placing the head-quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this
anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear; but we
have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might
easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed
for any thing which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover
addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, "Madam,
my _liver_ and fortune are entirely at your disposal;" or putting
a delicate question, "Amanda, have you a _midriff_ to bestow?" But
custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to
the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbours wait at
animal and anatomical distance.

Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds,
exceed in interest a _knock at the door_. It "gives a very echo to
the throne where Hope is seated." But its issues seldom answer to
this oracle within. It is so seldom that just the person we want to
see comes. But of all the clamorous visitations the welcomest in
expectation is the sound that ushers in, or seems to usher in, a
Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that announced the fatal
entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on this day is light,
airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth good tidings. It is
less mechanical than on other days; you will say, "That is not the
post, I am sure." Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymens!--delightful
eternal common-places, which "having been will always be;" which no
school-boy nor school-man can write away; having your irreversible
throne in the fancy and affections--what are your transports, when the
happy maiden, opening with careful finger, careful not to break the
emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well-designed allegory,
some type, some youthful fancy, not without verses--

  Lovers all,
  A madrigal,

or some such device, not over abundant in sense--young Love disclaims
it,--and not quite silly--something between wind and water, a chorus
where the sheep might almost join the shepherd, as they did, or as I
apprehend they did, in Arcadia.

All Valentines are not foolish; and I shall not easily forget thine,
my kind friend (if I may have leave to call you so) E. B.--E.B. lived
opposite a young maiden, whom he had often seen, unseen, from his
parlour window in C--e-street. She was all joyousness and innocence,
and just of an age to enjoy receiving a Valentine, and just of a
temper to bear the disappointment of missing one with good humour.
E.B. is an artist of no common powers; in the fancy parts of
designing, perhaps inferior to none; his name is known at the bottom
of many a well executed vignette in the way of his profession, but no
further; for E.B. is modest, and the world meets nobody half-way. E.B.
meditated how he could repay this young maiden for many a favour which
she had done him unknown; for when a kindly face greets us, though but
passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should feel it as
an obligation; and E.B. did. This good artist set himself at work to
please the damsel. It was just before Valentine's day three years
since. He wrought, unseen and unsuspected, a wondrous work. We need
not say it was on the finest gilt paper with borders--full, not of
common hearts and heartless allegory, but all the prettiest stories
of love from Ovid, and older poets than Ovid (for E.B. is a scholar.)
There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not forgot, nor
Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottos
and fanciful devices, such as beseemed,--a work in short of magic.
Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the
all-swallowing indiscriminate orifice--(O ignoble trust!)--of the
common post; but the humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful
stand, the next morning, he saw the cheerful messenger knock, and by
and by the precious charge delivered. He saw, unseen, the happy girl
unfold the Valentine, dance about, clap her hands, as one after one
the pretty emblems unfolded themselves. She danced about, not with
light love, or foolish expectations, for she had no lover; or, if she
had, none she knew that could have created those bright images which
delighted her. It was more like some fairy present; a God-send, as
our familiarly pious ancestors termed a benefit received, where the
benefactor was unknown. It would do her no harm. It would do her good
for ever after. It is good to love the unknown. I only give this as a
specimen of E.B. and his modest way of doing a concealed kindness.

Good-morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia; and no better wish,
but with better auspices, we wish to all faithful lovers, who are not
too wise to despise old legends, but are content to rank themselves
humble diocesans of old Bishop Valentine, and his true church.




IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES


  I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathized
  with all things, I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncracy in any
  thing. Those national repugnancies do not touch me, nor do I behold with
  prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch.--_Religio Medici_.


That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the airy stilts
of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences;
in whose categories of Being the possible took the upper hand of
the actual; should have overlooked the impertinent individualities
of such poor concretions as mankind, is not much to be admired.
It is rather to be wondered at, that in the genus of animals he
should have condescended to distinguish that species at all. For
myself--earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my activities,--

  Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky,

I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or
individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent
eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste
or distaste; or when once it becomes indifferent, it begins to be
disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices--made up
of likings and dislikings--the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies,
antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am
a lover of my species. I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot
feel towards all equally. The more purely-English word that expresses
sympathy will better explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy
man, who upon another account cannot be my mate or _fellow_. I cannot
_like_ all people alike.[1]

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to
desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me--and in
truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There
is something more plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding.
We know one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect
intellects (under which mine must be content to rank) which in its
constitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the
sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than
comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness or precision
in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their
intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it.
They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She
presents no full front to them--a feature or side-face at the most.
Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost
they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradventure--and leave
it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down.
The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and
shifting: waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is accordingly.
They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be content
to let it pass for what it is worth. They cannot speak always as
if they were upon their oath--but must be understood, speaking
or writing, with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a
proposition, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They
delight to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without
waiting for their full developement. They are no systematizers, and
would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before,
are suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not
mistaken) is constituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is
born in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their
growth--if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put together upon
principles of clock-work. You never catch his mind in an undress. He
never hints or suggests any thing, but unlades his stock of ideas
in perfect order and completeness. He brings his total wealth into
company, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always about him. He
never stoops to catch a glittering something in your presence, to
share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or
not. You cannot cry _halves_ to any thing that he finds. He does not
find, but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing.
His understanding is always at its meridian--you never see the first
dawn, the early streaks.--He has no falterings of self-suspicion.
Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses,
partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no
place in his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls
upon him. Is he orthodox--he has no doubts. Is he an infidel--he has
none either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no
border-land with him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines of
truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps
the path. You cannot make excursions with him--for he sets you right.
His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot
compromise, or understand middle actions. There can be but a right
and a wrong. His conversation is as a book. His affirmations have the
sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the square with him. He stops
a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's country. "A healthy
book!"--said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give
that appellation to John Buncle,--"did I catch rightly what you said?
I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I
do not see how that epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above
all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian.
Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest
with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print
of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing
off to Mr. ****. After he had examined it minutely, I ventured to
ask him how he liked MY BEAUTY (a foolish name it goes by among my
friends)--when he very gravely assured me, that "he had considerable
respect for my character and talents" (so he was pleased to say), "but
had not given himself much thought about the degree of my personal
pretensions." The misconception staggered me, but did not seem much
to disconcert him.--Persons of this nation are particularly fond
of affirming a truth--which nobody doubts. They do not so properly
affirm, as annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of
truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth
becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that contains it be
new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to become a subject of
disputation. I was present not long since at a party of North Britons,
where a son of Burns was expected; and happened to drop a silly
expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father
instead of the son--when four of them started up at once to inform
me, that "that was impossible, because he was dead." An impracticable
wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has hit off
this part of their character, namely their love of truth, in his
biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the
passage to the margin.[2] The tediousness of these people is certainly
provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one another!--In my early life
I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have sometimes
foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with his countrymen by expressing
it. But I have always found that a true Scot resents your admiration
of his compatriot, even more than he would your contempt of him. The
latter he imputes to your "imperfect acquaintance with many of the
words which he uses;" and the same objection makes it a presumption
in you to suppose that you can admire him.--Thomson they seem to have
forgotten. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven for his
delineation of Rory and his companion, upon their first introduction
to our metropolis.--peak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will
retort upon you Hume's History compared with _his_ Continuation of it.
What if the historian had continued Humphrey Clinker?

I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a piece of
stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage.
They date beyond the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits
of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. I confess that I
have not the nerves to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling
about me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries
of injury, contempt, and hate, on the one side,--of cloaked revenge,
dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers,
must, and ought, to affect the blood of the children. I cannot believe
it can run clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as
candour, liberality, the light of a nineteenth century, can close up
the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial
to me. He is least distasteful on 'Change--for the mercantile spirit
levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly
confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian,
which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, to
me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like to see
the Church and Synagogue kissing and congeeing in awkward postures of
an affected civility. If _they_ are converted, why do they not come
over to us altogether? Why keep up a form of separation, when the
life of it is fled? If they can sit with us at table, why do they
keck at our cookery? I do not understand these half convertites. Jews
christianizing--Christians judaizing--puzzle me. I like fish or flesh.
A moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet
Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially _separative_. B----
would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his
forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to
be of ---- Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of
his proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out,
when he sings, "The Children of Israel passed through the Red Sea!"
The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides
over our necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him.--B---- has a
strong expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by
his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is sense. He sings
with understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the
Commandments, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition.
His nation, in general, have not ever-sensible countenances. How
should they?--but you seldom see a silly expression among them.
Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's visage. I never heard
of an idiot being born among them.--Some admire the Jewish female
physiognomy. I admire it--but with trembling. Jael had those full dark
inscrutable eyes.

In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of
benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these
faces--or rather masks--that have looked out kindly upon one in casual
encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully
calls--these "images of God cut in ebony." But I should not like
to associate with them, to share my meals and my good-nights with
them--because they are black.

I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate the Quaker
principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when I meet any
of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by any
occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a
ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom.
But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live with
them." I am all over sophisticated--with humours, fancies, craving
hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat,
scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their
simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive
banquet. My appetites are too high for the salads which (according to
Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited

  To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse.

The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return to a
question put to them may be explained, I think, without the vulgar
assumption, that they are more given to evasion and equivocating than
other people. They naturally look to their words more carefully, and
are more cautious of committing themselves. They have a peculiar
character to keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their
veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. The custom
of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all
religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into
the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth--the one
applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the
common proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the
conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations
of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and conceded
upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less than truth
satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, "You do not expect me to
speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorrectness
and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary
conversation; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated,
where clergy-truth--oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances,
is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple
affirmation being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without
any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to use
upon the most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, naturally,
with more severity. You can have of him no more than his word. He
knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits,
for himself, at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He knows
that his syllables are weighed--and how far a consciousness of this
particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to
produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by honest
means, might be illustrated, and the practice justified, by a more
sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this occasion. The
admirable presence of mind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all
contingencies, might be traced to this imposed self-watchfulness--if
it did not seem rather an humble and secular scion of that old stock
of religious constancy, which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive
Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecution, to the violence of
judge or accuser, under trials and racking examinations. "You will
never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till
midnight," said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had been
putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter as the answers
may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of this people
is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instances.--I was
travelling in a stagecoach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the
straitest non-conformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover,
where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before
us. My friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I in my way
took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my
companions discovered that she had charged for both meals. This was
resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and positive. Some mild
arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated
mind of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard
came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out
their money, and formally tendered it.--so much for tea--I, in humble
imitation, tendering mine--for the supper which I had taken. She
would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put up their
silver, as did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and
gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who thought
I could not do better than follow the example of such grave and
warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went up. The coach drove
off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or ambiguously
pronounced, became after a time inaudible--and now my conscience,
which the whimsical scene had for a while suspended, beginning to give
some twitches, I waited, in the hope that some justification would be
offered by these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their
conduct. To my great surprise, not a syllable was dropped on the
subject. They sate as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of
them broke silence, by inquiring of his next neighbour, "Hast thee
heard how indigos go at the India House?" and the question operated as
a soporific on my moral feeling as far as Exeter.

[Footnote 1: I would be understood as confining myself to the subject
of _imperfect sympathies_. To nations or classes of men there can be
no direct _antipathy_. There may be individuals born and constellated
so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere cannot
hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and can believe the
story of two persons meeting (who never saw one another before in
their lives) and instantly fighting.

  --We by proof find there should be
  Twixt man and man such an antipathy,
  That though he can show no just reason why
  For any former wrong or injury,
  Can neither find a blemish in his fame,
  Nor aught in face or feature justly blame,
  Can challenge or accuse him of no evil,
  Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil.

The lines are from old Heywood's "Hierarchie of Angels," and he
subjoins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who attempted
to assassinate a King Ferdinand of Spain, and being put to the rack
could give no other reason for the deed but an inveterate antipathy
which he had taken to the first sight of the King.

  --The cause which to that act compell'd him
  Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him.]

[Footnote 2: There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit
themselves, and entertain their company, with relating facts of no
consequence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as
happen every day; and this I have observed more frequently among the
Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to omit the
minutest circumstances of time or place; which kind of discourse, if
it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases, as
well as accent and gesture peculiar to that country, would be hardly
tolerable.--_Hints towards an Essay on Conversation_.]




WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS


We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for
fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved
in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible
world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an
historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world
was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits
assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or
proportion--of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable
absurd--could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission
of any particular testimony?--That maidens pined away, wasting
inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire--that corn was
lodged, and cattle lamed--that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry
the oaks of the forest--or that spits and kettles only danced a
fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind
was stirring--were all equally probable where no law of agency was
understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the
flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the
weak fantasy of indigent eld--has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood
_à priori_ to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or
standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the
devil's market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolized by
a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that _he_ should come
sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor.--That the intercourse
was opened at all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake--but
that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story
of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There
is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be
criticised.

I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of
received witchcraft; that I could not have slept in a village where
one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more
obtuse. Amidst the universal belief that these wretches were in
league with the author of all evil, holding hell tributary to their
muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace seems to have scrupled
issuing, or silly Headborough serving, a warrant upon them--as if they
should subpoena Satan!--Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand
about him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of his
enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we
think, on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the
non-resistance of witches to the constituted powers.--What stops the
Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces--or who had made it a
condition of his prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious
bait--we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that country.

From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and
witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good
store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity
originally into this channel. In my father's book-closet, the History
of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The
pictures with which it abounds--one of the ark, in particular,
and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity
of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the
spot--attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of
the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We
shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes--and
there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with
infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation
which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work
from that time to this, but I remember it consisted of Old Testament
stories, orderly set down, with the _objection_ appended to each
story, and the _solution_ of the objection regularly tacked to that.
The _objection_ was a summary of whatever difficulties had been
opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of
ancient or modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary
excess of candour. The _solution_ was brief, modest, and satisfactory.
The bane and antidote were, both before you. To doubts so put, and so
quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon lay dead, for
the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But--like as was rather
feared than realised from that slain monster in Spenser--from the womb
of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, exceeding the
prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. The habit
of expecting objections to every passage, set me upon starting more
objections, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I
became staggered and perplexed, a sceptic in long coats. The pretty
Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their
purity and sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many
historic or chronologic theses to be defended against whatever
impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but--the next thing to
that--I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had
disbelieved them. Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting
him know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's
weakness, but the child's strength. O, how ugly sound scriptural
doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling!--I should have lost
myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with such unfit
sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of
ill-fortune, which about this time befel me. Turning over the picture
of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its
ingenious fabric--driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the
two larger quadrupeds--the elephant, and the camel--that stare (as
well they might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in
that unique piece of naval architecture. Stackhouse was henceforth
locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With the book, the
_objections_ and _solutions_ gradually cleared out of my head, and
have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me.--But there was
one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or
bar could shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves
rather more seriously.--That detestable picture!

I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude,
and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature
would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I
suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life--so
far as memory serves in things so long ago--without an assurance,
which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be
old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture
of the Witch raising up Samuel--(O that old man covered with a
mantle!) I owe--not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy--but
the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for
me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow--a sure bed-fellow, when
my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was
permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night
(if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found
the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, once enter the
chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely
from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was.--Parents do not know
what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the
dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm--the hoping for a familiar
voice--when they wake screaming--and find none to soothe them--what a
terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till
midnight, through candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are
called,--would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the
better caution.--That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the
fashion to my dreams--if dreams they were--for the scene of them was
invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture,
the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other--

  Headless bear, black man, or ape--

but, as it was, my imaginations took that form.--It is not book,
or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these
terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear
little T.H. who of all children has been brought up with the most
scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition--who was never
allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad
men, or to read or hear of any distressing story--finds all this world
of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded _ab extra_, in his
own "thick-coming fancies;" and from his little midnight pillow, this
nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition,
in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are
tranquillity.

Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimæras--dire stories of Celæno and the
Harpies--may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition--but
they were there before. They are transcripts, types--the archetypes
are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we
know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all?--or

  --Names, whose sense we see not,
  Fray us with things that be not?

Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered
in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury?--O,
least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond
body--or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the
cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante--tearing, mangling,
choking, stifling, scorching demons--are they one half so fearful
to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied
following him--

  Like one that on a lonesome road
  Doth walk in fear and dread,
  And having once turn'd round, walks on,
  And turns no more his head;
  Because he knows a frightful fiend
  Doth close behind him tread.[1]

That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual--that it
is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth--that it
predominates in the period of sinless infancy--are difficulties,
the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our
antemundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of
pre-existence.

My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an
occasional night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of
them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look
at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their
presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my
imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams
are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of
architecture and of buildings--cities abroad, which I have never seen,
and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length
of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon--their churches,
palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an
inexpressible sense of delight--a map-like distinctness of trace--and
a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake.--I have
formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells--my highest Alps,--but
they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition;
and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the
inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn.
Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The
poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will
can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and
Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns,

  Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,

to solace his night solitudes--when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry
Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in
nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to Neptune--when my
stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season,
raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a
mortifying light--it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet,
that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor
plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my
folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the
ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the
customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I myself, you may be
sure, the _leading god_,) and jollily we went careering over the main,
till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was
Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from
a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river-motion, and that
river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no other than
the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the wafture of a placid wave
or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth
palace.

The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no
whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the
same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist,
used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of
his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question
would be,--"Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much
faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein
returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of
prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious
inland landing.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.]




MY RELATIONS


I am arrived at that point of life, at which a man may account it a
blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents
surviving. I have not that felicity--and sometimes think feelingly of
a passage in Browne's Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that
hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. "In such a compass of
time," he says, "a man may have a close apprehension what it is to
be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember his
father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see
with what a face in no long time OBLIVION will look upon himself."

I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single
blessedness had soured to the world. She often used to say, that I
was the only thing in it which she loved; and, when she thought I was
quitting it, she grieved over me with mother's tears. A partiality
quite so exclusive my reason cannot altogether approve. She was from
morning till night poring over good books, and devotional exercises.
Her favourite volumes were Thomas à Kempis, in Stanhope's Translation;
and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, with the _matins_ and _complines_
regularly set down,--terms which I was at that time too young to
understand. She persisted in reading them, although admonished daily
concerning their Papistical tendency; and went to church every
Sabbath, as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books
she studied; though, I think, at one period of her life, she told me,
she had read with great satisfaction the Adventures of an Unfortunate
Young Nobleman. Finding the door of the chapel in Essex-street open
one day--it was in the infancy of that heresy--she went in, liked the
sermon, and the manner of worship, and frequented it at intervals
for some time after. She came not for doctrinal points, and never
missed them. With some little asperities in her constitution, which
I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a
fine _old Christian_. She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd
mind--extraordinary at a _repartee;_ one of the few occasions of her
breaking silence--else she did not much value wit. The only secular
employment I remember to have seen her engaged in, was, the splitting
of French beans, and dropping them into a China basin of fair water.
The odour of those tender vegetables to this day comes back upon my
sense, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it is the most
delicate of culinary operations.

Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none--to remember. By the
uncle's side I may be said to have been born an orphan. Brother, or
sister, I never had any--to know them. A sister, I think, that should
have been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies. What a comfort,
or what a care, may I not have missed in her!--But I have cousins,
sprinkled about in Hertfordshire--besides _two_, with whom I have been
all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, and whom I may term
cousins _par excellence_. These are James and Bridget Elia. They are
older than myself by twelve, and ten, years; and neither of them seems
disposed, in matters of advice and guidance, to waive any of the
prerogatives which primogeniture confers. May they continue still in
the same mind; and when they shall be seventy-five, and seventy-three,
years old (I cannot spare them sooner), persist in treating me in my
grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother!

James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, which not
every critic can penetrate; or, if we feel, we cannot explain them.
The pen of Yorick, and of none since his, could have drawn J.E.
entire--those fine Shandian lights and shades, which make up his
story. I must limp after in my poor antithetical manner, as the fates
have given me grace and talent. J.E. then--to the eye of a common
observer at least--seemeth made up of contradictory principles.--The
genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosopher of prudence--the
phlegm of my cousin's doctrine is invariably at war with his
temperament, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new project
in his brain, J.E. is the systematic opponent of innovation, and crier
down of every thing that has not stood the test of age and experiment.
With a hundred fine notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy,
he is startled at the least approach to the romantic in others; and,
determined by his own sense in every thing, commends _you_ to the
guidance of common sense on all occasions.--With a touch of the
eccentric in all which he does, or says, he is only anxious that _you_
should not commit yourself by doing any thing absurd or singular.
On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a certain
popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to _say_ so--for the world
would think me mad. He disguises a passionate fondness for works of
high art (whereof he hath amassed a choice collection), under the
pretext of buying only to sell again--that his enthusiasm may give no
encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were so, why does that piece of
tender, pastoral Dominichino hang still by his wall?--is the ball of
his sight much more dear to him?--or what picture-dealer can talk like
him?

Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their speculative
conclusions to the bent of their individual humours, _his_ theories
are sure to be in diametrical opposition to his constitution. He is
courageous as Charles of Sweden, upon instinct; chary of his person,
upon principle, as a travelling Quaker.--He has been preaching up to
me, all my life, the doctrine of bowing to the great--the necessity
of forms, and manner, to a man's getting on in the world. He himself
never aims at either, that I can discover,--and has a spirit, that
would stand upright in the presence of the Cham of Tartary. It is
pleasant to hear him discourse of patience--extolling it as the truest
wisdom--and to see him during the last seven minutes that his dinner
is getting ready. Nature never ran up in her haste a more restless
piece of workmanship than when she moulded this impetuous cousin--and
Art never turned out a more elaborate orator than he can display
himself to be, upon his favourite topic of the advantages of quiet,
and contentedness in the state, whatever it may be, that we are
placed in. He is triumphant on this theme, when he has you safe in
one of those short stages that ply for the western road, in a very
obstructing manner, at the foot of John Murray's street--where you get
in when it is empty, and are expected to wait till the vehicle hath
completed her just freight--a trying three quarters of an hour to some
people. He wonders at your fidgetiness,--"where could we be better
than we are, _thus silting, thus consulting_?"--"prefers, for his
part, a state of rest to locomotion,"--with an eye all the while upon
the coachman--till at length, waxing out of all patience, at _your
want of it_, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance at the fellow
for detaining us so long over the time which he had professed, and
declares peremptorily, that "the gentleman in the coach is determined
to get out, if he does not drive on that instant."

Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophistry, he is
incapable of attending _you_ in any chain of arguing. Indeed he makes
wild work with logic; and seems to jump at most admirable conclusions
by some process, not at all akin to it. Consonantly enough to this,
he hath been heard to deny, upon certain occasions, that there exists
such a faculty at all in man as _reason_; and wondereth how man came
first to have a conceit of it--enforcing his negation with all the
might of _reasoning_ he is master of. He has some speculative notions
against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is not natural
to _him_--when peradventure the next moment his lungs shall crow
like Chanticleer. He says some of the best things in the world--and
declareth that wit is his aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing
the Eton boys at play in their grounds--_What a pity to think, that
these fine ingenuous lads in a few years will all be changed into
frivolous Members of Parliament!_

His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous--and in age he discovereth
no symptom of cooling. This is that which I admire in him. I hate
people who meet Time half-way. I am for no compromise with that
inevitable spoiler. While he lives, J.E. will take his swing.--It does
me good, as I walk towards the street of my daily avocation, on some
fine May morning, to meet him marching in a quite opposite direction,
with a jolly handsome presence, and shining sanguine face, that
indicates some purchase in his eye--a Claude--or a Hobbima--for much
of his enviable leisure is consumed at Christie's, and Phillips's--or
where not, to pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these occasions
he mostly stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage a
person like me possesses above himself, in having his time occupied
with business which he _must do_--assureth me that he often feels
it hang heavy on his hands--wishes he had fewer holidays--and goes
off--Westward Ho!--chanting a tune, to Pall Mall--perfectly convinced
that he has convinced me--while I proceed in my opposite direction
tuneless.

It is pleasant again to see this Professor of Indifference doing the
honours of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. You must
view it in every light, till _he_ has found the best--placing it at
this distance, and at that, but always suiting the focus of your sight
to his own. You must spy at it through your fingers, to catch the
aërial perspective--though you assure him that to you the landscape
shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Wo be to the luckless
wight, who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who should
drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior
bargains to the present!--The last is always his best hit--his
"Cynthia of the minute."--Alas! how many a mild Madonna have I
known to _come in_--a Raphael!--keep its ascendancy for a few brief
moons--then, after certain intermedial degradations, from the front
drawing-room to the back gallery, thence to the dark parlour,--adopted
in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive lowering ascriptions
of filiation, mildly breaking its fall--consigned to the oblivious
lumber-room, _go out_ at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain Carlo
Maratti!--which things when I beheld--musing upon the chances and
mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to reflect upon the altered
condition of great personages, or that woful Queen of Richard the
Second--

                     --set forth in pomp,
  She came adorned hither like sweet May.
  Sent back like Hollowmass or shortest day.

With great love for _you_, J.E. hath but a limited sympathy with what
you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender
guesses at what passes in your mind. He never pierces the marrow of
your habits. He will tell an old established play-goer, that Mr.
Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one of the theatres), is a very
lively comedian--as a piece of news! He advertised me but the other
day of some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for me,
_knowing me to be a great walker_, in my own immediate vicinity--who
have haunted the identical spot any time these twenty years! He has
not much respect for that class of feelings which goes by the name
of sentimental. He applies the definition of real evil to bodily
sufferings exclusively--and rejecteth all others as imaginary. He
is affected by the sight, or the bare supposition, of a creature in
pain, to a degree which I have never witnessed out of womankind. A
constitutional acuteness to this class of sufferings may in part
account for this. The animal tribe in particular he taketh under his
especial protection. A broken-winded or spur-galled horse is sure to
find an advocate in him. An over-loaded ass is his client for ever. He
is the apostle to the brute kind--the never-failing friend of those
who have none to care for them. The contemplation of a lobster boiled,
or eels skinned _alive_, will wring him so, that "all for pity he
could die." It will take the savour from his palate, and the rest from
his pillow, for days and nights. With the intense feeling of Thomas
Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and unity of
purpose, of that "true yolk-fellow with Time," to have effected as
much for the _Animal_, as _he_ hath done for the _Negro Creation_. But
my uncontrollable cousin is but imperfectly formed for purposes which
demand co-operation. He cannot wait. His amelioration-plans must be
ripened in a day. For this reason he has cut but an equivocal figure
in benevolent societies, and combinations for the alleviation of human
sufferings. His zeal constantly makes him to outrun, and put out, his
coadjutors. He thinks of relieving,--while they think of debating.
He was black-balled out of a society for the Relief of **********,
because the fervor of his humanity toiled beyond the formal
apprehension, and creeping processes, of his associates. I shall
always consider this distinction as a patent of nobility in the Elia
family! Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, or
upbraid, my unique cousin? Marry, heaven, and all good manners, and
the understanding that should be between kinsfolk, forbid!--With all
the strangenesses of this _strangest of the Elias_--I would not have
him in one jot or tittle other than he is; neither would I barter or
exchange my wild kinsman for the most exact, regular, and everyway
consistent kinsman breathing.

In my next, reader, I may perhaps give you some account of my cousin
Bridget--if you are not already surfeited with cousins--and take you
by the hand, if you are willing to go with us, on an excursion which
we made a summer or two since, in search of _more cousins_--

  Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.




MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE


Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have
obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We
house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness;
with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in
myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the
rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well
in our tastes and habits--yet so, as "with a difference." We are
generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings--as it should be
among near relations. Our sympathies are rather understood, than
expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind
than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was
altered. We are both great readers in different directions. While I am
hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or
one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern
tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with
assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teazes me. I have little concern
in the progress of events. She must have a story--well, ill, or
indifferently told--so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of
good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction--and
almost in real life--have ceased to interest, or operate but dully
upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinions--heads with some
diverting twist in them--the oddities of authorship please me most. My
cousin has a native disrelish of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre.
Nothing goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the
road of common sympathy. She "holds Nature more clever." I can pardon
her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but
she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which
she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals
of a dear favourite of mine, of the last century but one--the thrice
noble, chaste, and virtuous,--but again somewhat fantastical, and
original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle.

It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I
could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine,
free-thinkers--leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and
systems; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions.
That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its
authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with
her understanding.

We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive; and I have
observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this--that
in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that I was
in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed
upon moral points; upon something proper to be done, or let alone;
whatever heat of opposition, or steadiness of conviction, I set out
with, I am sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her way
of thinking.

I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand,
for Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an
awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in company: at which
times she will answer _yes_ or _no_ to a question, without fully
understanding its purport--which is provoking, and derogatory in the
highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her
presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but
will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose
requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly;
but in matters which are not stuff of the conscience, she hath been
known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably.

Her education in youth was not much attended to; and she happily
missed all that train of female garniture, which passeth by the name
of accomplishments. She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into
a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much selection
or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome
pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in
this fashion. I know not whether their chance in wedlock might not be
diminished by it; but I can answer for it, that it makes (if the worst
come to the worst) most incomparable old maids.

In a season of distress, she is the truest comforter; but in the
teazing accidents, and minor perplexities, which do not call out the
_will_ to meet them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess
of participation. If she does not always divide your trouble, upon
the pleasanter occasions of life she is sure always to treble your
satisfaction. She is excellent to be at a play with, or upon a visit;
but best, when she goes a journey with you.

We made an excursion together a few summers since, into Hertfordshire,
to beat up the quarters of some of our less-known relations in that
fine corn country.

The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it
is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire;
a farm-house,--delightfully situated within a gentle walk from
Wheathampstead. I can just remember having been there, on a visit to a
great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of Bridget; who, as I
have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could
throw into a heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might
share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at
that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married
my grandmother's sister. His name was Gladman. My grandmother was a
Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still
flourishing in that part of the county, but the Fields are almost
extinct. More than forty years had elapsed since the visit I speak of;
and, for the greater portion of that period, we had lost sight of the
other two branches also. Who or what sort of persons inherited Mackery
End--kindred or strange folk--we were afraid almost to conjecture, but
determined some day to explore.

By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in
our way from Saint Alban's, we arrived at the spot of our anxious
curiosity about noon. The sight of the old farm-house, though every
trace of it was effaced from my recollection, affected me with a
pleasure which I had not experienced for many a year. For though _I_
had forgotten it, _we_ had never forgotten being there together, and
we had been talking about Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my
part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I knew the
aspect of a place, which, when present, O how unlike it was to _that_,
which I had conjured up so many times instead of it!

Still the air breathed balmily about it; the season was in the "heart
of June," and I could say with the poet,

  But them, that didst appear so fair
    To fond imagination,
  Dost rival in the light of day
    Her delicate creation!

Bridget's was more a waking bliss than mine, for she easily remembered
her old acquaintance again--some altered features, of course, a little
grudged at. At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy;
but the scene soon re-confirmed itself in her affections--and she
traversed every out-post of the old mansion, to the wood-house, the
orchard, the place where the pigeon-house had stood (house and birds
were alike flown)--with a breathless impatience of recognition, which
was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But
Bridget in some things is behind her years.

The only thing left was to get into the house--and that was a
difficulty which to me singly would have been insurmountable; for I
am terribly shy in making myself known to strangers and out-of-date
kinsfolk. Love, stronger than scruple, winged my cousin in without
me; but she soon returned with a creature that might have sat to
a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was the youngest of the
Gladmans; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had become mistress of the
old mansion. A comely brood are the Brutons. Six of them, females,
were noted as the handsomest young women in the county. But this
adopted Bruton, in my mind, was better than they all--more comely. She
was born too late to have remembered me. She just recollected in early
life to have had her cousin Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing
a style. But the name of kindred, and of cousinship, was enough. Those
slender ties, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending atmosphere
of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found it, in hearty, homely,
loving Hertfordshire. In five minutes we were as thoroughly acquainted
as if we had been born and bred up together; were familiar, even to
the calling each other by our Christian names. So Christians should
call one another. To have seen Bridget, and her--it was like the
meeting of the two scriptural cousins! There was a grace and dignity,
an amplitude of form and stature, answering to her mind, in this
farmer's wife, which would have shined in a palace--or so we thought
it. We were made welcome by husband and wife equally--we, and our
friend that was with us--I had almost forgotten him--but B.F. will not
so soon forget that meeting, if peradventure he shall read this on the
far distant shores where the Kangaroo haunts. The fatted calf was made
ready, or rather was already so, as if in anticipation of our coming;
and, after an appropriate glass of native wine, never let me forget
with what honest pride this hospitable cousin made us proceed to
Wheathampstead, to introduce us (as some new-found rarity) to her
mother and sister Gladmans, who did indeed know something more of
us, at a time when she almost knew nothing.--With what corresponding
kindness we were received by them also--how Bridget's memory, exalted
by the occasion, warmed into a thousand half-obliterated recollections
of things and persons, to my utter astonishment, and her own--and to
the astoundment of B.F. who sat by, almost the only thing that was not
a cousin there,--old effaced images of more than half-forgotten names
and circumstances still crowding back upon her, as words written in
lemon come out upon exposure to a friendly warmth,--when I forget
all this, then may my country cousins forget me; and Bridget no more
remember, that in the days of weakling infancy I was her tender
charge--as I have been her care in foolish manhood since--in those
pretty pastoral walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertfordshire.




MODERN GALLANTRY


In comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased to compliment
ourselves upon the point of gallantry; a certain obsequiousness, or
deferential respect, which we are supposed to pay to females, as
females.

I shall believe that this principle actuates our conduct, when I can
forget, that in the nineteenth century of the era from which we date
our civility, we are but just beginning to leave off the very frequent
practice of whipping females in public, in common with the coarsest
male offenders.

I shall believe it to be influential, when I can shut my eyes to the
fact, that in England women are still occasionally--hanged.

I shall believe in it, when actresses are no longer subject to be
hissed off a stage by gentlemen.

I shall believe in it, when Dorimant hands a fish-wife across the
kennel; or assists the apple-woman to pick up her wandering fruit,
which some unlucky dray has just dissipated.

I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humbler life, who would
be thought in their way notable adepts in this refinement, shall act
upon it in places where they are not known, or think themselves not
observed--when I shall see the traveller for some rich tradesman part
with his admired box-coat, to spread it over the defenceless shoulders
of the poor woman, who is passing to her parish on the roof of the
same stage-coach with him, drenched in the rain--when I shall no
longer see a woman standing up in the pit of a London theatre, till
she is sick and faint with the exertion, with men about her, seated
at their ease, and jeering at her distress; till one, that seems to
have more manners or conscience than the rest, significantly declares
"she should be welcome to his seat, if she were a little younger and
handsomer." Place this dapper warehouseman, or that rider, in a circle
of their own female acquaintance, and you shall confess you have not
seen a politer-bred man in Lothbury.

Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such principle
influencing our conduct, when more than one-half of the drudgery and
coarse servitude of the world shall cease to be performed by women.

Until that day comes, I shall never believe this boasted point to be
any thing more than a conventional fiction; a pageant got up between
the sexes, in a certain rank, and at a certain time of life, in which
both find their account equally.

I shall be even disposed to rank it among the salutary fictions of
life, when in polite circles I shall see the same attentions paid
to age as to youth, to homely features as to handsome, to coarse
complexions as to clear--to the woman, as she is a woman, not as she
is a beauty, a fortune, or a title.

I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when a
well-dressed gentleman in a well-dressed company can advert to the
topic of _female old age_ without exciting, and intending to excite,
a sneer:--when the phrases "antiquated virginity," and such a one
has "overstoocl her market," pronounced in good company, shall raise
immediate offence in man, or woman, that shall hear them spoken.

Joseph Paice, of Bread-street-hill, merchant, and one of the Directors
of the South-Sea company--the same to whom Edwards, the Shakspeare
commentator, has addressed a fine sonnet--was the only pattern of
consistent gallantry I have met with. He took me under his shelter at
an early age, and bestowed some pains upon me. I owe to his precepts
and example whatever there is of the man of business (and that is not
much) in my composition. It was not his fault that I did not profit
more. Though bred a Presbyterian, and brought up a merchant, he was
the finest gentleman of his time. He had not _one_ system of attention
to females in the drawing-room, and _another_ in the shop, or at the
stall. I do not mean that he made no distinction. But he never lost
sight of sex, or overlooked it in the casualties of a disadvantageous
situation. I have seen him stand bare-headed--smile if you please--to
a poor servant girl, while she has been inquiring of him the way to
some street--in such a posture of unforced civility, as neither to
embarrass her in the acceptance, nor himself in the offer, of it. He
was no dangler, in the common acceptation of the word, after women:
but he reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came before
him, _womanhood_. I have seen him--nay, smile not--tenderly escorting
a marketwoman, whom he had encountered in a shower, exalting his
umbrella over her poor basket of fruit, that it might receive no
damage, with as much carefulness as if she had been a Countess. To the
reverend form of Female Eld he would yield the wall (though it were to
an ancient beggar-woman) with more ceremony than we can afford to show
our grandams. He was the Preux Chevalier of Age; the Sir Calidore,
or Sir Tristan, to those who have no Calidores or Tristans to defend
them. The roses, that had long faded thence, still bloomed for him in
those withered and yellow cheeks.

He was never married, but in his youth he paid his addresses to the
beautiful Susan Winstanley--old Winstanley's daughter of Clapton--who
dying in the early days of their courtship, confirmed in him the
resolution of perpetual bachelorship. It was during their short
courtship, he told me, that he had been one day treating his mistress
with a profusion of civil speeches--the common gallantries--to which
kind of thing she had hitherto manifested no repugnance--but in
this instance with no effect. He could not obtain from her a decent
acknowledgment in return. She rather seemed to resent his compliments.
He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown
herself above that littleness. When he ventured on the following day,
finding her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her
coldness of yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that
she had no sort of dislike to his attentions; that she could even
endure some high-flown compliments; that a young woman placed in her
situation had a right to expect all sort of civil things said to
her; that she hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, short of
insincerity, with as little injury to her humility as most young
women: but that--a little before he had commenced his compliments--she
had overheard him by accident, in rather rough language, rating
a young woman, who had not brought home his cravats quite to the
appointed time, and she thought to herself, "As I am Miss Susan
Winstanley, and a young lady--a reputed beauty, and known to be a
fortune,--I can have my choice of the finest speeches from the mouth
of this very fine gentleman who is courting me--but if I had been poor
Mary Such-a-one (_naming the milliner_),--and had failed of bringing
home the cravats to the appointed hour--though perhaps I had sat up
half the night to forward them--what sort of compliments should I have
received then?--And my woman's pride came to my assistance; and I
thought, that if it were only to do _me_ honour, a female, like
myself, might have received handsomer usage: and I was determined
not to accept any fine speeches, to the compromise of that sex, the
belonging to which was after all my strongest claim and title to
them."

I think the lady discovered both generosity, and a just way of
thinking, in this rebuke which she gave her lover; and I have
sometimes imagined, that the uncommon strain of courtesy, which
through life regulated the actions and behaviour of my friend towards
all of womankind indiscriminately, owed its happy origin to this
seasonable lesson from the lips of his lamented mistress.

I wish the whole female world would entertain the same notion of these
things that Miss Winstanley showed. Then we should see something
of the spirit of consistent gallantry; and no longer witness the
anomaly of the same man--a pattern of true politeness to a wife--of
cold contempt, or rudeness, to a sister--the idolater of his female
mistress--the disparager and despiser of his no less female aunt, or
unfortunate--still female--maiden cousin. Just so much respect as a
woman derogates from her own sex, in whatever condition placed--her
handmaid, or dependent--she deserves to have diminished from herself
on that score; and probably will feel the diminution, when youth, and
beauty, and advantages, not inseparable from sex, shall lose of their
attraction. What a woman should demand of a man in courtship, or after
it, is first--respect for her as she is a woman;--and next to that--to
be respected by him above all other women. But let her stand upon
her female character as upon a foundation; and let the attentions,
incident to individual preference, be so many pretty additaments and
ornaments--as many, and as fanciful, as you please--to that main
structure. Let her first lesson be--with sweet Susan Winstanley--to
_reverence her sex_.




THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE


I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the
Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river,
I had almost said--for in those young years, what was this king of
rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?--these are
of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself
more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser,
where he speaks of this spot.

  There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,
  The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride,
  Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
  There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide;
  Till they decayd through pride.

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a
transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time--the
passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet-street, by unexpected
avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green
recesses! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it,
which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden: that goodly
pile

  Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,

confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more
fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful
Crown-office Row (place of my kindly engendure), right opposite the
stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely
trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham
Naiades! a man would give something to have been born in such places.
What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the
fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times!
to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who,
not being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost
tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had
the now almost effaced sundials, with their moral inscriptions,
seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take
their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding
correspondence with the fountain of light! How would the dark line
steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to
detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or
the first arrests of sleep!

  Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand
  Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead
and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with
the simple altar-like structure, and silent heart-language of the
old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it
almost every where vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more
elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded
for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not
protracted after sun-set, of temperance, and good-hours. It was the
primitive clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could scarce
have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet
plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their
silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The
shepherd "carved it out quaintly in the sun;" and, turning philosopher
by the very occupation, provided it with mottos more touching than
tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by
Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of
herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, for
they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty delicacy.
They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in a talk of fountains and
sun-dials. He is speaking of sweet garden scenes:

  What wondrous life in this I lead!
  Ripe apples drop about my head.
  The luscious clusters of the vine
  Upon my mouth do crush their wine.
  The nectarine, and curious peach,
  Into my hands themselves do reach.
  Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
  Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
  Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
  Withdraws into its happiness.
  The mind, that ocean, where each kind
  Does straight its own resemblance find;
  Yet it creates, transcending these,
  Far other worlds, and other seas;
  Annihilating all that's made
  To a green thought in a green shade.
  Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
  Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
  Casting the body's vest aside,
  My soul into the boughs does glide:
  There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
  Then whets and claps its silver wings;
  And, till prepared for longer flight,
  Waves in its plumes the various light.
  How well the skilful gardener drew,
  Of flowers and herbs, this dial new!
  Where, from above, the milder sun
  Does through a fragrant zodiac run:
  And, as it works, the industrious bee
  Computes its time as well as we.
  How could such sweet and wholesome hours
  Be reckon'd, but with herbs and flowers?[1]

The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like manner, fast
vanishing. Most of them are dried up, or bricked over. Yet, where one
is left, as in that little green nook behind the South-Sea House,
what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile! Four little winged
marble boys used to play their virgin fancies, spouting out ever
fresh streams from their innocent-wanton lips, in the square of
Lincoln's-inn, when I was no bigger than they were figured. They are
gone, and the spring choked up. The fashion, they tell me, is gone by,
and these things are esteemed childish. Why not then gratify children,
by letting them stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. They
are awakening images to them at least. Why must every thing smack of
man, and mannish? Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is
there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child's
heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments? The figures were
grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged living figures, that still flitter and
chatter about that area, less gothic in appearance? or is the splutter
of their hot rhetoric one half so refreshing and innocent as the
little cool playful streams those exploded cherubs uttered?

They have lately gothicised the entrance to the Inner Temple-hall, and
the library front, to assimilate them, I suppose, to the body of the
hall, which they do not at all resemble. What is become of the winged
horse that stood over the former? a stately arms! and who has removed
those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianized the end of the
Paper-buildings?--my first hint of allegory! They must account to me
for these things, which I miss so greatly.

The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade; but
the traces are passed away of the footsteps which made its pavement
awful! It is become common and profane. The old benchers had it almost
sacred to themselves, in the forepart of the day at least. They might
not be sided or jostled. Their air and dress asserted the parade.
You left wide spaces betwixt you, when you passed them. We walk on
even terms with their successors. The roguish eye of J----ll, ever
ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie
a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar durst have mated
Thomas Coventry?--whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and
elephantine, his face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and
path-keeping, indivertible from his way as a moving column, the
scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow-beater of equals and superiors,
who made a solitude of children wherever he came, for they fled his
insufferable presence, as they would have shunned an Elisha bear. His
growl was as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them in mirth
or in rebuke, his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the most
repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, aggravating the natural terrors
of his speech, broke from each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He
took it, not by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it under
the mighty flaps of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket; his waistcoat
red and angry, his coat dark rappee, tinctured by dye original, and by
adjuncts, with buttons of obsolete gold. And so he paced the terrace.

By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen; the pensive
gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and had nothing but
that and their benchership in common. In politics Salt was a whig,
and Coventry a staunch tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter
cast out--for Coventry had a rough spinous humour--at the political
confederates of his associate, which rebounded from the gentle bosom
of the latter like cannon-balls from wool. You could not ruffle Samuel
Salt.

S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, and of excellent
discernment in the chamber practice of the law. I suspect his
knowledge did not amount to much. When a case of difficult disposition
of money, testamentary or otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily
handed it over with a few instructions to his man Lovel, who was
a quick little fellow, and would despatch it out of hand by the
light of natural understanding, of which he had an uncommon share.
It was incredible what repute for talents S. enjoyed by the mere
trick of gravity. He was a shy man; a child might pose him in a
minute--indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet men would
give him credit for vast application in spite of himself. He was not
to be trusted with himself with impunity. He never dressed for a
dinner party but he forgot his sword--they wore swords then--or some
other necessary part of his equipage. Lovel had his eye upon him on
all these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his cue. If there was
anything which he could speak unseasonably, he was sure to do it.--He
was to dine at a relative's of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on the day
of her execution;--and L. who had a wary foresight of his probable
hallucinations, before he set out, schooled him with great anxiety not
in any possible manner to allude to her story that day. S. promised
faithfully to observe the injunction. He had not been seated in the
parlour, where the company was expecting the dinner summons, four
minutes, when, a pause in the conversation ensuing, he got up, looked
out of window, and pulling down his ruffles--an ordinary motion with
him--observed, "it was a gloomy day," and added, "Miss Blandy must
be hanged by this time, I suppose." Instances of this sort were
perpetual. Yet S. was thought by some of the greatest men of his time
a fit person to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the
law, but in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments of conduct--from
force of manner entirely. He never laughed. He had the same good
fortune among the female world,--was a known toast with the ladies,
and one or two are said to have died for love of him--I suppose,
because he never trifled or talked gallantry with them, or paid them,
indeed, hardly common attentions. He had a fine face and person, but
wanted, methought, the spirit that should have shown them off with
advantage to the women. His eye lacked lustre.--Not so, thought Susan
P----; who, at the advanced age of sixty, was seen, in the cold
evening time, unaccompanied, wetting the pavement of B----d Row, with
tears that fell in drops which might be heard, because her friend had
died that day--he, whom she had pursued with a hopeless passion for
the last forty years--a passion, which years could not extinguish or
abate; nor the long resolved, yet gently enforced, puttings off of
unrelenting bachelorhood dissuade from its cherished purpose. Mild
Susan P----, thou hast now thy friend in heaven!

Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of that name. He
passed his youth in contracted circumstances, which gave him early
those parsimonious habits which in after-life never forsook him; so
that, with one windfall or another, about the time I knew him he was
master of four or five hundred thousand pounds; nor did he look,
or walk, worth a moidore less. He lived in a gloomy house opposite
the pump in Serjeant's-inn, Fleet-street. J., the counsel, is doing
self-imposed penance in it, for what reason I divine not, at this day.
C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where he seldom spent above
a day or two at a time in the summer; but preferred, during the hot
months, standing at his window in this damp, close, well-like mansion,
to watch, as he said, "the maids drawing water all day long." I
suspect he had his within-door reasons for the preference. _Hic currus
et arma fuêre_. He might think his treasures more safe. His house had
the aspect of a strong box. C. was a close hunks--a hoarder rather
than a miser--or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes breed, who have
brought discredit upon a character, which cannot exist without certain
admirable points of steadiness and unity of purpose. One may hate a
true miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By taking
care of the pence, he is often enabled to part with the pounds,
upon a scale that leaves us careless generous fellows halting at an
immeasurable distance behind. C. gave away 30,000_l_. at once in his
life-time to a blind charity. His house-keeping was severely looked
after, but he kept the table of a gentleman. He would know who came
in and who went out of his house, but his kitchen chimney was never
suffered to freeze.

Salt was his opposite in this, as in all--never knew what he was worth
in the world; and having but a competency for his rank, which his
indolent habits were little calculated to improve, might have suffered
severely if he had not had honest people about him. Lovel took care of
every thing. He was at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser,
his friend, his "flapper," his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer.
He did nothing without consulting Lovel, or failed in any thing
without expecting and fearing his admonishing. He put himself almost
too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world. He
resigned his title almost to respect as a master, if L. could ever
have forgotten for a moment that he was a servant.

I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty.
A good fellow withal, and "would strike." In the cause of the
oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number
of his opponents. He once wrested a sword out of the hand of a man of
quality that had drawn upon him; and pommelled him severely with the
hilt of it. The swordsman had offered insult to a female--an occasion
upon which no odds against him could have prevented the interference
of Lovel. He would stand next day bare-headed to the same person,
modestly to excuse his interference--for L. never forgot rank, where
something better was not concerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow
breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly
to resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed a
fine turn for humorous poetry--next to Swift and Prior--moulded heads
in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural
genius merely; turned cribbage boards, and such small cabinet toys,
to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility;
made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the
merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether as brimful of
rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the
angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr.
Isaac Walton would have chosen to go a fishing with. I saw him in his
old age and the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad
stage of human weakness--"a remnant most forlorn of what he was,"--yet
even then his eye would light up upon the mention of his favourite
Garrick. He was greatest, he would say, in Bayes--"was upon the stage
nearly throughout the whole performance, and as busy as a bee." At
intervals, too, he would speak of his former life, and how he came up
a little boy from Lincoln to go to service, and how his mother cried
at parting with him, and how he returned, after some few years'
absence, in his smart new livery to see her, and she blessed herself
at the change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it was "her
own bairn." And then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, till I
have wished that sad second-childhood might have a mother still to lay
its head upon her lap. But the common mother of us all in no long time
after received him gently into hers.

With Coventry, and with Salt, in their walks upon the terrace, most
commonly Peter Pierson would join, to make up a third. They did not
walk linked arm in arm in those days--"as now our stout triumvirs
sweep the streets,"--but generally with both hands folded behind them
for state, or with one at least behind, the other carrying a cane.
P. was a benevolent, but not a pre-possessing man. He had that in
his face which you could not term unhappiness; it rather implied
an incapacity of being happy. His cheeks were colourless, even to
whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling (but without his
sourness) that of our great philanthropist. I know that he _did_ good
acts, but I could never make out what _he_ was. Contemporary with
these, but subordinate, was Daines Barrington--another oddity--he
walked burly and square--in imitation, I think, of Coventry--howbeit
he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he
did pretty well, upon the strength of being a tolerable antiquarian,
and having a brother a bishop. When the account of his year's
treasurership came to be audited, the following singular charge was
unanimously disallowed by the bench: "Item, disbursed Mr. Allen, the
gardener, twenty shillings, for stuff to poison the sparrows, by my
orders." Next to him was old Barton--a jolly negation, who took upon
him the ordering of the bills of fare for the parliament chamber,
where the benchers dine--answering to the combination rooms at
college--much to the easement of his less epicurean brethren. I know
nothing more of him.--Then Read, and Twopenny--Read, good-humoured
and personable--Twopenny, good-humoured, but thin, and felicitous in
jests upon his own figure. If T. was thin, Wharry was attenuated and
fleeting. Many must remember him (for he was rather of later date)
and his singular gait, which was performed by three steps and a jump
regularly succeeding. The steps were little efforts, like that of a
child beginning to walk; the jump comparatively vigorous, as a foot to
an inch. Where he learned this figure, or what occasioned it, I could
never discover. It was neither graceful in itself, nor seemed to
answer the purpose any better than common walking. The extreme tenuity
of his frame, I suspect, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising.
Twopenny would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail him as
Brother Lusty; but W. had no relish of a joke. His features were
spiteful. I have heard that he would pinch his cat's ears extremely,
when any thing had offended him. Jackson--the omniscient Jackson he
was called--was of this period. He had the reputation of possessing
more multifarious knowledge than any man of his time. He was the
Friar Bacon of the less literate portion of the Temple. I remember a
pleasant passage, of the cook applying to him, with much formality of
apology, for instructions how to write down _edge_ bone of beef in his
bill of commons. He was supposed to know, if any man in the world did.
He decided the orthography to be--as I have given it--fortifying his
authority with such anatomical reasons as dismissed the manciple (for
the time) learned and happy. Some do spell it yet perversely, _aitch_
bone, from a fanciful resemblance between its shape, and that of the
aspirate so denominated. I had almost forgotten Mingay with the iron
hand--but he was somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by some
accident, and supplied it with a grappling hook, which he wielded
with a tolerable adroitness. I detected the substitute, before I was
old enough to reason whether it were artificial or not. I remember
the astonishment it raised in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking
person; and I reconciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an emblem of
power--somewhat like the horns in the forehead of Michael Angelo's
Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) in the
costume of the reign of George the Second, closes my imperfect
recollections of the old benchers of the Inner Temple.

Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled? Or, if the like of you exist,
why exist they no more for me? Ye inexplicable, half-understood
appearances, why comes in reason to tear away the preternatural mist,
bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you? Why make ye so sorry a figure
in my relation, who made up to me--to my childish eyes--the mythology
of the Temple? In those days I saw Gods, as "old men covered with a
mantle," walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry
perish,--extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary
fabling,--in the heart of childhood, there will, for ever, spring up a
well of innocent or wholesome superstition--the seeds of exaggeration
will be busy there, and vital--from every-day forms educing the
unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light,
when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and
materiality. While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood,
shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings
totally to fly the earth.

       *       *       *       *       *

P.S. I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt. See
what it is to trust to imperfect memory, and the erring notices of
childhood! Yet I protest I always thought that he had been a bachelor!
This gentleman, R.N. informs me, married young, and losing his lady
in child-bed, within the first year of their union, fell into a deep
melancholy, from the effects of which, probably, he never thoroughly
recovered. In what a new light does this place his rejection (O
call it by a gentler name!) of mild Susan P----, unravelling
into beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring
character!--Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia for
true records! They are, in truth, but shadows of fact-verisimilitudes,
not verities--or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of
history. He is no such honest chronicler as R.N., and would have done
better perhaps to have consulted that gentleman, before he sent these
incondite reminiscences to press. But the worthy sub-treasurer--who
respects his old and his new masters--would but have been puzzled
at the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not,
peradventure, of the license which _Magazines_ have arrived at in this
plain-speaking age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the
_Gentleman's_--his furthest monthly excursions in this nature having
been long confined to the holy ground of honest _Urban's_ obituary.
May it be long before his own name shall help to swell those columns
of unenvied flattery!--Meantime, O ye New Benchers of the Inner
Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is himself the kindliest of human
creatures. Should infirmities over-take him--he is yet in green and
vigorous senility--make allowances for them, remembering that "ye
yourselves are old." So may the Winged Horse, your ancient badge
and cognisance, still flourish! so may future Hookers and Seldens
illustrate your church and chambers! so may the sparrows, in default
of more melodious quiristers, unpoisoned hop about your walks! so may
the fresh-coloured and cleanly nursery maid, who, by leave, airs her
playful charge in your stately gardens, drop her prettiest blushing
curtsy as ye pass, reductive of juvenescent emotion! so may the
younkers of this generation eye you, pacing your stately terrace, with
the same superstitious veneration, with which the child Elia gazed on
the Old Worthies that solemnized the parade before ye!

[Footnote 1: From a copy of verses entitled The Garden.]




GRACE BEFORE MEAT


The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its origin in the
early times of the world, and the hunter-state of man, when dinners
were precarious things, and a full meal was something more than a
common blessing; when a belly-full was a windfall, and looked like
a special providence. In the shouts and triumphal songs with which,
after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky booty of deer's or goat's
flesh would naturally be ushered home, existed, perhaps, the germ of
the modern grace. It is not otherwise easy to be understood, why the
blessing of food--the act of eating--should have had a particular
expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied
and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon
the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of
existence.

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in
the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out
upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting,
or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual
repasts--a grace before Milton--a grace before Shakspeare--a
devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy
Queen?--but, the received ritual having prescribed these forms to the
solitary ceremony of manducation, I shall confine my observations to
the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so called;
commending my new scheme for extension to a niche in the grand
philosophical, poetical, and perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now
compiling by my friend Homo Humanus, for the use of a certain snug
congregation of Utopian Rabelæsian Christians, no matter where
assembled.

The form then of the benediction before eating has its beauty at
a poor man's table, or at the simple and unprovocative repasts of
children. It is here that the grace becomes exceedingly graceful.
The indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the
next day or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the
blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose
minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some
extreme theory, have entered. The proper end of food--the animal
sustenance--is barely contemplated by them. The poor man's bread is
his daily bread, literally his bread for the day. Their courses are
perennial.

Again, the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded by the
grace. That which is least stimulative to appetite, leaves the mind
most free for foreign considerations. A man may feel thankful,
heartily thankful, over a dish of plain mutton with turnips, and have
leisure to reflect upon the ordinance and institution of eating;
when he shall confess a perturbation o f mind, inconsistent with the
purposes of the grace, at the presence of venison or turtle. When I
have sate (a _rarus hospes_) at rich men's tables, with the savoury
soup and messes steaming up the nostrils, and moistening the lips
of the guests with desire and a distracted choice, I have felt the
introduction of that ceremony to be unseasonable. With the ravenous
orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a religious
sentiment. It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a
mouth that waters. The heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of
devotion. The incense which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god
intercepts it for his own. The very excess of the provision beyond the
needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and means.
The giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice
of returning thanks--for what?--for having too much, while so many
starve. It is to praise the Gods amiss.

I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce consciously perhaps,
by the good man who says the grace. I have seen it in clergymen and
others--a sort of shame--a sense of the co-presence of circumstances
which unhallow the blessing. After a devotional tone put on for a few
seconds, how rapidly the speaker will fall into his common voice,
helping himself or his neighbour, as if to get rid of some uneasy
sensation of hypocrisy. Not that the good man was a hypocrite, or was
not most conscientious in the discharge of the duty; but he felt in
his inmost mind the incompatibility of the scene and the viands before
him with the exercise of a calm and rational gratitude.

I hear somebody exclaim,--Would you have Christians sit down at table,
like hogs to their troughs, without remembering the Giver?--no--I
would have them sit down as Christians, remembering the Giver,
and less like hogs. Or if their appetites must run riot, and they
must pamper themselves with delicacies for which east and west are
ransacked, I would have them postpone their benediction to a fitter
season, when appetite is laid; when the still small voice can be
heard, and the reason of the grace returns--with temperate diet and
restricted dishes. Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for
thanksgiving. When Jeshurun waxed fat, we read that he kicked. Virgil
knew the harpy-nature better, when he put into the mouth of Celasno
any thing but a blessing. We may be gratefully sensible of the
deliciousness of some kinds of food beyond others, though that is a
meaner and inferior gratitude: but the proper object of the grace is
sustenance, not relishes; daily bread, not delicacies; the means of
life, and not the means of pampering the carcass. With what frame or
composure, I wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his benediction
at some great Hall feast, when he knows that his last concluding
pious word--and that, in all probability, the sacred name which he
preaches--is but the signal for so many impatient harpies to commence
their foul orgies, with as little sense of true thankfulness (which
is temperance) as those Virgilian fowl! It is well if the good man
himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy
sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure altar sacrifice.

The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the banquet which
Satan, in the Paradise Regained, provides for a temptation in the
wilderness:

  A table richly spread in regal mode,
  With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort
  And savour; beasts of chase, or fowl of game,
  In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
  Gris-amber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore,
  Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained
  Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast.

The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go down without
the recommendatory preface of a benediction. They are like to be short
graces where the devil plays the host.--I am afraid the poet wants his
usual decorum in this place. Was he thinking of the old Roman luxury,
or of a gaudy day at Cambridge? This was a temptation fitter for a
Heliogabalus. The whole banquet is too civic and culinary, and the
accompaniments altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted, holy
scene. The mighty artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend conjures
up, is out of proportion to the simple wants and plain hunger of the
guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from his dreams might have
been taught better. To the temperate fantasies of the famished Son of
God, what sort of feasts presented themselves?--He dreamed indeed,

  --As appetite is wont to dream,
  Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet.

But what meats?--

  Him thought, he by the brook of Cherith stood,
  And saw the ravens with their horny beaks
  Food to Elijah bringing, even and morn;
  Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought:
  He saw the prophet also how he fled
  Into the desert, and how there he slept
  Under a juniper; then how awaked
  He found his supper on the coals prepared,
  And by the angel was bid rise and eat,
  And ate the second time after repose,
  The strength whereof sufficed him forty days:
  Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook,
  Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse.

Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate dreams of
the divine Hungerer. To which of these two visionary banquets, think
you, would the introduction of what is called the grace have been most
fitting and pertinent?

Theoretically I am no enemy to graces; but practically I own that
(before meat especially) they seem to involve something awkward and
unseasonable. Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent
spurs to our reason, which might otherwise but feebly set about the
great ends of preserving and continuing the species. They are fit
blessings to be contemplated at a distance with a becoming gratitude;
but the moment of appetite (the judicious reader will apprehend me)
is, perhaps, the least fit season for that exercise. The Quakers who
go about their business, of every description, with more calmness
than we, have more title to the use of these benedictory prefaces. I
have always admired their silent grace, and the more because I have
observed their applications to the meat and drink following to be
less passionate and sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons nor
wine-bibbers as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopt hay,
with indifference, calmness, and cleanly circumstances. They neither
grease nor slop themselves. When I see a citizen in his bib and
tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice.

I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the
kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh were not made to
be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows
it, affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in
higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to
like minced veal. There is a physiognomical character in the tastes
for food. C---- holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses
apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is right. With the decay of
my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those
innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust with
me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle
thoughts. I am impatient and querulous under culinary disappointments,
as to come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some
savoury mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter
ill melted--that commonest of kitchen failures--puts me beside my
tenour.--The author of the Rambler used to make inarticulate animal
noises over a favourite food. Was this the music quite proper to
be preceded by the grace? or would the pious man have done better
to postpone his devotions to a season when the blessing plight be
contemplated with less perturbation? I quarrel with no man's tastes,
nor would set my thin face against those excellent things, in their
way, jollity and feasting. But as these exercises, however laudable,
have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man should be sure,
before he ventures so to grace them, that while he is pretending his
devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing his hand to some
great fish--his Dagon--with a special consecration of no ark but the
fat tureen before him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the
banquets of angels and children; to the roots and severer repasts
of the Chartreuse; to the slender, but not slenderly acknowledged,
refection of the poor and humble man: but at the heaped-up boards of
the pampered and the luxurious they become of dissonant mood, less
timed and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than the noise of those
better befitting organs would be, which children hear tales of, at
Hog's Norton. We sit too long at our meals, or are too curious in
the study of them, or too disordered in our application to them, or
engross too great a portion of those good things (which should be
common) to our share, to be able with any grace to say grace. To
be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add
hypocrisy to injustice. A lurking sense of this truth is what makes
the performance of this duty so cold and spiritless a service at most
tables. In houses where the grace is as indispensable as the napkin,
who has not seen that never settled question arise, as to _who shall
say it_; while the good man of the house and the visitor clergyman, or
some other guest belike of next authority from years or gravity, shall
be bandying about the office between them as a matter of compliment,
each of them not unwilling to shift the awkward burthen of an
equivocal duty from his own shoulders?

I once drank tea in company with two Methodist divines of different
persuasions, whom it was my fortune to introduce to each other for the
first time that evening. Before the first cup was handed round, one of
these reverend gentlemen put it to the other, with all due solemnity,
whether he chose to _say any thing_. It seems it is the custom with
some sectaries to put up a short prayer before this meal also. His
reverend brother did not at first quite apprehend him, but upon an
explanation, with little less importance he made answer, that it was
not a custom known in his church: in which courteous evasion the other
acquiescing for good manner's sake, or in compliance with a weak
brother, the supplementary or tea-grace was waived altogether. With
what spirit might not Lucian have painted two priests, of _his_
religion, playing into each other's hands the compliment of performing
or omitting a sacrifice,--the hungry God meantime, doubtful of his
incense, with expectant nostrils hovering over the two flamens, and
(as between two stools) going away in the end without his supper.

A short form upon these occasions is felt to want reverence; a long
one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge of impertinence. I do
not quite approve of the epigrammatic conciseness with which that
equivocal wag (but my pleasant school-fellow) C.V.L., when importuned
for a grace, used to inquire, first slyly leering down the table, "Is
there no clergyman here?"--significantly adding, "thank G----." Nor do
I think our old form at school quite pertinent, where we were used to
preface our bald bread and cheese suppers with a preamble, connecting
with that humble blessing a recognition of benefits the most awful
and overwhelming to the imagination which religion has to offer. _Non
tunc illis erat locus._ I remember we were put to it to reconcile the
phrase "good creatures," upon which the blessing rested, with the
fare set before us, wilfully understanding that expression in a low
and animal sense,--till some one recalled a legend, which told how
in the golden days of Christ's, the young Hospitallers were wont to
have smoking joints of roast meat upon their nightly boards, till
some pious benefactor, commiserating the decencies, rather than the
palates, of the children, commuted our flesh for garments, and gave
us--_horresco referens_--trowsers instead of mutton.




MY FIRST PLAY


At the north end of Cross-court there yet stands a portal, of some
architectural pretensions, though reduced to humble use, serving at
present for an entrance to a printing-office. This old door-way, if
you are young, reader, you may not know was the identical pit entrance
to old Drury--Garrick's Drury--all of it that is left. I never pass it
without shaking some forty years from off my shoulders, recurring
to the evening when I passed through it to see _my first play_. The
afternoon had been wet, and the condition of our going (the elder
folks and myself) was, that the rain should cease. With what a beating
heart did I watch from the window the puddles, from the stillness of
which I was taught to prognosticate the desired cessation! I seem to
remember the last spurt, and the glee with which I ran to announce it.

We went with orders, which my godfather F. had sent us. He kept the
oil shop (now Davies's) at the corner of Featherstone-building,
in Holborn. F. was a tall grave person, lofty in speech, and had
pretensions above his rank. He associated in those days with John
Palmer, the comedian, whose gait and bearing he seemed to copy; if
John (which is quite as likely) did not rather borrow somewhat of
his manner from my godfather. He was also known to, and visited by,
Sheridan. It was to his house in Holborn that young Brinsley brought
his first wife on her elopement with him from a boarding-school at
Bath--the beautiful Maria Linley. My parents were present (over a
quadrille table) when he arrived in the evening with his harmonious
charge.--From either of these connexions it may be inferred that
my godfather could command an order for the then Drury-lane
theatre at pleasure--and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those
cheap billets, in Brinsley's easy autograph, I have heard him say
was the sole remuneration which he had received for many years'
nightly illumination of the orchestra and various avenues of that
theatre--and he was content it should be so. The honour of Sheridan's
familiarity--or supposed familiarity--was better to my godfather than
money.

F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen; grandiloquent, yet courteous.
His delivery of the commonest matters of fact was Ciceronian. He had
two Latin words almost constantly in his mouth (how odd sounds Latin
from an oilman's lips!), which my better knowledge since has enabled
me to correct. In strict pronunciation they should have been sounded
_vice versâ_--but in those young years they impressed me with more awe
than they would now do, read aright from Seneca or Varro--in his own
peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically elaborated, or Anglicized,
into something like _verse verse_. By an imposing manner, and the help
of these distorted syllables, he climbed (but that was little) to the
highest parochial honours which St. Andrew's has to bestow.

He is dead--and thus much I thought due to his memory, both for
my first orders (little wondrous talismans!--slight keys, and
insignificant to outward sight, but opening to me more than Arabian
paradises!) and moreover, that by his testamentary beneficence I came
into possession of the only landed property which I could ever call
my own--situate near the road-way village of pleasant Puckeridge, in
Hertfordshire. When I journeyed down to take possession, and planted
foot on my own ground, the stately habits of the donor descended upon
me, and I strode (shall I confess the vanity?) with larger paces over
my allotment of three quarters of an acre, with its commodious mansion
in the midst, with the feeling of an English freeholder that all
betwixt sky and centre was my own. The estate has passed into more
prudent hands, and nothing but an agrarian can restore it.

In those days were pit orders. Beshrew the uncomfortable manager who
abolished them!--with one of these we went. I remember the waiting at
the door--not that which is left--but between that and an inner door
in shelter--O when shall I be such an expectant again!--with the cry
of nonpareils, an indispensable play-house accompaniment in those
days. As near as I can recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of
the theatrical fruiteresses then was, "Chase some oranges, chase
some numparels, chase a bill of the play;"--chase _pro_ chuse. But
when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven
to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed--the breathless
anticipations I endured! I had seen something like it in the plate
prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in Rowe's Shakspeare--the tent scene
with Diomede--and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a
measure the feeling of that evening.--The boxes at that time, full
of well-dressed women of quality, projected over the pit; and the
pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance
(I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling--a homely
fancy--but I judged it to be sugar-candy--yet, to my raised
imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a
glorified candy!--The orchestra lights at length arose, those
"fair Auroras!" Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once
again--and, incapable of the anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in
a sort of resignation upon the maternal lap. It rang the second time.
The curtain drew up--I was not past six years old--and the play was
Artaxerxes!

I had dabbled a little in the Universal History--the ancient part of
it--and here was the court of Persia. It was being admitted to a sight
of the past. I took no proper interest in the action going on, for
I understood not its import--but I heard the word Darius, and I was
in the midst of Daniel. All feeling was absorbed in vision. Gorgeous
vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, passed before me. I knew not
players. I was in Persepolis for the time; and the burning idol
of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. I was
awe-struck, and believed those significations to be something more
than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. No such
pleasure has since visited me but in dreams.--Harlequin's Invasion
followed; where, I remember, the transformation of the magistrates
into reverend beldams seemed to me a piece of grave historic justice,
and the tailor carrying his own head to be as sober a verity as the
legend of St. Denys.

The next play to which I was taken was the Lady of the Manor, of
which, with the exception of some scenery, very faint traces are left
in my memory. It was followed by a pantomime, called Lun's Ghost--a
satiric touch, I apprehend, upon Rich, not long since dead--but to my
apprehension (too sincere for satire), Lun was as remote a piece of
antiquity as Lud--the father, of a line of Harlequins--transmitting
his dagger of lath (the wooden sceptre) through countless ages. I saw
the primeval Motley come from his silent tomb in a ghastly vest of
white patch-work, like the apparition of a dead rainbow. So Harlequins
(thought I) look when they are dead.

My third play followed in quick succession. It was the Way of the
World. I think I must have sat at it as grave as a judge; for, I
remember, the hysteric affectations of good Lady Wishfort affected me
like some solemn tragic passion. Robinson Crusoe followed; in which
Crusoe, man Friday, and the parrot, were as good and authentic as in
the story.--The clownery and pantaloonery of these pantomimes have
clean passed out of my head. I believe, I no more laughed at them,
than at the same age I should have been disposed to laugh at the
grotesque Gothic heads (seeming to me then replete with devout
meaning) that gape, and grin, in stone around the inside of the old
Round Church (my church) of the Templars.

I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was from six to seven
years old. After the intervention of six or seven other years (for
at school all play-going was inhibited) I again entered the doors
of a theatre. That old Artaxerxes evening had never done ringing in
my fancy. I expected the same feelings to come again with the same
occasion. But we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen,
than the latter does from six. In that interval what had I not lost!
At the first period I knew nothing, understood nothing, discriminated
nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all--

  Was nourished, I could not tell how--

I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. The
same things were there materially; but the emblem, the reference,
was gone!--The green curtain was no longer a veil, drawn between two
worlds, the unfolding of which was to bring back past ages, to present
"a royal ghost,"--but a certain quantity of green baize, which was
to separate the audience for a given time from certain of their
fellow-men who were to come forward and pretend those parts. The
lights--the orchestra lights--came up a clumsy machinery. The first
ring, and the second ring, was now but a trick of the prompter's
bell--which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a
voice, no hand seen or guessed at which ministered to its warning.
The actors were men and women painted. I thought the fault was in
them; but it was in myself, and the alteration which those many
centuries--of six short twelve-months--had wrought in me.--Perhaps
it was fortunate for me that the play of the evening was but an
indifferent comedy, as it gave me time to crop some unreasonable
expectations, which might have interfered with the genuine emotions
with which I was soon after enabled to enter upon the first appearance
to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella. Comparison and retrospection soon
yielded to the present attraction of the scene; and the theatre became
to me, upon a new stock, the most delightful of recreations.




DREAM-CHILDREN

A REVERIE


Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when _they_
were children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a
traditionary great-uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in
this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to
hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house
in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in which they and papa
lived) which had been the scene--so at least it was generally believed
in that part of the country--of the tragic incidents which they had
lately become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the
Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the children and their
cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the
chimney-piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the Robin
Redbreasts, till a foolish rich person pulled it down to set up a
marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story upon it.
Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender to be
called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, how religious and how good
their great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by every
body, though she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but
had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects she might be said
to be the mistress of it too) committed to her by the owner, who
preferred living in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he had
purchased somewhere in the adjoining county; but still she lived in it
in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of the
great house in a sort while she lived, which afterwards came to decay,
and was nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and
carried away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and
looked as awkward as if some one were to carry away the old tombs they
had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry
gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, "that would
be foolish indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her
funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the
gentry too, of the neighbourhood for many miles round, to show their
respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and religious
woman; so good indeed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay,
and a great part of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread
her hands. Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their
great-grandmother Field once was; and how in her youth she was
esteemed the best dancer--here Alice's little right foot played an
involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted--the
best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel disease, called
a cancer, came, and bowed her down with pain; but it could never bend
her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright,
because she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used
to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house; and
how she believed that an apparition of two infants was to be seen
at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near where she
slept, but she said, "those innocents would do her no harm;" and how
frightened I used to be, though in those days I had my maid to sleep
with me, because I was never half so good or religious as she--and
yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded all his eye-brows and
tried to look courageous. Then I told how good she was to all her
grand-children, having us to the great-house in the holydays, where I
in particular used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the
old busts of the Twelve Cæsars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till
the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into
marble with them; how I never could be tired with roaming about that
huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings,
fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken pannels, with the gilding almost
rubbed out--sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I
had almost to myself, unless when now and then a solitary gardening
man would cross me--and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the
walls, without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were
forbidden fruit, unless now and then,--and because I had more pleasure
in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew trees, or the
firs, and picking up the red berries, and the fir apples, which were
good for nothing but to look at--or in lying about upon the fresh
grass, with all the fine garden smells around me--or basking in the
orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the
oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth--or in watching the dace
that darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the bottom of the garden,
with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the water
in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings,--I
had more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet
flavours of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such like common baits
of children. Here John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch
of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing
with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the present
as irrelevant. Then in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how,
though their great-grandmother Field loved all her grand-children,
yet in an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John
L----, because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king to
the rest of us; and, instead of moping about in solitary corners, like
some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome horse he could get,
when but an imp no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half
over the county in a morning, and join the hunters when there were any
out--and yet he loved the old great house and gardens too, but had
too much spirit to be always pent up within their boundaries--and how
their uncle grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to
the admiration of every body, but of their great-grandmother Field
most especially; and how he used to carry me upon his back when I was
a lame-footed boy--for he was a good bit older than me--many a mile
when I could not walk for pain;--and how in after life he became
lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) make allowances enough
for him when he was impatient, and in pain, nor remember sufficiently
how considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how
when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he
had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and
death; and how I bore his death as I thought pretty well at first, but
afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though I did not cry or take
it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had
died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much
I had loved him. I missed his kindness, and I missed his crossness,
and wished him to be alive again, to be quarrelling with him (for
we quarreled sometimes), rather than not have him again, and was as
uneasy without him, as he their poor uncle must have been when the
doctor took off his limb. Here the children fell a crying, and asked
if their little mourning which they had on was not for uncle John,
and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but
to tell them some stories about their pretty dead mother. Then I told
how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair,
yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W--n; and, as much as
children could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and
difficulty, and denial meant in maidens--when suddenly, turning to
Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a
reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood
there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood
gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding,
and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features
were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely
impressed upon me the effects of speech; "We are not of Alice, nor
of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice called
Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We
are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores
of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name"--and
immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor
arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget
unchanged by my side--but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.




DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS

IN A LETTER TO B.F. ESQ. AT SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES


My dear F.--When I think how welcome the sight of a letter from the
world where you were born must be to you in that strange one to which
you have been transplanted, I feel some compunctious visitings at
my long silence. But, indeed, it is no easy effort to set about a
correspondence at our distance. The weary world of waters between us
oppresses the imagination. It is difficult to conceive how a scrawl
of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption
to expect that one's thoughts should live so far. It is like writing
for posterity; and reminds me of one of Mrs. Rowe's superscriptions,
"Alcander to Strephon, in the shades." Cowley's Post-Angel is no more
than would be expedient in such an intercourse. One drops a packet at
Lombard-street, and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets
it as fresh as if it came in ice. It is only like whispering through a
long trumpet. But suppose a tube let down from the moon, with yourself
at one end, and _the man_ at the other; it would be some balk to the
spirit of conversation, if you knew that the dialogue exchanged with
that interesting theosophist would take two or three revolutions of a
higher luminary in its passage. Yet for aught I know, you may be some
parasangs nigher that primitive idea--Plato's man--than we in England
here have the honour to reckon ourselves.

Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics; news, sentiment,
and puns. In the latter, I include all non-serious subjects; or
subjects serious in themselves, but treated after my fashion,
non-seriously.--And first, for news. In them the most desirable
circumstance, I suppose, is that they shall be true. But what security
can I have that what I now send you for truth shall not before you
get it unaccountably turn into a lie? For instance, our mutual friend
P. is at this present writing--_my Now_--in good health, and enjoys
a fair share of worldly reputation. You are glad to hear it. This is
natural and friendly. But at this present reading--_your Now_--he may
possibly be in the Bench, or going to be hanged, which in reason ought
to abate something of your transport (_i.e._ at hearing he was well,
&c.), or at least considerably to modify it. I am going to the play
this evening, to have a laugh with Munden. You have no theatre, I
think you told me, in your land of d----d realities. You naturally
lick your lips, and envy me my felicity. Think but a moment, and you
will correct the hateful emotion. Why, it is Sunday morning with
you, and 1823. This confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of _two
presents_, is in a degree common to all postage. But if I sent you
word to Bath or the Devises, that I was expecting the aforesaid treat
this evening, though at the moment you received the intelligence my
full feast of fun would be over, yet there would be for a day or two
after, as you would well know, a smack, a relish left upon my mental
palate, which would give rational encouragement for you to foster a
portion at least of the disagreeable passion, which it was in part my
intention to produce. But ten months hence your envy or your sympathy
would be as useless as a passion spent upon the dead. Not only does
truth, in these long intervals, un-essence herself, but (what is
harder) one cannot venture a crude fiction for the fear that it may
ripen into a truth upon the voyage. What a wild improbable banter I
put upon you, some three years since ---- of Will Weatherall having
married a servant-maid! I remember gravely consulting you how we
were to receive her--for Will's wife was in no case to be rejected;
and your no less serious replication in the matter; how tenderly you
advised an abstemious introduction of literary topics before the lady,
with a caution not to be too forward in bringing on the carpet matters
more within the sphere of her intelligence; your deliberate judgment,
or rather wise suspension of sentence, how far jacks, and spits, and
mops, could with propriety be introduced as subjects; whether the
conscious avoiding of all such matters in discourse would not have a
worse look than the taking of them casually in our way; in what manner
we should carry ourselves to our maid Becky, Mrs. William Weatherall
being by; whether we should show more delicacy, and a truer sense of
respect for Will's wife, by treating Becky with our customary chiding
before her, or by an unusual deferential civility paid to Becky as
to a person of great worth, but thrown by the caprice of fate into a
humble station. There were difficulties, I remember, on both sides,
which you did me the favour to state with the precision of a lawyer,
united to the tenderness of a friend. I laughed in my sleeve at your
solemn pleadings, when lo! while I was valuing myself upon this
flam put upon you in New South Wales, the devil in England, jealous
possibly of any lie-children not his own, or working after my copy,
has actually instigated our friend (not three days since) to the
commission of a matrimony, which I had only conjured up for your
diversion. William Weatherall has married Mrs. Cotterel's maid. But to
take it in its truest sense, you will see, my dear F., that news from
me must become history to you; which I neither profess to write, nor
indeed care much for reading. No person, under a diviner, can with any
prospect of veracity conduct a correspondence at such an arm's length.
Two prophets, indeed, might thus interchange intelligence with effect;
the epoch of the writer (Habbakuk) falling in with the true present
time of the receiver (Daniel); but then we are no prophets.

Then as to sentiment. It fares little better with that. This kind
of dish, above all, requires to be served up hot; or sent off in
water-plates, that your friend may have it almost as warm as yourself.
If it have time to cool, it is the most tasteless of all cold meats.
I have often smiled at a conceit of the late Lord C. It seems that
travelling somewhere about Geneva, he came to some pretty green spot,
or nook, where a willow, or something, hung so fantastically and
invitingly over a stream--was it?--or a rock?--no matter--but the
stillness and the repose, after a weary journey 'tis likely, in a
languid moment of his lordship's hot restless life, so took his fancy,
that he could imagine no place so proper, in the event of his death,
to lay his bones in. This was all very natural and excusable as a
sentiment, and shows his character in a very pleasing light. But when
from a passing sentiment it came to be an act; and when, by a positive
testamentary disposal, his remains were actually carried all that way
from England; who was there, some desperate sentimentalists excepted,
that did not ask the question, Why could not his lordship have found
a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree as green and pendent,
with a stream as emblematic to his purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset, or
in Devon? Conceive the sentiment boarded up, freighted, entered at the
Custom House (startling the tide-waiters with the novelty), hoisted
into a ship. Conceive it pawed about and handled between the rude
jests of tarpaulin ruffians--a thing of its delicate texture--the
salt bilge wetting it till it became as vapid as a damaged lustring.
Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some superstition about
sentiments) of being tossed over in a fresh gale to some propitiatory
shark (spirit of Saint Gothard, save us from a quietus so foreign
to the deviser's purpose!) but it has happily evaded a fishy
consummation. Trace it then to its lucky landing--at Lyons shall
we say?--I have not the map before me--jostled upon four men's
shoulders--baiting at this town--stopping to refresh at t'other
village--waiting a passport here, a license there; the sanction of the
magistracy in this district, the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in
that canton; till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out
and jaded, from a brisk sentiment, into a feature of silly pride or
tawdry senseless affectation. How few sentiments, my dear F., I am
afraid we can set down, in the sailor's phrase, as quite sea-worthy.

Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which, though contemptible
in bulk, are the twinkling corpuscula which should irradiate a
right friendly epistle--your puns and small jests are, I apprehend,
extremely circumscribed in their sphere of action. They are so far
from a capacity of being packed up and sent beyond sea, they will
scarce endure to be transported by hand from this room to the next.
Their vigour is as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment
for their brief existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the
bystanders: or this last, is the fine slime of Nilus--the _melior
Lutis_,--whose maternal recipiency is as necessary as the _sol pater_
to their equivocal generation. A pun hath a hearty kind of present
ear-kissing smack with it; you can no more transmit it in its pristine
flavour, than you can send a kiss.--Have you not tried in some
instances to palm off a yesterday's pun upon a gentleman, and has
it answered? Not but it was new to his hearing, but it did not seem
to come new from you. It did not hitch in. It was like picking up
at a village ale-house a two days old newspaper. You have not seen
it before, but you resent the stale thing as an affront. This sort
of merchandise above all requires a quick return. A pun, and its
recognitory laugh, must be co-instantaneous. The one is the brisk
lightning, the other the fierce thunder. A moment's interval, and the
link is snapped. A pun is reflected from a friend's face as from a
mirror. Who would consult his sweet visnomy, if the polished surface
were two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve-months, my dear F.)
in giving back its copy?

I cannot image to myself where about you are. When I try to fix it,
Peter Wilkins's island comes across me. Sometimes you seem to be in
the _Hades_ of _Thieves_. I see Diogenes prying among you with his
perpetual fruitless lantern. What must you be willing by this time to
give for the sight of an honest man! You must almost have forgotten
how _we_ look. And tell me, what your Sydneyites do? are they th**v*ng
all day long? Merciful heaven! what property can stand against such
a depredation! The kangaroos--your Aborigines--do they keep their
primitive simplicity un-Europe-tainted, with those little short
fore-puds, looking like a lesson framed by nature to the pickpocket!
Marry, for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided _a
priori_; but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair
a pair of hind-shifters as the expertest loco-motor in the colony.--We
hear the most improbable tales at this distance. Pray, is it true that
the young Spartans among you are born with six fingers, which spoils
their scanning?--It must look very odd; but use reconciles. For their
scansion, it is less to be regretted, for if they take it into their
heads to be poets, it is odds but they turn out, the greater part of
them, vile plagiarists.--Is there much difference to see to between
the son of a th**f, and the grandson? or where does the taint stop? Do
you bleach in three or in four generations?--I have many questions to
put, but ten Delphic voyages can be made in a shorter time than it
will take to satisfy my scruples.--Do you grow your own hemp?--What is
your staple trade, exclusive of the national profession, I mean? Your
lock-smiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists.

I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarly as when we used
to exchange good-morrows out of our old contiguous windows, in
pump-famed Hare-court in the Temple. Why did you ever leave that quiet
corner?--Why did I?--with its complement of four poor elms, from whose
smoke-dyed barks, the theme of jesting ruralists, I picked my first
lady-birds! My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in
a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us; a
length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of our English
letters before they can reach you. But while I talk, I think you hear
me,--thoughts dallying with vain surmise--

  Aye me! while thee the seas and sounding shores
  Hold far away.

Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall
hardly know me. Come, before Bridget walks on crutches. Girls whom you
left children have become sage matrons, while you are tarrying there.
The blooming Miss W----r (you remember Sally W----r) called upon us
yesterday, an aged crone. Folks, whom you knew, die off every year.
Formerly, I thought that death was wearing out,--I stood ramparted
about with so many healthy friends. The departure of J.W., two springs
back corrected my delusion. Since then the old divorcer has been busy.
If you do not make haste to return, there will be little left to greet
you, of me, or mine.




THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS


I like to meet a sweep--understand me--not a grown sweeper--old
chimney-sweepers are by no means attractive--but one of those tender
novices, blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal washings
not quite effaced from the cheek--such as come forth with the dawn, or
somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like
the _peep peep_ of a young sparrow; or liker to the matin lark should
I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom anticipating the
sun-rise?

I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks--poor
blots--innocent blacknesses--

I reverence these young Africans of our own growth--these almost
clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption; and from
their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys), in the nipping air of a
December morning, preach a lesson of patience to mankind.

When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness their
operation! to see a chit no bigger than one's-self enter, one knew not
by what process, into what seemed the _fauces Averni_--to pursue him
in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many dark stifling
caverns, horrid shades!--to shudder with the idea that "now, surely,
he must be lost for ever!"--to revive at hearing his feeble shout of
discovered day-light--and then (O fulness of delight) running out of
doors, to come just in time to see the sable phenomenon emerge in
safety, the brandished weapon of his art victorious like some flag
waved over a conquered citadel! I seem to remember having been told,
that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush, to indicate
which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly; not much
unlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the "Apparition of a
child crowned with a tree in his hand rises."

Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early
rambles, it is good to give him a penny. It is better to give him
two-pence. If it be starving weather, and to the proper troubles of
his hard occupation, a pair of kibed heels (no unusual accompaniment)
be superadded, the demand on thy humanity will surely rise to a
tester.

There is a composition, the ground-work of which I have understood to
be the sweet wood 'yclept sassafras. This wood boiled down to a kind
of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some
tastes a delicacy beyond the China luxury. I know not how thy palate
may relish it; for myself, with every deference to the judicious Mr.
Read, who hath time out of mind kept open a shop (the only one he
avers in London) for the vending of this "wholesome and pleasant
beverage, on the south side of Fleet-street, as thou approachest
Bridge-street--_the only Salopian house_,"--I have never yet
adventured to dip my own particular lip in a basin of his commended
ingredients--a cautious premonition to the olfactories constantly
whispering to me, that my stomach must infallibly, with all due
courtesy, decline it. Yet I have seen palates, otherwise not
uninstructed in dietetical elegances, sup it up with avidity.

I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it happens,
but I have always found that this composition is surprisingly
gratifying to the palate of a young chimney-sweeper--whether the oily
particles (sassafras is slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften
the fuliginous concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections)
to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged practitioners;
or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled too much of bitter
wood in the lot of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the earth
her sassafras for a sweet lenitive--but so it is, that no possible
taste or odour to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a
delicate excitement comparable to this mixture. Being penniless, they
will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steam, to gratify
one sense if possible, seemingly no less pleased than those domestic
animals--cats--when they purr over a new-found sprig of valerian.
There is something more in these sympathies than philosophy can
inculcate.

Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not without reason, that his is the
_only Salopian house;_ yet be it known to thee, reader--if thou art
one who keepest what are called good hours, thou art haply ignorant
of the fact--he hath a race of industrious imitators, who from
stalls, and under open sky, dispense the same savoury mess to humbler
customers, at that dead time of the dawn, when (as extremes meet) the
rake, reeling home from his midnight cups, and the hard-handed artisan
leaving his bed to resume the premature labours of the day, jostle,
not unfrequently to the manifest disconcerting of the former, for the
honours of the pavement. It is the time when, in summer, between the
expired and the not yet relumined kitchen-fires, the kennels of our
fair metropolis give forth their least satisfactory odours. The rake,
who wisheth to dissipate his o'er-night vapours in more grateful
coffee, curses the ungenial fume, as he passeth; but the artisan stops
to taste, and blesses the fragrant breakfast.

This is _Saloop_--the precocious herb-woman's darling--the delight of
the early gardener, who transports his smoking cabbages by break of
day from Hammersmith to Covent-garden's famed piazzas--the delight,
and, oh I fear, too often the envy, of the unpennied sweep. Him
shouldest thou haply encounter, with his dim visage pendent over the
grateful steam, regale him with a sumptuous basin (it will cost thee
but three half-pennies) and a slice of delicate bread and butter (an
added halfpenny)--so may thy culinary fires, eased of the o'er-charged
secretions from thy worse-placed hospitalities, curl up a lighter
volume to the welkin--so may the descending soot never taint thy
costly well-ingredienced soups--nor the odious cry, quickreaching from
street to street, of the _fired chimney_, invite the rattling engines
from ten adjacent parishes, to disturb for a casual scintillation thy
peace and pocket!

I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts; the jeers
and taunts of the populace; the low-bred triumph they display over
the casual trip, or splashed stocking, of a gentleman. Yet can I
endure the jocularity of a young sweep with something more than
forgiveness.--In the last winter but one, pacing along Cheapside with
my accustomed precipitation when I walk westward, a treacherous slide
brought me upon my back in an instant. I scrambled up with pain and
shame enough--yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if nothing had
happened--when the roguish grin of one of these young wits encountered
me. There he stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the
mob, and to a poor woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, till
the tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked
themselves out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a
previous weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling through all with
such a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth--but Hogarth has
got him already (how could he miss him?) in the March to Finchley,
grinning at the pye-man--there he stood, as he stands in the picture,
irremovable, as if the jest was to last for ever--with such a maximum
of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth--for the grin of a
genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it--that I could have
been content, if the honour of a gentleman might endure it, to have
remained his butt and his mockery till midnight.

I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine
set of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must pardon me) is
a casket, presumably holding such jewels; but, methinks, they should
take leave to "air" them as frugally as possible. The fine lady, or
fine gentleman, who show me their teeth, show me bones. Yet must
I confess, that from the mouth of a true sweep a display (even to
ostentation) of those white and shining ossifications, strikes me as
an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It
is, as when

  A sable cloud
  Turns forth her silver lining on the night.

It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct; a badge of
better days; a hint of nobility:--and, doubtless, under the obscuring
darkness and double night of their forlorn disguisement, oftentimes
lurketh good blood, and gentle conditions, derived from lost ancestry,
and a lapsed pedigree. The premature apprenticements of these tender
victims give but too much encouragement, I fear, to clandestine, and
almost infantile abductions; the seeds of civility and true courtesy,
so often discernible in these young grafts (not otherwise to be
accounted for) plainly hint at some forced adoptions; many noble
Rachels mourning for their children, even in our days, countenance the
fact; the tales of fairy-spiriting may shadow a lamentable verity, and
the recovery of the young Montagu be but a solitary instance of, good
fortune, out of many irreparable and hopeless _defiliations_.

In one of the state-beds at Arundel Castle, a few years since--under a
ducal canopy--(that seat of the Howards is an object of curiosity to
visitors, chiefly for its beds, in which the late duke was especially
a connoisseur)--encircled with curtains of delicatest crimson, with
starry coronets inwoven--folded between a pair of sheets whiter and
softer than the lap where Venus lulled Ascanius--was discovered by
chance, after all methods of search had failed, at noon-day, fast
asleep, a lost chimney-sweeper. The little creature, having somehow
confounded his passage among the intricacies of those lordly chimneys,
by some unknown aperture had alighted upon this magnificent chamber;
and, tired with his tedious explorations, was unable to resist the
delicious invitement to repose, which he there saw exhibited; so,
creeping between the sheets very quietly, laid his black head upon the
pillow, and slept like a young Howard.

Such is the account given to the visitors at the Castle.--But I cannot
help seeming to perceive a confirmation of what I have just hinted
at in this story. A high instinct was at work in the case, or I am
mistaken. Is it probable that a poor child of that description, with
whatever weariness he might be visited, would have ventured, under
such a penalty, as he would be taught to expect, to uncover the sheets
of a Duke's bed, and deliberately to lay himself down between them,
when the rug, or the carpet, presented an obvious couch, still far
above his pretensions--is this probable, I would ask, if the great
power of nature, which I contend for, had not been manifested within
him, prompting to the adventure? Doubtless this young nobleman (for
such my mind misgives me that he must be) was allured by some memory,
not amounting to full consciousness, of his condition in infancy,
when he was used to be lapt by his mother, or his nurse, in just such
sheets as he there found, into which he was now but creeping back as
into his proper _incunabula_, and resting-place.--By no other theory,
than by this sentiment of a pre-existent state (as I may call it), can
I explain a deed so venturous, and, indeed, upon any other system, so
indecorous, in this tender, but unseasonable, sleeper.

My pleasant friend JEM WHITE was so impressed with a belief of
metamorphoses like this frequently taking place, that in some sort to
reverse the wrongs of fortune in these poor changelings, he instituted
an annual feast of chimney-sweepers, at which it was his pleasure
to officiate as host and waiter. It was a solemn supper held in
Smithfield, upon the yearly return of the fair of St. Bartholomew.
Cards were issued a week before to the master-sweeps in and about the
metropolis, confining the invitation to their younger fry. Now and
then an elderly stripling would get in among us, and be good-naturedly
winked at; but our main body were infantry. One unfortunate wight,
indeed, who, relying upon his dusky suit, had intruded himself into
our party, but by tokens was providentially discovered in time to be
no chimney-sweeper (all is not soot which looks so), was quoited out
of the presence with universal indignation, as not having on the
wedding garment; but in general the greatest harmony prevailed. The
place chosen was a convenient spot among the pens, at the north side
of the fair, not so far distant as to be impervious to the agreeable
hubbub of that vanity; but remote enough not to be obvious to the
interruption of every gaping spectator in it. The guests assembled
about seven. In those little temporary parlours three tables were
spread with napery, not so fine as substantial, and at every board a
comely hostess presided with her pan of hissing sausages. The nostrils
of the young rogues dilated at the savour. JAMES WHITE, as head
waiter, had charge of the first table; and myself, with our trusty
companion BIGOD, ordinarily ministered to the other two. There was
clambering and jostling, you may be sure, who should get at the first
table--for Rochester in his maddest days could not have done the
humours of the scene with more spirit than my friend. After some
general expression of thanks for the honour the company had done him,
his inaugural ceremony was to clasp the greasy waist of old dame
Ursula (the fattest of the three), that stood frying and fretting,
half-blessing, half-cursing "the gentleman," and imprint upon her
chaste lips a tender salute, whereat the universal host would set up a
shout that tore the concave, while hundreds of grinning teeth startled
the night with their brightness. O it was a pleasure to see the
sable younkers lick in the unctuous meat, with _his_ more unctuous
sayings--how he would fit the tit bits to the puny mouths, reserving
the lengthier links for the seniors--how he would intercept a morsel
even in the jaws of some young desperado, declaring it "must to
the pan again to be browned, for it was not fit for a gentleman's
eating"--how he would recommend this slice of white bread, or
that piece of kissing-crust, to a tender juvenile, advising them
all to have a care of cracking their teeth, which were their best
patrimony,--how genteelly he would deal about the small ale, as if it
were wine, naming the brewer, and protesting, if it were not good,
he should lose their custom; with a special recommendation to wipe
the lip before drinking. Then we had our toasts--"The King,"--the
"Cloth,"--which, whether they understood or not, was equally diverting
and flattering;--and for a crowning sentiment, which never failed,
"May the Brush supersede the Laurel!" All these, and fifty other
fancies, which were rather felt than comprehended by his guests,
would he utter, standing upon tables, and prefacing every sentiment
with a "Gentlemen, give me leave to propose so and so," which was a
prodigious comfort to those young orphans; every now and then stuffing
into his mouth (for it did not do to be squeamish on these occasions)
indiscriminate pieces of those reeking sausages, which pleased them
mightily, and was the savouriest part, you may believe, of the
entertainment.

  Golden lads and lasses must.
  As chimney-sweepers, come to dust--

JAMES WHITE is extinct, and with him these suppers have long ceased.
He carried away with him half the fun of the world when he died--of
my world at least. His old clients look for him among the pens; and,
missing him, reproach the altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and the
glory of Smithfield departed for ever.




A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS IN THE METROPOLIS


The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation--your only
modern Alcides' club to rid the time of its abuses--is uplift with
many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the
bugbear MENDICITY from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags--staves,
dogs, and crutches--the whole mendicant fraternity with all their
baggage are fast posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh
persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the corners of streets
and turnings of allies, the parting Genius of Beggary is "with sighing
sent."

I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this impertinent
crusado, or _bellum ad exterminationem_, proclaimed against a species.
Much good might be sucked from these Beggars.

They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism. Their
appeals were to our common nature; less revolting to an ingenuous mind
than to be a suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any
fellow-creature, or set of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian.
Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the
assessment.

There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation;
as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go
in livery.

The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses; and when
Dionysius from king turned schoolmaster, do we feel any thing towards
him but contempt? Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying
a ferula for a sceptre, which would have affected our minds with the
same heroic pity, the same compassionate admiration, with which we
regard his Belisarius begging for an _obolum_? Would the moral have
been more graceful, more pathetic?

The Blind Beggar in the legend--the father of pretty Bessy--whose
story doggrel rhymes and ale-house signs cannot so degrade or
attenuate, but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shine
through the disguisements--this noble Earl of Cornwall (as indeed he
was) and memorable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence
of his liege lord, stript of all, and seated on the flowering green
of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter by his side,
illumining his rags and his beggary--would the child and parent have
cut a better figure, doing the honours of a counter, or expiating
their fallen condition upon the three-foot eminence of some
sempstering shop-board?

In tale or history your Beggar is ever the just antipode to your King.
The poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret Newcastle would
call them) when they would most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse
of fortune, never stop till they have brought down their hero in good
earnest to rags and the wallet. The depth of the descent illustrates
the height he falls from. There is no medium which can be presented
to the imagination without offence. There is no breaking the fall.
Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his garments, till
he answer "mere nature;" and Cresseid, fallen from a prince's love,
must extend her pale arms, pale with other whiteness than of beauty,
supplicating lazar alms with bell and clap-dish.

The Lucian wits knew this very well; and, with a converse policy, when
they would express scorn of greatness without the pity, they show us
an Alexander in the shades cobbling shoes, or a Semiramis getting up
foul linen.

How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had declined
his affections upon the daughter of a baker! yet do we feel the
imagination at all violated when we read the "true ballad," where King
Cophetua wooes the beggar maid?

Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity alloyed
with contempt. No one properly contemns a beggar. Poverty is a
comparative thing, and each degree of it is mocked by its "neighbour
grice." Its poor rents and comings-in are soon summed up and told.
Its pretences to property are almost ludicrous. Its pitiful attempts
to save excite a smile. Every scornful companion can weigh his
trifle-bigger purse against it. Poor man reproaches poor man in the
streets with impolitic mention of his condition, his own being a
shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both. No rascally
comparative insults a Beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him.
He is not in the scale of comparison. He is not under the measure of
property. He confessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No
one twitteth him with ostentation above his means. No one accuses him
of pride, or upbraideth him with mock humility. None jostle with him
for the wall, or pick quarrels for precedency. No wealthy neighbour
seeketh to eject him from his tenement. No man sues him. No man goes
to law with him. If I were not the independent gentleman that I am,
rather than I would be a retainer to the great, a led captain, or a
poor relation, I would choose, out of the delicacy and true greatness
of my mind, to be a Beggar.

Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the Beggar's robes, and
graceful _insignia_ of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the
suit in which he is expected to show himself in public. He is never
out of the fashion, or limpeth awkwardly behind it. He is not required
to put on court mourning. He weareth all colours, fearing none. His
costume hath undergone less change than the Quaker's. He is the only
man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearances. The ups
and downs of the world concern him no longer. He alone continueth
in one stay. The price of stock or land affecteth him not. The
fluctuations of agricultural or commercial prosperity touch him not,
or at worst but change his customers. He is not expected to become
bail or surety for any one. No man troubleth him with questioning his
religion or politics. He is the only free man in the universe. The
Mendicants of this great city were so many of her sights, her lions. I
can no more spare them than I could the Cries of London. No corner of
a street is complete without them. They are as indispensable as the
Ballad Singer; and in their picturesque attire as ornamental as the
Signs of old London. They were the standing morals, emblems, mementos,
dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary
checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry--

                      --Look
  Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there.

Above all, those old blind Tobits that used to line the wall of
Lincoln's Inn Garden, before modern fastidiousness had expelled them,
casting up their ruined orbs to catch a ray of pity, and (if possible)
of light, with their faithful Dog Guide at their feet,--whither are
they fled? or into what corners, blind as themselves, have they been
driven, out of the wholesome air and sun-warmth? immersed between
four walls, in what withering poor-house do they endure the penalty
of double darkness, where the chink of the dropt half-penny no more
consoles their forlorn bereavement, far from the sound of the cheerful
and hope-stirring tread of the passenger? Where hang their useless
staves? and who will farm their dogs?--Have the overseers of St. L----
caused them to be shot? or were they tied up in sacks, and dropt into
the Thames, at the suggestion of B----, the mild rector of ----?

Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne, most classical, and
at the same time, most English, of the Latinists!--who has treated
of this human and quadrupedal alliance, this dog and man friendship,
in the sweetest of his poems, the _Epitaphium in Canem_, or, _Dog's
Epitaph_. Reader, peruse it; and say, if customary sights, which could
call up such gentle poetry as this, were of a nature to do more
harm or good to the moral sense of the passengers through the daily
thoroughfares of a vast and busy metropolis.

  Pauperis hic Iri requiesco Lyciscus, herilis,
  Dum vixi, tutela vigil columenque senectæ,
  Dux cæco fidus: nec, me ducente, solebat,
  Prætenso hinc atque hinc baculo, per iniqua locorum
  Incertam explorare viam; sed fila secutus,
  Quæ dubios regerent passûs, vestigia tuta
  Fixit inoffenso gressu; gelidumque sedile
  In nudo nactus saxo, qua prætereuntium
  Unda frequens confluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras
  Lamentis, noctemque oculis ploravit obortam.
  Ploravit nec frustra; obolum dedit alter et alter,
  Queis corda et mentem indiderat natura benignam.
  Ad latus interea jacui sopitus herile,
  Vel mediis vigil in somnis; ad herilia jussa
  Auresque atque animum arrectus, seu frustula amice
  Porrexit sociasque dapes, seu longa diei
  Tædia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat.

  Hi mores, hæc vita fuit, dum fata sinebant,
  Dum neque languebam morbis, nec inerte senectâ;
  Quæ tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite cæcum
  Orbavit dominum: prisci sed gratia facti
  Ne tola intereat, longos deleta per annos,
  Exiguum hunc Irus tumulum de cespite fecit,
  Etsi inopis, non ingratæ, munuscula dextræ;
  Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque canemque
  Quod memoret, fidumque canem dominumque benignum.

         *       *       *       *       *

  Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie,
  That wont to tend my old blind master's steps,
  His guide and guard: nor, while my service lasted,
  Had he occasion for that staff, with which
  He now goes picking out his path in fear
  Over the highways and crossings; but would plant,
  Safe in the conduct of my friendly string,
  A firm foot forward still, till he had reach'd
  His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide
  Of passers by in thickest confluence flow'd:
  To whom with loud and passionate laments
  From morn to eve his dark estate he wail'd.
  Nor wail'd to all in vain: some here and there,
  The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave.
  I meantime at his feet obsequious slept;
  Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear
  Prick'd up at his least motion; to receive
  At his kind hand ray customary crums,
  And common portion in his feast of scraps;
  Or when night warn'd us homeward, tired and spent
  With our long day and tedious beggary.

  These were my manners, this my way of life,
  Till age and slow disease me overtook,
  And sever'd from my sightless master's side.
  But lest the grace of so good deeds should die.
  Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost,
  This slender tomb of turf hath Irus reared,
  Cheap monument of no ungrudging hand,
  And with short verse inscribed it, to attest,
  In long and lasting union to attest,
  The virtues of the Beggar and his Dog.

These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past a well-known
figure, or part of the figure, of a man, who used to glide his comely
upper half over the pavements of London, wheeling along with most
ingenious celerity upon a machine of wood; a spectacle to natives,
to foreigners, and to children. He was of a robust make, with a
florid sailor-like complexion, and his head was bare to the storm and
sunshine. He was a natural curiosity, a speculation to the scientific,
a prodigy to the simple. The infant would stare at the mighty man
brought down to his own level. The common cripple would despise his
own pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness, and hearty heart,
of this half-limbed giant. Few but must have noticed him; for the
accident, which brought him low, took place during the riots of 1780,
and he has been a groundling so long. He seemed earth-born, an Antæus,
and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured. He
was a grand fragment; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature, which
should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was not lost, but only
retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. I heard a
tremendous voice thundering and growling, as before an earthquake,
and, casting down my eyes, it was this mandrake reviling a steed that
had started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his
just stature to have rent the offending quadruped in shivers. He was
as the man-part of a Centaur, from which the horse-half had been
cloven in some dire Lapithan controversy. He moved on, as if he could
have made shift with yet half of the body-portion which was left
him. The _os sublime_ was not wanting; and he threw out yet a jolly
countenance upon the heavens. Forty-and-two years had he driven this
out of door trade, and now that his hair is grizzled in the service,
but his good spirits no way impaired, because he is not content to
exchange his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house,
he is expiating his contumacy in one of those houses (ironically
christened) of Correction.

Was a daily spectacle like this to be deemed a nuisance, which called
for legal interference to remove? or not rather a salutary and a
touching object, to the passers-by in a great city? Among her shows,
her museums, and supplies for ever-gaping curiosity (and what else but
an accumulation of sights--endless sights--_is_ a great city; or for
what else is it desirable?) was there not room for one _Lusus_ (not
_Naturæ_, indeed, but) _Accidentium_? What if in forty-and-two years'
going about, the man had scraped together enough to give a portion
to his child (as the rumour ran) of a few hundreds--whom had he
injured?--whom had he imposed upon? The contributors had enjoyed their
_sight_ for their pennies. What if after being exposed all day to the
heats, the rains, and the frosts of heaven--shuffling his ungainly
trunk along in an elaborate and painful motion--he was enabled to
retire at night to enjoy himself at a club of his fellow cripples over
a dish of hot meat and vegetables, as the charge was gravely brought
against him by a clergyman deposing before a House of Commons'
Committee--was _this_, or was his truly paternal consideration, which
(if a fact) deserved a statue rather than a whipping-post, and is
inconsistent at least with the exaggeration of nocturnal orgies which
he has been slandered with--a reason that he should be deprived of his
chosen, harmless, nay edifying, way of life, and be committed in hoary
age for a sturdy vagabond?--

There was a Yorick once, whom it would not have shamed to have sate
down at the cripples' feast, and to have thrown in his benediction,
ay, and his mite too, for a companionable symbol. "Age, thou hast lost
thy breed."--

Half of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by begging
are (I verily believe) misers' calumnies. One was much talked of in
the public papers some time since, and the usual charitable inferences
deduced. A clerk in the Bank was surprised with the announcement of
a five hundred pound legacy left him by a person whose name he was a
stranger to. It seems that in his daily morning walks from Peckham
(or some village thereabouts) where he lived, to his office, it had
been his practice for the last twenty years to drop his half-penny
duly into the hat of some blind Bartimeus, that sate begging alms
by the way-side in the Borough. The good old beggar recognised his
daily benefactor by the voice only; and, when he died, left all the
amassings of his alms (that had been half a century perhaps in the
accumulating) to his old Bank friend. Was this a story to purse up
people's hearts, and pennies, against giving an alms to the blind?--or
not rather a beautiful moral of well-directed charity on the one part,
and noble gratitude upon the other?

I sometimes wish I had been that Bank clerk.

I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creature, blinking, and
looking up with his no eyes in the sun--Is it possible I could have
steeled my purse against him?

Perhaps I had no small change.

Reader, do not be frightened at the hard words, imposition,
imposture--_give, and ask no questions_. Cast thy bread upon the
waters. Some have unawares (like this Bank clerk) entertained angels.

Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a
charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such)
comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small
children," in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable
existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save
a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he
pretendeth, _give_, and under a personate father of a family, think
(if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When
they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them
players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things,
which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell
whether they are feigned or not.




A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG


Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging
enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages
ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just
as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely
hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his
Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the
term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' holiday. The manuscript goes on
to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take
to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner
following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one
morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his
cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who
being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are,
let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly,
spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion,
till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry
antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of
much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than
nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all
over the East from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in
the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake
of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again
with a few dry branches, and the labour of an hour or two, at any
time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he
should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking
remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odour assailed his
nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What
could it proceed from?--not from the burnt cottage--he had smelt that
smell before--indeed this was by no means the first accident of the
kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young
fire-brand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed,
or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his
nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel
the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers,
and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth.
Some of the crums of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers,
and for the first time in his life (in the world's life indeed, for
before him no man had known it) he tasted--_crackling_! Again he felt
and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he
licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke
into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and
the pig that tasted so delicious; and, surrendering himself up to the
newborn pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched
skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in
his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters,
armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to
rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail-stones,
which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The
tickling pleasure, which he experienced in his lower regions, had
rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in
those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat
him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming
a little more sensible of his situation, something like the following
dialogue ensued.

"You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? Is it not
enough that you have burnt me down three houses with your dog's
tricks, and be hanged to you, but you must be eating fire, and I know
not what--what have you got there, I say?"

"O father, the pig, the pig, do come and taste how nice the burnt pig
eats."

The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he
cursed himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burnt
pig.

Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since moming, soon raked
out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser
half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out "Eat,
eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste--O Lord,"--with such like
barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke.

Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abominable thing,
wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural
young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had
done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn
tasted some of its flavour, which, make what sour mouths he would for
a pretence, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion
(for the manuscript here is a little tedious) both father and son
fairly sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had
despatched all that remained of the litter.

Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the
neighbours would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable
wretches, who could think of improving upon the good meat which
God had sent them. Nevertheless, strange stories got about. It was
observed that Ho-ti's cottage was burnt down now more frequently than
ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out
in broad day, others in the night-time. As often as the sow farrowed,
so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and Ho-ti himself,
which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed
to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched,
the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take
their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was
given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about
to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the
burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed into
the box. He handled it, and they all handled it, and burning their
fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature
prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all
the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given,--to
the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and
all present--without leaving the box, or any manner of consultation
whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty.

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity
of the decision: and, when the court was dismissed, went privily, and
bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few
days his Lordship's town house was observed to be on fire. The thing
took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fires in every
direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district.
The insurance offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter
and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of
architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this
custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my
manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that
the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked
(_burnt_, as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a
whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron.
Roasting by the string, or spit, came in a century or two later,
I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the
manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious arts,
make their way among mankind.--

Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must
be agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as
setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in
favour of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found
in ROAST PIG.

Of all the delicacies in the whole _mundus edibilis_, I will maintain
it to be the most delicate--_princeps obsoniorum_.

I speak not of your grown porkers--things between pig and pork--those
hobbydehoys--but a young and tender suckling--under a moon
old--guiltless as yet of the sty--with no original speck of the
_amor immunditiæ_, the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet
manifest--his voice as yet not broken, but something between a
childish treble, and a grumble--the mild forerunner, or _præludium_,
of a grunt.

_He must be roasted._ I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them
seethed, or boiled--but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument!

There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp,
tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, _crackling_, as it is well
called--the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure
at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance--with the
adhesive oleaginous--O call it not fat--but an indefinable sweetness
growing up to it--the tender blossoming of fat--fat cropped in the
bud--taken in the shoot--in the first innocence--the cream and
quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure food--the lean, no lean, but
a kind of animal manna--or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so
blended and running into each other, that both together make but one
ambrosian result, or common substance.

Behold him, while he is doing--it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth,
than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he
twirleth round the string!--Now he is just done. To see the extreme
sensibility of that tender age, he hath wept out his pretty
eyes--radiant jellies--shooting stars--

See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth!--wouldst
thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility
which too often accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would
have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable
animal--wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation--from these
sins he is happily snatched away--

  Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade,
  Death came with timely care--

his memory is odoriferous--no clown curseth, while his stomach half
rejecteth, the rank bacon--no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking
sausages--he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the
judicious epicure--and for such a tomb might be content to die.

He is the best of Sapors. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost
too transcendent--a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning,
that really a tender-conscienced person would do well to pause--too
ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips
that approach her--like lovers' kisses, she biteth--she is a pleasure
bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish--but
she stoppeth at the palate--she meddleth not with the appetite--and
the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for a mutton chop.

Pig--let me speak his praise--is no less provocative of the appetite,
than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate.
The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his
mild juices.

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices,
inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he
is--good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another.
He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the
least envious of banquets. He is all neighbours' fare.

I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the
good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in
this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my
friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine
own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants,
partridges, snipes, barn-door chicken (those "tame villatic fowl"),
capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as
I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue
of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like
Lear, "give every thing." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an
ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours, to extra-domiciliate,
or send out of the house, slightingly, (under pretext of friendship,
or I know not what) a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I
may say, to my individual palate--It argues an insensibility.

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good
old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without
stuffing a sweet-meat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had
dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the
oven. In my way to school (it was over London bridge) a grey-headed
old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt at this time of day that he was
a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity
of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, school-boy-like,
I made him a present of--the whole cake! I walked on a little,
buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of
self-satisfaction; but before I had got to the end of the bridge,
my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how
ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift
away to a stranger, that I had never seen before, and who might be a
bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt
would be taking in thinking that I--I myself, and not another--would
eat her nice cake--and what should I say to her the next time I saw
her--how naughty I was to part with her pretty present--and the odour
of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure
and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy
when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel
that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last--and I blamed
my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of
goodness, and above all I wished never to see the face again of that
insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey impostor.

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender
victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock,
as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is
gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light
merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and
dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh
of young, pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be
cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom
of the practice. It might impart a gusto--

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I
was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on
both sides, "Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig who obtained
his death by whipping (_per flagellationem extremam_) superadded a
pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible
suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using
that method of putting the animal to death?" I forget the decision.

His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread crums, done up
with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But, banish, dear
Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole
hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with
plantations of the rank and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or
make them stronger than they are--but consider, he is a weakling--a
flower.




A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE


As a single man, I have spent a good deal of my time in noting down
the infirmities of Married People, to console myself for those
superior pleasures, which they tell me I have lost by remaining as I
am.

I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their wives ever made any
great impression upon me, or had much tendency to strengthen me in
those anti-social resolutions, which I took up long ago upon more
substantial considerations. What oftenest offends me at the houses
of married persons where I visit, is an error of quite a different
description;--it is that they are too loving.

Not too loving neither: that does not explain my meaning. Besides,
why should that offend me? The very act of separating themselves from
the rest of the world, to have the fuller enjoyment of each other's
society, implies that they prefer one another to all the world.

But what I complain of is, that they carry this preference so
undisguisedly, they perk it up in the faces of us single people so
shamelessly, you cannot be in their company a moment without being
made to feel, by some indirect hint or open avowal, that _you_ are not
the object of this preference. Now there are some things which give
no offence, while implied or taken for granted merely; but expressed,
there is much offence in them. If a man were to accost the first
homely-featured or plain-dressed young woman of his acquaintance, and
tell her bluntly, that she was not handsome or rich enough for him,
and he could not marry her, he would deserve to be kicked for his ill
manners; yet no less is implied in the fact, that having access and
opportunity of putting the question to her, he has never yet thought
fit to do it. The young woman understands this as clearly as if it
were put into words; but no reasonable young woman would think of
making this the ground of a quarrel. Just as little right have a
married couple to tell me by speeches, and looks that are scarce less
plain than speeches, that I am not the happy man,--the lady's choice.
It is enough that I know I am not: I do not want this perpetual
reminding.

The display of superior knowledge or riches may be made sufficiently
mortifying; but these admit of a palliative. The knowledge which is
brought out to insult me, may accidentally improve me; and in the rich
man's houses and pictures,--his parks and gardens, I have a temporary
usufruct at least. But the display of married happiness has none of
these palliatives: it is throughout pure, unrecompensed, unqualified
insult.

Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least
invidious sort. It is the cunning of most possessors of any exclusive
privilege to keep their advantage as much out of sight as possible,
that their less favoured neighbours, seeing little of the benefit,
may the less be disposed to question the right. But these married
monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of their patent into our
faces.

Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and
satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple,
in that of the lady particularly: it tells you, that her lot is
disposed of in this world: that _you_ can have no hopes of her.
It is true, I have none; nor wishes either, perhaps: but this is
one of those truths which ought, as I said before, to be taken for
granted, not expressed. The excessive airs which those people give
themselves, founded on the ignorance of us unmarried people, would be
more offensive if they were less irrational. We will allow them to
understand the mysteries belonging to their own craft better than we
who have not had the happiness to be made free of the company: but
their arrogance is not content within these limits. If a single person
presume to offer his opinion in their presence, though upon the most
indifferent subject, he is immediately silenced as an incompetent
person. Nay, a young married lady of my acquaintance, who, the best
of the jest was, had not changed her condition above a fortnight
before, in a question on which I had the misfortune to differ from
her, respecting the properest mode of breeding oysters for the London
market, had the assurance to ask with a sneer, how such an old
Bachelor as I could pretend to know any thing about such matters.

But what I have spoken of hitherto is nothing to the airs which these
creatures give themselves when they come, as they generally do,
to have children. When I consider how little of a rarity children
are,--that every street and blind alley swarms with them,--that the
poorest people commonly have them in most abundance,--that there
are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these
bargains,--how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes
of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty,
disgrace, the gallows, &c.--I cannot for my life tell what cause
for pride there can possibly be in having them. If they were young
phoenixes, indeed, that were born but one in a year, there might be a
pretext. But when they are so common--

I do not advert to the insolent merit which they assume with their
husbands on these occasions. Let them look to that. But why _we_, who
are not their natural-born subjects, should be expected to bring our
spices, myrrh, and incense,--our tribute and homage of admiration,--I
do not see.

"Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the young
children:" so says the excellent office in our Prayer-book appointed
for the churching of women. "Happy is the man that hath his quiver
full of them:" So say I; but then don't let him discharge his
quiver upon us that are weaponless;--let them be arrows, but not to
gall and stick us. I have generally observed that these arrows are
double-headed: they have two forks, to be sure to hit with one or the
other. As for instance, when you come into a house which is full of
children, if you happen to take no notice of them (you are thinking
of something else, perhaps, and turn a deaf ear to their innocent
caresses), you are set down as untractable, morose, a hater of
children. On the other hand, if you find them more than usually
engaging,--if you are taken with their pretty manners, and set about
in earnest to romp and play with them, some pretext or other is sure
to be found for sending them out of the room: they are too noisy or
boisterous, or Mr. ---- does not like children. With one or other of
these forks the arrow is sure to hit you.

I could forgive their jealousy, and dispense with toying with their
brats, if it gives them any pain; but I think it unreasonable to be
called upon to _love_ them, where I see no occasion,--to love a whole
family, perhaps, eight, nine, or ten, indiscriminately,--to love all
the pretty dears, because children are so engaging.

I know there is a proverb, "Love me, love my dog:" that is not always
so very practicable, particularly if the dog be set upon you to tease
you or snap at you in sport. But a dog, or a lesser thing,--any
inanimate substance, as a keep-sake, a watch or a ring, a tree, or
the place where we last parted when my friend went away upon a long
absence, I can make shift to love, because I love him, and any thing
that reminds me of him; provided it be in its nature indifferent, and
apt to receive whatever hue fancy can give it. But children have a
real character and an essential being of themselves: they are amiable
or unamiable _per se_; I must love or hate them as I see cause for
either 'in their qualities. A child's nature is too serious a thing to
admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being, and
to be loved or hated accordingly: they stand with me upon their own
stock, as much as men and women do. O! but you will say, sure it is
an attractive age,--there is something in the tender years of infancy
that of itself charms us. That is the very reason why I am more nice
about them. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature,
not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them; but the
prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it
should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another
in glory; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest.--I was
always rather squeamish in my women and children.

But this is not the worst: one must be admitted into their familiarity
at least, before they can complain of inattention. It implies visits,
and some kind of intercourse. But if the husband be a man with whom
you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage,--if you did not
come in on the wife's side,--if you did not sneak into the house in
her train, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before
their courtship was so much as thought on,--look about you--your
tenure is precarious--before a twelve-month shall roll over your head,
you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered towards
you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have
scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I
can rely, whose friendship did not commence _after the period of his
marriage_. With some limitations they can endure that: but that the
good man should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship
in which they were not consulted, though it happened before they
knew him,--before they that are now man and wife ever met,--this
is intolerable to them. Every long friendship, every old authentic
intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with
their currency, as a sovereign Prince calls in the good old money that
was coined in some reign before he was born or thought of, to be new
marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will
let it pass current in the world. You may guess what luck generally
befalls such a rusty piece of metal as I am in these _new mintings_.

Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm you out
of their husband's confidence. Laughing at all you say with a kind of
wonder, as if you were a queer kind of fellow that said good things,
_but an oddity_, is one of the ways;--they have a particular kind of
stare for the purpose;--till at last the husband, who used to defer to
your judgment, and would pass over some excrescences of understanding
and manner for the sake of a general vein of observation (not quite
vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect whether you are
not altogether a humorist,--a fellow well enough to have consorted
with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be introduced
to ladies. This may be called the staring way; and is that which has
oftenest been put in practice against me.

Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony: that is,
where they find you an object of especial regard with their husband,
who is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attachment founded
on esteem which he has conceived towards you; by never-qualified
exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, till the good man,
who understands well enough that it is all done in compliment to him,
grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is due to so much candour,
and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking down a peg or two
in his enthusiasm, sinks at length to that kindly level of moderate
esteem,--that "decent affection and complacent kindness" towards you,
where she herself can join in sympathy with him without much stretch
and violence to her sincerity.

Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so desirable
a purpose are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity,
continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband fond
of you. If an esteem for something excellent in your moral character
was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any
imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your conversation, she
will cry, "I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. ---- as
a great wit." If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm
in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content
for this to overlook some trifling irregularities in your moral
deportment, upon the first notice of any of these she as readily
exclaims, "This, my dear, is your good Mr. ----." One good lady whom
I took the liberty of expostulating with for not showing me quite so
much respect as I thought due to her husband's old friend, had the
candour to confess to me that she had often heard Mr. ---- speak
of me before marriage, and that she had conceived a great desire
to be acquainted with me, but that the sight of me had very much
disappointed her expectations; for from her husband's representations
of me, she had formed a notion that she was to see a fine, tall,
officer-like looking man (I use her very words); the very reverse of
which proved to be the truth. This was candid; and I had the civility
not to ask her in return, how she came to pitch upon a standard of
personal accomplishments for her husband's friends which differed so
much from his own; for my friend's dimensions as near as possible
approximate to mine; he standing five feet five in his shoes, in which
I have the advantage of him by about half an inch; and he no more than
myself exhibiting any indications of a martial character in his air or
countenance.

These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered in the
absurd attempt to visit at their houses. To enumerate them all would
be a vain endeavour: I shall therefore just glance at the very common
impropriety of which married ladies are guilty,--of treating us as if
we were their husbands, and _vice versâ_. I mean, when they use us
with familiarity, and their husbands with ceremony. _Testacea_, for
instance, kept me the other night two or three hours beyond my usual
time of supping, while she was fretting because Mr. ---- did not come
home, till the oysters were all spoiled, rather than she would be
guilty of the impoliteness of touching one in his absence. This was
reversing the point of good manners: for ceremony is an invention to
take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to
be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some
other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in
little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to
deny in the greater. Had _Testacea_ kept the oysters back for me, and
withstood her husband's importunities to go to supper, she would have
acted according to the strict rules of propriety. I know no ceremony
that ladies are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond the point
of a modest behaviour and decorum: therefore I must protest against
the vicarious gluttony of _Cerasia_, who at her own table sent away a
dish of Morellas, which I was applying to with great good will, to her
husband at the other end of the table, and recommended a plate of
less extraordinary gooseberries to my unwedded palate in their stead.
Neither can I excuse the wanton affront of ----.

But I am weary of stringing up all my married acquaintance by Roman
denominations. Let them amend and change their manners, or I promise
to record the full-length English of their names, to the terror of all
such desperate offenders in future.




ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS


The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other
day--I know not by what chance it was preserved so long--tempts me to
call to mind a few of the Players, who make the principal figure in
it. It presents the cast of parts in the Twelfth Night, at the old
Drury-lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago. There is something very
touching in these old remembrances. They make us think how we _once_
used to read a Play Bill--not, as now peradventure, singling out a
favorite performer, and casting a negligent eye over the rest; but
spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of
the scene;--when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether
Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian; when Benson, and
Burton, and Phillimore--names of small account--had an importance,
beyond what we can be content to attribute now to the time's best
actors.--"Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore."--What a full Shakspearian sound
it carries! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the manner, of
the gentle actor!

Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen
years, can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as
Ophelia; Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well; and Viola in this play.
Her voice had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough
with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady
melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts--in which her memory now
chiefly lives--in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There
is no giving an account how she delivered the disguised story of her
love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to
weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following line,
to make up the music--yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather _read_,
not without its grace and beauty--but, when she had declared her
sister's history to be a "blank," and that she "never told her love,"
there was a pause, as if the story had ended--and then the image of
the "worm in the bud" came up as a new suggestion--and the heightened
image of "Patience" still followed after that, as by some growing (and
not mechanical) process, thought springing up after thought, I would
almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine
lines--

  Write loyal cantos of contemned love--
  Hollow your name to the reverberate hills--

there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which
was to follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion; or it was nature's
own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without
rule or law.

Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the pride of her beauty, made
an admirable Olivia. She was particularly excellent in her unbending
scenes in conversation with the Clown. I have seen some Olivias--and
those very sensible actresses too--who in these interlocutions have
seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to vie conceits with him
in downright emulation. But she used him for her sport, like what
he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, and then to be
dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still. She touched the
imperious fantastic humour of the character with nicety. Her fine
spacious person filled the scene.

The part of Malvolio has in my judgment been so often misunderstood,
and the _general merits_ of the actor, who then played it, so unduly
appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix
upon these points.

Of all the actors who flourished in my time--a melancholy phrase
if taken aright, reader--Bensley had most of the swell of soul,
was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions
consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy. He had
the true poetical enthusiasm--the rarest faculty among players. None
that I remember possessed even a portion of that fine madness which he
threw out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, or the transports of
the Venetian incendiary at the vision of the fired city. His voice had
the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect of the trumpet.
His gait was uncouth and stiff, but no way embarrassed by affectation;
and the thorough-bred gentleman was uppermost in every movement. He
seized the moment of passion with the greatest truth; like a faithful
clock, never striking before the time; never anticipating or leading
you to anticipate. He was totally destitute of trick and artifice. He
seemed come upon the stage to do the poet's message simply, and he
did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the
errands of the gods. He let the passion or the sentiment do its own
work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to mountebank
it; and betrayed none of that _cleverness_ which is the bane of
serious acting. For this reason, his Iago was the only endurable one
which I remember to have seen. No spectator from his action could
divine more of his artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His
confessions in soliloquy alone put you in possession of the mystery.
There were no by-intimations to make the audience fancy their own
discernment so much greater than that of the Moor--who commonly stands
like a great helpless mark set up for mine Ancient, and a quantity of
barren spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The Iago of Bensley did
not go to work so grossly. There was a triumphant tone about the
character, natural to a general consciousness of power; but none of
that petty vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any
little successful stroke of its knavery--as is common with your small
villains, and green probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow
before its time. It was not a man setting his wits at a child, and
winking all the while at other children who are mightily pleased at
being let into the secret; but a consummate villain entrapping a noble
nature into toils, against which no discernment was available, where
the manner was as fathomless as the purpose seemed dark, and without
motive. The part of Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed by
Bensley, with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some
recent castings of that character) the very tradition must be worn out
from the stage. No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving
it to Mr. Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons: when Bensley was occasionally
absent from the theatre, John Kemble thought it no derogation to
succeed to the part. Malvolio is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes
comic but by accident. He is cold, austere, repelling; but dignified,
consistent, and, for what appears, rather of an over-stretched
morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan; and he might have
worn his gold chain with honour in one of our old round-head families,
in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax. But his morality and
his manners are misplaced in Illyria. He is opposed to the proper
_levities_ of the piece, and falls in the unequal contest. Still his
pride, or his gravity, (call it which you will) is inherent, and
native to the man, not mock or affected, which latter only are the
fit objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the best unlovely,
but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His bearing is lofty, a little
above his station, but probably not much above his deserts. We see no
reason why he should not have been brave, honourable, accomplished.
His careless committal of the ring to the ground (which he was
commissioned to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth
and feeling. His dialect on all occasions is that of a gentleman, and
a man of education. We must not confound him with the eternal old, low
steward of comedy. He is master of the household to a great Princess;
a dignity probably conferred upon him for other respects than age or
length of service. Olivia, at the first indication of his supposed
madness, declares that she "would not have him miscarry for half of
her dowry." Does this look as if the character was meant to appear
little or insignificant? Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face--of
what?--of being "sick of self-love,"--but with a gentleness and
considerateness which could not have been, if she had not thought
that this particular infirmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to the
knight, and his sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited; and when
we take into consideration the unprotected condition of his mistress,
and the strict regard with which her state of real or dissembled
mourning would draw the eyes of the world upon her house-affairs,
Malvolio might feel the honour of the family in some sort in his
keeping; as it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers, or
kinsmen, to look to it--for Sir Toby had dropped all such nice
respects at the buttery hatch. That Malvolio was meant to be
represented as possessing estimable qualities, the expression of the
Duke in his anxiety to have him reconciled, almost infers. "Pursue
him, and entreat him to a peace." Even in his abused state of chains
and darkness, a sort of greatness seems never to desert him. He
argues highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas, and philosophises
gallantly upon his straw.[1] There must have been some shadow of worth
about the man; he must have been something more than a mere vapour--a
thing of straw, or Jack in office--before Fabian and Maria could have
ventured sending him upon a courting-errand to Olivia. There was some
consonancy (as he would say) in the undertaking, or the jest would
have been too bold even for that house of misrule.

Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness.
He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. He was starch,
spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of pride seemed bottomed
upon a sense of worth. There was something in it beyond the coxcomb.
It was big and swelling, but you could not be sure that it was hollow.
You might wish to see it taken down, but you felt that it was upon an
elevation. He was magnificent from the outset; but when the decent
sobrieties of the character began to give way, and the poison of
self-love, in his conceit of the Countess's affection, gradually to
work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person
stood before you. How he went smiling to himself! with what ineffable
carelessness would he twirl his gold chain! what a dream it was! you
were infected with the illusion, and did not wish that it should be
removed! you had no room for laughter! if an unseasonable reflection
of morality obtruded itself, it was a deep sense of the pitiable
infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him open to such frenzies--but
in truth you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it
lasted--you felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with
the eyes open. Who would not wish to live but for a day in the conceit
of such a lady's love as Olivia? Why, the Duke would have given his
principality but for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to
have been so deluded. The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste
manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate Hyperion. O! shake
not the castles of his pride--endure yet for a season bright moments
of confidence--"stand still ye watches of the element," that Malvolio
may be still in fancy fair Olivia's lord--but fate and retribution say
no--I hear the mischievous titter of Maria--the witty taunts of Sir
Toby--the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight--the
counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked--and "thus the whirligig of time,"
as the true clown hath it, "brings in his revenges." I confess that I
never saw the catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it,
without a kind of tragic interest. There was good foolery too. Few now
remember Dodd. What an Aguecheek the stage lost in him! Lovegrove, who
came nearest to the old actors, revived the character some few seasons
ago, and made it sufficiently grotesque; but Dodd was _it_, as it
came out of Nature's hands. It might be said to remain _in puris
naturalibus_. In expressing slowness of apprehension this actor
surpassed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing
slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with
a painful process, till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a
twilight conception--its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back
his intellect, as some have had the power to retard their pulsation.
The balloon takes less time in filling, than it took to cover
the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with
expression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a corner of his
eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would
catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to
the remainder.

I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five and twenty
years ago that walking in the gardens of Gray's Inn--they were then
far finer than they are now--the accursed Verulam Buildings had not
encroached upon all the east side of them, cutting out delicate green
crankles, and shouldering away one of two of the stately alcoves
of the terrace--the survivor stands gaping and relationless as if
it remembered its brother--they are still the best gardens of any
of the Inns of Court, my beloved Temple not forgotten--have the
gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverend and
law-breathing--Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their
gravel walks--taking my afternoon solace on a summer day upon the
aforesaid terrace, a comely sad personage came towards me, whom, from
his grave air and deportment, I judged to be one of the old Benchers
of the Inn. He had a serious thoughtful forehead, and seemed to be
in meditations of mortality. As I have an instinctive awe of old
Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of subindicative token of
respect which one is apt to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger,
and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than any
positive motion of the body to that effect--a species of humility and
will-worship which I observe, nine times out of ten, rather puzzles
than pleases the person it is offered to--when the face turning
full upon me strangely identified itself with that of Dodd. Upon
close inspection I was not mistaken. But could this sad thoughtful
countenance be the same vacant face of folly which I had hailed so
often under circumstances of gaiety; which I had never seen without
a smile, or recognised but as the usher of mirth; that looked out
so formally flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so
impotently busy in Backbite; so blankly divested of all meaning, or
resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand
agreeable impertinences? Was this the face--full of thought and
carefulness--that had so often divested itself at will of every trace
of either to give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two or
three hours at least of its furrows? Was this the face--manly, sober,
intelligent,--which I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry
with? The remembrance of the freedoms which I had taken with it came
upon me with a reproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I
thought it looked upon me with a sense of injury. There is something
strange as well as sad in seeing actors--your pleasant fellows
particularly--subjected to and suffering the common lot--their
fortunes, their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene,
their actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly
connect them with more awful responsibilities. The death of this fine
actor took place shortly after this meeting. He had quitted the stage
some months; and, as I learned afterwards, had been in the habit of
resorting daily to these gardens almost to the day of his decease. In
these serious walks probably he was divesting himself of many scenic
and some real vanities--weaning himself from the frivolities of the
lesser and the greater theatre--doing gentle penance for a life of no
very reprehensible fooleries,--taking off by degrees the buffoon mask
which he might feel he had worn too long--and rehearsing for a more
solemn cast of part. Dying he "put on the weeds of Dominic."[2]

If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily forget the
pleasant creature, who in those days enacted the part of the Clown
to Dodd's Sir Andrew.--Richard, or rather Dicky Suett--for so in
his life-time he delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the
appellation--lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy
Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender years were dedicated.
There are who do yet remember him at that period--his pipe clear and
harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was
"cherub Dicky."

What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange
the holy for the profane state; whether he had lost his good voice
(his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John, "with
hallooing and singing of anthems;" or whether he was adjudged to lack
something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to
an occupation which professeth to "commerce with the skies"--I could
never rightly learn; but we find him, after the probation of a
twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and become one
of us.

I think he was not altogether of that timber, out of which cathedral
seats and sounding boards are hewed. But if a glad heart--kind and
therefore glad--be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of
Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after
his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless
satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted for a
surplice--his white stole, and _albe_.

The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the
boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been
told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At
the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator
than he was in any true sense himself imitable.

He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all
things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the
matter. He was known, like Puck, by his note--_Ha! Ha! Ha!_--sometimes
deepening to _Ho! Ho! Ho!_ with an irresistible accession, derived
perhaps remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to
his prototype of,--_O La!_ Thousands of hearts yet respond to the
chuckling _O La!_ of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by
the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews's mimicry. The "force of
nature could no further go." He drolled upon the stock of these two
syllables richer than the cuckoo.

Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition.
Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never
have supported himself upon those two spider's strings, which served
him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt
or a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down;
the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his
balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his,
with Robin Good-Fellow, "thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of
a scratched face or a torn doublet.

Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They
have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery
tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest;
in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest
rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest,
or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch.

Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal
favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The
difference, I take it, was this:--Jack was more _beloved_ for his
sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was more _liked_ for
his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole conscience
stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the Children in the
Wood--but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of Love, too
young to know what conscience is. He put us into Vesta's days. Evil
fled before him--not as from Jack, as from an antagonist,--but because
it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was
delivered from the burthen of that death; and, when Death came
himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by
Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the
last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune,
with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his
epitaph--_O La! O La! Bobby!_

The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) commonly played Sir
Toby in those days; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of
that half-Falstaff which he did not quite fill out. He was as much too
showy as Moody (who sometimes took the part) was dry and sottish. In
sock or buskin there was an air of swaggering gentility about Jack
Palmer. He was a _gentleman_ with a slight infusion of _the footman_.
His brother Bob (of recenter memory) who was his shadow in every thing
while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow afterwards--was
a _gentleman_ with a little stronger infusion of the _latter
ingredient_; that was all. It is amazing how a little of the more or
less makes a difference in these things. When you saw Bobby in the
Duke's Servant,[3] you said, what a pity such a pretty fellow was only
a servant. When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought
you could trace his promotion to some lady of quality who fancied
the handsome fellow in his topknot, and had bought him a commission.
Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable.

Jack had two voices,--both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating;
but his secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively
histrionic than his common one. It was reserved for the spectator; and
the dramatis personas were supposed to know nothing at all about it.
The _lies_ of young Wilding, and the _sentiments_ in Joseph Surface,
were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the audience. This secret
correspondence with the company before the curtain (which is the
bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some
kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve
or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so
indispensable to scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather
interfere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe
in such characters as Surface--the villain of artificial comedy--even
while you read or see them. If you did, they would shock and not
divert you. When Ben, in Love for Love, returns from sea, the
following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with his
father--

_Sir Sampson._ Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw
thee.

_Ben._ Ey, ey, been! Been far enough, an that be all.--Well, father,
and how do all at home? how does brother Dick, and brother Val?

_Sir Sampson._ Dick! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. I
writ you word when you were at Leghorn.

_Ben._ Mess, that's true; Marry, I had forgot. Dick's dead, as you
say--Well, and how?--I have a many questions to ask you--

Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be
revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the
warm-hearted temperament of the character. But when you read it in the
spirit with which such playful selections and specious combinations
rather than strict _metaphrases_ of nature should be taken, or when
you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does wound the moral
sense at all. For what is Ben--the pleasant sailor which Bannister
gives us--but a piece of satire--a creation of Congreve's fancy--a
dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character--his
contempt of money--his credulity to women--with that necessary
estrangement from home which it is just within the verge of
credibility to suppose _might_ produce such an hallucination as is
here described. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as
a stain upon his character. But when an actor comes, and instead
of the delightful phantom--the creature dear to half-belief--which
Bannister exhibited--displays before our eyes a downright concretion
of a Wapping sailor--a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar--and nothing
else--when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of
the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose--he gives to it
a downright daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its
actions; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a
pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by
them alone--we feel the discord of the thing; the scene is disturbed;
a real man has got in among the dramatis personæ, and puts them out.
We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not
behind the curtain but in the first or second gallery.

[Footnote 1:_Clown_. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild
  fowl?
_Mal_. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.
_Clown_. What thinkest thou of his opinion?
_Mal_. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion.]

[Footnote 2: Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice
collection of old English literature. I should judge him to have been
a man of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu which no length of
study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him
one evening in Aguecheek, and recognising Dodd the next day in Fleet
Street, was irresistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him
as the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a "Save you,
_Sir Andrew_." Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this unusual address
from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave of the hand, put
him off with an "Away, _Fool_."]

[Footnote 3: High Life Below Stairs.]




ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY


The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our
stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years
only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear
them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional license of
dialogue? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic
characters will not stand the moral test. We screw every thing up to
that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of
an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications
of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent
or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests
left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours'
duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which
inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are
spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point
of strict morality) and take it all for truth. We substitute a real
for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try him in our
courts, from which there is no appeal to the _dramatis personæ_, his
peers. We have been spoiled with--not sentimental comedy--but a tyrant
far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the
exclusive and all devouring drama of common life; where the moral
point is every thing; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed
personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy) we recognise
ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons,
enemies,--the same as in life,--with an interest in what is going on
so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment,
in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for
a moment. What is _there_ transacting, by no modification is made
to affect us in any other manner than the same events or characters
would do in our relationships of life. We carry our fire-side concerns
to the theatre with us. We do not go thither, like our ancestors,
to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our
experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate.
We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful
privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral
ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue; or which in
fact was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in
question; that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual
moral questioning--the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted
casuistry--is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the
interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away
by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark
like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic
representation of disorder; and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety
that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great
blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine.

I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer
for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of
the strict conscience,--not to live always in the precincts of the
law-courts,--but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a
world with no meddling restrictions--to get into recesses, whither the
hunter cannot follow me--

             --Secret shades
  Of woody Ida's inmost grove,
  While yet there was no fear of Jove--

I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy
for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired
the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with
others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of
Congreve's--nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's--comedies. I
am the gayer at least for it; and I could never connect those sports
of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to
imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much
as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with
few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and
my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as
warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play
I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of _police_
is the measure of _political justice_. The atmosphere will blight
it, it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has
no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and
incapable of making a stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has
wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels.
But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?--The
Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in
their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact they do not
appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They
break through no laws, or conscientious restraints. They know of none.
They have got out of Christendom into the land--what shall I call
it?--of cuckoldry--the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty,
and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene
of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No
good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good
person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in
in these plays--the few exceptions only are _mistakes_--is alike
essentially vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is
especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his
scenes,--some little generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps
excepted,--not only any thing like a faultless character, but any
pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did
this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the
design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power
which his Way of the World in particular possesses of interesting you
all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care
nothing--for you neither hate nor love his personages--and I think it
is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole.
He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather
than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and
his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had
he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a
revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the
impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of
deformities, which now are none, because we think them none.

Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend
Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,--the business of
their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No
other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognised;
principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of
things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No
such effects are produced in _their_ world. When we are among them, we
are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages.
No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings,--for
they have none among them. No peace of families is violated,--for
no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is
stained,--for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections
are disquieted,--no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder,--for
affection's depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil.
There is neither right nor wrong,--gratitude or its opposite,--claim
or duty,--paternity or sonship. Of what consequence is it to virtue,
or how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon, or
Dapperwit, steal away Miss Martha; or who is the father of Lord
Froth's, or Sir Paul Pliant's children.

The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at
the issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice.
But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite
as impertinently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out
of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease
excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for
which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful
necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams.

Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it
is something to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This
comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of
the sentimental comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it
should be now _acted_, though it continues, at long intervals, to be
announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was
Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn
plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice--to express it
in a word--the downright _acted_ villany of the part, so different
from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,--the hypocritical
assumption of hypocrisy,--which made Jack so deservedly a favourite
in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of
play-goers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess
that he divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in
fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are passages,--like
that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a
poor relation,--incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the
attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either
of which must destroy the other--but over these obstructions Jack's
manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked
you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any
pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to
get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns.
The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted
every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the
contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not
believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in
Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less
pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous;
a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities: the gaiety
upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of
Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements.

A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do
the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every
turn which might tend to unrealise, and so to make the character
fascinating. He must take his cue from his spectators, who would
expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as
the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which
I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old friend
Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Church-yard memory--(an exhibition
as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad
and good man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions
of the former,--and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a
toasting fork is not to be despised,--so finely contrast with the
meek complacent kissing of the rod,--taking it in like honey and
butter,--with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle
bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of
a popular young ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would
not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower?--John
Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to
you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You
had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips.
His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his
fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it.
What was it to you if that half-reality, the husband, was over-reached
by the puppetry--or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was
persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of Othello and
Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has past from the stage
in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness.
The pleasant old Teazle _King_, too, is gone in good time. His
manner would scarce have past current in our day. We must love or
hate--acquit or condemn--censure or pity--exert our detestable
coxcombry of moral judgment upon every thing. Joseph Surface, to go
down now, must be a downright revolting villain--no compromise--his
first appearance must shock and give horror--his specious
plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers
welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic
harm even) could come, or was meant to come of them, must inspire a
cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the
scene--for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends,
but his brother's professions of a good heart centre in downright
self-satisfaction) must be _loved_ and Joseph _hated_. To balance one
disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer
the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings
(while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as
they were meant to concern any body on the stage,--he must be a real
person, capable in law of sustaining an injury--a person towards whom
duties are to be acknowledged--the genuine crim-con antagonist of the
villanous seducer Joseph. To realise him more, his sufferings under
his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life--must
(or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same
predicament would move you in a neighbour or old friend. The delicious
scenes which give the play its name and zest, must affect you in
the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a dear
female friend attacked in your real presence. Crabtree, and Sir
Benjamin--those poor snakes that live but in the sunshine of your
mirth--must be rippened by this hot-bed process of realization
into asps or amphisbænas; and Mrs. Candour--O! frightful! become a
hooded serpent. Oh who that remembers Parsons and Dodd--the wasp and
butterfly of the School for Scandal--in those two characters; and
charming natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished
from the fine lady of comedy, in this latter part--would forego
the true scenic delight--the escape from life--the oblivion of
consequences--the holiday barring out of the pedant Reflection--those
Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world--to
sit instead at one of our modern plays--to have his coward conscience
(that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with
perpetual appeals--dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without
repose must be--and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional
justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectators'
risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author nothing?

No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as
this _manager's comedy_. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abingdon
in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired, when I
first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions,
remained. I remember it was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble,
who took the part of Charles after Smith; but, I thought, very
unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a
certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections
of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased
beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of
Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a passport to
success in one of so opposite a tendency. But, as far as I could
judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal
incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part
came steeped and dulcified in good humour. He made his defects a
grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served
to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed
to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling
sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each in
succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could be
altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue--the
dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley--because none understood it--half
so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to my
recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of
tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic
character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed
to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The
relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since
him--the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the
players in Hamlet--the sportive relief which he threw into the darker
shades of Richard--disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods,
his torpors--but they were the halting-stones and resting-places of
his tragedy-politic savings, and fetches of the breath--husbandry of
the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist--rather, I
think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful
than the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigilance, the "lidless
dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy.




ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN


Not many nights ago I had come home from seeing this extraordinary
performer in Cockletop; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical
image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain
I tried to divest myself of it, by conjuring up the most opposite
associations. I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics
of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not do.

  --There the antic sate
  Mocking our state--

his queer visnomy--his bewildering costume--all the strange things
which he had raked together--his serpentine rod, swagging about in his
pocket--Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics--O'Keefe's wild
farce, and _his_ wilder commentary--till the passion of laughter, like
grief in excess, relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep
which in the first instance it had driven away.

But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers,
than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape
of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me,
like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been
taking opium--all the strange combinations, which this strangest of
all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the
day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for the loss
of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil
to have fixed them when I awoke! A season or two since there was
exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a
Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far
short of the former.

There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one
it is!) of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down,
and call _his_. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks,
in unaccountable warfare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an
entirely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion.
Not so much a comedian, as a company. If his name could be multiplied
like his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone,
literally _makes faces_: applied to any other person, the phrase is a
mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human countenance.
Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend
Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be
surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river horse; or
come forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis.

I have seen this gifted actor, in Sir Christopher Curry--in Old
Dornton--diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a
crowded theatre beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid of
the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen
some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players.
But in the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and
unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers.
The school of Munden began, and must end with himself.

Can any man _wonder_, like him? can any man _see ghosts_, like
him? or _fight with his own shadow_--"SESSA"--as he does in that
strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Preston--where his
alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico
to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment,
as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him
can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a preternatural interest over
the commonest daily-life objects? A table, or a joint stool, in his
conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It
is invested with constellatory importance. You could not speak of it
with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar
in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of
Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it
touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the
seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter,
contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg
of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the common-place
materials of life, like primæval man with the sun and stars about him.




THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA

(_From the 1st Edition_, 1833)




PREFACE

BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA


This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining
way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature.

To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if
there was ever much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years'
and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.

I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected
to my late friend's writings was well-founded. Crude they are, I grant
you--a sort of unlicked, incondite things--villainously pranked in an
affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been _his_,
if they had been other than such; and better it is, that a writer
should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a
naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. Egotistical
they have been pronounced by some who did not know, that what he tells
us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another; as
in a former Essay (to save many instances)--where under the _first
person_ (his favourite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate
of a country-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and
connections--in direct opposition to his own early history. If it
be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and
affections of another--making himself many, or reducing many unto
himself--then is the skilful novelist, who all along brings in his
hero, or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all;
who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how
shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who doubtless, under
cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blameless vent
to his most inward feelings, and expresses his own story modestly?

My late friend was in many respects a singular character. Those who
did not like him, hated him; and some, who once liked him, afterwards
became his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little
concern what he uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither
time nor place, and would e'en out with what came uppermost. With the
severe religionist he would pass for a free-thinker; while the other
faction set him down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he
belied his sentiments. Few understood him; and I am not certain that
at all times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that
dangerous figure--irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and reaped
plain, unequivocal hatred.--He would interrupt the gravest discussion
with some light jest; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears
that could understand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The
informal habit of his mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of
speech, forbade him to be an orator; and he seemed determined that,
no one else should play that part when he was present. He was _petit_
and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have seen him sometimes
in what is called good company, but where he has been a stranger, sit
silent, and be suspected for an odd fellow; till some unlucky occasion
provoking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether
senseless perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his character
for the evening. It was hit or miss with him; but nine times out of
ten, he contrived by this device to send away a whole company his
enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his
happiest _impromptus_ had the appearance of effort. He has been
accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was but struggling
to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose his companions for
some individuality of character which they manifested.--Hence, not
many persons of science, and few professed _literati_, were of his
councils. They were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain
fortune; and, as to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious
than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) income, he passed with
most of them for a great miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake.
His _intimados_, to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged
regiment. He found them floating on the surface of society; and the
colour, or something else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs stuck
to him--but they were gbod and loving burrs for all that. He never
greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any
of these were scandalised (and offences were sure to arise), he could
not help it. When he has been remonstrated with for not making more
concessions to the feelings of good people, he would retort by asking,
what one point did these good people ever concede to him? He was
temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on
this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he
might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would say, as
a solvent of speech. Marry--as the friendly vapour ascended, how
his prattle would curl up sometimes with it! the ligaments, which
tongue-tied him, were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist!

I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend
is departed. His jests were beginning to grow obsolete, and his
stories to be found out. He felt the approaches of age; and while he
pretended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to
bind him. Discoursing with him latterly on this subject, he expressed
himself with a pettishness, which I thought unworthy of him. In our
walks about his suburban retreat (as he called it) at Shacklewell,
some children belonging to a school of industry had met us, and bowed
and curtseyed, as he thought, in an especial manner to _him_. "They
take me for a visiting governor," he muttered earnestly. He had
a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything
important and parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to that
stamp daily.. He had a general aversion from being treated like a
grave or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances
of age that should so entitle him. He herded always, while it was
possible, with people younger than himself. He did not conform to the
march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners
lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The _toga
virilis_ never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions
of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of
manhood. These were weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key
to explicate some of his writings.




BLAKESMOOR IN H-----SHIRE


I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will
over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The
traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy: and
contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession
to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible
with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present
aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us
between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is
chance but some present human frailty--an act of inattention on the
part of some of the auditory--or a trait of affectation, or worse,
vain-glory, on that of the preacher--puts us by our best thoughts,
disharmonising the place and the occasion. But would'st thou know the
beauty of holiness?--go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of
good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church:
think of the piety that has kneeled there--the congregations, old
and young, that have found consolation there--the meek pastor--the
docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting
comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself
become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and
weep around thee.

Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles
out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great house with
which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised that
the owner of it had lately pulled it down; still I had a vague notion
that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity with
magnificence could not have been crushed all at once into the mere
dust and rubbish which I found it.

The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the
demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to--an antiquity.

I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood
the great gates? What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the
out-houses commence? a few bricks only lay as representatives of that
which was so stately and so spacious.

Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt
ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion.

Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of
destruction, at the plucking of every pannel I should have felt the
varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a plank
at least out of the cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I
used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plat before, and the hum
and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it about
me--it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns; or a pannel of
the yellow room.

Why, every plank and pannel of that house for me had magic in it.
The tapestried bed-rooms--tapestry so much better than painting--not
adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots--at which childhood ever
and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as
quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter
with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally--all Ovid on the
walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actæon in mid sprout,
with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking,
and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately
divesting of Marsyas.

Then, that haunted room--in which old Mrs. Battle died--whereinto I
have crept, but always in the day-time, with a passion of fear; and
a sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the
past.--_How shall they build it up again?_

It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that
traces of the splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent.
Its furniture was still standing--even to the tarnished gilt leather
battledores, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery,
which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely
child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook
and corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere.

The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as
it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration, So strange a
passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there
lay--I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion--half hid
by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which
bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict
and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and
not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I
found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus
Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive prospects--and
those at no great distance from the house--I was told of such--what
were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden?--So far from
a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences
of my chosen prison; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture
of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with that
garden-loving poet--

  Bind me, ye woodbines, in your 'twines,
  Curl me about, ye gadding vines;
  And oh so close your circles lace,
  That I may never leave this place;
  But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
  Ere I your silken bondage break,
  Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
  And, courteous briars, nail me through!

I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides--the low-built
roof--parlours ten feet by ten--frugal boards, and all the homeliness
of home--these were the condition of my birth--the wholesome soil
which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest
lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond;
and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting
accidents of a great fortune.

To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been
born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than
to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and the coatless
antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a
Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names may warm
himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit them. The claims
of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me
of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? can it be hacked off as a
spur can? or torn away like a tarnished garter?

What, else, were the families of the great to us? what pleasure should
we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass
monuments? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods,
if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent
elevation?

Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon that hung
upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have
I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters--thy
emblematic supporters, with their prophetic "Resurgam"--till, every
dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility?
Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and of nights, hast detained my
steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to
dreaming on thee.

This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of
blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion.

Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not,
I inquired not; but its fading rags, and colours cobweb-stained, told
that its subject was of two centuries back.

And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas--feeding
flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln--did I in less
earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud
Ægon?--repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly
have heaped in his life-time upon my poor pastoral progenitor.

If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the
mansion had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the
old house of their fathers for a newer trifle; and I was left to
appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy,
or to soothe my vanity.

I was the true descendant of those old W----s; and not the present
family of that name, who had fled the old waste places.

Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have
gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one--and then
another--would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to
recognise the new relationship; while the rest looked grave, as
it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled
posterity.

That Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb--that hung
next the great bay window--with the bright yellow H----shire hair, and
eye of watchet hue--so like my Alice!--I am persuaded she was a true
Elia--Mildred Elia, I take it.

Mine too, BLAKESMOOR, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic
pavements, and its Twelve Cæsars--stately busts in marble--ranged
round: of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the
frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder; but the
mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet
freshness of immortality.

Mine too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority,
high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or
self-forgetful maiden--so common since, that bats have roosted in it.

Mine too--whose else?--thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked
southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the
house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save
that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespeak their
pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters
backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality,
thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long
murmuring woodpigeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or
Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a
sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I
to that fragmental mystery.

Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your
idol worship, walks and windings of BLAKESMOOR! for this, or what sin
of mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes
think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their
extinguished habitations there may be a hope--a germ to be revivified.




POOR RELATIONS


A poor relation--is the most irrelevant thing in nature,--a piece of
impertinent correspondency,--an odious approximation,--a haunting
conscience,--a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of
your prosperity,--an unwelcome remembrancer,--a perpetually recurring
mortification,--a drain on your purse,--a more intolerable dun upon
your pride,--a drawback upon success,--a rebuke to your rising,--a
stain in your blood,--a blot on your scutcheon,--a rent in your
garment,--a death's head at your banquet,--Agathocles' pot,--a
Mordecai in your gate,--a Lazarus at your door,--a lion in your
path,--a frog in your chamber,--a fly in your ointment,--a mote in
your eye,--a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends,--the
one thing not needful,--the hail in harvest,--the ounce of sour in a
pound of sweet.

He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you "That is Mr.
----." A rap, between familiarity and respect; that demands, and,
at the same time, seems to despair of, entertainment. He entereth
smiling, and--embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake,
and--draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner
time--when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you
have company--but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your
visitor's two children are accommodated at a side table. He never
cometh upon open days, when your wife says with some complacency,
"My dear, perhaps Mr. ---- will drop in to-day." He remembereth
birth-days--and professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one.
He declareth against fish, the turbot being small--yet suffereth
himself to be importuned into a slice against his first resolution.
He sticketh by the port--yet will be prevailed upon to empty the
remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is
a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious,
or not civil enough, to him. The guests think "they have seen him
before." Every one speculateth upon his condition; and the most part
take him to be--a tide-waiter. He calleth you by your Christian
name, to imply that his other is the same with your own. He is too
familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half the
familiarity he might pass for a casual dependent; with more boldness
he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too
humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state than befits a
client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he
bringeth up no rent--yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, that
your guests take him for one. He is asked to make one at the whist
table; refuseth on the score of poverty, and--resents being left
out. When the company break up, he proffereth to go for a coach--and
lets the servant go. He recollects your grandfather; and will thrust
in some mean, and quite unimportant anecdote of--the family. He
knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as "he is blest in
seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to institute what
he calleth--favourable comparisons. With a reflecting sort of
congratulation, he will inquire the price of your furniture; and
insults you with a special commendation of your window-curtains. He
is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape, but, after all,
there was something more comfortable about the old tea-kettle--which
you must remember. He dare say you must find a great convenience in
having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not
so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet; and did
not know till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the
family. His memory is unseasonable; his compliments perverse; his talk
a trouble; his stay pertinacious; and when he goeth away, you dismiss
his chair into a corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly
rid of two nuisances.

There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is--a female Poor
Relation. You may do something with the other; you may pass him off
tolerably well; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. "He is
an old humourist," you may say, "and affects to go threadbare. His
circumstances are better than folks would take them to be. You are
fond of having a Character at your table, and truly he is one." But
in the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No
woman dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without
shuffling. "She is plainly related to the L----s; or what does she at
their house?" She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine
times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is something
between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently
predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously
sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be repressed
sometimes--_aliquando sufflaminandus erat_--but there is no raising
her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped--after the
gentlemen. Mr. ---- requests the honour of taking wine with her; she
hesitates between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former--because
he does. She calls the servant _Sir_; and insists on not troubling
him to hold her plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The children's
governess takes upon her to correct her, when she has mistaken the
piano for a harpsichord.

Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the
disadvantages, to which this chimerical notion of _affinity
constituting a claim to acquaintance_, may subject the spirit of a
gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt him and
a lady of great estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the
malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him
"her son Dick." But she has wherewithal in the end to recompense his
indignities, and float him again upon the brilliant surface, under
which it had been her seeming business and pleasure all along to sink
him. All men, besides, are not of Dick's temperament. I knew an Amlet
in real life, who, wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W----
was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of
promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much pride; but its quality
was inoffensive; it was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and
serves to keep inferiors at a distance; it only sought to ward off
derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried
as far as it could go, without infringing upon that respect, which he
would have every one else equally maintain for himself. He would have
you to think alike with him on this topic. Many a quarrel have I had
with him, when we were rather older boys, and our tallness made us
more obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, because I would not
thread the alleys and blind ways of the town with him to elude notice,
when we have been out together on a holiday in the streets of this
sneering and prying metropolis. W---- went, sore with these notions,
to Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness of a scholar's life,
meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction, wrought in him a
passionate devotion to the place, with a profound aversion from the
society. The servitor's gown (worse than his school array) clung to
him with Nessian venom. He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under
which Latimer must have walked erect; and in which Hooker, in his
young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no discommendable vanity.
In the depth of college shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor
student shrunk from observation. He found shelter among books, which
insult not; and studies, that ask no questions of a youth's finances.
He was lord of his library, and seldom cared for looking out beyond
his domains. The healing influence of studious pursuits was upon him,
to soothe and to abstract. He was almost a healthy man; when the
waywardness of his fate broke out against him with a second and worse
malignity. The father of W---- had hitherto exercised the humble
profession of house-painter at N----, near Oxford. A supposed interest
with some of the heads of the colleges had now induced him to take
up his abode in that city, with the hope of being employed upon some
public works which were talked of. From that moment I read in the
countenance of the young man, the determination which at length tore
him from academical pursuits for ever. To a person unacquainted with
our Universities, the distance between the gownsmen and the townsmen,
as they are called--the trading part of the latter especially--is
carried to an excess that would appear harsh and incredible. The
temperament of W----'s father was diametrically the reverse of his
own. Old W---- was a little, busy, cringing tradesman, who, with his
son upon his arm, would stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand, to
any-thing that wore the semblance of a gown--insensible to the winks
and opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose chamber-fellow, or
equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and gratuitously
ducking. Such a state of things could not last. W---- must change
the air of Oxford or be suffocated. He chose the former; and let the
sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as high
as they can bear, censure the dereliction; he cannot estimate the
struggle. I stood with W----, the last afternoon I ever saw him, under
the eaves of his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading
from the High-street to the back of ***** college, where W---- kept
his rooms. He seemed thoughtful, and more reconciled. I ventured to
rally him--finding him in a better mood--upon a representation of the
Artist Evangelist, which the old man, whose affairs were beginning to
flourish, had caused to be set up in a splendid sort of frame over his
really handsome shop, either as a token of prosperity, or badge of
gratitude to his saint. W---- looked up at the Luke, and, like Satan,
"knew his mounted sign--and fled." A letter on his father's table
the next morning, announced that he had accepted a commission in a
regiment about to embark for Portugal. He was among the first who
perished before the walls of St. Sebastian.

I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with treating half
seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently painful;
but this theme of poor relationship is replete with so much matter for
tragic as well as comic associations, that it is difficult to keep
the account distinct without blending. The earliest impressions which
I received on this matter, are certainly not attended with anything
painful, or very humiliating, in the recalling. At my father's table
(no very splendid one) was to be found, every Saturday, the mysterious
figure of an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black, of a sad yet
comely appearance. His deportment was of the essence of gravity; his
words few or none; and I was not to make a noise in his presence. I
had little inclination to have done so--for my cue was to admire in
silence. A particular elbow chair was appropriated to him, which was
in no case to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which
appeared on no other occasion, distinguished the days of his coming.
I used to think him a prodigiously rich man. All I could make out of
him was, that he and my father had been schoolfellows a world ago at
Lincoln, and that he came from the Mint. The Mint I knew to be a place
where all the money was coined--and I thought he was the owner of
all that money. Awful ideas of the Tower twined themselves about his
presence. He seemed above human infirmities and passions. A sort
of melancholy grandeur invested him. From some inexplicable doom I
fancied him obliged to go about in an eternal suit of mourning; a
captive--a stately being, let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often
have I wondered at the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an
habitual general respect which we all in common manifested towards
him, would venture now and then to stand up against him in some
argument, touching their youthful days. The houses of the ancient
city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers know) between the
dwellers on the hill, and in the valley. This marked distinction
formed an obvious division between the boys who lived above (however
brought together in a common school) and the boys whose paternal
residence was on the plain; a sufficient cause of hostility in
the code of these young Grotiuses. My father had been a leading
Mountaineer; and would still maintain the general superiority, in
skill and hardihood, of the _Above Boys_ (his own faction) over the
_Below Boys_ (so were they called), of which party his contemporary
had been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes on this
topic--the only one upon which the old gentleman was ever brought
out--and bad blood bred; even sometimes almost to the recommencement
(so I expected) of actual hostilities. But my father, who scorned to
insist upon advantages, generally contrived to turn the conversation
upon some adroit by-commendation of the old Minster; in the general
preference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, the
dweller on the hill, and the plain-born, could meet on a conciliating
level, and lay down their less important differences. Once only I saw
the old gentleman really ruffled, and I remembered with anguish the
thought that came over me: "Perhaps he will never come here again."
He had been pressed to take another plate of the viand, which I have
already mentioned as the indispensable concomitant of his visits. He
had refused, with a resistance amounting to rigour--when my aunt,
an old Lincolnian, but who had something of this, in common with
my cousin Bridget, that she would sometimes press civility out of
season--uttered the following memorable application--"Do take another
slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day." The old
gentleman said nothing at the time--but he took occasion in the course
of the evening, when some argument had intervened between them, to
utter with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which chills me
now as I write it--"Woman, you are superannuated." John Billet did not
survive long, after the digesting of this affront; but he survived
long enough to assure me that peace was actually restored! and, if I
remember aright, another pudding was discreetly substituted in the
place of that which had occasioned the offence. He died at the Mint
(Anno 1781) where he had long held, what he accounted, a comfortable
independence; and with five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a penny,
which were found in his escrutoire after his decease, left the world,
blessing God that he had enough to bury him, and that he had never
been obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was--a Poor Relation.




STAGE ILLUSION


A play is said to be well or ill acted in proportion to the scenical
illusion produced. Whether such illusion can in any case be perfect,
is not the question. The nearest approach to it, we are told, is, when
the actor appears wholly unconscious of the presence of spectators.
In tragedy--in all which is to affect the feelings--this undivided
attention to his stage business, seems indispensable. Yet it is, in
fact, dispensed with every day by our cleverest tragedians; and while
these references to an audience, in the shape of rant or sentiment,
are not too frequent or palpable, a sufficient quantity of illusion
for the purposes of dramatic interest may be said to be produced in
spite of them. But, tragedy apart, it may be inquired whether, in
certain characters in comedy, especially those which are a little
extravagant, or which involve some notion repugnant to the moral
sense, it is not a proof of the highest skill in the comedian when,
without absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a tacit
understanding with them; and makes them, unconsciously to themselves,
a party in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the mode of
doing this; but we speak only of the great artists in the profession.

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves,
or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. To see a coward
_done to the life_ upon a stage would produce anything but mirth.
Yet we most of us remember Jack Bannister's cowards. Could any thing
be more agreeable, more pleasant? We loved the rogues. How was
this effected but by the exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual
sub-insinuation to us, the spectators, even in the extremity of the
shaking fit, that he was not half such a coward as we took him for? We
saw all the common symptoms of the malady upon him; the quivering lip,
the cowering knees, the teeth chattering; and could have sworn "that
man was frightened." But we forgot all the while--or kept it almost a
secret to ourselves--that he never once lost his self-possession; that
he let out by a thousand droll looks and gestures--meant at _us_, and
not at all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the scene, that
his confidence in his own resources had never once deserted him. Was
this a genuine picture of a coward? or not rather a likeness, which
the clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead of an original;
while we secretly connived at the delusion for the purpose of greater
pleasure, than a more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility,
helplessness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to be
concomitants of cowardice in real life, could have given us?

Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable on the stage,
but because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub-reference, rather than
direct appeal to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its
odiousness, by seeming to engage _our_ compassion for the insecure
tenure by which he holds his money bags and parchments? By this subtle
vent half of the hatefulness of the character--the self-closeness
with which in real life it coils itself up from the sympathies of
men--evaporates. The miser becomes sympathetic; _i.e._ is no genuine
miser. Here again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very
disagreeable reality.

Spleen, irritability--the pitiable infirmities of old men, which
produce only pain to behold in the realities, counterfeited upon a
stage, divert not altogether for the comic appendages to them, but in
part from an inner conviction that they are _being acted_ before us;
that a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself. They
please by being done under the life, or beside it; not _to the life_.
When Gatty acts an old man, is he angry indeed? or only a pleasant
counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to recognise, without pressing
upon us the uneasy sense of reality?

Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural. It was the
case with a late actor. Nothing could be more earnest or true than the
manner of Mr. Emery; this told excellently in his Tyke, and characters
of a tragic cast. But when he carried the same rigid exclusiveness of
attention to the stage business, and wilful blindness and oblivion of
everything before the curtain into his comedy, it produced a harsh and
dissonant effect. He was out of keeping with the rest of the _Personæ
Dramatis_. There was as little link between him and them as betwixt
himself and the audience. He was a third estate, dry, repulsive, and
unsocial to all. Individually considered, his execution was masterly.
But comedy is not this unbending thing; for this reason, that the same
degree of credibility is not required of it as to serious scenes. The
degrees of credibility demanded to the two things may be illustrated
by the different sort of truth which we expect when a man tells us a
mournful or a merry story. If we suspect the former of falsehood in
any one tittle, we reject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a
suspected imposition. But the teller of a mirthful tale has latitude
allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth. 'Tis the
same with dramatic illusion. We confess we love in comedy to see an
audience naturalised behind the scenes, taken in into the interest
of the drama, welcomed as by-standers however. There is something
ungracious in a comic actor holding himself aloof from all
participation or concern with those who are come to be diverted by
him. Macbeth must see the dagger, and no ear but his own be told of
it; but an old fool in farce may think he _sees something_, and by
conscious words and looks express it, as plainly as he can speak, to
pit, box, and gallery. When an impertinent in tragedy, an Osric, for
instance, breaks in upon the serious passions of the scene, we approve
of the contempt with which he is treated. But when the pleasant
impertinent of comedy, in a piece purely meant to give delight, and
raise mirth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studious man
with taking up his leisure, or making his house his home, the same
sort of contempt expressed (however _natural_) would destroy the
balance of delight in the spectators. To make the intrusion comic,
the actor who plays the annoyed man must a little desert nature; he
must, in short, be thinking of the audience, and express only so much
dissatisfaction and peevishness as is consistent with the pleasure of
comedy. In other words, his perplexity must seem half put on. If he
repel the intruder with the sober set face of a man in earnest, and
more especially if he deliver his expostulations in a tone which in
the world must necessarily provoke a duel; his real-life manner will
destroy the whimsical and purely dramatic existence of the other
character (which to render it comic demands an antagonist comicality
on the part of the character opposed to it), and convert what was
meant for mirth, rather than belief, into a downright piece of
impertinence indeed, which would raise no diversion in us, but rather
stir pain, to see inflicted in earnest upon any unworthy person. A
very judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems to have fallen into
an error of this sort in his playing with Mr. Wrench in the farce of
Free and Easy.

Many instances would be tedious; these may suffice to show that comic
acting at least does not always demand from the performer that strict
abstraction from all reference to an audience, which is exacted of
it; but that in some cases a sort of compromise may take place, and
all the purposes of dramatic delight be attained by a judicious
understanding, not too openly announced, between the ladies and
gentlemen--on both sides of the curtain.




TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON


Joyousest of once embodied spirits, whither at length hast thou flown?
to what genial region are we permitted to conjecture that thou has
flitted.

Art thou sowing thy WILD OATS yet (the harvest time was still to come
with thee) upon casual sands of Avernus? or art thou enacting ROVER
(as we would gladlier think) by wandering Elysian streams?

This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics amongst us,
was in truth any thing but a prison to thee, as the vain Platonist
dreams of this _body_ to be no better than a county gaol, forsooth, or
some house of durance vile, whereof the five senses are the fetters.
Thou knewest better than to be in a hurry to cast off those gyves; and
had notice to quit, I fear, before thou wert quite ready to abandon
this fleshly tenement. It was thy Pleasure House, thy Palace of Dainty
Devices; thy Louvre, or thy White Hall.

What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant now? or when may we
expect thy aërial house-warming?

Tartarus we know, and we have read of the Blessed Shades; now cannot I
intelligibly fancy thee in either.

Is it too much to hazard a conjecture, that (as the school-men
admitted a receptacle apart for Patriarchs and un-chrisom Babes) there
may exist--not far perchance from that storehouse of all vanities,
which Milton saw in visions--a LIMBO somewhere for PLAYERS? and that

  Up thither like aërial vapours fly
  Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things
  Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame?
  All the unaccomplish'd works of Authors' hands,
  Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mix'd,
  Damn'd upon earth, fleet thither--
  Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery--

There, by the neighbouring moon (by some not improperly supposed
thy Regent Planet upon earth) mayst thou not still be acting thy
managerial pranks, great disembodied Lessee? but Lessee still, and
still a Manager.

In Green Rooms, impervious to mortal eye, the muse beholds thee
wielding posthumous empire.

Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump on earth) circle thee in
endlessly, and still their song is _Fye on sinful Phantasy_.

Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe of earth, ROBERT WILLIAM
ELLISTON! for as yet we know not thy new name in heaven.

It irks me to think, that, stript of thy regalities, thou shouldst
ferry over, a poor forked shade, in crazy Stygian wherry. Methinks I
hear the old boatman, paddling by the weedy wharf, with raucid voice,
bawling "SCULLS, SCULLS:" to which, with waving hand, and majestic
action, thou deignest no reply, other than in two curt monosyllables,
"No: OARS."

But the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king,
and cobbler; manager, and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life
were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by
cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently
departed candle-snuffer.

But mercy! what strippings, what tearing off of histrionic robes,
and private vanities! what denudations to the bone, before the surly
Ferryman will admit you to set a foot within his battered lighter!

Crowns, sceptres; shield, sword, and truncheon; thy own coronation
robes (for thou hast brought the whole property man's wardrobe with
thee, enough to sink a navy); the judge's ermine; the coxcomb's wig;
the snuff-box _à la Foppington_--all must overboard, he positively
swears--and that ancient mariner brooks no denial; for, since the
tiresome monodrame of the old Thracian Harper, Charon, it is to be
believed, hath shown small taste for theatricals.

Aye, now 'tis done. You are just boat weight; _pura et puta anima_.

But bless me, how _little_ you look!

So shall we all look--kings, and keysars--stript for the last voyage.

But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu, pleasant, and thrice pleasant
shade! with my parting thanks for many a heavy hour of life lightened
by thy harmless extravaganzas, public or domestic.

Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, leaving to his
two brethren the heavy calendars--honest Rhadamanth, always partial
to players, weighing their parti-coloured existence here upon
earth,--making account of the few foibles, that may have shaded thy
_real life_ as we call it, (though, substantially, scarcely less a
vapour than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards of Drury,) as but of
so many echoes, natural repercussions, and results to be expected from
the assumed extravagancies of thy _secondary_ or _mock life_, nightly
upon a stage--after a lenient castigation, with rods lighter than
of those Medusean ringlets, but just enough to "whip the offending
Adam out of thee"--shall courteously dismiss thee at the right
hand gate--the O.P. side of Hades--that conducts to masques, and
merry-makings, in the Theatre Royal of Proserpine.

PLAUDITO, ET VALETO




ELLISTONIANA


My acquaintance with the pleasant creature, whose loss we all deplore,
was but slight.

My first introduction to E., which afterwards ripened into an
acquaintance a little on this side of intimacy, was over a counter
of the Leamington Spa Library, then newly entered upon by a branch
of his family. E., whom nothing misbecame--to auspicate, I suppose,
the filial concern, and set it a going with a lustre--was serving in
person two damsels fair, who had come into the shop ostensibly to
inquire for some new publication, but in reality to have a sight of
the illustrious shopman, hoping some conference. With what an air did
he reach down the volume, dispassionately giving his opinion upon the
worth of the work in question, and launching out into a dissertation
on its comparative merits with those of certain publications of a
similar stamp, its rivals! his enchanted customers fairly hanging on
his lips, subdued to their authoritative sentence. So have I seen a
gentleman in comedy _acting_ the shopman. So Lovelace sold his gloves
in King Street. I admired the histrionic art, by which he contrived to
carry clean away every notion of disgrace, from the occupation he had
so generously submitted to; and from that hour I judged him, with no
after repentance, to be a person, with whom it would be a felicity to
be more acquainted.

To descant upon his merits as a Comedian would be superfluous. With
his blended private and professional habits alone I have to do;
that harmonious fusion of the manners of the player into those of
every day life, which brought the stage boards into streets, and
dining-parlours, and kept up the play when the play was ended.--"I
like Wrench," a friend was saying to him one day, "because he is the
same natural, easy creature, _on_ the stage, that he is _off_." "My
case exactly," retorted Elliston--with a charming forgetfulness,
that the converse of a proposition does not always lead to the same
conclusion--"I am the same person _off_ the stage that I am _on_." The
inference, at first sight, seems identical; but examine it a little,
and it confesses only, that the one performer was never, and the other
always, _acting_.

And in truth this was the charm of Elliston's private deportment.
You had a spirited performance always going on before your eyes,
with nothing to pay. As where a monarch takes up his casual abode for
a night, the poorest hovel which he honours by his sleeping in it,
becomes _ipso facto_ for that time a palace; so where-ever Elliston
walked, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre. He carried about
with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and set up his portable
playhouse at corners of streets, and in the market-places. Upon
flintiest pavements he trod the boards still; and if his theme chanced
to be passionate, the green baize carpet of tragedy spontaneously rose
beneath his feet. Now this was hearty, and showed a love for his art.
So Apelles _always_ painted--in thought. So G.D. _always_ poetises.
I hate a lukewarm artist. I have known actors--and some of them of
Elliston's own stamp--who shall have agreeably been amusing you in
the part of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three hours of
their dramatic existence; but no sooner does the curtain fall with
its leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems to seize on all their
faculties. They emerge sour, morose persons, intolerable to their
families, servants, &c. Another shall have been expanding your heart
with generous deeds and sentiments, till it even beats with yearnings
of universal sympathy; you absolutely long to go home, and do some
good action. The play seems tedious, till you can get fairly out of
the house, and realise your laudable intentions. At length the final
bell rings, and this cordial representative of all that is amiable
in human breasts steps forth--a miser. Elliston was more of a piece.
Did he _play_ Ranger? and did Ranger fill the general bosom of the
town with satisfaction? why should _he_ not be Ranger, and diffuse
the same cordial satisfaction among his private circles? with _his_
temperament, _his_ animal spirits, _his_ good-nature, _his_ follies
perchance, could he do better than identify himself with his
impersonation? Are we to like a pleasant rake, or coxcomb, on the
stage, and give ourselves airs of aversion for the identical character
presented to us in actual life? or what would the performer have
gained by divesting himself of the impersonation? Could the man
Elliston have been essentially different from his part, even if he
had avoided to reflect to us studiously, in private circles, the
airy briskness, the forwardness, and 'scape goat trickeries of his
prototype?

"But there is something not natural in this everlasting _acting_; we
want the real man."

Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you cannot, or
will not see, under some adventitious trappings, which, nevertheless,
sit not at all inconsistently upon him? What if it is the nature of
some men to be highly artificial? The fault is least reprehensible in
_players_. Cibber was his own Foppington, with almost as much wit as
Vanburgh could add to it.

"My conceit of his person,"--it is Ben Jonson speaking of Lord
Bacon,--"was never increased towards him by his _place_ or _honours_.
But I have, and do reverence him for the _greatness_, that was only
proper to himself; in that he seemed to me ever one of the _greatest_
men, that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that
heaven would give him strength; for _greatness_ he could not want."

The quality here commended was scarcely less conspicuous in the
subject of these idle reminiscences, than in my Lord Verulam. Those
who have imagined that an unexpected elevation to the direction of a
great London Theatre, affected the consequence of Elliston, or at all
changed his nature, knew not the essential _greatness_ of the man whom
they disparage. It was my fortune to encounter him near St. Dunstan's
Church (which, with its punctual giants, is now no more than dust
and a shadow), on the morning of his election to that high office.
Grasping my hand with a look of significance, he only uttered,--"Have
you heard the news?"--then with another look following up
the blow, he subjoined, "I am the future Manager of Drury Lane
Theatre."--Breathless as he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation
or reply, but mutely stalked away, leaving me to chew upon his
new-blown dignities at leisure. In fact, nothing could be said to
it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was in his
_great_ style.

But was he less _great_, (be witness, O ye Powers of Equanimity,
that supported in the ruins of Carthage the consular exile, and
more recently transmuted for a more illustrious exile the barren
constableship of Elba into an image of Imperial France), when, in
melancholy after-years, again, much near the same spot, I met him,
when that sceptre had been wrested from his hand, and his dominion was
curtailed to the petty managership, and part proprietorship, of the
small Olympic, _his Elba?_ He still played nightly upon the boards
of Drury, but in parts alas! allotted to him, not magnificently
distributed by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and
magnificently sinking the sense of fallen _material_ grandeur in
the more liberal resentment of depreciations done to his more
lofty _intellectual_ pretensions, "Have you heard" (his customary
exordium)--"have you heard," said he, "how they treat me? they put me
in _comedy_." Thought I--but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal
interruption--"where could they have put you better?" Then, after a
pause--"Where I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio,"--and so
again he stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses.

O, it was a rich scene,--but Sir A---- C----, the best of
story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as
well as he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to it--that I was
witness to, in the tarnished room (that had once been green) of that
same little Olympic. There, after his deposition from Imperial Drury,
he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was his "highest heaven;"
himself "Jove in his chair." There he sat in state, while before
him, on complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment--how shall
I describe her?--one of those little tawdry things that flirt at
the tails of choruses--a probationer for the town, in either of its
senses--the pertest little drab--a dirty fringe and appendage of the
lamps' smoke--who, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a
"highly respectable" audience, had precipitately quitted her station
on the boards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgust.

"And how dare you," said her Manager--assuming a censorial severity
which would have crushed the confidence of a Vestris, and disarmed
that beautiful Rebel herself of her professional caprices--I verily
believe, he thought _her_ standing before him--"how dare you, Madam,
withdraw yourself, without a notice, from your theatrical duties?" "I
was hissed, Sir." "And you have the presumption to decide upon the
taste of the town?" "I don't know that, Sir, but I will never stand
to be hissed," was the subjoinder of young Confidence--when gathering
up his features into one significant mass of wonder, pity, and
expostulatory indignation--in a lesson never to have been lost upon a
creature less forward than she who stood before him--his words were
these: "They have hissed _me_."

'Twas the identical argument _a fortiori_, which the son of Peleus
uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade him to take his
destiny with a good grace. "I too am mortal." And it is to be believed
that in both cases the rhetoric missed of its application, for want
of a proper understanding with the faculties of the respective
recipients.

"Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was courteously conducting
me over the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the last retreat, and
recess, of his every-day waning grandeur.

Those who knew Elliston, will know the _manner_ in which he pronounced
the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud
day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which
I had superadded a preliminary haddock. After a rather plentiful
partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort
of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare,
observing that for my own part I never ate but of one dish at dinner.
"I too never eat but one thing at dinner"--was his reply--then after
a pause--"reckoning fish as nothing." The manner was all. It was as
if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all
the savory esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving
Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This was
_greatness_, tempered with considerate _tenderness_ to the feelings of
his scanty but welcoming entertainer.

_Great_ wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston! and _not
lessened_ in thy death, if report speak truly, which says that
thou didst direct that thy mortal remains should repose under no
inscription but one of pure _Latinity_. Classical was thy bringing
up! and beautiful was the feeling on thy last bed, which, connecting
the man with the boy, took thee back in thy latest exercise
of imagination, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and
Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, under the
roofs builded by the munificent and pious Colet. For thee the Pauline
Muses weep. In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose, they
shall celebrate thy praise.




DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING


    To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with
    the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of
    quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts
    of his own.

    _Lord Foppington in the Relapse._


An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this
bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether,
to the great improvement of his originality. At the hazard of
losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no
inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I dream
away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other
men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and
think. Books think for me.

I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor
Jonathan Wild too low. I can read any thing which I call a _book_.
There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.

In this catalogue of _books which are no books--biblia a-biblia_--I
reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards
bound and lettered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks,
Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie,
Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which "no gentleman's
library should be without:" the Histories of Flavins Josephus (that
learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I
can read almost any thing. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic,
so unexcluding.

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these _things in books'
clothing_ perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true
shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate
occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and
hope it is some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what "seem its
leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a
Steele, or a Farquhar, and find--Adam Smith. To view a well-arranged
assortment of blockheaded Encyclopædias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas)
set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that
good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would
renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look like
himself again in the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to
strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils.

To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of a volume.
Magnificence comes after. This, when it can be afforded, is not to be
lavished upon all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would not dress
a set of Magazines, for instance, in full suit. The dishabille, or
half-binding (with Russia backs ever) is _our_ costume. A Shakespeare,
or a Milton (unless the first editions), it were mere foppery to trick
out in gay apparel. The possession of them confers no distinction. The
exterior of them (the things themselves being so common), strange to
say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of property in the
owner. Thomson's Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little
torn, and dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading
are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearance, nay, the very
odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in
fastidiousness, of an old "Circulating Library" Tom Jones, or Vicar
of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned
over their pages with delight!--of the lone sempstress, whom they may
have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long
day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an
hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean
cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a
whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them
in?

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from
binding. Fielding, Smollet, Sterne, and all that class of perpetually
self-reproductive volumes--Great Nature's Stereotypes--we see them
individually perish with less regret, because we know the copies
of them to be "eterne." But where a book is at once both good and
rare--where the individual is almost the species, and when _that_
perishes,

  We know not where is that Promethean torch
  That can its light relumine--

such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by
his Duchess--no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable,
to honour and keep safe such a jewel.

Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever to
be reprinted; but old editions of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney,
Bishop Taylor, Milton in his prose-works, Fuller--of whom we _have_
reprints, yet the books themselves, though they go about, and are
talked of here and there, we know, have not endenizened themselves
(nor possibly ever will) in the national heart, so as to become stock
books--it is good to possess these in durable and costly covers. I do
not care for a First Folio of Shakspeare. I rather prefer the common
editions of Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and with _plates_, which,
being so execrably bad, serve as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the
text; and without pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are
so much better than the Shakspeare gallery _engravings_, which _did_.
I have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his Plays, and
I like those editions of him best, which have been oftenest tumbled
about and handled.--On the contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and
Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions are painful to look at. I
have no sympathy with them. If they were as much read as the current
editions of the other poet, I should prefer them in that shape to the
older one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint of
the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of unearthing the bones
of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of
the newest fashion to modern censure? what hapless stationer could
dream of Burton ever becoming popular?--The wretched Malone could not
do worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him
white-wash the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, which stood there,
in rude but lively fashion depicted, to the very colour of the cheek,
the eye, the eye-brow, hair, the very dress he used to wear--the only
authentic testimony we had, however imperfect, of these curious parts
and parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat of white paint.
By ----, if I had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire, I would
have clapt both commentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair
of meddling sacrilegious varlets.

I think I see them at their work--these sapient trouble-tombs.

Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names of some
of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear--to
mine, at least--than that of Milton or of Shakspeare? It may be, that
the latter are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. The
sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit
Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.

Much depends upon _when_ and _where_ you read a book. In the five or
six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would
think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of
Bishop Andrewes' sermons?

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before
you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens,
had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.

Winter evenings--the world shut out--with less of ceremony the gentle
Shakspeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's
Tale--

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud--to yourself, or (as
it chances) to some single person listening. More than one--and it
degenerates into an audience.

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye
to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never
listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme
irksomeness.

A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices
it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the
clerks--who is the best scholar--to commence upon the Times, or the
Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud _pro bono publico_.
With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly
vapid. In barbers' shops and public-houses a fellow will get up,
and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as some discovery.
Another follows with _his_ selection. So the entire journal transpires
at length by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and, without
this expedient no one in the company would probably ever travel
through the contents of a whole paper.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without
a feeling of disappointment.

What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, keeps the
paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, "the
Chronicle is in hand, Sir."

Coming in to an inn at night--having ordered your supper--what can be
more delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left there time
out of mind by the carelessness of some former guest--two or three
numbers of the old Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing
_tête-à-tête_ pictures--"The Royal Lover and Lady G----;" "The Melting
Platonic and the old Beau,"--and such like antiquated scandal? Would
you exchange it--at that time, and in that place--for a better book?

Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much for the
weightier kinds of reading--the Paradise Lost, or Comus, he could have
_read_ to him--but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his
own eye a magazine, or a light pamphlet.

I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some
cathedral alone, and reading _Candide_.

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once
detected--by a familiar damsel--reclined at my ease upon the grass, on
Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading--_Pamela_. There was nothing in
the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she
seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company,
I could have wished it had been--any other book. We read on very
sociably for a few pages; and, not finding the author much to her
taste, she got up, and--went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee
to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us) was
the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you
shall never get the secret.

I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my
spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be
seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's-street _was not_), between the
hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner.
I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I
used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts.
An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, would
have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have
left me worse than indifferent to the five points.

There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate
without affection--the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy
or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls--the owner,
with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and
thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after
page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict,
and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they "snatch
a fearful joy." Martin B----, in this way, by daily fragments,
got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped
his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days)
whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no
circumstances of his life did he ever peruse a book with half the
satisfaction which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess
of our day has moralised upon this subject in two very touching but
homely stanzas.

  I saw a boy with eager eye
  Open a book upon a stall,
  And read, as he'd devour it all;
  Which when the stall-man did espy,
  Soon to the boy I heard him call,
  "You, Sir, you never buy a book,
  Therefore in one you shall not look."
  The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh
  He wish'd he never had been taught to read,
  Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need.

  Of sufferings the poor have many,
  Which never can the rich annoy:
  I soon perceiv'd another boy,
  Who look'd as if he'd not had any
  Food, for that day at least--enjoy
  The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder.
  This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder,
  Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny,
  Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat:
  No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat.




THE OLD MARGATE HOY


I am fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said so before) at
one or other of the Universities. Next to these my choice would fix
me at some woody spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley affords in
abundance, upon the banks of my beloved Thames. But somehow or other
my cousin contrives to wheedle me once in three or four seasons to a
watering place. Old attachments cling to her in spite of experience.
We have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller at Brighton another,
dullest at Eastbourn a third, and are at this moment doing dreary
penance at--Hastings!--and all because we were happy many years ago
for a brief week at--Margate. That was our first sea-side experiment,
and many circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holyday
of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea, and we had never been
from home so long together in company.

Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather-beaten,
sun-burnt captain, and his rough accommodations--ill exchanged for the
foppery and fresh-water niceness of the modern steam-packet? To the
winds and waves thou committedst thy goodly freightage, and didst
ask no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons. With
the gales of heaven thou wentest swimmingly; or, when it was their
pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like patience. Thy course was
natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed; nor didst thou go poisoning
the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke--a great sea-chimæra,
chimneying and furnacing the deep; or liker to that fire-god parching
up Scamander.

Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy reluctant
responses (yet to the suppression of anything like contempt, to the
raw questions, which we of the great city would be ever and anon
putting to them, as to the uses of this or that strange naval
implement?) 'Specially can I forget thee, thou happy medium, thou shade
of refuge between us and them, conciliating interpreter of their skill
to our simplicity, comfortable ambassador between sea and land!--whose
sailor-trowsers did not more convincingly assure thee to be an adopted
denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter apron over them,
with thy neat-fingered practice in thy culinary vocation, bespoke thee
to have been of inland nurture heretofore--a master cook of Eastcheap?
How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner,
attendant, chamberlain; here, there, like another Ariel, flaming at
once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations--not
to assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a kindred sense of our
infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that untried motion might
haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And when the o'er-washing
billows drove us below deck (for it was far gone in October, and we
had stiff and blowing weather) how did thy officious ministerings,
still catering for our comfort, with cards, and cordials, and thy more
cordial conversation, alleviate the closeness and the confinement of
thy else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very inviting, little
cabin!

With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow-passenger,
whose discourse in verity might have beguiled a longer voyage than we
meditated, and have made mirth and wonder abound as far as the Azores.
He was a dark, Spanish complexioned young man, remarkably handsome,
with an officer-like assurance, and an insuppressible volubility of
assertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with then,
or since. He was none of your hesitating, half story-tellers (a most
painful description of mortals) who go on sounding your belief, and
only giving you as much as they see you can swallow at a time--the
nibbling pickpockets of your patience--but one who committed
downright, daylight depredations upon his neighbour's faith. He did
not stand shivering upon the brink, but was a hearty thoroughpaced
liar, and plunged at once into the depths of your credulity. I partly
believe, he made pretty sure of his company. Not many rich, not
many wise, or learned, composed at that time the common stowage
of a Margate packet. We were, I am afraid, a set of as unseasoned
Londoners (let our enemies give it a worse name) as Aldermanbury, or
Watling-street, at that time of day could have supplied. There might
be an exception or two among us, but I scorn to make any invidious
distinctions among such a jolly, companionable ship's company, as
those were whom I sailed with. Something too must be conceded to the
_Genius Loci_. Had the confident fellow told us half the legends on
land, which he favoured us with on the other element, I flatter myself
the good sense of most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new
world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and place
disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time
has obliterated from my memory much of his wild fablings; and the
rest would appear but dull, as written, and to be read on shore. He
had been Aid-de-camp (among other rare accidents and fortunes) to
a Persian prince, and at one blow had stricken off the head of the
King of Carimania on horseback. He, of course, married the Prince's
daughter. I forget what unlucky turn in the politics of that court,
combining with the loss of his consort, was the reason of his quitting
Persia; but with the rapidity of a magician he transported himself,
along with his hearers, back to England, where we still found
him in the confidence of great ladies. There was some story of a
Princess--Elizabeth, if I remember--having intrusted to his care an
extraordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion--but
as I am not certain of the name or circumstance at this distance of
time, I must leave it to the Royal daughters of England to settle the
honour among themselves in private. I cannot call to mind half his
pleasant wonders; but I perfectly remember, that in the course of his
travels he had seen a phoenix; and he obligingly undeceived us of
the vulgar error, that there is but one of that species at a time,
assuring us that they were not uncommon in some parts of Upper Egypt.
Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming
fancies had transported us beyond the "ignorant present." But when
(still hardying more and more in his triumphs over our simplicity) he
went on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs of the
Colossus at Rhodes, it really became necessary to make a stand. And
here I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of our
party, a youth, that had hitherto been one of his most deferential
auditors, who, from his recent reading, made bold to assure the
gentleman, that there must be some mistake, as "the Colossus in
question had been destroyed long since;" to whose opinion, delivered
with all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to concede thus much,
that "the figure was indeed a little damaged." This was the only
opposition he met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, for
he proceeded with his fables, which the same youth appeared to swallow
with still more complacency than ever,--confirmed, as it were, by the
extreme candour of that concession. With these prodigies he wheedled
us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, which one of our own
company (having been the vogage before) immediately recognising, and
pointing out to us, was considered by us as no ordinary seaman.

All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a different
character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, and very
patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile: and, if he caught
now and then some snatches of these wild legends, it was by accident,
and they seemed not to concern him. The waves to him whispered more
pleasant stories. He was as one, being with us, but not of us. He
heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring; and when some of
us pulled out our private stores--our cold meat and our salads--he
produced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit he had
laid in; provision for the one or two days and nights, to which these
vessels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voyage Upon a
nearer acquaintance with him, which he seemed neither to court nor
decline, we learned that he was going to Margate, with the hope of
being admitted into the Infirmary there for sea-bathing. His disease
was a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over him. He
expressed great hopes of a cure; and when we asked him, whether he had
any friends where he was going, he replied, "he _had_ no friends."

These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first sight
of the sea, co-operating with youth, and a sense of holydays, and
out-of-door adventure, to me that had been pent up in populous cities
for many months before,--have left upon my mind the fragrance as of
summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance for
cold and wintry hours to chew upon.

Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwelcome
comparisons), if I endeavour to account for the _dissatisfaction_
which I have heard so many persons confess to have felt (as I did
myself feel in part on this occasion), _at the sight of the sea for
the first time?_ I think the reason usually given--referring to the
incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of
them--scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the same person
see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his life,
and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do
not fill up that space, which the idea of them seemed to take up in
his mind. But they have still a correspondency to his first notion,
and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar impression:
enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon familiarity. But the sea
remains a disappointment.--Is it not, that in _the latter_ we had
expected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of
imagination unavoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts,
or that mountain compassable by the eye, but _all the sea at once_,
THE COMMENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH! I do not say we, tell
ourselves so much, but the craving of the mind is to be satisfied with
nothing less. I will suppose the case of a young person of fifteen
(as I then was) knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. He
comes to it for the first time--all that he has been reading of it all
his life, and _that_ the most enthusiastic part of life,--all he has
gathered from narratives of wandering seamen; what he has gained from
true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously from romance and
poetry; crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from
expectation.--He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down
unto it; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes;
of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom,
without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells, and
the mariner

  For many a day, and many a dreadful night,
  Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape;

of fatal rocks, and the "still-vexed Bermoothes;" of great whirlpools,
and the water-spout; of sunken ships, and sumless treasures swallowed
up in the unrestoring depths: of fishes and quaint monsters, to which
all that is terrible on earth--

  Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal,
  Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral;

of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and shells; of coral
beds, and of enchanted isles; of mermaids' grots--

I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all these
wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty faculty,
which haunts him with confused hints and shadows of all these; and
when the actual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather too
most likely) from our unromantic coasts--a speck, a slip of sea-water,
as it shows to him--what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and
even diminutive entertainment? Or if he has come to it from the mouth
of a river, was it much more than the river widening? and, even out
of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him,
nothing comparable to the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar
object, seen daily without dread or amazement?--Who, in similar
circumstances, has not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the
poem of Gebir,--

  Is this the mighty ocean?--is this _all_?

I love town, or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I
hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from
between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritious rocks; which the
amateur calls "verdure to the edge of the sea." I require woods, and
they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and
pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs. I cannot stand all day on
the naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea, shifting
like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the
windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into the interior
of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it,
across it. It binds me in with chains, as of iron. My thoughts are
abroad. I should not so feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me
here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive
resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers,
Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean. If
it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to
have remained, a fair honest fishing town, and no more, it were
something--with a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered about,
artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it
were something. I could abide to dwell with Meschek; to assort with
fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many
of this latter occupation here. Their faces become the place. I like
a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs nothing but the
revenue,--an abstraction I never greatly cared about. I could go out
with them in their mackarel boats, or about their less ostensible
business, with some satisfaction. I can even tolerate those poor
victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beach,
in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their illicit
countrymen--townsfolk or brethren perchance--whistling to the
sheathing and unsheathing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who
under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil
warfare in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their
detestation of run hollands, and zeal for old England. But it is the
visitants from town, that come here to _say_ that they have been here,
with no more relish of the sea than a pond perch, or a dace might be
supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace
in these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here, as
for them. What can they want here? if they had a true relish of the
ocean, why have they brought all this land luggage with them? or why
pitch their civilised tents in the desert? What mean these scanty
book-rooms--marine libraries as they entitle them--if the sea were, as
they would have us believe, a book "to read strange matter in?" what
are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain be
thought to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and
hollow pretention. They come, because it is the fashion, and to
spoil the nature of the place. They are mostly, as I have said,
stockbrokers; but I have watched the better sort of them--now and
then, an honest citizen (of the old stamp), in the simplicity of his
heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters, to taste the sea
breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to see it
in their countenance. A day or two they go wandering on the shingles,
picking up cockleshells, and thinking them great things; but, in a
poor week, imagination slackens: they begin to discover that cockles
produce no pearls, and then--O then!--if I could interpret for the
pretty creatures (I know they have not the courage to confess it
themselves) how gladly would they exchange their sea-side rambles
for a Sunday walk on the green-sward of their accustomed Twickenham
meadows!

I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think they
truly love the sea, with its wild usages, what would their feelings
be, if some of the unsophisticated aborigines of this place,
encouraged by their courteous questionings here, should venture, on
the faith of such assured sympathy between them, to return the visit,
and come up to see--London. I must imagine them with their fishing
tackle on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a
sensation would it cause in Lothbury? What vehement laughter would it
not excite among

  The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard-street.

I am sure that no town-bred, or inland-born subjects, can feel their
true and natural nourishment at these sea-places. Nature, where she
does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. The
salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured
as by the milder waters of my natural river. I would exchange these
sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow for ever about the banks of
Thamesis.




THE CONVALESCENT


A pretty severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a
nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is
but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of reflecting
upon any topic foreign to itself. Expect no healthy conclusions from
me this month, reader; I can offer you only sick men's dreams.

And truly the whole state of sickness is such; for what else is it
but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw day-light
curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total
oblivion of all the works which are going on under it? To become
insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one
feeble pulse?

If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords
it there! what caprices he acts without controul! how kinglike he
sways his pillow--tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering,
and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever varying
requisitions of his throbbing temples.

He changes _sides_ oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length,
then half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across
the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four
curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum.

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he
is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon
him as his only duty. 'Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has
nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors, or
within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.

A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of a
law-suit, which was to be the making or the marring of his dearest
friend. He was to be seen trudging about upon this man's errand to
fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing
that solicitor. The cause was to come on yesterday. He is absolutely
as indifferent to the decision, as if it were a question to be tried
at Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the
house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him
understand, that things went cross-grained in the Court yesterday,
and his friend is ruined. But the word "friend," and the word "ruin,"
disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of any
thing but how to get better.

What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing
consideration!

He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is wrapped in the
callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious
vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only.

He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearneth
over himself; his bowels are even melted within him, to think what he
suffers; he is not ashamed to weep over himself.

He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself; studying
little stratagems and artificial alleviations.

He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable
fiction, into as many distinct individuals, as he hath sore and
sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates--as of a thing apart from
him--upon his poor aching head, and that dull pain which, dozing or
waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance
of pain, not to be removed without opening the very scull, as it
seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated
fingers. He compassionates himself all over; and his bed is a very
discipline of humanity, and tender heart.

He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none can so
well perform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his
tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that
announces his broths, and his cordials. He likes it because it is
so unmoved, and because he can pour forth his feverish ejaculations
before it as unreservedly as to his bed-post.

To the world's business he is dead. He understands not what the
callings and occupations of mortals are; only he has a glimmering
conceit of some such thing, when the doctor makes his daily call:
and even in the lines of that busy face he reads no multiplicity of
patients, but solely conceives of himself as _the sick man_. To what
other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out of
his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully for fear of
rustling--is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He
thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same
hour to-morrow.

Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of life
going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly
what it is. He is not to know any thing, not to think of any thing.
Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as
upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so long as he troubles not
himself further than with some feeble guess at their errands. Exacter
knowledge would be a burthen to him: he can just endure the pressure
of conjecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the
muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking "who was it?" He
is flattered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him,
but he cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general
stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels
his sovereignty.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the silent
tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is
served--with the careless demeanour, the unceremonious goings in
and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same
attendants, when he is getting a little better--and you will confess,
that from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the
elbow chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity, amounting to a
deposition.

How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where
is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the
family's eye? The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was
his presence chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fancies--how
is it reduced to a common bedroom! The trimness of the very bed has
something petty and unmeaning about it. It is _made_ every day.
How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it
presented so short a time since, when to _make_ it was a service not
to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when
the patient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while
out of it, to submit to the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and
decencies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it
again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder it out of
shape again, while every fresh furrow was a historical record of some
shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease;
and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled
coverlid.

Hushed are those mysterious sighs--those groans--so much more awful,
while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they
proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is
solved; and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage.

Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness survives in
the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how
is he too changed with everything else! Can this be he--this man of
news--of chat--of anecdote--of every thing but physic--can this be he,
who so lately came between the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some
solemn embassy from Nature, erecting herself into a high mediating
party? Pshaw!'tis some old woman.

Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous--the spell that
hushed the household--the desart-like stillness, felt throughout
its inmost chambers--the mute attendance--the inquiry by looks--the
still softer delicacies of self-attention--the sole and single eye of
distemper alonely fixed upon itself--world-thoughts excluded--the man
a world unto himself--his own theatre--

  What a speck is he dwindled into!

In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet
far enough from the terra firma of established health, your note,
dear Editor, reached me, requesting--an article. In Articulo Mortis,
thought I; but it is something hard--and the quibble, wretched as it
was, relieved me. The summons, unseasonable as it appeared, seemed to
link me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I had lost
sight of; a gentle call to activity, however trivial; a wholesome
weaning from that preposterous dream of self-absorption--the puffy
state of sickness--in which I confess to have lain so long, insensible
to the magazines and monarchies, of the world alike; to its laws, and
to its literature. The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding; the acres,
which in imagination I had spread over--for the sick man swells in
the sole contemplation of his single sufferings, till he becomes
a Tityus to himself--are wasting to a span; and for the giant of
self-importance, which I was so lately, you have me once again in my
natural pretensions--the lean and meagre figure of your insignificant
Essayist.




SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS


So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in
our modern way of speaking), has a necessary alliance with insanity,
the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the
sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad
Shakspeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here
chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of
all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess
of any one of them. "So strong a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a
poetical friend,

  "--did Nature to him frame,
  As all things but his judgment overcame,
  His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,
  Tempering that mighty sea below."

The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of
the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no
parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of
it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the
poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by
his subject, but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks
familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean heaven, and
is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay; he wins
his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos "and old night."
Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a "human mind
untuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind
(a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor this
misanthropy, so unchecked, but that,--never letting the reins of
reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so,--he has his better
genius still whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent
suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward Flavius
recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from
humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of
Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the
law of her consistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign
directress, even when he appears most to betray and desert her. His
ideal tribes submit to policy; his very monsters are tamed to his
hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus. He tames,
and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they
wonder at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to
European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of
their own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and
Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced; that if
the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they
lose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their
visions nightmares. They do not create, which implies shaping and
consistency. Their imaginations are not active--for to be active is to
call something into act and form--but passive, as men in sick dreams.
For the super-natural, or something super-added to what we know of
nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all,
and that these mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the
treatment of subjects out of nature, or transcending it, the judgment
might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little
wantonized: but even in the describing of real and every day life,
that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more
deviate from nature--show more of that inconsequence, which has a
natural alliance with frenzy,--than a great genius in his "maddest
fits," as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to any one that is
acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels,--as they existed some
twenty or thirty years back,--those scanty intellectual viands of the
whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled
for ever the innutritious phantoms,--whether he has not found his
brain more "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and
where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent
incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some
third-rate love intrigue--where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour
and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and
Bond-street--a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than
he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the
productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the
persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one; an
endless string of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute
of motive:--we meet phantoms in our known walks; _fantasques_ only
christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction; and we
have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the
Fairy Queen prate not of their "whereabout." But in their inner
nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home and
upon acquainted ground. The one turns life into a dream; the other to
the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every day occurrences. By
what subtile art of tracing the mental processes it is effected, we
are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode
of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the
lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the
god of all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition,
before whom all the world kneels for favours--with the Hesperian
fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly,
but not impertinently, in the same stream--that we should be at one
moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the
forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with
the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment
yet all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the
fallacy,--is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet
in his widest seeming-aberrations.

It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's
conceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort--but what a copy! Let the
most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the
spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the
morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so
shifting, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when
it comes under cool examination, shall appear so reasonless and so
unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have
taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions
in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant
dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them.




CAPTAIN JACKSON


Among the deaths in our obituary for this month, I observe with
concern "At his cottage on the Bath road, Captain Jackson." The
name and attribution are common enough; but a feeling like reproach
persuades me, that this could have been no other in fact than my dear
old friend, who some five-and-twenty years ago rented a tenement,
which he was pleased to dignify with the appellation here used, about
a mile from Westbourn Green. Alack, how good men, and the good turns
they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled but by the surprise
of some such sad memento as that which now lies before us!

He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with a wife and two
grown-up daughters, whom he maintained with the port and notions of
gentlewomen upon that slender professional allowance. Comely girls
they were too.

And was I in danger of forgetting this man?--his cheerful suppers--the
noble tone of hospitality, when first you set your foot in the
_cottage_--the anxious ministerings about you, where little or
nothing (God knows) was to be ministered.--Althea's horn in a poor
platter--the power of self-enchantment, by which, in his magnificent
wishes to entertain you, he multiplied his means to bounties.

You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag--cold
savings from the foregone meal--remnant hardly sufficient to send
a mendicant from the door contented. But in the copious will--the
revelling imagination of your host--the "mind, the mind, Master
Shallow," whole beeves were spread before you--hecatombs--no end
appeared to the profusion.

It was the widow's cruse--the loaves and fishes; carving could not
lessen nor helping diminish it--the stamina were left--the elemental
bone still flourished, divested of its accidents.

"Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the open-handed creature
exclaim; "while we have, let us not want," "here is plenty left;"
"want for nothing"--with many more such hospitable sayings, the
spurs of appetite, and old concomitants of smoaking boards, and
feast-oppressed chargers. Then sliding a slender ratio of Single
Gloucester upon his wife's plate, or the daughter's, he would convey
the remanent rind into his own, with a merry quirk of "the nearer the
bone," &c., and declaring that he universally preferred the outside.
For we had our table distinctions, you are to know, and some of us in
a manner sate above the salt. None but his guest or guests dreamed of
tasting flesh luxuries at night, the fragments were _verè hospilibus
sacra_. But of one thing or another there was always enough, and
leavings: only he would sometimes finish the remainder crust, to show
that he wished no savings.

Wine he had none; nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits;
but the sensation of wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I
remember--"British beverage," he would say! "Push about, my boys;"
"Drink to your sweethearts, girls." At every meagre draught a toast
must ensue, or a song. All the forms of good liquor were there, with
none of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear
a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of
generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table
corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence; tipsy upon
words; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian
encouragements.

We had our songs--"Why, Soldiers, Why"--and the "British
Grenadiers"--in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both
the daughters sang. Their proficiency was a nightly theme--the masters
he had given them--the "no-expence" which he spared to accomplish them
in a science "so necessary to young women." But then--they could not
sing "without the instrument."

Sacred, and by me, never-to-be violated, Secrets of Poverty! Should
I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your make-shift efforts
of magnificence? Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of
the bunch be extant; thrummed by a thousand ancestral thumbs; dear,
cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa! Without mention of mine, be dumb,
thou thin accompanier of her thinner warble! A veil be spread over
the dear delighted face of the well-deluded father, who now haply
listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when
she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings of
that slender image of a voice.