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UNDER THE BLUE SKY 
 
UNDER THE BLUE SKY. 
 
 / 
 
 CHARLES MACKAY, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "STUDIES FROM THE ANTIQUE," "A MAN'S HEART, 
 "THE SALAMAA'DKIXE," ETC., ETC. 
 
 LONDON: 
 SAMPSON LOW, MAESTON, LOW AND SEAELE, 
 CROWN BUILDINGS, FLEET STEEET. 
 
 1871. 
 
 {All rights reserved.) 
 

 CIIISV.ICK PI.ESS :— PRINTED BY WHIITCTGHAM A2tD WTIIKIXS 
 TOOSS COURT, CHANCERY LAKE. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 HE larger portion of the papers in the 
 following collection, now for the first 
 time brought together, have appeared 
 during the last few years in " All the Tear 
 Kound," u Eobin Goodeellow," and other perio- 
 dicals. Though on different subjects, they are by 
 no means unconnected, but are all, as the title 
 implies, the result of open air studies of men and 
 Nature — of walks and talks in the country — and 
 sometimes in the town ; and all inspired, the writer 
 hopes and believes, by the same spirit — a desire to 
 find a soul of goodness even in things evil, and to 
 make the best of the innocent enjoyments which 
 Nature scatters so bountifully around for all who 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 know 3iow to seek and profit by thera. Like 
 Yictor Hugo in his u Kayons et Ombres,," the- 
 author may say 
 
 II a l'amour des eaux et des bois, 
 
 and of all that they can teach, which is very much 
 more than those imagine who have never tried 
 what companionship is to be fonnd in solitude; 
 and what pleasant social intercourse is to be 
 enjoyed with people to whom no formal intro- 
 duction has been necessary. 
 
 September, 1871. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 
 
 Page 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 NTEODUCTOKY 
 The Koad Mender 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 6 
 
 
 m 
 
 Happy Jack 
 
 The Language of Animals 
 
 
 
 14 
 
 29 
 
 
 The Intelligence of Plants 
 
 
 
 47 
 
 Country and Town Sparrows 
 
 
 
 59 
 
 Poor Tom ..... 
 
 
 
 71 
 
 A Lover of Trees ..*■■.. 
 
 
 
 82 
 
 Mr. Plant, the English Peasant 
 
 
 
 . 110 
 
 A Plea for Bare Feet 
 
 
 
 124 
 
 A "Wit and a Poet .... 
 
 
 
 . 131 
 
 lee ...... 
 
 
 
 . 146 
 
 Mr. Gomm's Experience of the Poor 
 
 
 
 . 156 
 
 Music and Misery in London . 
 
 
 
 . 173 
 
 The Mirth of the Million 
 
 
 
 . 188 
 
 Flies and Mosquitoes 
 
 
 
 . 202 
 
 The Physiology of Hand- Shaking . 
 
 
 
 . 219 
 
 The I 
 
 ieftB 
 
 "and : a Plea for the Neglecbec 
 
 
 
 . 229 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 A Great and a Mighty City . 
 
 The Alphabet of the Lower Creation 
 
 A Specimen of a New Mythological Dictionary 
 
 Growth of a London Myth . 
 
 New Light on an old Snbject . 
 
 On some Popular and Unpopular Poets . 
 
 Page 
 
 238 
 256 
 266 
 282 
 304 
 328 
 
UNDER THE BLUE SKY. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 DEARLY love a long day's walk in the 
 country, through the beautiful green 
 lanes of England, through the glens and 
 straths, and over the mountain summits 
 of Scotland, along the margin of the sea-shore, 
 over the cliffs and downs, and wherever there are 
 trees and green fields, or mountains, or a sight of 
 lake or ocean to be obtained. In my walks I am 
 never alone. I find companionship in the wild 
 flowers by the road side, in the birds upon the 
 bough, in the skylark poised high in mid-air, and 
 dropping his jocund notes upon the earth like so 
 many diamonds of melodyo I find occupation for 
 the mind in the varying aspect of the clouds, and 
 the landscape; a landscape which belongs to me, 
 far more than to the lord of the manor, if I admire 
 
 B 
 
2 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 its beauty and lie does not. But though I enjoy 
 the solitudes of nature, I never hold aloof from the 
 companionship of man. I am fond of talking to 
 farm-labourers and shepherds, to beggars and to 
 tramps, to travelling tinkers, gipsies, and showmen. 
 I love to study the wild flowers and weeds of 
 humanity, as much as the botanist loves to study 
 and classify the herbs and flowers that are too 
 lowly and of too ill-repute to find a place in the 
 conservatory, but which belong nevertheless to 
 the great garden of God. In my intercourse 
 with the waifs and strays of civilization, I always 
 find that I can learn something, even from the 
 most ignorant, if I take to them kindly, and do 
 not offend their pride. The poor are as proud, 
 after their own fashion, as the rich ; and the most 
 degraded of men knows that he belongs to the 
 aristocracy of nature, and that, like Alexander 
 Selkirk, in Cowper's well-known poem, he is " lord 
 of the fowl and the brute." He who hath sixpence 
 is king, to the extent of sixpence, says Emerson; 
 and a man is a man, and among the noblest of 
 animals, even when he is taken at his worst. 
 
 Though the rich may not know it or wish it, 
 there is almost as great a distinction of " caste " in 
 England as there is in India. It is something more 
 than money that divides the rich from the poor, 
 and the poor from the rich; and something else 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 3 
 
 than money or education — or the absence of one or 
 both — that separates trades from each other, or one 
 class of work-people from another ; and it is exceed- 
 ingly difficult for one whose dress, manners, and 
 conversation mark him as belonging to the profes- 
 sional, commercial, or gentlemanly classes to esta- 
 blish friendly and intimate relations with the pea- 
 santry and lower orders of labourers, or to get at 
 the secrets of their moral and intellectual life. To 
 call upon poor working people in their homes, sug- 
 gests to them that you have a ' ' mission " — religious 
 or otherwise — to reform or lecture them, and they 
 immediately — whether male or female — put on a 
 mental armour to defy you. They do not like to be 
 preached at, or lectured, or patronised, by " unco' 
 guid " or " rigidly righteous " people ; and though 
 they will most likely take your money if you offer 
 it, you will get but little insight into their mode of 
 life or habits of thought, if you talk to them for a 
 twelvemonth. They are on their guard against 
 you, and will not admit you into their confidence, 
 strive as hard as you may. If you sit with them 
 in their beerhouses, they discover at a glance, in 
 whatever way you may have dressed yourself, that 
 you are not one of them ; and they look upon you 
 as a flock of sheep might look upon a wolf, or a 
 congregation of crows upon an alien magpie, who 
 had obtruded into their clan or companionship. But 
 
4 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 when you meet with them on the country roads and 
 tramp along with them for miles, not having forced 
 yourself upon their company, but- offering it or 
 accepting it, as from man to man, you may often 
 make the acquaintance of some very excellent people, 
 from whom you can sometimes learn more than they 
 can learn from you. If they have not the know- 
 ledge of books — and even in this respect some of 
 them are by no means ignorant — they have the 
 knowledge of things : and if they look upon man 
 and nature, fate and circumstance, and on the rights 
 and wrongs of the poor, with eyes different from 
 yours, and, perhaps, from a totally opposite point 
 of view, you acquire a new kind of experience, and, 
 it may be, learn something of the previously unsus- 
 pected fires and forces that lie smouldering and 
 latent in the hearts of the multitude, of which our 
 lawgivers are often wholly unaware, and which they 
 would not, perhaps, credit on any authority but 
 that of their own experience. "It maybe some 
 entertainment," says Eobert Burns, in a letter to 
 his friend Robert Riddel, of Glenriddel, " to a curious 
 observer of human nature to see how a ploughman 
 thinks and feels under the pressure of love, ambi- 
 tion, anxiety, and grief, with like cares and passions, 
 which, however diversified by the modes and man- 
 ners of life, operate, I believe, pretty much alike on 
 all the species." Agreeing with Robert Burns in 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 5 
 
 this particular, not only as regards ploughmen, but 
 labouring men of every description, I never neglect 
 an opportunity to exchange ideas with them, and to 
 inquire how and on what they live 5 what opinions 
 they form of their own class, and of the classes 
 above and below them ; what notions, if any, they 
 have of the government of their own or other coun- 
 tries ; what are their enjoyments, their sorrows, their 
 prejudices ; whether they attend church or chapel ; 
 and what are their ideas of the divine government 
 of the world, and their hopes, if they have any, of a 
 hereafter. 
 
THE ROAD MENDER. 
 
 1STE of the most respectable men I know, 
 and whose acquaintance I made upon 
 the highway where he does his daily 
 work, is employed to keep three miles 
 of the public road in order. The road winds through 
 a beautiful country, and need not be more parti- 
 cularly specified, lest my good friend the labourer 
 should be pointed out too particularly to the notice 
 of the public of his own neighbourhood. He bears 
 an aristocratic name, and were he dressed in the 
 garb of a gentleman would present a distinguished 
 if not an aristocratic appearance. Pass him when I 
 will, he is always at his work. He labours as if he 
 liked his employment ; he never loiters, or dozes, or 
 takes unfair advantage of his paymaster to " scamp" 
 the job in hand. He clears the pathway from weeds, 
 trims the hedges, sees that the water-courses are 
 clear, looks to the drains, scrapes the horse manure 
 into little heaps by the roadside to be carted away 
 
THE BO AD MENDER. 7 
 
 by the agencies appointed for the purpose ; levels 
 the roadway wherever it gets worn into holes or 
 ruts, by shovelling in the necessary amount of mac- 
 adam ; and every day has enough to occupy him in 
 all these matters, and fill up the requisite number 
 of hours that he is bound to labour. He has got, 
 it seems, to be very much attached to his three 
 miles of woodland road. He knows every tree on 
 either side, and how old it is ; he can point out 
 those that are the favourite haunts of the squirrel 
 and the dormouse ; and he is acquainted with the 
 common but not with the botanical names of all the 
 hedge flowers and herbs in his district. He is close 
 upon sixty years of age, but looks older, and is 
 seldom to be seen without his short pipe in his 
 mouth, unless when he is spoken to. 
 
 " What wages do you earn, Mr. Stanley ? " I one 
 day asked him. Stanley is not his name, but he 
 has one quite as aristocratic. 
 
 " Two shillings a day." 
 
 " You have a wife and family ? " 
 
 u A wife and five children." 
 
 " Are any of the children old enough to earn 
 anything ? " 
 
 " Not one. The oldest is only ten." 
 
 ' ( And how can you feed them all, on two shillings 
 a day?" 
 
 ' ' God knows," he replied. " I don't. The wife 
 
8 THE ROAD MENDER. 
 
 manages somehow to get them bread and potatoes, 
 though scarcely enough, and a little tea." 
 
 « No meat?" 
 
 " Meat ! Well, we sometimes get a little bit of 
 rusty bacon, just to grease the potatoes with ; bacon 
 that shopkeepers, or clerks, or servant girls would 
 not look at, but which we manage to relish. I sup- 
 pose it is because we are hungry. " 
 
 " Is the Sunday dinner no better than the week 
 day one ? " 
 
 ' c Well, yes, we buy the offal, as the butchers call 
 it, when it is cheap, as it generally is in the hot 
 weather when it will not keep long." 
 
 " What do you mean by offal ? " 
 
 " I mean the heart, liver, and entrails. The wife 
 can cook a little, and chops up these things with 
 onions and salt, to make them savoury, and hide 
 the taste of putrefaction when the things are cheap 
 and not over fresh. When I was a young man, I 
 did not much mind the stale flavour. I had a 
 stomach and an appetite like an ostrich then \ but 
 now that I am growing old, I am getting particular, 
 and prefer cheese to meat. Bread and cheese and 
 onions is not bad fare, after all, if a man gets enough 
 of it." 
 
 a I see you manage to spare a little out of your 
 earnings for tobacco. Surely you could do without 
 that ? " 
 
THE ROAD MENDER. 9 
 
 e ' I cannot do without ' baccy/ but I spend very 
 little — next to nothing, I may say — on the article. 
 I find almost all that I need, upon the road. Gen- 
 tlemen who smoke throw away the cigar ends, and 
 I pick up sufficient during the day, to cut or 
 untwist, to supply my pipe. If you stopped my 
 ' baccy ' I should lose the best friend I have in the 
 world — next to my wife." 
 
 "You seem a strong man. Do you drink beer ?" 
 
 " I am a strong man, thank God ; and I hope 
 there is no harm in liking a glass of good ale or 
 beer?" 
 
 " Not in the least. I know I like it, if it be good, 
 and shall have much pleasure in treating you to a 
 pint." 
 
 " Thank you kindly. I never begged a glass of 
 beer in my life, and would scorn to do it, but I 
 never refused one if offered. People are pretty good 
 to me, and I get two or three pints in a week, 
 or more than that, from acquaintances on the 
 road. But the beer gets awfully bad now-a-days. 
 The publicans are not honest. They put water in 
 their beer first, and that makes it weak ; and then 
 they put drugs into it, to make it strong again. I 
 think such men ought to be severely punished. It's 
 worse than poaching, in my opinion." 
 
 ' l And in mine, too ; and if I could have my way, 
 I would make such an example of some of the 
 
10 THE ROAD MENDER. 
 
 poisoners of the poor man's beer, as would create a 
 talk in the world." 
 
 "Yes, sir, it's cruel; and the more cruel because 
 it is the poor, who can't help themselves, who are 
 made to suffer." 
 
 " Do you earn daily wages all the year round ? " 
 
 " No. Whenever there is a hard frost, or the 
 snow lies upon the ground, I have to shut up. In 
 such times I earn nothing, though they are just 
 the times when a man requires most. Coals are 
 dear, but we get them at half price at a place in the 
 village, where the gentry subscribe to let us have 
 them. And then I have the privilege of gathering 
 sticks and windfalls, which helps a little." 
 
 ' c And when you are too old to work, what then V 
 I asked suggestively. 
 
 "Well, there is first of all, the workhouse, and 
 after that, the grave. If it were not for the work- 
 house, I sometimes think that the squires and great 
 people would not have such a nice time of it in this 
 world, as they have. I don't want to go there, how- 
 ever. I should like to work on, and earn my wage 
 to the last. England's a poor place for such as I 
 am, at the best. There are too many of us. That's 
 the truth." 
 
 ' ' You can read ? " 
 
 " Ay, well enough ; and I like reading, too, espe- 
 cially the newspapers." 
 
TEE ROAD MENDER. 11 
 
 " Do you take in a penny paper ?" 
 
 " No, indeed, but I borrow one, when it's a week 
 old, from the butcher. I get the news stale, as I 
 do my victuals, but contrive to learn what is going 
 on in the world. " 
 
 " Do you read in the evening, after your work is 
 done?" 
 
 " Well, sometimes ;- — not always. I like to have 
 a talk with people, and hear the news of the place. 
 Sunday's my day for reading." 
 
 ' ( Do you attend church ? " 
 
 "Not often, for I fall asleep, and I don't like to 
 set a bad example — and to be nudged by somebody 
 near me as if I was committing a sin. Besides, I 
 snore sometimes. I wish I could keep awake at 
 church, but I can't. So I stay away and read the 
 newspaper, and sometimes lie in bed half the day, 
 and bless it as a day of rest." 
 
 ({ Do you study the politics in the papers V 
 
 "I don't care much about politics. I have no 
 vote. Fm nobody. But if I had a vote, Fd vote 
 for any gentleman who'd abolish the game laws, and 
 punish the wretches who put drugs into the beer. 
 And I should like to vote for any one who'd bring 
 beef or mutton from Australia or South America, so 
 that I could get meat instead of offal, and live half 
 as well as my lord's footman. But this won't be in 
 my time, I suppose ! " 
 
12 THE BO AD MENDER. 
 
 "I'm afraid not, though it's not impossible. 
 There's food enough in the world for all mankind, 
 if we could but bring the food to the mouths that 
 require it. Do none of your children go to school?" 
 
 ' ( Yes, the two eldest, boys of nine and ten, go 
 to school in the winter; but in the summer they get 
 a job now and then as crow boys and sparrow boys, 
 to frighten the birds from the corn, and earn a few 
 shillings to buy clothes with. They'll be able to 
 read and write, and do a little cyphering, I sup- 
 pose, by the time they are fourteen or fifteen.'" 
 
 " And your own clothes ; how do you manage ? " 
 
 " Well, clothes last a good while with care and 
 mending". I've got the suit I was married in, and 
 it looks pretty good still. Boots are the most 
 expensive article I have to buy. The wife manages ; 
 and she is a clever woman. She goes out charing 
 sometimes, and gets herself a little bit of finery, and 
 a few ribbons. Lord love her ! She deserves them. 
 And you see I am a sober man, and waste no money 
 in drink, though, as I said, I like my beer, and I 
 like it good, and would like to have the pillory set 
 up once more in our parish. Wouldn't I pelt some 
 people if they got there ! " 
 
 I took care that the road-mender had some good 
 beer that day — Bass's bottled — which he highly 
 relished. He is, it will be seen, a very favourable 
 specimen of the English peasantry — an honest, 
 
TEE BO AD MENDER. 13 
 
 hard-working, cheerful, but hopeless man ; born to 
 be a drudge, eking out his life with the aid of 
 charitable coals and chance kindnesses; one who 
 has but little idea of, or care for, the promises of 
 religion — a good man in his way, but practically as 
 much a heathen as his compeers in Greece in the 
 days of Plato. He harbours no resentment against, 
 and entertains no jealousy of, his superiors in 
 station and worldly wealth, and speaks ill of nobody 
 with the sole exception of the adulterators of his 
 beer. The portrait is from the life ; and were there 
 no worse or more ignorant people in England than 
 he, England would be a better place than it is for the 
 labouring classes. 
 
HAPPY JACK. 
 
 HY are you called Happy Jack?" in- 
 quired I of a very worthy man of my 
 acquaintance, who came to my garden 
 to show me some rare plants, which he 
 thought I would purchase. He was a man of the 
 people ; a man in a fustian jacket, with good thick 
 substantial shoes on his feet ; a wide-awake on his 
 head ; a blackthorn walking-stick in his hand ; a 
 wallet at his back ; and a short black pipe in his 
 mouth. He slowly and deliberately removed his 
 pipe to answer me. 
 
 " The people all calls me Happy Jack," he said. 
 <c It seems to please them, and doesn't do me any 
 harm. But my name, as you may have perhaps 
 heard, is not Jack or Tom either, but Giles ; and a 
 very good name too, at least I knows no harm of it. 
 But Jack somehow or other stands to being honest 
 and handy ; and that's why they call sailors Jacks, 
 I suppose. And a Jack-of-all-Trades means a clever 
 
EAPPY JACK 15 
 
 chap as can turn his hand to anything. And when 
 people calls me Happy Jack, I suppose they mean 
 it as a compliment ; and as the world goes, I am 
 happy enough. Anyhow I never complain. I make 
 a pretty fair living ; and I don't mind telling you, 
 that I've laid by a little bit of money in the savings 
 bank, and shan't come upon the union if I grow 
 ever so old and worn out. The secret of my happi- 
 ness — if I be's happy — and I don't deny it alto- 
 gether, though I might, are a good wife, a good 
 appetite, a good conscience, and a business as I likes 
 and sticks to ; and which, if I were proud, which I 
 ain't, I might call a perfession. I would not change 
 it for ne'er another business in the world." 
 
 And hereupon he put his pipe into his mouth 
 again, drew several long-drawn satisfactory whiffs, 
 and meditated. 
 
 I knew Giles's business well enough, and knew 
 also that he took a pleasure in it; as I took a 
 pleasure sometimes in hearing him talk about it. 
 Giles, whom I shall call Happy Jack, as his peers 
 and comrades call him, as more descriptive of his 
 character than his legal and baptismal cognomen, is a 
 wandering herbalist, or gatherer of simples, and some- 
 what of a physician in his humble fashion among the 
 poorer order of farm-labourers and cottagers. He 
 is a diligent student of botany — the botany of the 
 meadow, the garden and the roadside ; with Nature 
 
16 HAPPY JACK 
 
 for his first great teacher, and old Nicholas Culpeper, 
 student in physic and astrology, for his guide and 
 universal referee. Like Shakespeare's Father 
 Laurence, in " Eomeo and Juliet," he knows well 
 how to fill his osier basket — 
 
 With baleful weeds and precious juiced flowers, 
 
 and can as thoroughly as that worthy friar, un- 
 derstand — 
 
 How mickle is the powerful grace that lies 
 In plants and herbs. 
 
 An ancient edition of Culpeper, entitled "The 
 Complete Herbal" (with nearly four hundred medi- 
 cines made from English herbs, physically applied 
 to the cure of all disorders incident to man, with 
 rules for compounding them; also directions for 
 making syrups, ointments, &c. &c. &c, and bearing 
 for its motto on the frontispiece the Bible text,. 
 c ' And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is 
 in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth 
 out of the wall ") is the constant companion of Jack's 
 wanderings. A well-thumbed, greasy, time-stained, 
 dog's-eared book it is ; and annotated by hundreds, 
 of illegible marks ; — not illegible, however, to Jack, 
 though looking very like Egyptian hieroglyphics to 
 all eyes but his own. In the pursuit of herbs, such 
 as the herbalists sell in most of the great towns and 
 cities of England, which the homoeopathic chemists 
 
HAPPY JACK. 17 
 
 will sometimes purchase, to re vend in infinitesimal 
 doses, which hospitals require for plasters and poul- 
 tices; and which poor women of the old school are 
 fond of using as infallible nostrums for their own 
 ailments, and those of their husbands and children. 
 Jack makes regular circuits into the midland, 
 southern, eastern, and western counties of England ; 
 from Margate to the Land's End in one direction, 
 and from Warwick to Southampton and Portsmouth 
 in another. A sturdy man he was when I first 
 knew him, about sixty years of age, though as hale 
 and hearty as if he had been but forty, and with an 
 appetite, never very small, that had been kept large 
 by fresh air, daily exercise, and a mind at ease. 
 He is an educated man in everything except the 
 education of books — the great Culpeper's alone ex- 
 cepted ; and able to discourse on many things 
 hidden from the philosophy of people who, were 
 they brought into juxta-position with him, might 
 consider themselves to be very much his supe- 
 riors. 
 
 " What simples are most in request, now-a-days ? " 
 I once inquired of him. 
 
 " Well, I can't say, exactly/' he replied ; li but I 
 think there Las of late been more call for henbane, 
 deadly nightshade, and briony, than there used to 
 be. The homoeopathic doctors" — such he called 
 them — " makes great use of all these herbs, and so 
 
 c 
 
18 HAPPY JAGK. 
 
 does the other doctors too, I believe. Mighty useful 
 herbs they be, every one on 'em." 
 
 "All poisons V 3 I said. 
 
 " Pisons ! " he said, emphatically. I knew he 
 would take exception to the word, and used it of 
 malice prepense, that I might draw him out the 
 more strongly. Ci Pisons ! " he repeated. " There are 
 no positive pisons in the world, and everything is a 
 pison if you don't know how to use it. Beef is pison 
 if you eat nothing else for breakfast, dinner, and 
 supper; and bread is pison, and taters uncommon 
 pisonous. Henbane is pison, ne'er a doubt, if you 
 swallow an improper dose of it; and so is deadly 
 nightshade ; it has a flower uncommon like the 
 flower of the tater ; and white briony — one of the 
 prettiest and handsomest things as grows, with 
 fingers as fine as a lady's — has a root as well as a 
 berry, as is good for more ailments than I can count 
 on my fingers. Pisons ! Look here ! " he said, 
 stretching his hand towards the meadows and the 
 woods beyond them — " there's not a herb, or flower, 
 or weed, if there be anything as grows as deserves 
 to be called a weed, that you could pluck in a long 
 summer's day, as is not good for summut or other. 
 Only men, as a rule, are so ignorant! The very 
 dogs and cats knows better than some men; and 
 when they are unwell after eatin' too much stuff, 
 which men has given them, and as is not good for 
 
HAPPY JAOK. 19 
 
 them, they goes to the herbs appointed by God 
 Almighty, and eats ''em, to purge out the ill- 
 humours. And the rooks and the crows too, after 
 they have gorged 'emselves with worms and grubs, 
 knows where to go for physic, and eats nettle-seeds 
 or yew-berries. They can't afford to pay doctors, 
 and they doctors 'emselves, as men might do, if 
 they looked into Culpeper as much as they ought. 
 I don't like to hear the plants and herbs called 
 pisons and weeds. There's no such thing as a real 
 pison. Milk is pison if, instead of drinking it, you 
 cuts a vein open and pours a drop or two in. Some 
 herbs are pison outwardly, and some are pison 
 in'ardly. But not one as grows — I don't care what 
 the doctors say — is pisonous in itself, if you knows 
 how to use it, and the right quantity to take. 
 Pisons indeed ! I don't believe, wise as people think 
 'emselves in our day, with their steam-engines and 
 their telegraphs, and all the rest of the new-fangled 
 contrivances as we hear on every day of our lives — 
 that we have found out half the virtues of the 
 plants — no, nor a tenth part of 'em. It's my belief 
 that Nebuchadnezzar, when he ate grass, took a 
 physic as was good for him, and that there is a great 
 deal more virtue in grass than the world knows on, 
 with all its wisdom. For of all "herbs," is not 
 grass called in Scripture the herb of the field, as if 
 it was, which I sometimes think it is, the best as 
 
20 HAPPY JACK. 
 
 well as the commonest of all the herbs ? I've many 
 a time wished, when I've seen a dog a eatin' on it, 
 as I could ax him what he was a doin' it for. Of 
 course I can ax the dog the question, but by wuss 
 luck I can't get his answer. The only fault in old 
 Culpeper as ever I could find is, as he says nothing 
 about grass. If I was a scholard and could write 
 as well as him, or only half as well for the matter of 
 that, I'd write about grass myself. I knows> be- 
 cause I tried, that what the people calls^ mountain- 
 grass is a certain cure for the rheumatics ; that is 
 to say, the tea or broth made of it by boiling. And 
 it's my opinion that there isn't any kind of grass as 
 isn't good for man as well as beast, only, as I said 
 before, men are, for the most part, such fools, and 
 has to be taught what the beasts knows without 
 teaching. Could any one believe now," continued 
 Jack, who had warmed with his subject, and whom 
 I would not have interrupted on any account, except 
 by a word of stimulation — ' ( as any men of laming 
 and eddication could have been such hasses — I beg 
 the hasses' pardon — as the three railway gents, that 
 I read of last week in the newspapers, who got eating 
 the roots of deadly nightshade, and thought they were 
 wild carrots ? A dog, now, would have had more 
 sense. And one of the precious simpletons died of 
 his carrots in an hour or two ! I don't like to say it 
 sarved him right ! What's the good of so much 
 
HAPPY JACK 21 
 
 book laming if a fellow doesn't know a carrot when 
 he sees it ? It wasn't the root that killed the poor 
 silly creature, but his own stupidity : for deadly 
 nightshade is one of the finest physics in all the 
 world, as any common doctor knows, let alone the 
 herbalist." 
 
 " Have you any particular favourite of your own 
 among the simples you gather ; any one more 
 valuable than the rest in your opinion, and of a 
 greater benefit to mankind ? " 
 
 " Well, I can't tell ! So many on 'em ' deserve 
 honourable mention/ as they used to say of things 
 sent to the Great Exhibition, that I can't fix upon 
 any one in particular. Now, there's poppy, for 
 instance. What a blessing poppy is, let alone its 
 juice in the shape of lodnum, which brings the 
 blessed sleep to the weary eyes and brain of many a 
 sick man and woman as couldn't get a wink without 
 it ; but as a relief to swelling and inflammation of 
 every kind. There's the common field poppy, 
 now," and Jack stooped to gather one as he spoke, 
 " which some folks calls the corn rose ; — it is good 
 for more things than causing sleep. Hear what 
 old Culpeper says about it. I have it all by heart. 
 1 The wild poppy, or corn rose, is good to prevent the 
 falling sickness. The syrup made with the flowers 
 is with good effect given to those that have the 
 pleurisy ; and the dried flowers also, either boiled 
 
22 HAPPY JAGK. 
 
 in water, or made into powder, and drank, either in 
 the distilled water of them, or some other drink, 
 worketh the like effect. The distilled water of the 
 Sowers is held to be of much good nse against sur- 
 feits, being drunk evening and morning. It is 
 more cooling than any of the other poppies, and 
 effectual in hot agues, frenzies, and other inflamma- 
 tions, inward or outward/ C{ Ah ! " added Jack, 
 in corroboration of what his great master had said, 
 " poppy's quite as good in its way as the corn that 
 it grows among ; though the farmers doesn't know 
 it. Then, again, there's chick-weed and groundsel, 
 that the London people take such mighty cartloads 
 of every week to feed their singing birds with, but 
 which are quite as good for men or women as for 
 goldfinches and canaries." 
 
 I suppose that I looked doubtful on this point, 
 for Jack went on with renewed earnestness : " I 
 tell you chickweed and groundsel is good for many 
 kinds of sickness. I knows it, and Culpeper says 
 it ; and surely he knowed. ( Chickweed,' he says, 
 1 is a fine, soft, pleasing herb, born under the 
 dominion of the moon/ " 
 
 " Why of the moon ? " I inquired. 
 
 " Every plant as grows," said Jack, with as 
 much gravity as a judge, " grows under the in- 
 fluence of the sun, or the moon, or its own particular 
 planet. That's positive ! Many grows under Venus, 
 
HAPPY JACK. 23 
 
 many under Mars, and many under Saturn. What 
 plant was I talking on ? Chickweed. Yes ! Chick- 
 weed belongs to the moon. And, as you might, 
 perhaps, not believe me, hear what Culpeper says : — 
 ' This herb bruised, or the juice applied with cloths 
 or sponges dipped therein, to the region of the 
 liver, doth wonderfully temperate the inflamma- 
 tion thereof. It is effectual for all swellings and 
 imposthumes ; for all redness in the face, wheals, 
 pushes, itches, and scabs. The juice, either simply 
 used, and boiled with hog's lard, and applied to the 
 part, helpeth cramps, convulsions, and palsy. The 
 juice or distilled water is of much good use for all heats 
 and redness in the eyes, to drop some thereof into 
 them. It is good, also, in virulent sores and ulcers of 
 the leg and other parts of the body. The leaves boiled 
 with marsh-mallows and made into a poultice, with 
 fenugreek and linseed, helpeth the sinews when they 
 are shrunk by cramp or otherwise.' That's what 
 Culpeper says of chickweed, which you may see is 
 not sent by a kind Providence for the birds only. 
 And e grunsel ' (groundsel) is just as good, if not 
 better ; for grunsel is under the dominion of Venus. 
 I shan't tell you what I think of it, 'cause you 
 might think I was a exaggerating, or that I was a 
 drawin' on my fancy, which I assure you I never 
 does in the matter of any plant, big or little, 
 common or uncommon. Culpeper was in love with 
 
24 HAPPY JACK. 
 
 grunsel, I do believe. He says that this herb 
 is Venus's masterpiece, and f is as gallant and 
 universal a remedy for all diseases coming of heat, 
 in whatever part of the body they may be, as any 
 that the sun shines upon. It is very safe and 
 friendly to the body of man ; yet causeth vomiting 
 if the stomach be affected, if not, purging, which it 
 doth with more gentleness than might be expected.' 
 Old Culpeper didn't like the doctors — they got 
 the guineas out of people in his time, as they do 
 in ours, a vast deal too easily. c Lay by your 
 learned Latin receipts,' he says ; about c so many 
 grains of senna, and scammony, and colocynth, and 
 crocus metallora' — whatever that may mean — f and 
 grunsel alone in a syrup, or distilled water, shall do' 
 the deed for you, in all hot diseases, speedily 
 and safely. Nor is this all ; it is excellent for 
 jaundice, the cholic, sciatica, and the gravel.' In 
 short," added Jack, " it's about the best physic as 
 goes." 
 
 I plucked a nettle as Jack concluded, with a 
 gloved hand, Men entendu, and asked him, " Has 
 this vile thing any virtue ? " 
 
 ' ' Vile thing ! " he responded indignantly. " Why 
 vile ? it is one of the best plants as grows ; a prime 
 gift of God to poor ungrateful human kind. Call a 
 nettle vile ! But you don't mean it — I know you 
 don't ! Bless your heart ! the nettle — you may 
 
HAPPY JACK. 25 
 
 discover it in the dark, as old Culpeper says — is 
 good for scores of diseases. Mars is the lord of it ; 
 for the nettle, like Mars, is fiery. Nettle broth 
 is good for shortness of breath, and the asthma. 
 Look into Culpeper and see if it isn't good also for 
 pleurisy and sore throat ; good for the gravel ; 
 good for worms in children ; and as I have heerd 
 say, and believe, good for the sting of adders 
 and pisonous snakes; and the bite of mad dogs. 
 Nettles ! why we can make beer of 'em, and very 
 good beer too." 
 
 I think Jack would have gone on for an hour 
 or more about the nettles — had I not stopped to 
 pluck a daisy as he finished his laudation, and, 
 offering it to him, asked if there were any medicinal 
 properties in that, and under what planet he 
 supposed daisies to be born ? 
 
 " Suppose them to be born ? " he replied, <( I know 
 them to be born under Yenus. Culpeper says so. 
 That's enough for me. As for the virtues of the 
 daisy, it has lots an' lots. Its juice distilled is good 
 for the liver complaint. For ulcers in the gums, 
 the lips, or the tongue, it is the best thing in the 
 world. But look to Culpeper if you want to know 
 more ; all I say is, that its leaves and flowers, as well 
 as its juice, is good for inflammations and swellings, 
 and eases the pains of gout, rheumatism, and sciatica. 
 I gather cart-loads of daisies every year and sells 'em ; 
 
26 HAPPY JACK 
 
 and many a poor old hedger and ditcher, or his poor 
 old wife, troubled with the rheumatics, can get as good 
 a remedy for their ailment, for a pennorth o' daisies, 
 as they could have got from the queen's own doctor, 
 if they had paid him — which they could not do, 
 poor souls ! — a guinea fifty times over. And how 
 kind and bountiful God Almighty is," said Jack, 
 with a feeling of real piety, surging up in his simple 
 heart, u to make all the good things of this world so 
 common. Fresh air now ! what a good physic and 
 medicine is that ! And free to the poorest creature 
 as crawls, if he will only crawl out from his hole and 
 condescend to breathe it. And sunshine ! What is 
 so good as sunshine ? I have often thought to my- 
 self, that if I had the value in my pocket of one day 
 of sunshine in harvest time, that I should be the 
 richest man in all the universal world ! Not that I 
 wants to be the richest man in the world, or rich at 
 all — for that matter. For if I was rich, could I eat 
 my dinner with a better appetite than I do now ? 
 And sleep better o' nights ? And have more plea- 
 sure in my walks ? ~Not that I objects to a little bit 
 of money, mind ye, by no means. But when I hears 
 of people scrapin', and scraping and scrapin' up 
 money, and cheatm' other people so as they may 
 scrape deeper and pile up higher, and never enjoym* 
 themselves a bit, or even so much as laughin' except 
 when they have swindled or cheated somebody, I 
 
HAPPY JACK 27 
 
 thinks as money may be bought too dear, and that 
 them's the happiest folks, who takes a little pleasure 
 as they goes, doesn't cheat nobody, and thinks more 
 of the sunshine out o' doors, at least once in a way, 
 than they does of a good bargain.-" 
 
 "Well, Jack," I said, "you enjoy yourself, any 
 how. You always seem happy, and I know you are 
 strong." 
 
 " Well," he replied, (e it's a grand thing to enjoy 
 your business if it be a innocent one. And mine is 
 innocent, and I likes it. Lord, love ye ! I would 
 not be a tailor, a carpenter, a shoe-maker, or a shop- 
 keeper, for all the money the queen could offer me. 
 I love the open air, the road-side, the path through 
 the woods and meadows, or by the river. I love to 
 hear the birds a-singing, and to see the herbs and 
 plants a-growing; and to feel at the same time that 
 they are all a-growing- for me, and that I knows 
 how to use 'em, and make a decent and a honour- 
 able living out of 'em. And then you see, I'm 
 different from a farmer. He has to sow afore he 
 can reap. I never sows, and I always reaps. The 
 wind and the birds sows the seeds for me, and they 
 grows without my care and for my benefit ; the rain 
 soaks 'em and the sun ripens 'em, and all for me, 
 because I knows what they are, what they can do, 
 and where I can look for 'em when I wants 'em." 
 
 - ' You told me," I said, " that you made a good 
 
28 HAPPY JACK. 
 
 living by this business of gathering and selling 
 simples. Would you think it rude in me if I asked 
 you how much you earn on the average in a week, 
 or whether from year's end to year's end you are as 
 well paid as a gardener or a farm-labourer V* 
 
 " There's ne'er a gardener or farm-labourer in all 
 England as I would change places with/' answered 
 Jack, somewhat contemptuously. " Farm-labourers 
 get ten or twelve shillings a week, and gardeners 
 eighteen or twenty and their beer. If I did not 
 earn three, times as much as any farm-labourer, or, 
 at least, twice as much as any gardener as ever 
 mowed a lawn, or dug a potato, I should think my 
 business was a-going to the dogs. Farm-labourers, 
 poor things, knows very little, and gardeners doesn't 
 know much; and it stands to reason, as I knows 
 more than they, that I should make a better living 
 than they do. Howsomever, that's neither here nor 
 there. I like my business, and my business likes 
 me ; and I wouldn't change it — no, not to be Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury ! " 
 
 Good bye, Happy Jack ! Long may you flourish I 
 You deserve your name ! 
 
THE LANGUAGE OF ANIMALS. 
 
 HO has not read the Arabian Nights' 
 Entertainments ? I pity the man or 
 woman, if any such there be, who has 
 not ; or, if I do not pity them, I envy 
 the treat in store for them, if they will turn from the 
 error of their ways, and read the fascinating book 
 from beginning to end. Among the stories which 
 first fixes the attention of most people is that of the 
 merchant who understood the language of animals. 
 And a delightful story it is. In ".^Esop's Fables," also, 
 where the beasts and the birds talk to each other and 
 to mankind, no reader, who has a proper faith in what 
 he reads, is in the least degree surprised at the saga- 
 city which the animals display and put into the most 
 natural language imaginable. The fox did say the 
 grapes were sour ; the wolf did fix an unconscionable 
 quarrel upon the poor little lamb which he wanted 
 to devour, and the lion did really express to the 
 man his candid opinion upon the favouritism of por- 
 
30 TEE LANGUAGE 
 
 trait-painting. At all events, the youthful imagi- 
 nation sees no absurdity in the idea. This brings 
 me to my subject — Is fable entirely wrong in these 
 little matters, and have not all animals a language 
 of their own ? Have not birds a language which 
 other birds understand ? and insects ? and, for that 
 matter, fishes ? In the pride of our superior know- 
 ledge, we assert of ourselves that Man is the only 
 animal who kindles a fire, cooks food, makes clothes,, 
 and is endowed with the faculty of articulate speech. 
 While granting our own monopoly of fire-making, 
 cookery, and tailoring, are we quite sure that we 
 do not arrogate to ourselves a little too much supe- 
 riority when we claim that to us alone is accorded 
 the glorious privilege of language ? Philosophers 
 are very dogmatic on the subject. u However 
 much," says Professor Max Muller, "the frontiers 
 of the animal kingdom have been pushed forward, 
 so that at one time the line of demarcation between 
 animal and man seemed to depend on a mere fold 
 of the brain, there is one barrier which no one has 
 yet ventured to touch — the barrier of language." 
 The professor proceeds to quote Lord Monboddo 
 and John Locke. The first says that "As yet no 
 animal has been discovered in the possession of lan- 
 guage, not even the beaver, who of all the animals 
 we know, that are not like the ourang-outang, of 
 our own species, comes nearest to us in sagacity." 
 
OF ANIMALS. 31 
 
 Locke says, " The power of abstracting is not at all 
 in brutes ; and . the having of general ideas is that 
 which puts a perfect distinction between man and 
 brutes. For it is evident we observe no footsteps 
 in these of making use of general signs for universal 
 ideas ; from which we have reason to imagine that 
 they have not the faculty of abstracting or making 
 general ideas, since they have no use of words or of 
 other general signs." Are not these philosophers 
 a little too confident ? 
 
 We know that there are many creatures on the 
 earth which are utterly unconscious of the existence 
 of man ; and we might, if we were not too proud, 
 ask ourselves, in like manner, if there may not be 
 many things in the animal creation of which man is 
 necessarily unconscious. If I walk through the 
 woods on a bright summer's day, or sit under the 
 oaken or beech en shadows, I am conscious of a tide 
 and tremor of life around me. I hear the birds 
 singing, twittering, and chattering, each species with 
 its own peculiar note. I hear the bees and the flies 
 buzzing with more or less vigour, pertinacity, and 
 volume of sound ; while a faint echo comes from the 
 distant pastures of the bleating of sheep, the lowing 
 of cattle, the barking of shepherds' dogs, and the 
 lusty crowing of the cocks in the farm-yard. I ask 
 myself whether all these various sounds may not be 
 as many languages, perfectly intelligible to the 
 
32 TEE LANGUAGE 
 
 creatures which speak them to each other, though 
 unintelligible to me. I know that some animals — the 
 dog especially — understand many words that I em- 
 ploy, if I speak emphatically, and that my own dog 
 will do what I tell him ; but, if I do not understand 
 what one dog says to another, whose fault is it, mine 
 or the dog's ? Man may doubtless claim that he has 
 a larger vocabulary than the inferior creation. He 
 has wants more numerous, ideas more abundant ; 
 hopes, fears, recollections, and aspirations, un- 
 known perhaps to their limited intelligence, and 
 must consequently have a language more copious 
 than theirs. Language keeps pace with knowledge, 
 intelligence, and imagination. A Shakespeare may 
 require fourteen thousand words to express all his 
 thoughts, and tell all his marvellous stories; a 
 scientific writer, obliged to be accurate, may re- 
 quire a few thousand more ; a modern gentleman, 
 of average education, may manage to express all his 
 wants, wishes, and emotions, and carry on the usual 
 intercourse of life and society, with four thousand ; 
 while an ordinary peasant in some of our rural dis- 
 tricts sometimes gets on satisfactorily to himself, his 
 family, and his associates, with about five hundred, 
 and can manage to transact all his business with his 
 horse in half-a-dozen. And as it does not follow 
 that we can truly call such a peasant a man without 
 a language, even when speaking to his horse, neither 
 
OF ANIMALS. 33 
 
 does it follow in the case of a quadruped, that may 
 have but four or five, or even but one word or sound 
 to express its meaning, that such quadruped is with- 
 out a language which its fellow- quadrupeds may 
 understand ? A single sound, with a rising or a 
 falling accent, or a stronger or weaker emphasis, 
 may express different meanings ; and the same 
 sound, repeated, twice, thrice, or four times, with 
 the rising or the falling accent at the first, second, 
 third, or fourth repetition, may contain a whole 
 vocabulary for the simple creatures who emit and 
 understand the sound, and whose wants and emo- 
 tions are as circumscribed as their speech. 
 
 Professor Max Miiller supplies us with an illus- 
 tration in point. He says that in the Chinese, 
 the Annamitic, and likewise in the Siamese and 
 Burmese languages, one single sound does duty in 
 this way for a great variety of meanings. " Thus," 
 he says, t( in Annamitic, c ha, pronounced with the 
 grave accent, means a lady or an ancestor ; pro- 
 nounced with a sharp accent, it means the favourite 
 of a prince ; pronounced with the semi-grave accent, 
 it means what has been thrown away ; pronounced 
 with the grave circumflex, it means what is left of 
 a fruit after the juice has been squeezed out ; pro- 
 nounced with no accent, it means three ; pronounced 
 with the ascending or interrogative accent, it means 
 a box on the ear. Thus, "Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba" is 
 
 D 
 
34 THE LANGUAGE 
 
 said to mean, if properly pronounced, e Three ladies 
 gave a box on the ear to the favourite of the 
 prince.' " 
 
 In our own and in several European languages 
 identical sounds have various meanings ; the English 
 " box " being one example, and the French " sang," 
 " s'en," " sans," " sent," " cent " another. If we 
 consider this subject without a prejudice, may we 
 not see reason to think that the " Bow ! wow ! 
 wow ! " of our estimable friend the dog, may be 
 susceptible of a great variety of meanings, according 
 to the tone and accentuation he gives to those 
 fundamental words or syllables of his language, or 
 the number of repetitions either of the " boiv " or 
 the "wow?" Sometimes, when a dog barks, he will 
 omit the C( boiv" altogether, and say, (i wow ! wow ! 
 wowl" very sharply and rapidly; and it can be 
 scarcely supposed that so very intelligent a creature 
 has no reason for this little change in its customary 
 phraseology. Mr. Max Miiller positively states that 
 " no animal thinks, and no animal speaks, except 
 man." Every one who has made a friend of an 
 animal — and there are few who have not — must 
 dispute the first part of this assertion. When a 
 dog is presented with a bone after he has had his 
 dinner and satisfied his hunger, he thinks the bone 
 is too good to be rejected, and it would be wise in 
 him to put it into a place of safety, to be ready 
 
OF ANIMALS. 35 
 
 when required, just as a man puts his money in the 
 bank. Accordingly, he takes his opportunity to go 
 into the garden and bury it; and, if watched in 
 the process, will dig it up again with his nose, and 
 carry it off to a safer spot. Is not this thinking ? 
 When I put on my hat and overcoat, and take my 
 walking stick from its accustomed place in the hall, 
 my dog thinks, and speedily knows, that I am 
 going out ; and very plainly asks me, not only by 
 the sudden sparkling of his expressive eyes and the 
 wagging of his equally expressive tail, but by a 
 succession of joyous barks and yelps, whether I 
 mean to take him along with me ; and, if I refuse 
 the request, very plainly expresses his sorrow for 
 my decision. 
 
 Mr. Max Muller says elsewhere in his lecture, 
 that " language and thought are inseparable." If 
 this statement be correct, it follows from his own 
 showing, that if we can prove the possession of a 
 faculty for thinking in the members of the inferior 
 creation, we must admit that they may possess a 
 language which they may thoroughly understand, 
 and which may be quite sufficient for the expres- 
 sion of their limited ideas. It is difficult to be- 
 lieve that the crow has not two or three, and the 
 nightingale at least a dozen notes in its voice, and 
 that these notes may not, in their interchange, re- 
 iteration, and succession, express ideas with which 
 
36 THE LANGUAGE 
 
 crows are familiar, and whole poems or histories, 
 such as nightingales love to tell and repeat to one 
 another; and that any one of the many notes in 
 the sweet song of the skylark may not, according 
 to its accentuation, or even to its place in the 
 gamut, express as many shades of meaning as the 
 Annamitic "ba" of which Mr. Max Miiller dis- 
 courses. That we cannot understand the language 
 is no proof that it is not a language ; for, if it were, 
 the nations of the earth might mutually accuse each 
 other of being as speechless as the brutes. It is 
 quite as difficult for the uneducated and untrained 
 ear — say, of an Englishman — to distinguish the 
 several sounds uttered by a Frenchman, a Russian, 
 a Spaniard, or a Gaelic Highlander, speaking rapidly, 
 as it is to distinguish from one another the separate 
 sounds in the song of the lark or the nightingale, 
 or the twitter of sparrows. In Scotland the cuckoo 
 is called the gowk, as it used to be formerly called 
 in England ; and the saying remains in the northern 
 parts of the island that a very silly person is cc as 
 stupid as a gowk." A gowk means a fool, or a 
 person that is always saying the same thing, and has 
 but one idea — like the Cuckoo. But no one thinks 
 of applying such an epithet of scorn to a real 
 singing-bird, that has many notes in its voice, and 
 consequently expresses a larger number of ideas. 
 Every one knows the paucity of mere sounds in a 
 
OF ANIMALS. 37 
 
 musical octave — the seven notes of the gamut, with 
 their flats and sharps ; but out of these seven come 
 all the national melodies, all the glees and madrigals, 
 all the popular tunes, all the dances and galops, all 
 the reels and strathspeys, all the hymns and songs, 
 all the oratorios, all the grand and little operas, that 
 ever have been or ever will be composed ; so that, 
 if we grant even so few as seven notes to the lark 
 or the nightingale, we grant it a language, or, at all 
 events, the possibility of a language or a vocabu- 
 lary, quite as rich as that of Hodge the farm- 
 labourer, with his . five or six hundred words, or 
 that of the little child, that uses scarcely half the 
 number. 
 
 These remarks, speculations, or arguments, which- 
 ever the reader may consider them to be, apply only 
 to those sounds at the command of the inferior 
 creation which may, for all we know to the con- 
 trary, serve as the constituent syllables of the words 
 which make their language, and not to those other 
 languages of the eye, or the gesture, which human 
 beings with articulate speech at their disposal so 
 constantly employ. The eyes of man or woman, as 
 everybody knows and has felt, can express love, or 
 hate, or fear, or anger, without the necessity of 
 speech ; and so may the eyes of all creatures that 
 possess the gift of sight. Gestures and signs, in 
 like manner, as we know, not only by the example 
 
38 THE LANGUAGE 
 
 of the deaf and dumb, who have been tanght the 
 alphabet of the fingers, but by what we may daily 
 witness in the conduct of domestic animals towards 
 each other, may serve largely for the expression 
 of love or hatred. This power of language even 
 Lord Monboddo and Mr. Locke would have con- 
 ceded; and so, doubtless, would Mr. Max Muller. 
 In this manner the meanest things that live and 
 feel have power of communication with their fellows, 
 as well as with such a superior creature as man, 
 when they become either attached to or afraid of 
 him. But the question whether some kind of 
 articulate speech is not at their command — available 
 among themselves, though not to man, on account 
 of man's incapacity to bring down his big intellect 
 into the little circle of theirs, or of the dulness of 
 his ear to sounds that may be very clear, sharp, and 
 well-defined to theirs — remains unajffected by their 
 undoubted possession of the mute language of 
 gesture and the eyes. The spider, with his hundred 
 eyes, cannot see me if I stand at the distance of a 
 few inches from his cunning web ; but would 
 Mr. Spider, if he were a philosopher, be justified, 
 on that account, in asserting that I was not there, 
 or even that I did not exist ? Is it my imperfection 
 that he cannot behold me ? In like manner, is 
 it not my imperfection if I cannot see or hear that 
 which smaller things can both hear and see ? The 
 
OF ANIMALS. 39 
 
 animalcule in a drop of water, that sees and some- 
 times eats smaller animalcules than himself, is 
 doubtless in entire ignorance of all beyond the 
 circle of his water-drop ; but he would be a silly 
 animalcule if he were, on that account, to deny the 
 existence of anything bigger and nobler than him- 
 self. And you and I, dear reader, may never have 
 heard a fly talk to a fly, or a worm to a worm, 
 or been able to make out the language of the birds 
 when they mate about St. Valentine's Day ; but the 
 fly may have talked to the fly, the worm to the 
 worm, and the bird to the bird, all the same for our 
 incapacity to hear the talk of the one or understand 
 the song of the other. 
 
 Most people who are gifted with the faculty of 
 observing, and blessed with the privilege of enjoying, 
 the sights and sounds of nature, and who have 
 either resided in, or been frequent visitors to, the 
 country, must at one time or other have remarked 
 the actions and behaviour of crows and rooks, or, in 
 the quaint language of the old Scottish poet, 
 Alexander Montgomery, must have listened to, and 
 been " deaved with the din 
 
 And jargon of the jangling jays, 
 
 The craiking craws, and keckling kays." 
 
 "No one who has at all studied the habits of these 
 birds will think it a very daring assertion that the 
 cry or sound of <( caw " may be as susceptible of a 
 
40 THE LANGUAGE 
 
 variety of meanings as the Annamitic " ba," or the 
 English " box/' or the French " sang," or the 
 canine " bow-wow ! " — and that its duplication into 
 l( caw ! caw ! " or into a still greater number of re- 
 petitions, is not without a purpose and signification 
 as intelligible to the birds which utter as to those 
 which hear them. The rooks and crows have often 
 been observed to hold public meetings of all the 
 individuals in the tribe or colony — male and female 
 (for in their democracy, as well as in that which 
 Mr. John Stuart Mill proposes for England, the 
 mothers as well as the fathers, the paired as well as 
 the unpaired of both sexes have votes) — to debate 
 on matters of importance. As far as we know and 
 can understand the objects of these assemblages, 
 the tribe is summoned to decide whether a sickly 
 bird is so sickly as to be beyond hope of recovery, 
 and therefore to be put out of its misery, they having 
 no doctors among them ; whether an interloper from 
 a neighbouring colony has not violently or surrep- 
 titiously endeavoured to establish himself among 
 them ; or whether he has not committed some other 
 offence against the lex non scrijpta of their com- 
 munity which calls for reprobation or punishment. 
 At all events, something marvellously like a trial 
 takes place, with a judge or presiding officer, and 
 the whole community for the jurors. The prisoner, 
 looking dejected, penitent, and woebegone, is 
 
OF ANIMALS. 41 
 
 perched in the middle. A series of caw-ca wings 
 ensues, which, as Lord Dundreary might say, " no 
 fellow can understand," but which cannot be other- 
 wise than intelligible to the sachems and members 
 of the corvine tribe — or why should the sounds be 
 uttered ? — and which, protracted sometimes for 
 twenty or thirty minutes, or even for an hour, 
 results in a decision of some kind. If the defendant 
 flies away comfortably with the judge and jury at 
 the conclusion of the council, we have a right to 
 suppose that he has been acquitted. If, on the 
 contrary, as often happens, the whole tribe pounce 
 upon him with beak and claw, and peck him to 
 death, screeching and caw- cawing all the while, we 
 must suppose, on the same principle, that he has 
 been found guilty of some crime or other — perhaps 
 of being hopelessly unwell — sentenced to death, 
 and executed accordingly. If there be thought in 
 these matters among the birds, is it not right, even 
 according to the theory of Mr. Max Muller and the 
 other philosophers, to suppose that there is language 
 also ? And if a stray rook or crow happened to 
 make its way into the Central Criminal Court while 
 a trial was pending, and perched himself, like Edgar 
 Poe s raven, on the top of a bookcase or the cross- 
 beam of , a door, and listened attentively to the 
 pleadings, to the examination of the witnesses, and 
 the judge's charge, without understanding a word 
 
42 THE LANGUAGE 
 
 that was said, would Mr. Crow or Mr. Rook be 
 justified, if he could get back to his comrades in 
 the woods, in asserting that men had no articulate 
 language ? 
 
 When sparrows quarrel among themselves on a 
 marital or amorous question, and all the branches 
 of a tree resound with their angry and recriminatory 
 twitterings, do not these sparrows talk? And 
 when swallows assemble, at the close of summer, 
 preparatory to their annual migration to the trans- 
 lucent waters and the ever-green umbrageousness 
 of the south, is there no language in the sounds 
 they utter ? Do they not deliberate whether the 
 summer be indeed gone in the regions which they 
 still inhabit ? Do they not ask one another whether 
 it is still possible to stay a little longer, and be con- 
 tented with the good things they enjoy ? or whether 
 the icy breath of winter is not even now palpable to 
 them, if not to men, creeping and soon to be blow- 
 ing from afar ? — and whether, consequently, it is 
 not expedient for them to spread their wings and 
 fly away to the bright regions where winter never 
 penetrates ? If they do not say these things, they 
 say something — of that there can be little doubt ; 
 and because we possess no swallow grammar, and 
 no hirondelle dictionary, are we not a little too wise 
 in our own conceit if we assume that no such lan- 
 guage is possible ? 
 
OF ANIMALS. 43 
 
 If, descending in the scale of creation from the 
 qnadrnpeds and birds that emit sounds which are 
 perfectly audible to themselves and us — whatever 
 those sounds may mean — to that lower world of 
 insect life which emits little and sometimes no sound 
 that our ears can detect, we may still discover rea- 
 son to believe that they may have some power of 
 speech — possibly by means of sound, possibly by 
 means of touch and signs. Take bees and ants as 
 familiar examples. When the bees in a hive select 
 one particular bee, and station her at the entrance 
 — like a hall-porter at a club in Pali-Mall — and 
 assign to her the duty, which she well performs, of 
 allowing none but members of the hive to pass in, 
 is it not certain that the functionary has been chosen 
 for sufficient reasons from the rest, and informed 
 of the wishes of the community ? This cannot be 
 done without a language of some sort, whether of 
 the eye, the touch, or the expression of a sound or 
 series of sounds. When black ants make war against 
 red ants, for the purpose of taking the children of 
 the latter into captivity and making slaves of them, 
 is war declared without preliminary consultation? 
 and, if not, must not these belligerent Formicans 
 have a language ? The battles of the ants have 
 often been seen, and often described. I was one day 
 strolling on the wild and beautiful shore of Loch Eck, 
 in Argyllshire, when I sat me down to rest by the 
 
■ 44 THE LANGUAGE 
 
 side of a little rill or burnie that trickled down a 
 bank, when I noticed that a large flat stone or slab, 
 that ages ago, perhaps, had slidden down from the 
 mountain — a slab that was about five or six feet 
 long by about as many wide — was covered with 
 ants of two species — the one with wings, the other 
 wingless — and that they were fighting a desperate 
 battle, a very Waterloo or Sadowa of carnage. The 
 stone was encumbered with the dead and dying; 
 battalion charged battalion, division assailed divi- 
 sion, while episodes of individual bravery — one 
 single combatant against another — spotted the 
 battle-field. There were march and countermarch, 
 assault and defence, retreat and pursuit, and, as far 
 as my unpractised eye could judge, a considerable 
 amount of care and attention to the wounded and 
 disabled. Returning home to my books, I found 
 a description in Leigh Hunt's " Companion" of 
 a similar battle, on the authority of a German 
 naturalist, named Hanhart, and a still more inte- 
 resting description in " Episodes of Insect Life," 
 by Acheta Domestica, both confirmatory of what I 
 had seen, and both containing particulars of the 
 mode of battle, which I had been unable to under- 
 stand. The puzzle was then, as it still is, whether 
 these quarrelsome little Formicans could form them- 
 selves into battalions, arrange plans of attack and 
 defence, appoint commanders and captains, and 
 
OF ANIMALS. 45 
 
 play the parts of Napoleon and Wellington, without 
 some means of intercommnnication of idea, equiva- 
 lent, in its results, to human speech ? The question 
 cannot be decided, except inferentially, and by 
 arguing from the known to the unknown. If treated 
 in this manner, there is much more to be said in 
 favour of the proposition that the Formicans can 
 speak to each other than can be said against it — 
 especially if, remembering with Shakespeare, that 
 there are more things in heaven and earth than are 
 dreamt of in our philosophy, we consider, at the 
 same time, that there may be an infinitude of sounds 
 in Nature which our ears are too dull to hear, and 
 of which the vibrations are far too faint and delicate 
 to strike upon the human tympanum. 
 
 Without dogmatising on the subject, a student 
 of Nature may be permitted to express his belief 
 that the all-wise and infinitely beneficent Creator 
 has not only given to every living creature, great 
 or small, the capacity for enjoyment, and the con- 
 sequent capacity for pain, but the power of express- 
 ing to its own kind its joy or sorrow, its fears, its 
 wishes, and its wants ; and that man is not so wholly 
 a monopolist of speech and reason as the philo- 
 sophers have imagined. 
 
 It may be fairly argued that the non-existence of 
 speech among animals, and even among insects, is 
 (to use the Scottish law phrase) "not proven." 
 
 
46 LANGUAGE OF ANIMALS. 
 
 The sun may spread around a very great and 
 glorious radiance, and a candle may emit a very 
 small glimmer; but there is light in both cases. 
 Man's reasoning powers, and the speech that accom- 
 panies them, when compared with the reasoning 
 faculty and the speech of all the inferior inhabitants 
 of the globe, may be as greatly in excess of theirs 
 as the noonday sunshine is in excess of the ray of 
 a farthing candle ; but the least particle of reason- 
 ing power is reason as far as it extends. What we 
 call instinct is but a kind and degree of reason, 
 and, in a world full of balances and compensations, 
 its very inferiority has its compensation in the fact 
 that, unlike reason, instinct never goes wrong. 
 If animals cannot understand our language unless 
 in very few instances of ordinary occurrence and 
 when accompanied by sign, gesture, and the expres- 
 sion of the eye, neither can we understand their 
 language, except it have the same mute accompani- 
 ments. Mr. Emerson says, C( that we are wiser than 
 we know;" I say it is possible, that with all our 
 undoubted superiority, and all our pride of intellect, 
 we are not so wise as we think. 
 
THE INTELLIGENCE OF PLANTS. 
 
 HATEVER be the exact difference be- 
 tween reason and instinct, which has 
 been rather a puzzling matter for philo- 
 sophers in all ages, and however much 
 or however little of either faculty may be possessed 
 by men and animals, be the latter large as elephants, 
 eagles, and whales, or small as mice, butterflies, or 
 animalculae, man clearly admits that these creatures 
 have a certain degree of intelligence which is useful 
 to them. He will not, however, admit this to be 
 true in the case of plants and vegetables, whether 
 as regards reason, instinct, or any minor degree of 
 intelligence whatsoever. The great naturalist, Lin- 
 nseus, although he was the first to declare and pro- 
 mulgate that plants and flowers, as well as animals, 
 are male and female — a discovery which one would 
 suppose might have led him to acknowledge sen- 
 sation, if not intelligence, in these living beings, 
 says, in defining the differences between the mineral, 
 
43 THE INTELLIGENCE 
 
 vegetable,, and animal kingdoms, c ' Minerals grow ; 
 vegetables grow and live ; animals live, grow, and 
 feel." In other words, he asserts that the members 
 of the vegetable world do not iC feel." Another and 
 more recent definition sets forth that " a plant is an 
 organised being, unconscious of its own existence, 
 fed by inorganic substances which it extracts from 
 air or water, according to laws independent of the 
 formulee of organic chemistry, by the help of a 
 faculty dependent on vital force." Are these ideas 
 just, and these definitions correct ? I think not, 
 and have been led by observation to believe that 
 plants are conscious of their own existence, and 
 therefore of their own wants, and that they are en- 
 dowed, not only with feeling or sensation, but with 
 intelligence in such degree as is sufficient to make 
 life pleasant to them, and enable them to take proper 
 measures for its preservation. 
 
 When we consider the extreme beauty of plants 
 and flowers, and know from experience that they 
 live, propagate, and die, it seems like setting a 
 presumptuous limit to the divine love of God, to 
 deny that he has given sensation to such lovely 
 creatures. If the oyster fastened upon the rock can 
 feel, why not the rose or the convolvulus, or the 
 great oak-tree that is fast rooted in the ground ? 
 The glow of the sunshine or the freshness of the rain 
 and the air that feed plants and vegetables, are they 
 
OF PLANTS. 49 
 
 not agreeable to the plants and vegetables,, as things 
 to be felt and enjoyed ? Who can tell ? Or who 
 shall deny, and give good reason for his incredulity ? 
 What philosopher can prove this negation ? And, 
 in point of fact, who, however learned he may be, 
 can decide where animal life ends and where vege- 
 table life begins ? What, for instance, is a sponge ? 
 And if, as Linneeus says, plants have no feeling, 
 what makes the mimosa, or sensitive plant, shrink 
 so timidly from the slightest touch, and apparently 
 with such pain or terror from a ruder blow ? 
 Whether I am scientifically and philosophically right 
 or wrong, I take a pleasure in believing that 
 
 To every thing that lives, 
 The kind Creator gives 
 Share of enjoyment, 
 
 and that the possession of life, in however infini- 
 tesimal a degree, presupposes in its possessor, 
 whether animal or vegetable, a faculty of sensation 
 that administers to its happiness, and that may con- 
 sequently administer to its suffering. For pleasure 
 and pain are twins, and the one is not attainable 
 without liability to the other. The idea is not new 
 to poetry, though not accepted by science. It 
 blooms and sparkles in the graceful mythology of 
 Greece, and the somewhat less graceful mythology 
 of Rome, as all who remember the Dryads and 
 Hamadryads ■ — the loves of Apollo with Laura, 
 
50 TEE INTELLIGENCE 
 
 Daphne, and Acantha, or who at school or col- 
 lege have pored over the metaphors of Ovid, will 
 readily admit. The poets of India and Persia 
 delighted to animate the flowers and trees, and, 
 according to Hafiz, the rose appreciates the tender 
 melodies of her lover the nightingale. Greek super- 
 stition endowed the atropa mandragora with all the 
 sensations of an animal, and believed that it shrieked 
 with pain when its roots were wrested from the 
 ground. 
 
 Science may laugh at all such notions ; but 
 Science, though a very great and learned lady, does 
 not know everything-, and her elder sister, Poetry, 
 often sees further and deeper into things than she 
 does. Did not Shakespeare, in the " Tempest," 
 foreshadow the possibility of the electric telegraph 
 more than two hundred years before Wheatstone ? 
 Did not Dr. Erasmus Darwin, long in advance of 
 James Watt and Robert Stephenson, predict the 
 steamship and the locomotive engine ? And did 
 not Coleridge, in the " Ancient Mariner," very 
 clearly explain the modus operandi of the then un- 
 suspected atmospheric railway ? 
 
 On the question of the intelligence of plants, I 
 must confess that my convictions as well as my 
 sympathies go with the poets rather than with the 
 scientific men. I know that the trees and the 
 flowers, inasmuch as they live, are my fellow- 
 
OF PLANTS. 51 
 
 creatures,, and the children of the same God as 
 myself, and, like niyself, it is to be presumed,, en- 
 dowed with the faculty, though possibly in a much 
 fainter degree, of enjoying the world in which His 
 love and goodness have placed both them and me. 
 They breathe, they perspire, they sleep, they feed 
 themselves, and may be overfed ; they are male and 
 female. If science admits all these facts, how can 
 it logically stop short at such a definition as that of 
 Linnseus, and deny them sensation ? Darwin, in 
 his philosophical poem, the " Botanic Garden" (not 
 much read in the present day) , fancifully describes 
 the Loves of the Flowers, and imagines, not perhaps 
 wrongly, that love-making may be as agreeable to 
 them as it is to higher organisations : — 
 
 What beaux and beauties crowd the gaudy groves, 
 And woo and win their vegetable loves ! 
 Here snowdrops cold and blue-eyed harebells blend 
 Their tender tears as o'er the stream they bend ; 
 The love-sick violet and the primrose, pale, 
 Bow their sweet heads, and whisper to the gale ; 
 "With secret sighs, the virgin lily droops, 
 And jealous cowslips hang their tawny cups ; 
 And the young rose, in beauty's damask pride, 
 Drinks the warm blushes of his bashful bride ; 
 With honey lips, enamoured woodbines meet, 
 Clasp with fond arms, and mix their kisses sweet. 
 
 This may be thought an idle dream, unworthy of 
 serious, or, more especially, of scientific considera- 
 
52 THE INTELLIGENCE 
 
 tion ; while some very matter-of-fact persons msij 
 ask, how there can be sensation without senses ? 
 It is true that flowers have no organs of sight, or 
 hearing, or taste, or smell, that man can discover ; 
 but they may, nevertheless, possess a very delicate 
 sense of touch. And how much intelligence may 
 display itself, without any other sense than this, is 
 known to every one who has read the remarkable 
 story of Laura Bridgeman. In her earliest infancy, 
 this unhappy person lost her eyes, her ears, her 
 palate ; every door of the inner spirit leading to the 
 outer world of life and humanity, save the one door 
 of touch. But through that door, by the patient 
 sagacity and untiring kindliness of Dr. Howe, of 
 Boston, Massachusetts, the resident physician of 
 the Blind Asylum, to which she was consigned as a 
 patient of whom there was no hope, she was en- 
 abled to communicate her wants, her wishes, her 
 hopes, and her ideas to her fellow- creatures, and to 
 share, to some extent, in the knowledge and the 
 civilization of her time. Though she can neither 
 see nor hear, nor articulate, nor remember the time 
 when her eyes were open to the light, she can talk 
 with her fingers, and receive responses through the 
 same medium. Though the great world of sound 
 and the joyous world of music are as alien to her as 
 invisible planets on the uttermost verge of sidereal 
 space, yet, by means of the one sense mercifully 
 
OF PLANTS. 53 
 
 left to her— that of touch — she is able to distinguish 
 her friends and acquaintances the one from the 
 other, and to enjoy music, by means of the vibra- 
 tion through her sensitive and delicate nerves, of 
 the rhythmic pulsations of the air caused by the 
 great organ in the hall of the asylum, which throb 
 through her whole body, giving her a palpable 
 pleasure, possibly as great to her as that which more 
 fortunate persons can derive from the sense of 
 hearing. " Little chinks let in much light," says 
 the ancient proverb ; and through the one little 
 chink of feeling, touch, or sensation, the intelligence 
 of Laura Bridgeman can both act and be acted 
 upon. And if it be granted that the trees, the 
 plants, and the flowers possess this one sense — and 
 who can prove that they do not ? — may we not 
 reasonably suppose that some degree of intelligence 
 and capacity for pleasure and pain go along with it ? 
 Being a systematic man, although a very busy 
 one, I always find that I have time to spare for my 
 amusement. I also find that my amusement often 
 assumes the shape of a new variety of work, and 
 that when I have had enough of work that I am 
 compelled to do, I take a turn at some other kind 
 of work, to which nothing compels me but my own 
 love for it. In this manner I have become a student 
 of natural history; and whenever I walk in my 
 garden, or through the green lanes and country 
 
54 THE INTELLIGENCE 
 
 roads, over the meadow path, or through the woods, 
 I always discover something to interest me in the 
 phenomena of Nature, animate and inanimate. I 
 have educated my eyes as well as my mind, in 
 remembrance of the sage maxim, " that in every 
 object there is inexhaustible meaning ; and that the 
 eye always sees what the eye brings the means of 
 seeing." And last summer in my garden, when 
 resting and amusing myself after protracted mental 
 labour, I made the acquaintance of a very respect- 
 able, and as I found reason to believe, a very intelli- 
 gent plant, and studied its growth and its move- 
 ments during two or three weeks. The plant was 
 Cucurbita ovifera, known to market-gardeners and 
 housekeepers as the vegetable marrow. This, like 
 all of its genus, will creep along the ground if it 
 find nothing up which it can climb ; but if there be 
 a tree, a branch, a pole, or a wall within easy reach, 
 it will infallibly make its way to it, and twine its 
 tendrils round the most available points of support. 
 The vegetable marrow, like the vine, the hop, the 
 briony, and all other varieties of the genus vitis, is, 
 to use the words of Barry Cornwall, applied to her 
 more renowned sister the grape-vine, one ' ' who 
 weareth a hundred rings and a roamer o'er wall and 
 tree." I noticed that this particular plant extended 
 its tendrils outwards, and away from the trunk of 
 a hazel, and from a box-hedge of about seven feet 
 
OF PLANTS. 55 
 
 high, and towards a gravel path. It persevered in 
 extending itself in this direction for three days, 
 after I first began to take notice of it ; but on the 
 fourth morning I perceived that it had changed the 
 course which its tendrils were pursuing, and had 
 turned them in the contrary direction towards the 
 box-hedge. In two days more it had securely 
 fastened itself to the hedge with its old tendrils, 
 and put forth new a short distance higher up, with 
 which also in due time it enveloped the supporting 
 tree, which, for the first portion of its life, it had 
 sought in the wrong" direction. Another marrow, 
 further removed from all support, had also put forth 
 its feelers towards the gravel path, but finding 
 nothing to lay hold of, turned them back in a similar 
 manner ; but like the first one, only to meet with a 
 disappointment. The marrow, however, made the 
 best of unfavourable circumstances, as a wise man 
 and a wise plant should do, and meeting with the 
 tendrils of a sister or a brother marrow engaged in 
 the like pursuit of a prop under difficulties, they 
 resolved apparently that, as union was strength, 
 they would twist around each other. And they did 
 so. After they had been intertwined for a day, I 
 deliberately and very tenderly removed them, with 
 such care as not to injure the tender stalks and ten- 
 drils, and laid them apart on the ground. In less 
 than twenty-four hours they had found each other 
 
56 THE INTELLIGENCE 
 
 out again, and twisted their slender cords together 
 in a loving, or a friendly, or at least a mutually 
 supporting union. Much interested in these en- 
 terprising" marrows, I tried some experiments with 
 another climbing- plant, the scarlet-runner ; and un- 
 twisted one that had grown to the height of about 
 a foot up the pole which had been placed for its 
 reception, and twisted it carefully round another 
 pole, which I had stuck into the ground at a dis- 
 tance of about an inch from the old one. The 
 scarlet-runner, however, had a will of its own, and 
 would not cling to the new pole, unless I would tie 
 it, which would have ruined the experiment. I 
 therefore left the plant to do as it pleased ; and in 
 two days afterwards I found it on its original pole, 
 twined securely around it. I repeated this experi- 
 ment several times afterwards, with briony and 
 hop, and always discovered that the only means 
 to make a creeper creep, or a climber climb, in a 
 direction different from that which it had already 
 taken, was to tie or fasten it ; and that if left freely 
 to itself, it persisted in carrying out its original 
 intentions. Is this intelligence or instinct ; or is it 
 merely mechanical action ? During the same season, 
 I had occasion to remark that several climbing roses 
 in front of my cottage seemed sickly, and on in- 
 vestigating the cause of their ill-health, discovered 
 that the soil in which they grew was very poor, and 
 
OF PLANTS. 57 
 
 consisted merely of a thin layer of earth over the 
 chalk ; that their roots had reached the chalky and 
 could not penetrate it, and that they decayed in 
 strength for want of proper nourishment. I had a 
 pit dug of about three feet in depth all along the 
 front where the roses grew ; and filled it up with 
 new soil,, manure, and rotted leaves, in which they 
 have since thriven remarkably well. A healthy and 
 luxuriant honeysuckle around these roses, that clam- 
 bers over my cottage porch, was at the same time 
 laid bare to the roots. I found that the honeysuckle 
 had been wiser than the roses, and instead of push- 
 ing its roots vertically downwards to the barren 
 chalk, had extended them horizontally through the 
 thin layer of earth, immediately under the sod, to 
 the distance of no less than eight feet from the 
 stem. Was this instinct or intelligence ? Or was 
 it blind mechanical force ? My opinion is, that it 
 was intelligence, and the adaptation of means to 
 ends by a will that might have acted otherwise. 
 Every plant growing in a darkened room, bends 
 itself to the chance light that may happen to pene- 
 trate through a hole or a chink; and every such 
 plant overshadowed by trees of larger growth, en- 
 deavours to stretch itself beyond their influence, 
 and to catch the sunlight which a superior circum- 
 ference of shadow prevents from reaching all beneath 
 them. Is this instinct, intelligence, or mechanical 
 
58 INTELLIGENCE OF PLANTS. 
 
 force ? I confess my inability to decide. I doubt 
 the ability of any one else to settle the question, and 
 taking refuge in the idea that every manifestation 
 of God's power and love is illimitable, and may be 
 infinitely small as well as infinitely great, I come to 
 the conclusion that there is no life upon this globe, 
 however humble, which is so wholly unintelligent 
 as to be helpless for its own sustenance and preser- 
 vation ; and unendowed with the capacity of joy or 
 sorrow. And in corroboration as well as conclusion 
 — quote the serious prose, rather than the poetic 
 fancies of Darwin : " The vegetable passion of love 
 is agreeably seen in the flower of the parnassia, in 
 which the males alternately approach and recede 
 from the females, and in the flower of the nigefla, 
 or ' Devil in the Bush/ in which the tall females 
 bend down to their dwarf husbands." 
 
 Where there is both love and beauty, as in flowers, 
 is absence of sensation possible ? 
 
COUNTRY AND TOWN SPARROWS. 
 
 HATEVER the fair Lesbia may have 
 done in the days of Horace and Me- 
 ceenas, nobody in our time makes a 
 household pet or a bosom friend of the 
 sparrow. Nor has the sparrow much to recommend 
 him to affection or familiarity. He is not beautiful, 
 like the canary ; he cannot sing, like the lark or the 
 nightingale ; but only chirp and twitter in a manner 
 that is not particularly agreeable ; and, unlike the 
 duck, the goose, the barn-door fowl, or the ortolan, 
 he has no attraction for the disciples of Brillat 
 Savarin, and would be scorned as food by the hun- 
 griest of human beings. But, notwithstanding all 
 these deficiencies, there is a good word to be said 
 for the sparrow, blackguard among the birds as he 
 may be. He is brave and lively in his behaviour to 
 the outer world, and very affectionate to his mate 
 and little ones in domestic life. He, moreover, plays 
 his allotted part in the beneficent scheme of nature, 
 
60 COUNTRY AND 
 
 as much as man does at one end of the great chain 
 and the animalcule at the other. 
 
 There are, according to Buffon, who calls the 
 sparrow an " idle glutton/' no less than sixty-seven 
 varieties of this well-known bird. The best known 
 of the sixty- seven — all of them inhabitants of the 
 old or Eastern hemisphere, and none of them known, 
 except by name, in the Western world — are the 
 house sparrow, the tree sparrow, and the hedge 
 sparrow; to which I think should be added the 
 London sparrow. Unlike the swallow, the cuckoo, 
 and other migratory birds, the sparrow does not seek 
 a perpetual spring or summer, by travel to the sunny 
 south, but stays with us in all seasons. The severest- 
 winter does not drive him away, though it may some- 
 times kill him or force him to desperate straits for a 
 subsistence. All the year round he twitters in town 
 and country, and picks up a livelihood as best he 
 can; and all the year round he multiplies his kind. 
 The hen produces three broods in the twelvemonth. 
 Next to his fondness for human neighbourhood — 
 for the sparrow is never found in the wilderness or 
 in dense forests, but always within easy flight of the 
 cottager's chimney or the smoke of city houses — his 
 great characteristics are amativeness and combat- 
 iveness — cause and effect. When he has fixed his 
 affections on the charmer of his heart, and any 
 other sparrow presumes even so much as to look at 
 
TOWN S PAR BO TVS. 61 
 
 her, or to utter one loving chirp to distract her 
 attention, woe betide the interloper, unless he be a 
 much stronger and fiercer bird than his antagonist. 
 War is declared immediately, and a combat ensues, 
 in which, as among men, the prize falls to the 
 possession of the victor. " None but the brave 
 deserve the fair," is a maxim apparently as well 
 understood among sparrows as it used to be among 
 the preux chevaliers or knights errant of the olden 
 time. In his domestic life, as far as man can judge 
 of him by external appearances, the sparrow is 
 happy. He and his mate are fond of home ; and if 
 any one wickedly destroys their nest they indulge in 
 no vain repining, but immediately set about build- 
 ing another ; not like the waggoner in the fable, 
 asking Jupiter to help them in their distress, but 
 helping themselves, as all good birds, and all good 
 people, ought to do. And if a mischievous farm- 
 boy steal her eggs, Mrs. Sparrow, instead of weeping 
 disconsolately over her loss, for more than a very 
 brief period of natural disappointment, proceeds 
 forthwith to fill up the void thus created in her 
 domestic circle by the production of just as many 
 eggs as have been taken from her. 
 
 Once, before I knew any better, I was fool enough 
 to think that the sparrow preferred worms, slugs 
 and caterpillars to the produce of the garden. I 
 allured him to my window by daily feasts of bread- 
 
62 COUNTRY AND 
 
 crumbs and chopped fat. One sparrow seemed to 
 tell another of the good fortune thus awaiting the 
 birds ; and the first corner, who, in nine cases out 
 of ten, was a sparrow, no sooner flew away to the 
 tree or hedge, or house-top which he inhabited with 
 a crust or crumb about the size of his head, than 
 down came from all points of the compass a dozen 
 or two of his friends or acquaintances. Sometimes 
 a mutton or a fish bone that my dog had done with 
 was thrown among the crumbs, and the sparrow, not 
 at all particular about his diet, proceeded to pick it, 
 and, if it were a marrow bone, to put his bill into it 
 in search of the choice morsels which the dog's teeth 
 and tongue had been unable to reach. The female 
 sparrow brought her young ones to these symposia 
 as soon as they were able to fly, and stuffed the large 
 pieces of bread or fat down their gaping throats 
 with true maternal devotion. It cannot be said 
 that she feeds her " little ones," for what, consider- 
 ing their age, ought to be her little ones, were, in 
 point of fact, her " large " ones. You have but to 
 fancy Mrs. Smith or Mrs. Jones, or any other fair 
 lady of your acquaintance, who had been married a 
 twelvemonth, and had a baby to feed as big as her- 
 self and her husband rolled into one, to realize the 
 comparative size of the sparrow's progeny and the 
 mother's thoughtful care in nursing*, tending*, and 
 providing for such monsters. Not that the size of 
 
TOWN SPARROWS. 63 
 
 the young sparrow represents flesh and blood. On 
 the contrary, it represents little but feathers. As 
 the young bird grows old its size diminishes. The 
 feast that attracts the sparrows attracts other varie- 
 ties of birds — the chaffinch, the bullfinch, the gold- 
 finch, the blackbird, the thrush, the starling, and 
 the robin redbreast. JSTone of these associate 
 with the sparrow, but watch their chance when 
 the vulgar little birds have flown away. The 
 robin especially seems to avoid the sparrow, and 
 will no more associate with him than a gentle- 
 man will shake hands with a chimney-sweep. The 
 blackbirds and thrushes — thrice as large as spar- 
 rows — will on no account eat with them, but, like 
 the robin, take the opportunity of the sparrow's ab- 
 sence to claim a share of any of the good things 
 that may be going*. Is it because, as the nursery 
 rhyme says, " the sparrow killed cock robin with 
 his bow and arrow," in some far-distant period of 
 antiquity, that to this day the robin refuses so per- 
 tinaciously to have anything to do with his tradi- 
 tionary foe ? or does the robin consider himself an 
 aristocrat and the sparrow a rough ? Whatever the 
 reason may be, no sparrow is admissible into the 
 robin's society, or into that, as far as my observa- 
 tions extend, of any other bird whatever. Another 
 difference of character between the robin and the 
 sparrow deserves notice. However often you 
 
64 COUNTRY AND 
 
 may feed the sparrow,, and however well lie may in 
 consequence become acquainted with you, he can- 
 not be induced to enter the house. The robin, on 
 the contrary, after a little while, will hop in at the 
 open window or door, and trust to your generosity 
 and sense of honour not to try to capture him. 
 The sparrow, besides being distrustful, seems to be 
 a pariah among the feathered race, the lowest of the 
 low, the vulgarest of the vulgar, the slightest contact 
 with whom is as contaminating as greased cartridges 
 to a Sepoy. The sparrow, however, does not seem 
 to take to heart the dislike with which he is regarded; 
 and if other birds are to dine off the crumbs that my 
 hand distributes, he takes especial care that he shall 
 have the first pickings. He is not afraid of any of 
 them, however large, and, in fact, does not seem to 
 be afraid of anything but a man, a woman, a dog, or 
 a cat. Once I noticed a rat venture, just as the spar- 
 rows had left the ground clear for a minute, to run off 
 with a small piece of bread. Half a dozen sparrows 
 immediately flew down from a tree, and chased him 
 with vociferous twitterings, till he disappeared into 
 his hole — not, however, discomfited, for he got clear 
 off with his prize. 
 
 Though I once fed the sparrows during a whole 
 winter — a piece of benevolence which my subsequent 
 knowledge of sparrow-nature, has induced me not to 
 repeat, I found that they did not spare my garden 
 
TOWN SPARROWS. 65 
 
 in the spring and summer on that account. My 
 gardener held that I did mischief by my ill-judged 
 kindness, and that I attracted to the place a hun- 
 dred sparrows for every one that would otherwise 
 have frequented it. However this may be, I know, 
 that they had not the smallest amount of gra- 
 titude, but, like human sinners, did those things 
 which they ought not to have done, and eat those 
 things which I would much rather they had let 
 alone. They dug up with their bills the seed newly 
 sown in the ground, especially the carrots, the tur- 
 nips, the spinach, the parsnips, and the lettuces. 
 Whether they watched with their sharp little eyes 
 from some neighbouring tree the process of sowing 
 the seed, and knew where to go to in the gardener's 
 absence, or whether, as the gardener said, they 
 smelt the seed in the ground, I am unable to 
 say. I only know that they were very destruc- 
 tive till I employed a method to punish or pre- 
 vent their depredations. The sparrow has very 
 tender feet, and does not like to have them pricked 
 or stung, either by pulverised glass, or by what is 
 better for the purpose, the common prickly furze 
 chopped small and strewed over the ground. Thus, 
 whenever I sow seed which is in danger from them, 
 I strew chopped furze over the place ; and the spar- 
 row after one trial at robbery gives over the attempt, 
 and transfers his attentions to some one with less 
 
 F 
 
6Q COUNTRY AND 
 
 experience of his tricks. The sparrow is particu- 
 larly fond of the first tender buds of gooseberry and 
 currant bushes,, which in the early spring he some- 
 times strips bare of their nascent leaves. He is also 
 very partial to the young lettuces when they first 
 appear above the ground, and as for peas, straw- 
 berries, cherries, red and white currants, he is, as 
 Buffon says, a veritable, though by no means an 
 idle, glutton. Not being a farmer I cannot state 
 from experience the damage he does to the ripening 
 corn ; but the French naturalist calculated that it 
 would require twenty pounds of grain to keep a 
 pair of sparrows for a year. This calculation pre- 
 supposes that the birds should be kept in captivity, 
 and fed with nothing else but corn ; whereas the 
 sparrow in his wild state is as omnivorous as man. 
 The farmers, as most people know, have a great 
 objection to sparrows. In some parts of the country 
 they enrol themselves into sparrow-clubs, for the 
 purpose of exterminating these busy depredators, 
 and in most parts of the country they employ small 
 boys in the corn-fields to frighten them awajr, either 
 by shouts or cries, or by the more effectual discharge 
 of fire-arms. 
 
 Honest old Bewick, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, an 
 excellent naturalist as well as an artist, says upon 
 this subject : 
 
 " Most of the smaller birds are supported, espe- 
 
TOWN 8 P ARROWS. 67 
 
 cially when young, by a profusion of caterpillars, 
 small worms, and insects ; on these they feed, and 
 thus they contribute to preserve the vegetable world 
 from destruction. This is contrary to the commonly 
 received opinion that birds, particularly sparrows, do 
 much mischief in destroying the labours of the gar- 
 dener and husbandman. It has been observed ( that 
 a single pair of sparrows, during the time they are 
 feeding their young, will destroy about/bw thousand 
 caterpillars weekly ! ' They likewise feed their young 
 with butterflies and other winged insects, each of 
 which, if not destroyed in this manner, would be 
 productive of several hundreds of caterpillars. Let 
 us not condemn a whole species of animals because, 
 in some instances, we have found them troublesome 
 or inconvenient. Of this we are sufficiently sensible, 
 but the uses to which they are subservient in the 
 grand economical distribution of nature, we cannot 
 so easily ascertain. We have already observed that 
 in the destruction of caterpillars, sparrows are emi- 
 nently serviceable to vegetation, and in this respect 
 alone, there is reason to suppose, sufficiently repay 
 the destruction they make in the produce of the 
 garden and the field. " 
 
 My experience of the sparrow does not accord 
 with that of Bewick ; and as far as I have been able 
 to ascertain he eats very few insects, and never eats 
 one when he can get anything else. 
 
68 COUNTRY AND 
 
 The London sparrow, like other created things, 
 takes something of his colour from his habitat, and 
 is a brown, dingy, dirty, smoke -hued featherling, 
 compared with the country sparrow, in whose 
 plumage white, and grey, and pure black, mingle 
 harmoniously with russet brown, which is the pre- 
 dominant colour of his livery. He has to make 
 as hard a fight for his living as the " city Arab." 
 There are no corn-fields to pillage, no orchards to 
 rob, no succulent green peas or juicy cherries to be 
 got. There is nothing for him but the refuse of 
 men and animals ; flies, spiders, earwigs, and all the 
 vermin that haunt the crannies of old brickwork, or 
 imbed themselves in the interstices of the slates and 
 tiles. In the country he has human enemies, and 
 a good many of them ; in the town his only enemy 
 is the cat. There is, it is true, a tradition that 
 some poor Polish and other political refugees from 
 the wars, revolutions, and intrigues of Continental 
 Europe, who inhabit the foreign settlements around 
 Leicester Square, are in the habit of setting traps 
 and springes for the sparrows at the windows of 
 their squalid attics, and eating them, in default 
 sometimes of any other kind of food ; but if this be 
 the case, it is exceptional, and can make but slight 
 inroad upon the security of almost the only small 
 bird that lives in a state of nature and wild free- 
 dom in the metropolis. Among the Londoners 
 
 
TOWN SPARROWS. 69 
 
 the sparrow is rather a favourite than otherwise,, 
 and many a fair hand of child or woman in many a 
 poor locality strews bread-crumbs on some humble 
 balcony to attract the little dusky chirp er to the 
 window. The sparrows soon discover the places 
 where such treats are provided, and learn to come 
 regularly for their dinner or breakfast, if punctuality 
 be one of the virtues of the donor. 
 
 Nature, all wise and beneficent, provided a means 
 for keeping down the exuberant propagation of the 
 sparrow, as of every other kind of life. The means 
 were hawks, falcons, owls, and other birds of prey. 
 But English landed proprietors in their too great 
 greediness for the preservation of game, and in their 
 mercenary love for those all but sacred birds, the 
 pheasant and the partridge, have, through the 
 agency of their gamekeepers, waged such a war of 
 extermination against the Falconidce, that the spar- 
 row has increased beyond due bounds. And if the 
 farmers, for self-protection, do no more than thin 
 the numbers of the sparrow at certain seasons of the 
 year, without waging a war of annihilation against 
 him, they will do no more than supply the place in 
 the wise economy of nature, which would have been 
 filled by the carnivorous birds, which sportsmen — 
 real or pretended, and especially the game preservers 
 and their servants — have not allowed to find a home 
 in our hills and valleys. The herring, as we all 
 
70 COUNTRY AND TOWN SPARROWS. 
 
 know, is a very excellent fish ; but it is so prolific 
 that a single pair produces in one season a progeny 
 to be numbered by hundreds of thousands. If there 
 were no check to its increase in the shape, not only of 
 the fishermen, but of the whales and other fish that 
 devour them by myriads, the deep sea itself would 
 in the course of a score or two of years, become as 
 thick as barley broth with this one form of life, to 
 the exclusion of others. So of the sparrow. He 
 is an excellent bird in his way. It is only when he 
 becomes too many for the work to be done that the 
 thinning of his numbers becomes justifiable. 
 
 
POOR TOM. 
 
 HE "Poor Tom" whose humble story I 
 am about to relate, is, although he will 
 not admit the fact, a beggar. There 
 is this much to be said for his denial of 
 the truth, that he is to a certain extent a trader, 
 and that in the summer months and the early 
 autumn he does a certain amount of profitable 
 business — profitable from his point of view, though 
 never sufficiently remunerative to enable him to 
 deal with either the tailor or the shoemaker. His 
 whole attire is eleemosynary, and his raggedness, 
 though doubtless very uncomfortable, is picturesque, 
 and might, if any good artist happened to fall in 
 with him, procure for him the honour of a sitting, 
 and such reward as the pose might be worth. Tom 
 is sixty-five years of age, and has a large handsome 
 brown beard, striped with grey. Though I have 
 known him for three or four years, I never saw him 
 
72 POOR TOM. 
 
 but once without his hat on — a very battered and 
 tattered one it is — and then I discovered that his 
 beard was the only hirsuteness he could exhibit, 
 and that his head was as devoid of hair as a tea-cup. 
 His elbows peep out from his sleeves, and his toes 
 from his miserable old shoes, and his general rag- 
 gedness is as looped and windowed as that which 
 Lear pitied and Shakespeare described. In his 
 youth poor Tom was a carpenter, but he has not 
 done a stroke of carpenter's work for upwards of 
 forty years, having, as he says, been disabled at five- 
 and-twenty by rheumatism in his right shoulder and 
 hand, and in both of his feet — rheumatism so long 
 neglected or so imperfectly treated as to have become 
 chronic and incurable. Having no money to set up 
 a shop, and no friends to help him, he betook him- 
 self to the road to live by what he could pick up ; 
 not perhaps without reliance upon the sweet little 
 cherub already mentioned, or on the Providence 
 that takes account of men as well as of sparrows. 
 
 Poor Tom once called upon me with a basket 
 of mushrooms that he had gathered in the fields, 
 having a standing commission from me to give me 
 the first offer of these dainties whenever he can find 
 sufficient for a dish. The last time I had seen him 
 prior to this visit, was about six weeks previously, 
 when I had come across him in a byeway, lying by the 
 side of a ditch, and very drunk indeed. I reminded 
 
POOR TOM. 73 
 
 him (perhaps unnecessarily) of the fact, but as I 
 had bought his mushrooms at a good price, he was 
 not offended. 
 
 " Yes," said he, ' ' I remember ; I was main 
 drunk. I think I was never so drunk in all my 
 life before. It was with champagne." 
 
 " Champagne ? " I repeated incredulously. 
 
 " Yes, champagne ; and not bad stuff neither, 
 though it did make me uncommon ill." 
 
 Tom went on to explain that there had been a large 
 pic-nic party upon the hill that day, at which nearly 
 two hundred people were present, dispersed in 
 groups under the trees. As attendance upon pic- 
 nics is part of his regular business, he was, as he 
 said, " to the fore" on this occasion, to take his 
 chance either of being ruthlessly driven away, as he 
 sometimes is for his utter incongruity with sur- 
 rounding circumstances, or of being employed in 
 some way or other, or of obtaining a share of the 
 broken victuals and remnants of the feast. Tom 
 had been plashing about all the morning in the 
 little river that winds and murmurs under the hill- 
 side, and had the large basket, which is usually 
 slung at his back, filled with fresh forget-me-nots, 
 which he had gathered on the banks of the stream. 
 Young ladies love the forget-me-not more for its 
 name than for its beauty, and Tom's venture among 
 the merry-makers with such an abundant supply of 
 
74 POOR TOM. 
 
 a flower so suggestive to love-makers proved to be 
 a success. One young gentleman gave him a 
 shilling for a bunch, which he forthwith presented 
 to a young lady, and such a desire for forget-me- 
 nots took possession of all the other ladies, young 
 and old, that the gentlemen in attendance, as in 
 gallantry and duty bound, made all haste to gratify 
 their wishes. The consequence was that Tom's 
 forget-me-nots were speedily sold at highly remu- 
 nerative prices, and he found himself in possession 
 of nearly twelve shillings. " It was the best day's 
 work I ever did in my life," said Tom ; " nor was 
 this all. Pic-nic people, though they generally 
 bring plenty of wine or ale with them, always 
 manage to forget to bring water; and this party 
 had not a drop. One of the ladies asked me if I 
 could get some, and a gentleman sitting next to 
 her on the grass offered to give me a bottle of 
 champagne in exchange for six bottles of pure cold 
 water. They had the water, and I had the wine. 
 I had heard of champagne, but I had never tasted 
 a drop of it in my life. They all laughed to see me 
 drinking it. Let them laugh as wins, thought I, as 
 I sat under a tree by myself, and drank." 
 
 1 ' You liked it, of course ? " 
 
 " Liked it ! It was glorious, and did me a power 
 of good ; leastways, I think it would have done 
 if I had stuck to the one bottle. But I amused the 
 
POOR TOM. 75 
 
 gentlemen, I suppose, and made fun for them, so 
 they gave me more, and more again upon the top 
 of that, till my head began to spin and swim, and I 
 felt that I was going to be very unwell. How I 
 got away I don't remember, but I was main ill, and 
 after a while I fell asleep where you saw me. When 
 I woke it was pitch dark, and I heard the church 
 clock at Darkham strike three in the morning." 
 
 " Darkham," said I ; " where* s that ? You mean 
 Dorking." 
 
 ' ' No," replied Tom, very dictatorially, and as if 
 sure of his point. Some people say Dorking, others 
 say Darking, I say Darkham." 
 
 Tom had begun to interest me, for if I have a 
 favourite hobby it is philology, and I had long had 
 a suspicion that the modern name of this pretty 
 little town was not the correct one. 
 
 " Did you ever hear any one else call it Dark- 
 ham?" 
 
 " Yes, my father and my mother, and scores of 
 people. There is Mickleham, and Effingham, and 
 Brockham, and Bookham, and Darkham, all in a 
 string, as I might say." 
 
 " Have you any idea what Darkham means ? 
 Bookham means the home among the beech- 
 trees, Brockham the home by the brook, and Effing- 
 ham is probably Upping home ; but what is Dark- 
 ham ? " 
 
7Q POOR TOM. 
 
 " The dark home," said Toin, as if the question 
 were settled. 
 
 " No, that's not it. Darag or Darach is the old 
 Celtic for oak, and Darkham is the home among 
 the oak-trees." 
 
 ee You've got it now/' said Tom. " That's it for 
 sartain." 
 
 I have had many talks with Tom, and have taken 
 considerable interest in his humble fortunes. As 
 soon as the leaves fall from the trees and the 
 nights begin to grow frosty, Tom retires from the 
 busy world into his Winter Palace. That Palace 
 is the workhouse, or rather the workhouse in- 
 firmary ; for Tom cannot work if he would, and his 
 rheumatism or poor man's gout — he does not ex- 
 actly know to which of the two names his inveterate 
 malady is properly entitled— requires the treatment 
 that none but the parish doctor and the parish 
 funds will supply. But as soon as the cuckoo is 
 heard in the woods, Tom, after a hybernation which 
 he has shared with the flies, the bees, the dormice, 
 and others of God's creatures, which are mercifully 
 permitted to sleep all through the season when 
 no food is to be found for them, emerges once 
 again into the light of day to ply his vocation. 
 He looks so very miserable, that many kind- 
 hearted people stop him on the road, and give him 
 either of their own poverty or of their riches the 
 
 
POOR TOM. 77 
 
 wherewithal to make himself a little more com- 
 fortable. But he never asks for charity. For this 
 reason he denies being a beggar — a figment,, a 
 white lie, a suppressio veri, whatever it may be 
 called, which does no harm to anybody, while it 
 administers very sensibly to the little pride that the 
 world, and old age, and hard struggles have left in 
 him. It is his wish to earn an honest subsistence, 
 and he does his best in that direction, and with a 
 very patient, humble, and uncomplaining spirit. 
 The first objects of his solicitude as soon as he is 
 emancipated from his winter thraldom are the 
 primrose roots and flowers, with which he drives 
 his small bargains in the towns and villages with 
 people who want to ornament their little front gar- 
 dens or their cottage windows, and which he sells 
 for what he can get — for a penny or a halfpenny a 
 root, or for a piece of bread, or, better still, for a 
 pair of old boots or shoes, or any cast-off garment 
 that may be too ragged for the poorest of the poor, 
 but which is not utterly valueless to him. He 
 also collects herbs, or, as he calls them, " yarbs," 
 either for the garden or for the use of the poor 
 people and the notable housewives among them, who 
 have faith in simples for the treatment and cure of 
 burns and scalds, or other simple maladies. Though, 
 unlike Happy Jack, he cannot 
 
 Ope his leathern scrip, 
 And show us simples of a thousand names, 
 
78 POOR TOM. 
 
 he can display some dozens of varieties in his basket, 
 and can tell what they are supposed to be good 
 for. One day he got an order from a village 
 apothecary for cart-loads of groundsel, if he could 
 collect as much, and was busy on the job for a whole 
 fortnight. It was wanted for a military hospital for 
 the purpose of making poultices. But he never 
 received so extensive an order again. Ferns and 
 orchids were other sources of income, and last, but 
 by no means the least, were watercresses and mush- 
 rooms. Tom has no faith in the new-fangled ideas 
 about mushrooms, and does not believe that there 
 is more than one kind in England that is edible. 
 "Mushrooms/' said he, with a conservatism strongly 
 opposed to the radicalism of the present day, that 
 will not allow us our ancient faith even in fungi, 
 " have been growing- in the English meadows for a 
 thousand years, and if there were more than one 
 sort good for eating*, do you think our grandfathers 
 and their grandfathers would not have found it out ? 
 "No, no ! " he added, with strong emphasis, (l there 
 is only one mushroom ; all the others are toadstools ; 
 and I won't believe otherwise if all the doctors in 
 England says the contrary." 
 
 There is a suspicion afloat, that in his early man- 
 hood, and when he first took to the road, Tom got 
 into trouble, and was had before a justice of the 
 peace for poaching. But the suspicion is too vague 
 
POOR TOM. 79 
 
 and shadowy to merit much notice. I have tried more 
 than once to get him on the subject of the Game 
 Laws, as affecting the rural population ; but he has 
 always evaded it, and expressed no opinion, or even 
 made a remark, except " that he did not understand 
 about that." Tom can read, and has a small dog's- 
 eared and very shabby-looking and well-thumbed 
 Bible, which he carries in his basket, and studies 
 every Sunday in the fields, out of the public path 
 somewhere, when the weather is fine, and he has 
 enough bread and cheese or scraps of victuals in his 
 pocket to serve for his dinner. He never goes to 
 church in the summer when he is a free man, having 
 been, he says, turned from the door of a church 
 some years ago by the beadle, who told him he 
 was much too dirty to enter. " Perhaps what he 
 said was true," observed Tom, when he told me the 
 story ; " but I thought all the same, that I might 
 have been allowed to go into a corner. Howsom- 
 ever, I went away, and sat upon a tombstone to 
 rest myself out of the beadle's sight, and hear the 
 organ play, and thought that, maybe, when I was 
 put under the mould, I might be as clean as Mr. 
 Beadle or Mr. Parson, or any of the grand folks in 
 the pews ! And I think so still, though, as I said, 
 it was a good many years ago, and I was not so near 
 the mould as I am now." But though Tom avoids 
 church in summer, he regularly attends the service 
 
80 POOR TOM. 
 
 in the Union during the winter months, and seems, 
 from the manner in which he speaks of the sermons 
 he hears, to be quite as good a Christian as his 
 betters. 
 
 The last time I saw Tom he was on his way to the 
 Union workhouse for the winter, when he showed me 
 the ticket of admission duly signed by the relieving 
 officer. 
 
 " I am afraid," he said, " I shall not come out 
 again : though I shall be glad to see the primroses 
 and hear the cuckoo once more. I don't think I 
 have been a very bad man, though once, and only 
 once in my life, I had a pheasant for dinner." 
 
 I thought Tom was going to talk about that 
 poaching business at last ; but he hesitated, and 
 pulled up suddenly. 
 
 " No ! I have not been a very bad man ; and if 
 I have not worked as hard as other people, it is 
 because I have not been able to work." 
 
 " Well, Tom ! " I said, <( your life has been a 
 hard one, I have no doubt. But I never knew 
 much harm of you ; and I suppose that, like the 
 rest of us, you have had your joys as well as your 
 sorrows." 
 
 " There was a young woman," he said — but he 
 did not wipe his eye with his cuff, nor whimper — 
 " who was very fond of me, and she died when I 
 was twenty and she was eighteen. Since that time 
 
POOR TOM. 81 
 
 the best things I have known in the world have 
 been the sunshine and the warm weather. It is 
 very hard to be poor, and old, and cold. Cold, 
 as far as I know, is the worst of all — worse than 
 hunger ; at least Fve found it so. And if it were 
 not for the cold, I don't think Fd go to the Union 
 at all, but would try and jog along in the winter as 
 I do in the summer." 
 
 Poor Tom, it will be seen, though he has a cer- 
 tain amount of pride, has not a very high spirit ; — 
 how could he have with such a hopeless battle to 
 fight ? — and by no means despises the workhouse, or 
 thinks it derogatory to his manly dignity as some 
 of the hard-working poor do, to depend upon it for 
 assistance. Without its kindly hand, however, he 
 would doubtless die in the cold December — of 
 " serum on the brain," as the parish doctors have 
 lately taken it into their heads to call starvation. 
 So small blame be to him for going into it when he 
 must, and for coming out of it when he can. In 
 spite of his last fit of despondency, I hope to see 
 the old fellow out again in the spring, along with 
 his favourite primroses, listening to the cuckoo, 
 gathering cresses, and drawing such comfort out 
 of the sunshine as Diogenes may have done, but 
 without the misanthropy, that perhaps was not real, 
 even in Diogenes. 
 

 A LOVEH OF TEEES. 
 
 people in the world take such intel- 
 lectual pleasure in trees as those of the 
 British islands. The squirearchy and 
 aristocracy, in their beautiful country- 
 houses, find about as much enjoyment in their an- 
 cestral oaks and over-arching avenues of elm, lime, 
 beech, and chesnut, as they do in the picture gal- 
 leries and libraries, or the heirlooms of their race. 
 The overthrow by storm, or natural decay of an 
 ancient and picturesque tree, in their domain, 
 afflicts them more than the loss of a favourite 
 horse, and almost as much as that of a member 
 of the family. None but the veriest scapegrace 
 and spendthrift, unless reduced to the direst ex- 
 tremity of pecuniary misfortune, will sell his or- 
 namental timber without a struggle. The class 
 immediately below them, who are proprietors of 
 no paternal acres, and who pass their long and 
 useful lives in striving to amass fortunes, perhaps 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. 83 
 
 i;o build up a county family, if their ambition points 
 that way, as it often does, have in the intervals 
 when even the busiest and most plodding of men 
 must unbend, delightful visions of a coming time, 
 when in the evening of their days, they too may 
 sit under the shadow of their own vines or figtrees, 
 " with none to make them afraid." Perchance on 
 a holiday visit to the country, they may stand at 
 the lodge-gate of some patrician mansion, and, look- 
 ing wistfully up the shady avenue, exclaim, like the 
 wanderer in the Pleasures of Hope, "■ Oh, that for 
 me some home like this would smile ! " Descending 
 yet another step in the social ladder, the clerk, the. 
 shopkeeper, and the mechanic, escaping from the 
 smoke and moil of the over-populous city, where their 
 daily lives are spent, rush to the green fields and the 
 shady trees ; with an appetite sharpened by months, 
 or it may sometimes happen of years of enforced ab- 
 stinence from all enjoyment of the manifold beauties 
 of the country. The French have a great love of 
 flowers, but not that passionate admiration for trees 
 which is a part of our British idiosyncracy. The 
 Americans have not yet arrived at that point in 
 social history, when antiquity, whether it be in the 
 shape of a tree or an edifice, claims respect or ad- 
 miration, and find the soil of their fertile continent, 
 too greatly encumbered with trees that are neither 
 useful nor ornamental, to be justified in allowing 
 
84 A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 forests to occupy tlie space that ought to be devoted 
 to corn-fields. The tastes and habits, no less than 
 the democratic principles of the people, do not, and 
 are not likely to lead to the growth and establish- 
 ment of great rural and aristocratic families among 
 them, and such luxury as wealth commands finds 
 among the Americans its field of display in the city 
 rather than in the country. I once invited a dis- 
 tinguished American, on a visit to London, to dine 
 at the Star and Garter, at Richmond, and, as a 
 matter of course, directed his attention to the 
 beautiful natural panorama that is visible from the 
 terrace. Accustomed to admire the sylvan loveliness 
 and umbrageous verdure of the scene, with the clear 
 Thames flowing through the landscape like a thread 
 of gold over a tissue of green velvet, I expected 
 that the American, as a man of taste, would sympa- 
 thise in my feelings. "Yes," said the American; 
 ' ' it is f handsome ' enough, but it seems to me that 
 it sadly wants clearing ! " 
 
 The English were always lovers of trees. With- 
 out going back to the time of the Druids to prove 
 the fact, or to the entries in Doomsday Book to cor- 
 roborate it ; but coming down to the later days of 
 Chaucer, Spenser, and our ballad literature, there 
 are found such frequent and joyous allusions to the 
 " merry green wood," in all these early singers, as 
 to make it evident that a life in the forest was 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. 85 
 
 one which had peculiar charms in the imagination 
 of the people. The opening stanza of the old 
 ballad of Eobin Hood and Guy of Gisborne — 
 
 When shawes are sheen and straddes full faire, 
 
 And leaves both large and long, 
 "Pis merry walking in faire forest, 
 
 To hear the sweet birds' song— 
 
 expresses the popular sympathy with the sights and 
 sounds of Nature,, which is one of the healthiest 
 components of the English character. 
 
 The long and sanguinary civil wars of the Red 
 and White Roses, that ruined so many of the fore- 
 most English nobles and put new men in their 
 places, who did not value the ancestral trees, except 
 for what they would fetch as timber ; the disposses- 
 sion of the monks from their cosy monasteries by 
 Henry VIII. ; and the new series of commotions, 
 wars, and revolutions that began under Charles I., 
 and only ended with the flight of James II., pro- 
 duced disastrous effects, not only . upon the orna- 
 mental trees that are the delight of the landed 
 aristocracy, but upon all the woodland districts 
 and forests of England. On the restoration of 
 Charles II., when men's minds had calmed down, 
 after the long perturbation of civil strife, and 
 people had leisure to bestow their attention upon 
 the minor matters that had been neglected when 
 the state itself was in danger, it became a com- 
 
m A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 mon subject of remark and complaint that many 
 previous generations had been prodigal and waste- 
 ful in the matter of trees, and that while war and 
 cupidity had been busily engaged in cutting 1 them 
 down, nobody had been replacing the loss by plant- 
 ing. It was even feared, so great was the scarcity 
 of oak, that the country might, in the event of a 
 foreign war, find itself without timber for the con- 
 struction of a navy to maintain its vaunted supre- 
 macy of the seas ; a fear that in Charles's reign 
 was justified by the appearance in the Medway of 
 a hostile fleet of Dutch vessels-of-war, recalling to 
 mind the long previous boast of Admiral Yan 
 Tromp, with his broom at his masthead, that 
 he would sweep the navies of England from the 
 ocean. But, whenever a great work has to be 
 done, a man is found to do it. And so it hap- 
 pened in this case. The hour came, and the man 
 along with it ; not in the shape of a great or de- 
 spotic king, emperor, or conqueror, whom to hear 
 was to obey; not in the shape of a parliament 
 or a legislature to frame a law and compel obedi- 
 ence to it; but in that of a quiet, studious, 
 country gentleman, with a book in his hand, of 
 which the facts and the logic were sufficient to con- 
 vince the nation that a very important duty had 
 been too long neglected. The remedy followed 
 speedily upon the public proclamation of the eviL 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. S7 
 
 The wealthy English landlords set vigorously to 
 work in the systematic plantation of trees, especially 
 of oak, and many a noble tree now standing* in many 
 a beautiful park and avenue, and many a shady elm 
 by the road side and in the green lanes of England, 
 owe their propagation to the taste thus stimulated. 
 The country gentleman, who had sense and pa- 
 triotism enough to lead his countrymen to this 
 useful and elegant pursuit, was John Evelyn, of 
 Sayes Court near Deptford; and the book was 
 Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees and the Pro- 
 pagation of Timber in his Majesty's Dominions. 
 The volume had been previously read before the 
 Eoyal Society, of which the author was a prominent 
 member, having been suggested by certain inquiries 
 addressed to that learned body by the Commissioners 
 of the Navy, and was ordered to be printed at its 
 cost, being the first book that ever received such 
 an honour at its hands. 
 
 Before speaking further of the contents of a 
 volume that was destined in due time to improve 
 the face of " merry England," and make it look as 
 merry as it did in the early days of the Norman 
 Kings, when Robin Hood and his men roamed 
 through the glades of Sherwood, and when the New 
 Forest rang with the echoes of bugle horns ; a short 
 account of the amiable author may prove interesting 
 to a generation that knows little of him but his 
 
88 A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 name. He was born at Wotton, near Dorking in 
 Surrey, the second of the three sons of Richard 
 Evelyn of that place ; a country gentleman with a 
 rental of about four thousand pounds a-year, which 
 was equivalent in that day to a rental of at least 
 ten thousand pounds in our own. John Evelyn 
 and his elder brother George, studied together at 
 Oxford. On leaving the university, they both en- 
 tered themselves as students of the Middle Temple, 
 not so much with the view of studying law, as of 
 obtaining the social position of barristers in ad- 
 dition to that of country gentlemen. Neither of 
 the brothers appears to have had much liking for the 
 law, or to have made any proficiency in it. After 
 the death of Richard Evelyn from dropsy in 1641, 
 George betook himself to Wotton, to act the squire, 
 and John made a tour on the continent, and served 
 for a short time as a volunteer in the king's army 
 in Flanders. Returning home towards the end of 
 the year, he went to live at Wotton with his brother, 
 to whom he was much attached, making occasional 
 visits to London, where he relates that he ' c studied 
 a little ; but danced and fooled a great deal more." 
 With the design, it would appear, of avoiding all 
 part in the political troubles of the times, a royalist 
 at heart, though not very enthusiastic in admiration 
 of the character or policy of Charles I., he retired 
 once more to the continent in 1634, and spent his 
 
A LOVER OF TREE 8. 89 
 
 time in travelling through Belgium, France, and 
 Italy, noting every thing that was noteworthy, 
 and storing his mind with knowledge of pictures, 
 architecture, and natural history, as well as of men 
 and manners. In the year 1647 he arrived in Paris, 
 where he made the acquaintance of the British 
 Ambassador, Sir Eichard Browne, " with whose lady 
 and family," he says in his diary, " I contracted a 
 great friendship, and particularly set my affections 
 on his daughter. Mary Browne was very young at 
 the time, just turned fifteen." Evelyn appears to 
 have thriven well in his wooing, for he records in 
 his diary, just thirty- six days after his first mention 
 of the young lady, that he was married to her in 
 the Chapel of the Embassy, by Dr. Earle, chaplain 
 to the Prince of Wales. Recalled to England by 
 the state of his private affairs, which required his 
 attention, he left his juvenile wife with her father 
 and mother, and did not rejoin her till a year 
 and a-half had elapsed. Among the very first 
 places which he visited on his return to England 
 was Sayes Court, Deptford, the country house 
 of Sir Richard Browne, which he afterwards in- 
 herited in right of his wife, and where, during a 
 long and happy life, he indulged himself in those 
 favourite pursuits of gardening and planting, which 
 enabled him to write like a master of the art, and 
 to produce a book of such authority as Sylva. Though 
 
90 A LOVER OF TREE S. 
 
 he had strong political ideas, hated Cromwell, and 
 adored the memory of Charles I., without ever 
 having expressed any great enthusiasm for the royal 
 person during the king's lifetime, he found it 
 politic and necessary to walk warily during the days 
 of the Commonwealth, and to avoid getting either 
 himself or his estates into trouble by his plain- 
 spokenness. In this sage resolution he persevered 
 — a suspected, but an unmolested citizen — and in 
 his quiet unobtrusive manner, paid all requisite 
 respect and obedience to his de facto rulers, not 
 without an occasional sigh, as his Diary shows, for 
 the return of the ruler de jure. 
 
 On the 3rd of September, 1658, he records, with 
 great apparent satisfaction, i( died that arch-rebel, 
 Oliver Cromwell, called Protector." He also de- 
 scribes the magnificent and truly regal funeral 
 twenty-one days afterwards; when the body of 
 Oliver was conveyed in state from Somerset House 
 to Westminster Abbey, adding, as if he highly en- 
 joyed the remembrance, "but it was the joyfullest 
 funeral I ever saw, for there were none that cried but 
 the dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a bar- 
 barous noise, drinking and smoking tobacco in the 
 streets as they went." On the restoration of Charles 
 II., Evelyn was taken into the high favour and confi- 
 dence of the king*, and remained during his whole 
 reign on terms of familiar intercourse with that 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. 91 
 
 easy-going personage, who fascinated everybody 
 with whom he came in contact. 
 
 John Evelyn was not in a position to require 
 offices of emolument from the state, but he accepted 
 some offices of trust and honour. He was a 
 commissioner for taking care of the sick and 
 wounded in the Dutch war; a commissioner of 
 Greenwich Hospital ; a commissioner for the rebuild- 
 ing of St. Paul's Cathedral ; a commissioner for the 
 regulation of the Mint ; a commissioner for the im- 
 provement and widening of the streets of London, 
 and one of the original Lords of Trade and Planta- 
 tions — the precursors of the present Board of Trade. 
 But none of these public duties, onerous as many 
 of them were, interfered with his planting and 
 gardening, or with his enjoyment of the intellec- 
 tual and convivial society of the time. He was 
 personally acquainted with all the celebrated men 
 of the day — except with those who, in his opinion, 
 were defiled by their revolutionary politics, and by 
 the support they had given to Oliver Cromwell — 
 and familiar with all the popular literature of the 
 day, in which, it may be remarked, that the works 
 neither of Shakespeare nor of Milton — those great 
 particular stars in our modern firmament — were in- 
 cluded : for the fashionables of that age had scarcely 
 heard of the one, and only knew the other as a 
 rebel. The most famous poet of the period was 
 
92 A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 Abraham Cowley — ' ' the melancholy Cowley/' as he 
 called himself — betwixt whom and Evelyn, though 
 Evelyn was far too wary a man and too true a phi- 
 losopher to be melancholy, there was much congeni- 
 ality of taste, more especially in the matter of gar- 
 dens. To the third edition of Sylva, he prefixed a 
 letter and a poem addressed to him by Cowley. In 
 the letter, dated in 1666, Cowley declared that he 
 never had any desire so strong or so like cove- 
 tousness as that which he still had, and always had, 
 of being master of a small house and a large garden 
 with moderate conveniences attached to them ; and 
 that he might there dedicate the remainder of his life 
 to culture and the study of nature. ' ' I know," he 
 added, apostrophising Evelyn, " nobody that pos- 
 sesses more private happiness than you do in your 
 garden ; and no man who makes his happiness more 
 public by a free communication of the art and know- 
 ledge of it to others. All that I myself am yet able 
 to do is only to recommend to mankind the search 
 of that felicity which you instruct them how to find 
 and enjoy." In the accompanying poem, in praise 
 of gardens and of the delights which the philosophic 
 mind may find in rural pursuits, Cowley represented 
 that " God the first garden made, and the first city 
 Cain," a passage that must have been in the mind 
 of William Cowper more than a century afterwards, 
 when, with far inferior point, he wrote, " God made 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. 93 
 
 the country, and man made the town." Both the 
 poet and the philosopher were of one mind on the 
 subject. ' ( Methinks," said Cowley — 
 
 I see great Diocletian walk 
 In the Salomaia garden's noble shade, 
 Which by his own imperial hands was made. 
 I see him smile methinks, as he does talk 
 With the ambassadors, who come, in vain, 
 T' entice him to a throne again. 
 If I, my friends (saith he), should to you show 
 All the delights which in these gardens grow, 
 'Tis likelier much that you should with me stay, 
 Than 'tis that you should carry me away. 
 
 The two friends, with dispositions and tastes so 
 much alike, were not destined to see much of each 
 other, for in less than a twelvemonth after these 
 lines were written, the poet died of a neglected 
 cold, which he had caught when working in his 
 hay-field, near Chertsey. 
 
 Evelyn, in his Diary, under date of the 1st of 
 August, 1667, records that he that day received 
 "the sad news of Abraham Cowley's death, that 
 incomparable poet and virtuous man, and my very 
 dear friend.-" Evelyn continued to reside at Sayes 
 Court, and occasionally in London; one of the 
 busiest men of his age, although one who, to the 
 world, appeared among the least busy, until his 
 seventieth year, when, by the death of his elder 
 brother without heirs, he entered into possession of 
 
94 A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 the paternal estate of Wotton. Here he had even 
 better scope than at Sayes Court for his favourite 
 avocations, and continued planting and improving 
 for sixteen years longer, when he died in his eighty- 
 sixth year, leaving his affectionate wife, Mary 
 Browne, to mourn his loss for three years, and a 
 young grandson who succeeded to the property. 
 Evelyn had few sorrows during his long* and blame- 
 less life but those which happen to all who live to 
 advanced years, such as the loss of beloved children 
 and dear friends. One of his most serious afflictions 
 (happy he that has none greater) befell him, in an 
 evil hour, when he let his residence at Sayes Court 
 to an illustrious foreigner. On becoming possessed 
 of Wotton, the seat of his ancestors, in the year 
 1690, he was in the habit of letting the inferior but 
 still very beautiful domain of Sayes Court, and had 
 found a tenant in Admiral Benbow, about whom 
 and whose achievements English sailors continue to 
 sing to this day, 
 
 Come all yon brave fellows wherever you've been, 
 Let us drink to the health of our king and our queen, 
 And another good health to the girls that we know, 
 And a third in remembrance of Admiral Benbow. 
 
 Admiral Benbow, to whom the place was let un- 
 furnished for three years, on condition that he would 
 keep up the darling garden as Evelyn had left it, 
 was not a tenant to the philosopher's mind; partly 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. 95 
 
 "because he was not "polite" (sailors in those days 
 were rough men, even in the highest ranks) , but 
 principally because he neglected the trees, and 
 otherwise mismanaged the garden. His next 
 tenant was no other than " the Czar of Muscovy/' as 
 he was then called, the "Peter the Great" of Russian 
 history, who came to London in 1698 to study the 
 art of shipbuilding. He desired to live near Deptford 
 Dockyard, and was a still greater thorn in the flesh 
 of poor Evelyn. The philosopher was approaching 
 his seventy-ninth year, and all the philosophy left 
 in him was sorely tried by the ruthless proceed- 
 ings of the vulture which he had unluckily admitted 
 into his dovecote. The Czar desired to come 
 and go, to and from, the dockyard by the 
 shortest route from Sayes Court. Not finding- 
 such a route he made it by cutting a hole through 
 the wall of Evelyn's domain. But to destroy a 
 wall is a small matter, for a wall can be repaired or 
 rebuilt, and it is nothing but a question of money ; 
 but who shall repair a tree? Who shall make 
 good the destruction of an ancient and picturesque 
 hedge of holly? or any other hedge that it has 
 taken more than a lifetime to bring to per- 
 fection? This was what the Czar did. He was 
 fond of robust exercise, and of trundling a wheel- 
 barrow full of stones ; and in pursuit of this latter 
 pleasure in his own grounds (for the time being, 
 
96 A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 and as long as he paid the rent) he made a large 
 gap through the holly hedge, that was dearest of all 
 other things in and about Sayes Court to the heart of 
 John Evelyn. " Is there under the heavens," said 
 the philosopher, in the last edition of his Sylva, the 
 fourth which he lived to see through the press, " any 
 more glorious and refreshing object than an im- 
 pregnable hedge of about four hundred feet in 
 length, nine feet high, and five in diameter, which 
 I can still show at this time in the year in my ruined 
 garden at Sayes Court (thanks to the Czar of Mus- 
 covy), glittering with its armecf and variegated 
 leaves ? It mocks the rudest assaults of the weather, 
 beasts, and hedge-breakers." The "beast and 
 hedge-breaker" — he was certainly one of the two 
 in Evelyn's estimation, if not both — did other and 
 more reparable damage, altogether to the amount 
 of a hundred and fifty pounds, which was assessed 
 after the Czar's departure, and paid by the govern- 
 ment of William III, The house did not fare 
 better than the garden, though Evelyn did not care 
 much about any damage done to the former, pro- 
 vided he were paid for it. His man-servant, left in 
 charge, wrote to his master that the house was full 
 of people, "right nasty;" that the Czar slept in a 
 room next the library ; that he dined twice a day, 
 at ten in the morning and six in the afternoon ; that 
 he changed his dress several times daily (from that 
 
A LOVE It OF TREES. 97 
 
 of a workman to that of a gentleman), and that one 
 day, when the king was expected, " the best parlour 
 had been got pretty clean for him ; " that is to say, 
 as clean as it was possible to make it with such a 
 barbarian upon the premises. 
 
 Evelyn's book, presented to the world under the 
 patronage of the King 1 , the Eoyal Society, and of 
 xi Society" itself — a power in those days quite as 
 great as in our own — was a decided if not a rapid 
 success. It is not written in so easy and natural 
 a style as his Diary, which he did not intend for 
 publication, and abounds with learned words de- 
 rived more immediately from the Latin, many of 
 which, in an advertisement prefixed to the work, he 
 thought it necessary to explain to the uninitiated 
 public. Among the words which he thought might 
 loe obscure and unfamiliar were several which, in 
 our time, are very old and well-known acquain- 
 tances; such as "avenue," "bulb," " compost," 
 P culinary," " culture," " esculent," " exotic," " fer- 
 mentation," t( films," "homogeneous," "heteroge- 
 neous," " irrigation," "laboratory," " mural," " par- 
 terre," "perennial," and "vernal." Among the 
 " pedantic " words which he thought it necessary to 
 explain, and which neither his example nor that 
 of any one else has yet naturalised in English 
 literature, are " ablaqueation," the laying bare 
 of the roots; " frondation," the stripping of the 
 
 H 
 
93 A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 boughs ; " hyeniation," production in winter ; ei ich- 
 nography," tlie ground plan ; " letation," dung ; 
 " lixivium," lee ; " olitory," belonging to the kitchen 
 garden ; " stercoration," manuring with dung ; and 
 "tonsile," that which may be shorn or clipped. 
 Among the words that he used and did not explain, 
 because he considered them obvious, are many that 
 are not at all obvious to his readers of the nineteenth 
 century: such as cc capidescent," " surbated," "ligne- 
 scent," " improsperity," ( ( insititious," f f politure," 
 1 ( stramental," " subductition," u suberous," "pro- 
 cerity," "lux," and " emoluniental." 
 
 As the main object of the work was to induce 
 English gentlemen to plant oak trees for the service 
 of the State in the event of war, and the secondary 
 object was the plantation of other trees for orna- 
 ment and beauty, the author, as a matter of course, 
 began with the oak as the tree par excellence : not 
 only, he said, "because it was held in high esteem 
 by c that wise and glorious people/ the Romans;" 
 but because it surpassed all other trees whatso- 
 ever for the building of ships in general, and 
 particularly for being tough, bending well, strong, 
 and not too heavy, nor easily admitting water." In 
 his instructions for the planting, the culture, the 
 transplanting, and the management of this tree, 
 Evelyn invariably writes like an adept ; and though 
 sometimes historical, classical, and poetical in his 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. 99 
 
 allusions and quotations, is in the main scientific 
 and practical. " To enumerate," he says, " the in- 
 comparable uses of this tree were needless, but so 
 precious was the esteem of it, that there was an ex- 
 press law among the Twelve Tables concerning the 
 very gathering of the acorns (oak-corns), though 
 they should be found fallen into another man's 
 ground. The land and the sea do sufficiently speak 
 for the improvement of this excellent material. 
 Houses and ships, cities and navies are built with 
 it." And not only in his estimation was the oak 
 timber to be admired for its uses, but the bark, the 
 acorns, the leaves, its very disease, the gall, were 
 each and all of utility to mankind. " Of the gall," 
 he says, " is made spa water. It is the ground and 
 basis of several dies, especially of the sadder colours. 
 Nor must I forget ink composed of galls, copperas, 
 gum-arabic, and claret, or French wine. Of the 
 very moss of the oak, that which is white composes 
 the choicest cypress powder, which is esteemed good 
 for the head ; but impostors familiarly vend other 
 mosses under this name, as they do the fungi, ex- 
 cellent in haemorrhages and fluxes, for the true 
 agaric, to the great scandal of physic. Young red 
 oaken leaves, decocted in wine, make an excellent 
 gargle for a sore mouth ; and almost any part of 
 this tree is sovereign against fluxes in general, and 
 where astringents are proper. The dew that im- 
 
100 A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 pearls the leaves in May, insolated, meteorises, and 
 sends up a liquor which is of admirable effect in 
 ruptures. The liquor issuing about between the 
 bark, which looks like treacle, has many sovereign 
 virtues; and a water distilled from the acorns is 
 good against the pthisick and stitch in the side, 
 heals inward ulcers, and breaks the stone ; nay, the 
 acorns themselves, eaten fasting, kill the worms. 
 The evals of oak, beaten and mingled into honey, 
 cures the carbuncle, to say nothing of polypods and 
 other excrescences ; of it innumerable remedies are 
 composed, noble antidotes and syrups." And as if 
 all these virtues were not sufficient in the good 
 man's estimation to endow his favourite trees, he 
 wound up his eulogy by stating, what he did not 
 expressly say he believed though he left the 
 reader to infer his credence, "that it is reported 
 that the very shade of the tree is so wholesome, 
 that the sleeping or lying under it becomes a pre- 
 sent remedy to paralytics ! " 
 
 The elm, dear to all lovers of English scenery and 
 poetry, comes next in Evelyn's list. " I know," he 
 says, in his magniloquent way, " of no tree among 
 all the forest, becoming the almost interminate 
 contananza of walks and vistas, comparable to this 
 majestic plant. . . . The elm is, by reason of its 
 aspiring and tapering growth, the least offensive to 
 corn and pasture grounds, to both of which and to 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. 101 
 
 cattle it affords a benign shade, defence, and agree- 
 able ornament." It will serve no purpose to enu- 
 merate, as Evelyn does, all the manufacturing and 
 commercial uses of this tree, and the various tools, 
 implements, and commodities which may be made 
 of it. He incidentally mentions the coffin as one of 
 them ; the coffin, which to the mournful imagination 
 of poor Thomas Hood in his beautiful poem of " The 
 Elm Tree," seemed the only manufacture for which 
 its timber was designed : — 
 
 Ah well the abounding elm may grow 
 
 In hedge and field so rife, 
 In forest, copse, and wooded park, 
 
 Amid the city's strife, 
 For every hour that passes by 
 
 Shall end a human life. 
 
 Evelyn looked at things more cheerfully, and 
 found the elm beautiful and useful for the living, 
 and, like the oak, a plant in all its parts of high 
 medicinal virtue. ' ' The green leaf of the elms con- 
 tused," he informed his readers, "heals a green 
 wound or cut, and boiled with the bark consolidates 
 fractured bones. All the parts of this tree are ab- 
 stersive, and therefore sovereign for the consoli- 
 dating wounds, and assuage the pains of the gout. 
 The bark, decocted in common water to almost the 
 consistence of a syrup, adding a third part of aqua 
 vitse, is a most admirable remedy for the Ischiadica 
 
102 A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 (gout in the hip) , the place being well rubbed and 
 chafed, near the fire." 
 
 The beech tree was not so great a favourite with 
 Mr. Evelyn as the elm. " In the valleys where they 
 stand warm and in consort, they will, he says, grow 
 to a stupendous procerity (height) , though the soil 
 be stony and very barren ; also upon the declivity, 
 sides, and tops of high hills, and chalky mountains 
 especially, for though they thrust not down such 
 deep and numerous roots as the oak, and grow to 
 vast trees, they will strangely insinuate their roots 
 into the bowels of those seemingly impenetrable 
 places. The beech serves for various uses of the 
 housewife : — 
 
 Beech makes the chest, the bed, and the joint stools, 
 Beech makes the boards, the platter and the bowls." 
 
 But with these and other such exceptions, Evelyn 
 condemned the beech as timber. "Indeed," he 
 says, "I can hardly call it timber." He nevertheless 
 considers it in every respect a highly respectable 
 and useful tree. cc I must not omit," he says, "to 
 praise the mast (the nuts) which fats our swine and 
 deer, and hath in some families even supported man 
 with bread. Chios endured a memorable siege by 
 the benefit of beech-mast, and in some parts of 
 France they now grind it in mills. It affords a 
 sweet oil which the people eat willingly. But there 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. 103 
 
 is yet another benefit which this tree presents us, 
 that its very leaves, which makes a most agreeable 
 canopy all the summer, being gathered about ' the 
 Fall/ 1 and somewhat before they are much frost- 
 bitten, afford the best and easiest mattresses in the 
 world to lie on under our quilts, instead of straw, 
 because, besides their tenderness and loose-lying 
 together, they continue sweet for seven or eight 
 years, long before which time straw becomes musty 
 and hard. They are thus used by divers persons of 
 quality in Dauphiny; and in Switzerland I have 
 sometimes lain on them to my great refreshment. . 
 . . . The kernels of the mast are greedily devoured 
 by squirrels, mice, and, above all, by dormice, who, 
 harbouring in the hollow trees, grow so fat that in 
 some countries abroad they take infinite numbers 
 of them, I suppose to eat. What relief they give 
 to thrushes, blackbirds, and fieldfares everybody 
 knows." 
 
 Evelyn had no taste for philology, or he might 
 have recorded that the practice of our Anglo-Saxon 
 ancestors of writing on the bark of the " buch," or 
 "buck" (the beech tree), gave the German and the 
 English languages the words, iC buch " and "book." 
 
 1 The Americans claim this word as their own, a claim 
 which cannot be allowed. It is good old English, and far 
 better than the modern " Autumn." 
 
104 A LOVER OF TREES, 
 
 The many picturesque clumps and clusters of 
 beeches in various parts of England are well-known, 
 and few Londoners are unacquainted either with the 
 Burnham beeches near Windsor , or the Knockholt 
 beeches in Kent. 
 
 Evelyn, though he loved all trees for some quality 
 or other, had but little good to say of the "birch," 
 which he stigmatised, chiefly for its timber, as de- 
 spicable, or for the elder, which he considered to 
 be "despicable and vulgar." The ash — of which 
 the old song, a favourite of Charles II., says : — 
 
 Oh, the oak and the ash, and the bonnie ivy tree, 
 They nourish at home in my own country — 
 
 stood high in Evelyn's estimation. 
 
 ' ' The husbandman," he says, ' ' cannot be without 
 the ash for his carts, ladders, and other tackling, 
 from the pike to the plough, spear and bow, for of 
 ash were they formerly made, and therefore reckoned 
 amongst those woods which, after a long tension, 
 has a natural spring and recovers its position; so 
 that in peace or war it is a wood in highest request. 
 In short, so useful and profitable is this tree (next 
 to the oak), that every prudent lord of a manor 
 should employ an acre of ground into ash c*r acorns 
 to every twenty acres of other land, since in as 
 many years it would be worth more than the land 
 itself." He also finds as many medicinal virtues in 
 the ash as in the oak. ' ' There is," he says, ( ' an 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. 105 
 
 oil extracted from the ash, which is excellent to 
 recover the hearing, some drops of it being dis- 
 tilled warm into the ears. For the caries, or rot of 
 the bones, for tooth-ache, pains in the kidneys, and 
 for the spleen, the anointing therewith is most 
 sovereign." 
 
 The lime or linden tree, which is now a greater 
 favourite in England than it was in Evelyn's time, 
 and which, in the poetry and romance of the Ger- 
 mans, ranks above all other trees whatever, received 
 Evelyn's hearty commendation. "We send com- 
 monly for this tree into Flanders and Holland, and 
 it is a shameful negligence that we are no better 
 provided with nurseries of a tree so choice and so 
 universally acceptable. Limes ,may be planted as 
 big as one's leg, their heads topped at about six or 
 eight feet bole. They will thus become of all others 
 the most proper and beautiful for walks, as pro- 
 ducing an upright body, smooth and even bark, 
 ample leaf, sweet blossom (the delight of bees) and 
 a goodly shade." Recalling to mind his travels in 
 Holland and Germany, he asks in triumph, " Is 
 there a more ravishing or delightful object than to 
 behold some entire streets, and even whole towns 
 planted with these trees in even lines before the 
 doors ? This is extremely fresh, of admirable effect 
 against the epilepsy, for which the delicately scented 
 blossoms are held prevalent, and screen the houses 
 
106 A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 both from winds, sun, and dust, than which there 
 can be nothing more desirable where streets are 
 much frequented." The lime, too, has its medicinal 
 virtues. " The berries, reduced to powder, cure 
 dysentery and stop bleeding of the nose. The dis- 
 tilled water of the same is good against epilepsy, 
 apoplexy, vertigo, palpitation of the heart, and 
 gravel, and I am told the juice of the leaves fixes 
 colours." To this may be added what Evelyn does 
 not seem to have known, that linden leaves, dried 
 and placed in the tea-pot, make a tea which is 
 highly sodorific. In Germany, the popular cure 
 for influenza, catarrh, or cold in the head, is to 
 lie quietly in bed for four-and- twenty hours and 
 drink copiously of hot ' Linden Thee/" The same 
 remedy is common in France. 
 
 The chesnut, perhaps, during the short season at 
 the end of May and beginning of June, the most 
 beautiful of the trees that adorn the English land- 
 scape, the white blossoming hawthorn not excepted, 
 is the only one of Evelyn's favourites which re- 
 quires further notice. He is warm in praise of its 
 beauty as a growing tree and of its uses as timber. 
 " He observed," he says, " that this tree is so 
 prevalent against cold, that where they stand, they 
 preserve other trees from the injuries of the 
 severest frost. I am sure that, being planted in 
 hedgerows, and for avenues to our country houses, 
 
A LOVER OF TREE 8. 107 
 
 they are a magnificent and a royal ornament." 
 This is an opinion in which most Londoners, who 
 remember the glories of Bushy Park in early sum- 
 mer, will cordially coincide. Even the fruit, bitter 
 as that of the horse chesnut is, finds favour in his 
 philosophic eyes. " We give," he says, ce that 
 fruit to our swine in England which is among the 
 delicacies of princes in other countries, and of better 
 nourishment to husbandmen than kohl (cabbage) 
 and rusty bacon, yea, or beans to boot . . . . The 
 bread made of chesnut flour is exceedingly nutritive, 
 and makes women well complexioned, as I have read 
 in a good author." What may interest the ladies, if 
 golden locks be in fashion, and the dark possessors 
 of locks that are not golden, desire to appear 
 as other than they are, is the fact, given on 
 Evelyn's authority alone, that te a decoction of the 
 rind of the chesnut tree tinctures hair of a golden 
 colour. This," he adds, without the gift of pro- 
 phecy to lead him to 1871, "is esteemed a beauty in 
 some countries." 
 
 Evelyn was justified in the pride which he took 
 in his Sylva, and in the additions which he con- 
 tinued to make to it from time to time, until nearly 
 the close of his life. In his Dedication of the third 
 edition to Charles II., sixteen years after its 
 first publication, he says, with pardonable self- 
 appreciation, u I need not acquaint your majesty 
 
103 A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 how many millions of timber trees (besides infinite 
 others) have been propagated and planted through- 
 out your vast dominions at the instigation and 
 by the sole direction of this work; because your 
 gracious majesty has been pleased to own it publicly 
 for my encouragement ; who, in all that I here pre- 
 tend to say, delivers only those precepts which your 
 majesty has put in practice, as has (like another 
 Cyrus), by your own royal example, exceeded 
 all your predecessors in the plantations you have 
 made, beyond (I dare assert it) all the monarchs 
 of this nation since the conquest of it. And, in- 
 deed, what more august, what more worthy of your 
 majesty, or more becoming our imitation, than, 
 whilst you are thus solicitous for the public good, 
 we pursue your majesty's great example, and by 
 cultivating our decaying* woods, contribute to your 
 power as to our own greatest wealth and safety." 
 
 It is only within our own time — within a very 
 few years — that Evelyn's far-sighted anxiety for the 
 continuous production of material for the building of 
 a great navy to maintain British supremacy in all the 
 seas of the world has become a thing- of the past, a 
 matter with which the present generation has no 
 concern. ' ( Hearts of oak " are no longer synonymes 
 or our ships or our sailors. Iron, not oak, is the 
 monarch of the seas. None the less, however, is 
 Evelyn's glory or the gratitude we owe him. For 
 
A LOVER OF TREES. 
 
 109 
 
 nearly two hundred years his book did noble service 
 in the mode he designed ; and in other modes also. 
 He taught the rural aristocracy a duty they owed to 
 themselves and their country; and since his time 
 they have well performed it. Nowhere in the 
 world are there such fine parks and plantations as 
 there are in England. 
 
 Sayes Court, where the amiable philosopher so 
 long lived and cultivated his trees, his shrubs, and 
 his salads — or, as he calls them, " acetaria" — has 
 long ceased to be rural, and is mural as far as houses 
 and streets can make it so. Wotton, however, still 
 remains, and an Evelyn still resides in it, to cultivate 
 the grounds, and maintain the fair fame of an 
 ancient and honourable family. 
 
MR. PLANT, THE ENGLISH PEASANT. 
 
 F there be any class of the English 
 people pre-eminently unknown to itself 
 and to all other classes, it is that of the 
 farm-labourer. The squire or other 
 great landed proprietor of the neighbourhood knows 
 the labourers, after a certain fashion, as he knows 
 his cattle ; but of the labourer's mind he has as 
 little idea as he has of that of the animal which he 
 bestrides in the hunting -field. He knows the peasant 
 to be a useful drudge, like the horse that draws the 
 plough, but unlike the horse, feels and deplores 
 that he will be a burden upon the poor-rates, 
 either present or prospective. Furthermore, he 
 suspects him to be a poacher ; and in his capacity of 
 magistrate deals out the harshest justice (or injustice) 
 towards him, if the suspicion ever comes to be 
 verified. The squire's lady, and the clergyman's 
 lady, and the fair matrons and spinsters of the 
 Dorcas Society, or managers of the Penny Clothing 
 Club, know the labourer's wife as the grateful and 
 
THE ENGLISH PEASANT. Ill 
 
 very humble recipient of eleemosynary soup, coals, 
 flannels, medicines, and other small mercies that are 
 great in their season. The parson knows the 
 labourer and his family better perhaps than anybody, 
 if he be a true parson, and does his duty by his 
 flock ; but it is doubtful whether even he, however 
 zealous and truly christian-like he may be, penetrates 
 into the arcana of the labourer's mind, or under- 
 stands what the poor man really thinks of his 
 condition in this world, or his prospects in the 
 next. The farmer who employs him ought to know 
 him better, but he does not. The farmer's only 
 concern with him is on a par with the concern he 
 has for his inanimate tools — for his plough, his 
 spade, or his harrow, which he buys as cheaply as 
 he can, uses as long as possible, and throws away 
 when worn out. He employs the labourer when 
 he is young and strong, and gets as much work out 
 of him as he can, for the smallest price allowed by 
 the custom of the neighbourhood, and quietly con- 
 signs him to the tender mercies of the workhouse, 
 when old age and decrepitude overtake him. To 
 the dwellers in great cities the peasant is scarcely 
 known, always excepting the stage peasant, who is 
 the favourite dolt and clodhopper of the minor 
 dramatists, the incarnation of all that is stupid, if 
 he is well disposed towards society, and the incar- 
 nation of all that is vicious and dangerous, if he 
 
112 MB. PLANT, 
 
 has daring or desperation enough to forsake the 
 paths of village virtue. 
 
 And the peasants know as little of themselves as 
 their worldly superiors. They have not even begun 
 to understand, like other labouring men, the value 
 of union and brotherhood in preventing wages from 
 being screwed down to the starvation point. They 
 do not see the necessity if labour fails them in their 
 own district of trying their fortunes elsewhere. 
 The law does not make them serfs, but they make 
 serfs of themselves by their limpet-like tenacity in 
 sticking to the parish in which they were born. 
 Oliver Goldsmith may or may not have been right 
 when he spoke of this class in a former day, but 
 extinct is our own as " a hold peasantry, their 
 country's pride;" for it is only too certain in our 
 time, that if we are to look for a " bold " peasantry 
 anywhere within the circuit of the British Isles, 
 we must look to the border counties, to Scotland 
 and to Ireland, rather than to Saxon England. In 
 the southern shires, more especially, the condition 
 of the peasant is virtually that of a slave. He is 
 tied to his parish by circumstances too formidable 
 to be overcome by such small and weak agencies 
 as he can employ ; and he can only escape from it, 
 to run a worse risk of pauperism in the great cities, 
 that do not need him, and that have no work to 
 offer that he is capable of performing. By the 
 
TEE ENGLISH PEASANT. 113 
 
 hardest labour he cannot earn a decent subsistence, 
 even in his youngest and strongest days. He is 
 submissive to authority because he is so snubbed, 
 and buffeted, and preached at, and lectured at, as 
 to have become hopeless of bettering himself morally 
 or physically. He is what in the south of England 
 is called a " droil," and what in the north of Eng- 
 land and the southern shires of Scotland is called 
 a " snool," *. e.j one whose spirit is broken by daily 
 oppression and continuous ill-treatment. He does 
 sometimes, it is true, enter a protest against his 
 life and his circumstances ; and kindly fate some- 
 times takes pity on his misery, and lifts him out of 
 the ill-paid drudgery which is his normal state. In 
 his wild young days, when his passions are strong, 
 and he entangles himself in a love affair, from 
 which he has no other means of escape, he despe- 
 rately enlists for a soldier, and if he be strong, well- 
 behaved, and fortunate, and has received as much 
 education as enables him to read, write, and work 
 up in arithmetic as far as the rule of three, he may 
 rise in middle age to the dignity of a sergeant. A 
 French peasant under similar circumstances may 
 console himself with the idea of a marshal's baton 
 latent in his knapsack, but no such prospect exists 
 for the British recruit. A broken constitution, and 
 a pension of sixpence or ninepence a day, are his 
 prospects after forty, and if he return to his native 
 
 i 
 
114 ME. PLANT, 
 
 village after this time, and is able to hedge or ditch 
 or follow the plough, he is better than his fellows 
 by the sixpence or ninepence aforesaid. If he be 
 reckless in another direction, and takes the notion 
 into his head, which he sometimes does, that the 
 wild fowl and game belong as much to him as 
 to any one else who can snare, shoot, or otherwise 
 capture them, as they do to the squire or other 
 great landed proprietor of the neighbourhood, he 
 gets into difficulties more serious than love, how- 
 ever illicit and unfortunate, could bring upon him, 
 and is lucky indeed if he do not find himself in jail ; 
 still luckier if, when he is released from it, he 
 is not possessed by seven times as many devils of 
 desperation as possessed him when he and the Law 
 first came into conflict. Young peasants are to be 
 considered particularly fortunate if they attract the 
 attention of the squire or the squire's lady by their 
 handiness or good looks, for they may in conse- 
 quence be promoted from the paternal cottage to 
 the stables or to the servants' hall of the great man- 
 sion. This is almost the only road to fortune that 
 is really open to the agricultural masses. Once in 
 this position the way is clear before them if they 
 are prudent, provident, ambitious, and not too 
 honest, to amass from their savings their "vails," 
 their perquisites, and their " priggings," as much 
 as will elevate them into that upper stratum of 
 
THE ENGLISH PEASANT. * 115 
 
 society,, which is occupied by greengrocers, beer- 
 shop keepers, and other small tradesmen who have 
 capital enough to invest in business. But these are 
 the exceptions, just as the manumitted slaves in 
 the days of negro slavery in America were the ex- 
 ceptions to the otherwise universal bondage of the 
 race. Once a peasant always a peasant seems to 
 be the fate of the large majority of this useful and 
 laborious class, leaving, perhaps, a margin of five 
 or six per cent, who drift off into the army, the 
 stable, or the kitchen. Why the English peasantry, 
 the border men excepted, should be inferior in 
 energy, or in the art of bettering themselves than 
 their compeers in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, has 
 never yet been satisfactorily explained; unless — 
 and I do not mean to say that this particular expla- 
 nation is wholly satisfactory — it be from their in- 
 nate sluggishness of character. Whatever may be 
 the cause, there is a lack of imagination among 
 them that leads to a lack of enterprise, and that 
 seems somehow or other to run in the blood of 
 those portions of the British people that are not of 
 Celtic origin or intermixture. The peasantry of 
 Saxon England have produced among them but 
 two poets, Robert Bloomfield, the author of the 
 " Farmer's Boy," and John Clare, author of the 
 p Village Minstrel ; " neither of them a poet with 
 any claims to the first or even to the second rank, 
 
116 MB. PLANT, 
 
 while Scotland's poets, sprung from the agricul- 
 tural and labouring classes, are to be numbered by 
 scores, including Robert Burns, a greater than fifty 
 Bloomfields and Clares rolled into one, and a long 
 bead roll of genuine bards and minstrels, of whom 
 it is sufficient to name Allan Ramsay, the barber ; 
 William Ferguson, the sailor; James Hogg, the 
 shepherd; Robert Tannahill, the weaver; Hugh 
 Miller, the stonemason; and Jean Glover, the 
 strolling tinker. 
 
 I once endeavoured to make a more intimate 
 acquaintance with one English peasant, than squires 
 and parsons and charitable ladies ever think it 
 worth while to cultivate with persons of a caste, 
 from which their own caste is as much removed 
 as that of the Brahmin from the Pariah. The old 
 man was a fair specimen of his class, neither much 
 better nor much worse, neither much more intelli- 
 gent nor much more apathetic than his fellows. He 
 was seventy years of age when I knew him first, 
 and he lived for three years afterwards in the work- 
 house, the sole resource for such as he, when old 
 age comes upon them. His name was Plant, and 
 the parson of the rural parish in which he was born 
 and bred, and in the neighbourhood of which he had 
 laboured until his limbs grew stiff and his right hand 
 lost its cunning, informed me that there had been 
 people of that name in the parish for five hundred 
 
THE ENGLISH PEASANT. 117 
 
 years ; perhaps, lie said, offshoots of the great house 
 of the Plantagenets, but, at all events, a very ancient 
 family (as if all families were not equally ancient, if 
 we could but trace them) ! William Plant married 
 when he was nineteen years of age, and in re- 
 ceipt of the magnificent wages of ten shillings a 
 week. His wife, who was a year older than him- 
 self, was a domestic servant in the family of the 
 village doctor, and had saved from her wages at the 
 time that Plant became enamoured of her no less a 
 sum than seven pounds, a fortune in the eyes of one 
 who, as he said, had never before held two sovereigns 
 in his hand. The seven pounds went a good way 
 towards furnishing their little cottage of two rooms, 
 and for two or three years, as the wife was a handy 
 woman, and could do plain needlework, wash, iron, 
 and get up fine linen, their humble household was 
 happy enough, and Plant thought he had done a wise 
 thing to marry. " It kept me out of the public- 
 house," he said, " and out of bad company. It had 
 f been my delight of a shiny night, in the season of 
 the year ' just to go out for a lark, but I never did 
 that after I was married. By-and-by the children 
 came, and twice the wife had twins. It seemed to 
 me that the twins brought us good luck, for the 
 squire's lady was very kind when they came, and 
 sent clothes, and baby linen, and a little port wine 
 for the missus. The vicar's wife was good too, and 
 
113 MB. PLANT, 
 
 made as much fuss over the babies,, for a month or 
 two, as if they were real live angels. And it so 
 happened that before twelve years passed over, the 
 missus and I were in possession of eleven children, 
 and very hard put to it to find them bread, let alone 
 clothes. The missus, after her fifth child, was no 
 longer able to work, and had more than enough to 
 do to keep the house in order and mend the rags. 
 My wages were by this time two shillings a day. 
 But, Lord love ye ! that was nothing, not enough 
 for two of us, let alone thirteen. How we managed 
 I don't know. They say God Almighty always 
 sends bread when he sends mouths and stomachs. 
 I did not find it so always, and when one little child 
 — a poor sickly ailing thing it was — died of fever, 
 I was, I am afraid, almost wicked enough not to 
 feel very sorry. It was buried by the parish, and 
 the missus wept over it, just as if it had been the 
 dearest treasure in the world, as no doubt it was to 
 her. It is very hard to keep the little things ; but 
 very hard to lose them all the same, especially for the 
 women kind. We got helped on a bit by the parish 
 every winter; and the two elder children — a boy 
 and a girl — when they were eight years old, earned 
 a shilling now and then by weeding and scaring 
 the crows and sparrows. The missus, too, earned 
 a little in harvest time, and betwixt us all we 
 managed, though God knows how, just to live, and 
 
THE ENGLISH PEASANT. 119 
 
 to keep ourselves warm, though not too warm, I 
 can assure you. Didn't the children go to school ? 
 Well, to the Sunday school, and in winter now and 
 then to the day school : but you see we could not 
 spare them for the latter part of the year ; for as 
 soon as they growed up to be eight or nine they 
 could earn summat, however small, if it were only 
 picking up sticks in the woods and the road side to 
 help light the fire. It wasn't much as they learned 
 at the Sunday-school, only reading ; no writing or 
 ciphering— just about as much as I learned when I 
 was a boy. I can read a little. I read the Bible 
 and the newspaper sometimes, but I can't write, and 
 I don't understand newspapers much, except the 
 murders, she robberies, and fires, and such like. 
 The missus can write a bit, and tried to teach me ; 
 but I was too old to larn, and never could make 
 nothing on it. She taught Tom, our eldest boy, to 
 write, and Jane our eldest girl; but the children 
 came on so fast after a time, and she had so much 
 to do with managing them and mending their 
 clothes and screwing and scraping to feed them that 
 she had to give up teaching. I kept my health and 
 strength wonderfully well — the Lord be praised. I 
 think that if I could have earned twenty-four 
 shillings a week instead of twelve I should have 
 been happy enough in good seasons. Did I never 
 think of going to America ? Well, I dare say I 
 
120 MB. PLANT, 
 
 may have done. They say there's plenty of land 
 there, and few men — -just the revarse of what there 
 is here ; but how was I to get to America I should 
 like to know ? I could not save a penny in a year, 
 and it would' have cost a matter of forty pounds, I 
 have heerd, to pay our passage out. Forty pounds ! 
 You might as well come upon me to pay the national 
 debt. No ; it was of no use for me to think of 
 America, and besides, even if I had the money, I 
 was too old to go to America when I first heerd on 
 it. It's too late in the day at fifty- six years of age 
 to go to a new country, and to a new people. I 
 think my eldest boy, Tom, would have gone with 
 his wife and children if he had had money enough ; 
 but it was the same with him as with me. He got 
 married like a fool, as his father was before him, 
 when he was barely twenty ; but not being of such 
 a good constitution as me, he couldn't stand the 
 work and the trouble as I did; and though he's 
 only fifty now, he's an older man nor I am at seventy. 
 He's got eight children, and one of them's a born 
 idiot and another a cripple. It's hard times for 
 him, I think 3 and if anything should happen to 
 him the whole family would have to go to the work- 
 house. Any more of my children married ? Yes. 
 My eldest daughter. She was a tidy girl, and a 
 pretty girl too, and got into service at the vicar's. 
 She had good wages, and a good place — plenty to 
 
THE ENGLISH PEASANT. 121 
 
 eat and drink, and all her money her own to buy 
 clothes and ribbons with, and sometimes at Christ- 
 mas a pound to spare to help her poor old father 
 and mother through the winter. But she did not 
 know when she was well off. She would go and 
 get married, after she had only been three years in 
 service, to a fellow as I never could bear — a jobbing 
 carpenter, who is a good deal too fond of his beer 
 and of bad company to make a good husband. She's 
 never known what it was to be comfortable since 
 her marriage, and wishes she was back again in 
 service, with a shilling to spare for a ribbon now 
 and then. But she has no shilling and no ribbon, 
 nor is likely to have. How many grandchildren 
 have I ? Well, I think there have been more than 
 forty of them, but a good many of them are dead — 
 died young, and I do sometimes think that if all the 
 children that are born into the world lived and 
 growed up to be men and women that there wouldn't 
 be half room enough in the world for 'em, leastways 
 not in England and in our parish. You say it's 
 wrong for the poor to marry in this thoughtless 
 manner. Well, perhaps it is. I don't say it isn't ; 
 but it's about the only comfort the poor have got, 
 though the comfort brings sorrow along with it ; as 
 most things do in this world as far as I know on. 
 It would be rather hard lines if the sparrows and 
 the butterflies might mate, and men and women 
 
122 MB. PLANT, 
 
 might not unless they had a hundred and fifty pounds 
 a year, or were squires, and dukes, and such like. 
 The missus ? Ay, she's been dead more 'an ten 
 years now — rest her soul ; an' if she had been alive 
 I should not ha' gone into the workhouse to be 
 separated from her, but have got an out-door 
 allowance, and managed somehow to crawl down to 
 the grave alongside of her. She was a good woman 
 she was, and sorely tried, and wears I hope a crown 
 of glory on her head in heaven at this moment. 
 f Blessed are the poor in spirit/ says our Lord and 
 Saviour, ' for their's is the Kingdom of Heaven, and 
 she is in the Kingdom of Heaven, where I hope to 
 be." He was going to be pathetic, so I suppose I 
 must have put a sudden question to him, for he said 
 rather sharply for so raild, so very mild and meek, 
 and utterly down-trodden and worn-out a person, 
 i( Have I no dislike in eating the bread of the 
 parish ? Well, I can't say I have. I would rather 
 eat it at our cottage, and have an allowance to live 
 with one of my sons. And the skilligalee is 
 wretched poor stuff, and I don't like the house rules, 
 and would like to get out oftener than I do ; but 
 still right is right, and the parish owes me my 
 bread. I've toiled in it all my life ; and after all, 
 though I'm a pauper, I'm a man, and not a dog to 
 be turned out to die in a ditch, and then you see, 
 God is just. I've had a bad time of it in this world, 
 and I hope to have a good time of it in the next." 
 
THE ENGLISH PEASANT. 123 
 
 The reader will see that there was a good deal of 
 stolid endurance in Mr. Plant, but very little pluck, 
 energy, or spirit. There was fair material in him 
 that had never been worked up to any good end ; 
 material that, under more favourable circumstances, 
 say in the prairies of America, where labour is 
 scarce, the soil fruitful, and farms to be easily 
 obtained by the poorest of squatters, might have 
 been so manipulated as to have converted this 
 patient and hopeless serf into a lively, active, and 
 prosperous citizen. Though England may be over- 
 peopled by thoughtless and improvident labourers 
 of the lowest class, like poor Plant, the world is not 
 over-peopled by any means ; and how to bring the 
 Plants to the soil that cannot come to the Plants 
 is the problem. Before any satisfactory solution is 
 likely to be obtained, the Plants are likely to go on 
 breeding, toiling, and suffering for centuries to 
 come, as they have done for centuries past. The 
 more's the pity ! 
 
A PLEA FOE BARE FEET. 
 
 HE clergyman of my parish made a 
 piteous appeal to me a short time ago, 
 in behalf of the poor, and especially of 
 the little children — who had, as the re- 
 verend gentleman pathetically remarked, ec scarcely 
 a shoe or stocking to their poor little feet." A 
 day or two afterwards, a respectable married 
 woman, the wife of a mechanic, earning about 
 twenty shillings a week, and having a family of 
 nine children, seven of whom were dependent 
 upon her and her husband's exertions, complained 
 bitterly of what she called the " awful expense" of 
 boots and shoes for her little ones. She often 
 bought them boots, after a hard struggle, when she 
 would much rather have spent the money in bread 
 and butter, which they sorely needed. She starved 
 their bellies, as she said, for the sake of their feet. 
 Now, as I went barefooted myself when a u wee 
 Gallant," as most Scottish lads and lasses do in 
 the rural districts, whether their parents be rich or 
 
A FLEA FOB BABE FEET. 125 
 
 poor, I bethought myself that much might be said 
 on behalf of bare feet for young children, whether 
 as regarded health, cleanliness, beauty, or economy. 
 A late gallant Scottish Admiral once said, that 
 until he was twelve years of age, he never wore shoe 
 or boot unless he went into a town ; and that he was 
 always glad to get back into the country again and 
 take off the encumbrance from his feet and legs. He 
 also said that until he was fourteen, he seldom had 
 anything but oatmeal porridge and new milk for his 
 breakfast, dinner and supper, an excellent food, he 
 added, for the making both of bone and muscle. 
 The admiral was proud of his agility, and when 
 close upon the threescore years and ten, that are 
 the allotted period of human life, could dance the 
 Highland Fling and the Gillie Callum, with a grace 
 and alertness, which men young enough to be his 
 grandsons might have envied. He attributed much 
 of his vigour to his early training, and to the fact 
 that his feet had been left in his childhood and 
 youth in the wholesome regimen of Scottish out- 
 door life, to develope themselves as nature intended. 
 The Admiral's experience was not peculiar, as many 
 a sturdy Scot in every part of the world can testify. 
 Every one who has travelled, either in the Highlands 
 or the Lowlands, must have noticed the legs bare 
 and shapely, and the neat ankles and feet of the 
 lads, and especially of the lasses in the gleus, and 
 
126 A PLEA FOE 
 
 on the moors, and in the streets of the towns and 
 villages; and, if he be a reader of Robert Burns, 
 must have thought upon the lines where he de- 
 scribes the genius of Caledonia, in the guise of a 
 rural maiden, without shoe or stocking, as a spirit 
 should be. 
 
 Down flowed her robe o' tartan sheen, 
 Till half a leg was scrimply seen, 
 And such a leg ! My bonnie Jean 
 Alone conld peer it ! 
 
 Most children in rural Scotland are innocent of 
 all patronage of the craft of St. Crispin, and love, 
 as the immortal song says, to "paidle" in the burns 
 that all over the mountain land are as plentiful as 
 trees in England : 
 
 We twa hae paidled in the burn 
 
 Frae morning sun till dine, 
 But seas between us braid hae roamed 
 
 Since Auld Lang Syne. 
 
 " Paidled ? " exclaims the English reader — 
 "what is paidling?" Nothing, my friend, but 
 paddling about in the water with bare feet — a very 
 favourite diversion with the children of the glens 
 and the mountains, and the recollection of which, 
 when brought to mind in a company of Scotsmen 
 by the singing of their national song, of Auld Lang 
 Syne invariably arouses their enthusiasm, and fills 
 them with patriotic emotion. 
 
BABE FEET. 127 
 
 It can scarcely be denied that a bare foot 
 and leg is a more picturesque object than a foot 
 with an old, patched, down-trodden boot or shoe, 
 and a dirty darned stocking. But for young 
 people the bare foot has other than artistic and 
 sesthetic recommendations, and much may be said 
 in favour of its economy, and what is far more im- 
 portant, of its healthiness. Nothing in the back 
 slums of English cities is more suggestive of squalid - 
 ness and misery than the unsuccessful attempts of 
 the poor to be decently shod. A ragged coat or gown 
 is less suggestive of extreme want than the forlorn 
 boots and shoes of the children, and the filthiness of 
 their stockings. And yet the poor of England 
 must spend a considerable portion of their scanty 
 earnings in the attempt to procure what custom, 
 habit, use, and the general consent of society, agree 
 to think indispensable pieces of attire. If it be 
 estimated that the number of poor children under 
 twelve years of age living in the rural districts and 
 cities of England is three millions — a very moderate 
 calculation — and that each child costs five shillings 
 a year for such poor boots, shoes, and stockings as 
 its parents can purchase, we have a sum of no less 
 than seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds per 
 annum expended for a purpose which the children 
 of the poor Scotch, as well as the Irish, neither 
 think essential nor agreeable ; and if the annual sum 
 
128 A FLEA FOB 
 
 be multiplied by twelve, we have no less than nine 
 millions of pounds sterling lost to the parents, with- 
 out any real advantage to the children. Amongst 
 the poorest of the poor, would it not be an advan- 
 tage if the share contributed by them to this large 
 total of wealth were expended, as my good friend the 
 mechanic's wife said, in bread and butter, and the 
 other food required, or if a little share of it went to 
 pay the school fees ? There is no reason in nature 
 why the foot and leg should be covered — with the 
 exception perhaps of the sole. A handsome foot is, 
 as everybody knows, as pleasant an object as a 
 well-shaped hand. And if the hand could only be 
 cramped by the glove a quarter as much as the foot 
 is cramped by the shoemaker, there would scarcely 
 be a pretty hand left in all England, unless it 
 belonged to some strong-minded person of either 
 sex who was bold enough to set fashion at defiance. 
 As regards health, grace, and agility, we have 
 but to ask ourselves whence come corns and 
 bunions, and how continually the sufferers from 
 these painful callosities, are prevented by the tor- 
 ture they inflict, from taking the walking exercise 
 which is alike the cheapest, the most healthful, 
 and the most agreeable, to be convinced that of 
 all the handicrafts that minister to the wants 
 and the comforts of man, that of the shoemaker 
 could be most advantageously dispensed with. In 
 
BABE FEET. 129 
 
 England, among rich and poor alike, the normally- 
 shaped foot of an adult is very seldom to be seen, 
 as every doctor or surgeon can testify as the result 
 of his experience. In fact, the feet of most men 
 and women are deformed, and the great toe forced 
 from its natural position in a curve towards the 
 little toe, which, in like manner, is curved inward. 
 Were it not for the respite and the liberty accorded 
 at night — which mitigate but do not remove the 
 evil — the feet of Englishmen, and more especially 
 of English women, who cramp them in order that 
 they may appear small and elegant, would be as 
 little serviceable for wholesome exercise as those of 
 the Chinese ladies, whom we all agree to laugh at, 
 seeing the mote in our neighbour's eyes, but not in 
 our own. It has been cynically suggested that the 
 boot and shoemakers are in league with the chiro- 
 podists and doctors to damage our health by means 
 of our feet ; and that they are allowed a per-centage 
 by the profession for the callosities which they 
 create. But cynics are privileged to believe the 
 worst of everything and everybody; and doubtless 
 the Crispins, great and small, would be quite as 
 willing to make boots and shoes on natural prin- 
 ciples, so as to allow for the healthful play and 
 motion of the foot as to make unnatural ones, if 
 Fashion and Custom would but run in that direc- 
 tion. But Custom is like a mountain, not to be 
 
 K 
 
130 PLEA FOB BABE FEET. 
 
 moved by the blast of a trumpet ; and Fashion is 
 more obstinate in having its own way, in spite of 
 reason and remonstrance, than all the mules, pigs, 
 and asses that ever existed since the creation of 
 the world. 
 
 I end in the same spirit with which I began. 
 Better a clean hand than a dirty glove ; better bare 
 feet than clouted shoon and ragged stockings \ and 
 better, far better feet such as Nature intended, than 
 the feet which we owe to Fashion and the boot- 
 makers. 
 
A WIT AND A POET. 
 
 HOTLY contested election in a county 
 town was just concluded, and the can- 
 didate of whose committee I had been a 
 member, had been returned at the head 
 of the poll by a very splendid majority. I was 
 alone in the committee-room, wheu there walked 
 in, unannounced, and very much the worse for 
 liquor, a person whom I shall take the liberty of 
 calling Mr. Donaldson. He was a man of about 
 fifty years of age, unwashed, unkemped, and in a 
 state of raggedness that was distressing to behold. 
 I knew well who he was, and what he wanted ; and 
 though I was in very good humour with myself and 
 all the world, as one is apt to be in the hour of 
 success, I determined that I would not comply with 
 Mr. Donaldson's demand. It was, as I anticipated, 
 a request for money — for the small sum of five 
 shillings — which, to do Mr. Donaldson justice, I 
 must say he had very fairly earned. Mr. Donald- 
 
132 A WIT AND A POET. 
 
 son had been a journeyman weaver — had a taste 
 for literature — was a man of great natural ability — 
 had published a volume of poems, which were neither 
 very good nor very bad ; and was a capital hand at 
 epigrammatic squibs, both in prose and verse ; and 
 in the composition of such, which our committee 
 had published in the press and upon the walls of 
 our town, had done good service to the victorious 
 candidate. He had received many small sums 
 during the election, and had spent them in drink. 
 Had he been sober when he presented himself be- 
 fore me, he should, as a matter of course, have re j 
 ceived his five shillings and a little good advice, 
 which, not being a matter of course, it is more than 
 probable he would not have taken ; but as he was 
 so painfully drunk, I resolved that I would not, at 
 least that day, add fuel to the flame that was con- 
 suming him, or give him even a sixpence, to pour 
 an additional dose of his enemy into his mouth. I 
 made him understand this, as peremptorily as I 
 could, but as he was not savagely but only maudlin 
 drunk, he was more pained than offended, and 
 appealed to my mercy, rather than to my justice, 
 for the money. But I was obdurate, and made him 
 understand that if he would return in the morning, 
 perfectly sober, " clothed, and in his right mind," 
 he should have ten shillings instead of five, and the 
 prospect of earning something more on account of 
 
A WIT AND A POET. 133 
 
 the election. It was a long parley, and a very diffi- 
 cult victory to win ; but I won it, partly by threats, 
 partly by entreaties, and partly, I suppose, by the 
 electrical influence of a strong will over a weak one. 
 The fact was that I knew and had heard so much 
 good of this poor man, that I greatly desired not 
 only for an opportunity to do him a real service, 
 but to hear from his own lips the story of his life, 
 his struggles, his temptations, and his hopes for 
 the future — if he had any. 
 
 He came the next morning at eight o'clock, ac- 
 cording to appointment, ragged as usual, but with 
 clean hands and face, and a light in his clear blue 
 eyes, that seemed to show that the fumes of liquor 
 in his brain were very volatile, and passed away 
 quicker than is common with most people. I asked 
 him if he were ready for a walk of a dozen miles, to 
 a town to which we might easily have gone by rail 
 had it suited my fancy. He expressed himself in 
 the affirmative, though he said he should first of all 
 like to have his breakfast. This I provided for him, 
 not in money but in kind, for fear of accidents. 
 The day was lovely, neither too hot nor too cold, 
 and when, after twenty minutes' walk, we got clear 
 of the streets, the beauty of the autumnal tints upon 
 the trees, the greenness of the grass, the transparent 
 blueness of the sky, the warmth of the sunshine, and 
 the joyous freshness of the breeze, seemed to affect 
 
134 A WIT AND A POET. 
 
 my ragged companion as I know they affected me, 
 with a sense of physical enjoyment, and of gratitude 
 to Heaven for the blessed gift of life. I soon en- 
 gaged him in a conversation which gradually as- 
 sumed, on his part, an autobiographical shape. He 
 was the son of a poor weaver in the West of Scot- 
 land, and was put to work at his father's trade at 
 the tender age of eight years. Before that time he 
 had learned to read at a little school kept by an old 
 woman or ' ' dame," and being naturally quick, he 
 had already stored his infant mind with fairy legends, 
 stories of adventure, and snatches of verse. The 
 hours of labour at that time in factory work were 
 from six in the morning until eight in the evening, 
 with two intervals for meals, half an hour for break- 
 fast and an hour for dinner. The overseer of the 
 factory seeing the child engaged in reading during 
 the dinner hour, and being surprised to find the 
 eager desire of knowledge that had taken possession 
 of him, not only allowed him an additional couple of 
 hours every day to attend school, without making 
 any deduction from his wages, but very generously 
 paid for his schooling. By the time he was fifteen 
 years of age, he had attained considerable pro- 
 ficiency in English composition, a competent ac- 
 quaintance with the rules of arithmetic, had studied 
 Greek, Roman, and English history, together with 
 geography, and knew something — but not much — 
 
A WIT AND A POET. 135 
 
 of Latin. He also began to revel in the writings 
 of Robert Burns,, and to awake to the consciousness 
 that he, too, was a poet. Like Burns, too, his first 
 rhymes welled from his heart in admiration of the 
 beauty of a young girl in his own sphere of life. 
 Precocious in his physical as well as in his mental 
 powers, he fell desperately in love before he was 
 sixteen, and, before he was seventeen, he was 
 married to the girl of his first choice — like himself, 
 a millworker. Between them both they earned 
 about a pound a week, and on this pittance they 
 commenced the hard battle of the world. The young 
 man, as he grew older, discovered that he was a 
 wit and a politician as well as a weaver, and at the 
 time of the first Reform agitation took the Radical 
 side, and let off in the local newspapers a series of 
 squibs against the " borough-mongers," as they were 
 called, which excited much attention, and led to 
 many inquiries for the author. He, on his part, 
 was by no means unwilling to declare himself, and 
 to receive such homage and pay as his effusions 
 commanded. The homage was considerable, the pay 
 very scanty. Unthinking people, surprised to find 
 such talents in a weaver, patronized him in their 
 good-natured but blundering way ; brought him into 
 the society of his betters — better only in point of 
 worldly position — and invited him to their con- 
 vivial parties. 
 
136 A WIT AND A POET. 
 
 " Many a time," said he, " when I would have 
 been better pleased with a shilling in hard cash, I 
 have drunk, at other people's expense, ten shillings' 
 worth of wine and whisky, and have been brought 
 out, I feel it now, to make sport of these brainless 
 but good-hearted Philistines, who enjoyed my con- 
 versation, and had very little of their own. I must 
 own that I liked this kind of thing. I felt a sense 
 of power and supremacy. I was a Triton among 
 the minnows. My appetite grew by what it fed on. 
 I knew myself to be the intellectual superior of the 
 people who plied me with liquor to get the wit out 
 of me, yet I did not despise them, or shun their 
 society. On the contrary, I felt ill at ease with 
 myself and with the world, if, by any accident, I were 
 not invited to their social gatherings. Off and on, I 
 had been leading this kind of life for some years — 
 being still a mill-hand, and gaining an occasional 
 guinea for a poem — save the mark ! when one of my 
 comrades, the managing clerk in a lawyer's office, 
 gave me an introduction to the editor of a liberal 
 paper in the city. He appeared to be as pleased with 
 me, as I certainly was with him, and offered me a 
 situation on his paper, partly as a collector of local 
 news, and partly as a corrector of proofs, in which art 
 and mystery I soon became expert. This was a great 
 rise in the world for me, for I had a salary of two 
 guineas a week, more than double the joint earnings 
 
A WIT AND A POET. 137 
 
 of myself and wife, and I was thus enabled to take 
 her out of the mill, and give her freedom to attend 
 to the children. I was twenty-one years old at 
 this time, and had three children, and the prospect 
 of a fourth. But my old love of good-fellowship, 
 and my power of repartee, and the knack of saying 
 things that were either good in themselves, or that 
 seemed good to those who heard them, especially 
 when spiced with a little cynicism — which I never 
 really felt in my heart — proved my bane, to a far 
 greater extent than in my humbler sphere as a 
 weaver. For a time all went on smoothly enough ; 
 and I might have done well, had I been ordinarily 
 prudent, and had not the devil of conceit taken pos- 
 session of me, to a degree that made me imagine I 
 was one of the greatest geniuses in the world, and 
 that some of the good fellows, whose evenings I 
 made so pleasant, would sometime or other find the 
 means of advancing my fortunes. I am old enough 
 — and sad enough now — to know that a man is his 
 own best friend, if not his only one, and that he who 
 expects others to help him forward in the great life- 
 battle, while he himself does nothing, is as big a 
 fool as was ever suffered to crawl upon the earth. 
 But I was full of hope at that time, and had not 
 discovered mankind to be that ' unco' squad ' which 
 Kobert Burns described. I was out so much and 
 so late at nights, during my newspaper engage- 
 
138 A WIT AND A POET, 
 
 ments ; sometimes on business,, oftener for pleasure 
 — such pleasure as illimitable whisky could supply 
 — that my wife began to grieve and pine, and make 
 things very disagreeable to me at home. This 
 ought to have cured me of my unfortunate habits ; 
 but it did not — the more's the pity! It only 
 afforded me in my perversity of mind an additional 
 excuse for persistence in wrong-doing. It is an old 
 story, and a sad one ; and I need not repeat too 
 much of it. Late hours and debaucheries, affected 
 by degrees my capacity for work. I gave dissatis- 
 faction at the office, and ultimately ; — I must say 
 after many efforts on the part of my employer to 
 bring me back into the ways of sobriety and regu- 
 larity; — I lost my situation. The blow for a while 
 was stunning. But I plucked up heart. I had no 
 idea of going back to the mill, even if I could have 
 been taken on again. I felt that I was a journalist, 
 and something better than a weaver ; and a jour- 
 nalist I resolved to remain. But I saw no chance of 
 advancement in this career at home, and as for 
 London, which I once thought of attempting, I gave 
 up the idea of it, and resolved to try my fortune in 
 the United States. A little subscription was got up 
 for me, sufficient to pay my passage to New York 
 in a sailing packet — there were no steamboats on 
 the Atlantic at that time — and to leave my wife as 
 much money as would maintain her for three months. 
 

 A WIT AND A POET. 139 
 
 I was full of hope and courage, and resolved to send 
 for her as soon as I could turn round in the New- 
 World. I had great ideas of the future. Andrew 
 Jackson, whose Irish mother had once kept an 
 apple-stall at a street corner in Limerick or Dublin 
 — I forget which — was President of the United 
 States, and if he, born so low, could rise so high, 
 could not I mount in that land of liberty above my 
 present mean estate, and be a little more of a some- 
 body than I could ever hope to be at home ? We 
 had bad weather going out, and the voyage lasted 
 seventy- one days, during all which time I had 
 neither the means nor the opportunity for indul- 
 gence in liquor. I had not been a week in New 
 York before I found that I had made a great mis- 
 take as regards the chances of employment in that 
 city ; and I trudged away on foot to Philadelphia. 
 Here also I found that I was out of my element. I 
 discovered that America was not exactly the place 
 for any one who was not a farmer, a farm-labourer, 
 or a lusty mechanic, who was able to clear a farm on 
 the outskirts of civilization, and fight with the bears 
 and Eed Indians. I was disappointed and sick at 
 heart. No doubt I was a poor fool, and a coward 
 as well. A countryman from the West of Scotland 
 whom I met in Philadelphia, helped me on a bit, 
 and tried to get me a newspaper engagement. But 
 I knew nothing of American politics, and did not 
 
140 A WIT AND A POET. 
 
 care to learn ; and became, I scarcely know how, 
 or by what gradations, a mere " loafer," living from 
 hand to mouth, from hour to hour, as it were, on 
 chances that were scarcely better for me than for 
 the birds, or the stray dogs that prowled about the 
 streets. I was long in this condition, brightened up 
 now and then by my temporary friend and per- 
 manent foe, the whisky bottle, which was provided 
 for me in the company of a few of my countrymen, 
 who liked my society, and were glad to drink with 
 any one who had recently arrived from the { dear 
 auld country,' as they called it, and who loved to 
 sing ' Auld Lang Syne/ and ' Willie brewed a Peck 
 o' Maut,' and other songs that recalled Scotland to 
 their memory. I had written home the news of my 
 bad fortune, and after a while, at the instigation of 
 my wife, a letter was sent to me from my old friend 
 the lawyer's clerk, to say that another newspaper 
 engagement, about as good as the last, but on 
 another journal, awaited me, if I thought it advis- 
 able to return, and would notify the fact immedi- 
 ately. I was but too willing. The home-sickness 
 was strong upon me. My Philadelphian friends 
 subscribed money enough to pay my passage across 
 the Atlantic, and gave me a little purse in hand, 
 and a parting supper, which I remember to this 
 day, as one of the happiest incidents in my weary 
 life. ( The mirth and fun grew fast and furious/ 
 
A WIT AND A POET. 141 
 
 as we toasted Scotland and her worthies, and above 
 all, ' the immortal memory of Robert Burns/ whose 
 equal in genius on this occasion I fully believed 
 myself to be — a belief, I think, that was shared by 
 several of the company. The passage home was 
 pleasanter than the voyage out, and occupied but 
 nineteen days. I often thought, as I paced the 
 deck, and I sometimes think the same now, that I 
 ought, with my generous ideas — my love of com- 
 pany and conversation, and my conviviality of nature 
 to have been born to a good estate, and enabled to 
 dispense hospitality to high and low. I should have 
 made a good country squire, and devoted my morn- 
 ings to my books, my garden, or my farm, and my 
 evenings to the company of good fellows. But 
 I, with my tastes and predilections was a mere 
 waif and stray, a floating straw upon the river of 
 life, and by no means the big ship that I thought 
 myself. 
 
 " On my return home, after a happy meeting with 
 my family, I received the appointment that had 
 been promised me, and resolved to work hard, and 
 walk warily for the remainder of my days ; to put 
 the drag upon the wheel, or stop the coach of con- 
 viviality altogether. I kept my resolution indiffer- 
 ently well for six or seven years, and in addition 
 to the current routine of my newspaper duties, 
 threw off songs, ballads, and epigrams almost as 
 
142 A WIT AND A POET. 
 
 freely as the clouds throw out the rain drops, and 
 
 got as little for my drops as the clouds for theirs. 
 
 I published a volume of poems, which did not so 
 
 greatly take the taste of the public as to pay the 
 
 expense of printing, and I at one time thought I 
 
 should have had to go to jail for the debt I had 
 
 contracted by this unlucky venture. I got over 
 
 it, somehow ; though the thing was like a mill- stone 
 
 round my neck for a longer time than I can now 
 
 remember. I think it was the unsuccess of this 
 
 unlucky book — I made a bonfire one night of three 
 
 or four hundred unsold copies of it, determined 
 
 that they should not go to the trunk-makers — that 
 
 drove me for comfort to the whisky again. I took 
 
 it as a medicine for the hope deferred that maketh 
 
 the heart sick, and found it successful. 
 
 Wi' tippenny we fear nae evil, 
 Wi' usquebae we'll face the devil. 
 
 Such was my experience — and as long and as often 
 as I was in the mood for it, I never had far to look 
 to find companions to treat me, as in an earlier time 
 — to laugh at my sallies of wit, if wit it was, and to 
 applaud the lightest utterances of the rollicking 
 humour that possessed me, after the third or fourth 
 tumbler. For ten years I have been in this plight. 
 I have knocked at Death's door, and have not been 
 admitted. I have slept in barns and outhouses. I 
 have been in the hospital, and I have been in the 
 
A WIT AND A POET. 143 
 
 lunatic asylum ; and I am, as you now see me, a 
 poor wreck of a man, one whom it is impossible 
 to save, even if he were worth the salvage. My 
 wife left me long ago ; but is still alive. I dare not 
 go to see her. My children are all grown up, and 
 able to take care of themselves — which is more 
 than I can do. And yet I think I was made for 
 better things. I feel some spark of divinity within 
 me, which whisky has not quenched. I feel that I 
 might have been a good man, if I had had a strong 
 will to govern me in my early days, and train me 
 properly. But I never had any guidance except 
 the gratification of my own will, and cannot say 
 with Eobert Burns that 'the light that led astray 
 was light from Heaven/ No, it was light from Hell. 
 You ask me if I have any hopes or plans for the 
 future ? Frankly, I have none. My mind — or 
 what is left of it — is as purposeless as the wander- 
 ing wind. It cannot fix itself to anything; and it 
 is a wonder to me, if what I have said in our walk, 
 has been consistent and coherent. I think, how- 
 ever, if I like anything, that I should like to get 
 out of the city and all its ways, and live wholly in 
 the country. It is my present idea — I don't know 
 how long it will last — that I could take the part of 
 assistant gardener, if there were not much digging 
 to do, for my back is weaker than my mind, and 
 stooping pains me. But light work, pruning, train- 
 
144 A WIT AND A POET. 
 
 ing, weeding, and pottering about, as I might say, 
 just to give me a pursuit, or the semblance of a pur- 
 suit, takes my fancy for the moment ; and possibly, 
 God knows ! might make me respectable for the 
 remainder of my days." 
 
 " And your wife ?" I interposed. " Well, poor 
 woman, she thinks me incorrigible and irreclaim- 
 able. Perhaps I am, but I hope not; and could I 
 exorcise the Whisky Demon out of me, it is very 
 likely she would come back to me. Women are 
 better than men, all the world over, suffer more, 
 love more, and are worth more." 
 
 Mr. Donaldson would not sit down with me to 
 dinner in the inn at which we halted. -■ I am too 
 proud to sit down with you," he said ; u too proud 
 to afford the waiters an opportunity to stare at you 
 and think you eccentric, or out of your mind for 
 consorting with such a ragged, rascally-looking 
 vagabond as I am. Give me the means to get a 
 dinner by myself, and I pledge you my honour I 
 will spend it on dinner, and return to you as fresh 
 and liquorless as I am now." I trusted him, and 
 he kept his word ; and we walked back to the great 
 city, when he received his stipulated guerdon for 
 his loss of time ; and made a solemn promise to call 
 upon me that day week, sober. He kept his word in 
 this instance also. Meanwhile, I had spoken about 
 him to our friend the member for the borough — 
 
A WIT AND A POET. 145 
 
 interested him in Donaldsons talents and character, 
 and procured for him the post he coveted of assis- 
 tant-gardener in the honourable gentleman's domain. 
 He had light work — a little pleasant cottage to 
 live in — and humble but sufficient wages. His wife 
 rejoined him \ and for six months, perhaps the hap- 
 piest of his life, he lived amid the trees and flowers, 
 and did not get drunk above once a fortnight. But 
 the end was at hand. His constitution was shat- 
 tered. The flame of life burned low in the socket, 
 and he went off. suddenly without a sigh or a groan. 
 Peace to his memory ! He was an acorn that had 
 the capacity for becoming an oak-tree if circum- 
 stances had favoured ; but he fell into evil places, 
 and rotted into barrenness; or, if the simile be 
 more appropriate, was found by a swine — the swine 
 of Intemperance that consumed and ate him up. 
 
ICE. 
 
 HE thermometer stood at ninety in the 
 shade in my garden. There had fallen 
 no rain in the sonth of England for up- 
 wards of six weeks, except an occasional 
 shower, of no more real refreshment to the parched 
 ground than a teaspoonful of water would have been 
 to a thirsty giant. I sat on the lawn under the shade 
 of an apple-tree, and read the doleful account in the 
 morning's newspaper of the damage already done by 
 the drought, and the still further damage to be ap- 
 prehended if the fierce sun continued to stream down 
 upon the world much longer, without veiling his 
 face with a few clouds and storms. Brown was the 
 grass and sickly were the flowers ; and the leaves 
 on the tall tree-tops, though green and fresh, made 
 no merry rustling to the gentle wind, for the 
 simple reason that not a breath of air was stirring. 
 I looked wistfully to the deep blue sky, in which 
 there was not a speck of cloud that had a drop of 
 
I CK 147 
 
 moisture in it, and bethought me how scant was in 
 ordinary seasons the gratitude of the English for 
 one of the greatest blessings of this or any other 
 country. Having too much of a good thing, in the 
 matter of rain, it is only when they suffer from the 
 want of it that the dwellers in these isles, whether 
 agriculturists or not, know what a blessing the 
 rain is, just as, for a similar reason, most people 
 undervalue their health, until the angelic visitant 
 takes leave of them, perhaps to return no more. 
 After a forty or fifty days' drought, it would be 
 difficult even for Mr. Babbage, or Mr. George 
 Bidder, to count up to within a hundred thou- 
 sand pounds or so, the value to the farmers and 
 gardeners of Great Britain and Ireland of one 
 good drenching downfall of big round drops con- 
 tinued for four-and- twenty hours. From the bles- 
 sings of the rain, as I was both warm and thirsty, 
 my thoughts wandered to the blessings of the frost 
 and the snow, and to that fairest production of the 
 cold — the clear, transparent, delicious ice, such as 
 Lake Wenham and numberless Norwegian lakes, 
 whose names no one has thought it worth while to 
 promulgate, have for long years been in the habit 
 of supplying to a world not sufficiently grateful for 
 the luxury. As it happened, there was a remnant 
 of pure Wenham in the house, brilliant as the 
 Koh-i-noor. Placing a lump of the dainty bless- 
 
143 ICE. 
 
 ing in a goblet, and pouring thereon the contents 
 of a bottle of Brighton seltzer, I drank and was 
 refreshed, and felt a physical as well as a moral 
 conviction that ice was one of the greatest bounties 
 of nature, and that those who do not consume it 
 daily as an addendum to their diet, are ignorant of 
 a cheap luxury, or thoughtlessly forego a healthful 
 gratification to the palate. In the moist climate of 
 the British Isles, where the commonest transitions of 
 the weather are from wet to dry, and from dry to wet, 
 we scarcely know what wholesome cold is, especially 
 the clear, crisp cold that invigorates the whole 
 system of the healthy human creature, and sets the 
 blood coursing merrily through the veins. Some- 
 times, it is true, as Shakespeare sings, " The icicles 
 hang by the wall, and Dick the shepherd bites his 
 nail," to prevent his finger-tips from being frost- 
 bitten, but such hardy and vigorous seasons are 
 rare and short as angel visits. Not perhaps more 
 than once in seven years has the skater a fair 
 chance for the enjoyment of his beautiful recreation. 
 But when the ice will bear the weight of a crowd, it 
 is one of the pleasantest sights in the world to 
 witness the delight of the young and the middle- 
 aged English of both sexes, as they wend their way 
 to the nearest water, skates in hand, ready for a 
 pleasure as captivating to most people as the dance 
 in a ball-room, and a thousand times more healthful. 
 
ICE. 149 
 
 If there be a happier being in the world at snch a time 
 than a nimble skater, male or female, it is the small 
 boy npon a slide, rollicking, uproarious, blissful ! 
 Quick motion with little effort is always delightful, 
 and in this respect both skating and sliding afford 
 the nearest approach to bliss and to flying, which 
 such wingless bipeds as men and women can ever 
 hope to enjoy in their present state of existence. 
 "I hate England," said a little Canadian boy of 
 twelve years old, on board a steamer bound from 
 New York to Liverpool, on his way to school at 
 Harrow. "Why?" said the astonished captain. 
 " Because there's no skating, and the rivers never 
 freeze there, and it's always raining," he replied, 
 sulkily, yet defiantly ; ' ' and it's so jolly in Canada 
 in the winter." Jack Frost, if not a jack of all 
 trades, is a jack of many. As an agriculturist, he is 
 as serviceable in producing a full crop as the sun- 
 shine or the rain, as every farmer will acknowledge. 
 He destroys the noxious insects, that but for his 
 exterminating touch would consume the early sown 
 seed before it had time to germinate. Moreover, 
 he infuses into the arable earth a chemical virtue 
 that the warm moist atmosphere does not always 
 contribute, and of which the beneficial results are 
 apparent in the summer grass and the autumnal 
 corn. As a scavenger he does more work in a 
 night, by drying up the miry ways, than a million 
 
150 ICE. 
 
 of men with brooms and shovels could do in a 
 week. As an engineer, he can build a bridge over 
 the Thames or the St. Lawrence, not exactly so 
 durable as Mr. Page's at Westminster, or Mr. 
 Stephenson's at Montreal, but quite as solid as either 
 while it lasts; and has been known to do such 
 Titanic work in a single night, which is a feat 
 that the engineering genius of mere Stephensons, 
 Brunels, and Pages can never hope to accomplish. 
 But it is as a working jeweller that Jack Frost is 
 most conspicuous. By a breath he can transform 
 the dew upon the grass into diamonds, make a rose- 
 leaf as beautiful as a brooch of malachite studded 
 with brilliants, and convert the flimsy rope of the 
 spider's web into a string of beaded pearls, such as 
 empresses might envy, if any human jeweller could 
 execute in more permanent form an adornment so 
 lovely. Nor are these the only specimens of his 
 handiwork. He can trace upon our windows the 
 most delicate filagree work to which imagination 
 can give almost any form it pleases, from that of 
 the tree, the flower, or the leaf, to that of the whole 
 forest, the flowing river, or a miniature Alp-Land, 
 with the simulacra of Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, and 
 the Wetterhorn in microscopic accuracy. Nature, 
 so full of beautiful forms, offers nothing more 
 beautiful in its kind than the icicle, produced by 
 the mingled action of the sunshine and the frost ; 
 
ICE. 151 
 
 of the sunshine that melts and the frost that 
 hardens; of the frost that gains the temporary 
 victory in the struggle, and converts the thawing 
 snow into pendants of transparent crystal, glowing 
 in the discomfited sunshine with all the colours of 
 the rainbow. 
 
 He who has never seen an iceberg — and expects 
 to see one — has, if his expectation be realized, a 
 glory yet to come, and a terror yet to behold. 
 
 One of these floating mountains ran aground, as 
 a ship might do, some years ago, and stuck fast in 
 the harbour of St. John's, Newfoundland. Here it 
 remained for two years, before the heats of the 
 short summers were powerful enough to dissolve it. 
 This berg stood upwards of eight hundred feet in 
 height ; and as floating ice sinks two-thirds of its 
 depth, this respectable refrigerator must have been 
 about two thousand four hundred feet in total height, 
 or about six times as high as St. Paul's. Some sup- 
 pose that the unfortunate Atlantic steamer, the Pre- 
 sident — the mysterious disappearance of which, more 
 than a quarter of a century ago, created so much 
 painful anxiety in England and America — must 
 have run against such a floating island as this, and 
 been sent to the bottom with all on board. The 
 iceberg and the floe — the latter being flat or sur- 
 face, as distinguished from the peak and mountain 
 ice — when detached from the solid earth of the 
 
152 ICE. 
 
 Polar regions, sometimes carry along with them on 
 their sudden disruption large masses of granite; 
 and sometimes Polar bears, which, unsuspicious of 
 danger from the influence of the warm sun that 
 penetrates even these inhospitable regions, have 
 gone to sleep upon the ice, and awakened to find 
 themselves unwilling mariners, drifting away to 
 certain death in the warm waters of the southern 
 seas. 
 
 Whatever is beautiful is useful in its degree, and 
 the uses of ice are as manifold as its loveliness. 
 Medical science — always beneficently active to dis- 
 cover the means of alleviation as well as of cure for 
 the numberless physical evils that assail humanity — 
 very early became aware of the value of ice as an 
 anodyne, or soother of pain, in cases of local inflam- 
 mation. More recently it has been discovered that 
 ice can be used as an anaesthetic as advantage- 
 ously as chloroform, and in some respects more ad- 
 vantageously, inasmuch as it can be employed to- 
 pically, in surgical operations of a severe character. 
 There is no danger in its application to people of 
 abnormally nervous temperament, or who suffer from 
 heart disease. In the extraction of teeth — a very 
 painful surgical operation, as most people know 
 who remember that man (and woman also) 
 
 Is born to trouble, 
 
 Both from single teeth and double — 
 
ICE. 153 
 
 ice is an angesthetic that completely deadens the 
 sensibility of pain, and renders tooth-drawing almost 
 as easy as the paring of the nails. As an article of 
 luxury for the table, ice is only just beginning to be 
 known to the English people — to the "upper ten 
 thousand/' as it were. It remains for the present 
 "caviare to the million/' except perhaps in the 
 form of ices, as retailed by the pastrycooks and 
 confectioners. To the fishmongers, as a conservator 
 of their wares in freshness to the latest possible 
 moment, ice has long been known in the shape of 
 the thin slabs of dirty frozen water, in rare wintry 
 seasons collected from the stagnant pools in the 
 neighbourhood of our great towns and cities. Such 
 ice is good for nothing but refrigeration ; but the 
 real Wenham, or Norway, or St. Lawrence ice, is 
 not only good for refrigeration but for consumption, 
 and for every purpose of utility and health to which 
 ice can be applied. In the cities of the New World ice 
 is almost as essential an article of diet as bread, and 
 the iceman comes round every morning as regularly 
 as the milkman does in London, and leaves at the 
 doorsteps of every house which he supplies a glitter- 
 ing block, sufficient for the day's consumption, which 
 the servant or "help" takes in at her convenience, 
 serving up a portion with the breakfast butter, not 
 because it is ordered, but simply as a matter of course. 
 Iced water, iced milk, iced ale or beer, are as com- 
 
154 ICE. 
 
 mon among all classes as iced champagne is among 
 the select few in England. To forego the customary 
 cooler would in the summer — and often in the 
 winter, for ice is good in all seasons — be as great a 
 hardship as to go without dinner. 
 
 The British are a flesh-consuming people ; but our 
 labourers and unskilled workmen taste little meat 
 except bacon. Every year butchers' meat is be- 
 coming more costly, and further out of the reach of I 
 the poor. Trade ought to bring from South America . 
 the superabundant beef, and from the Antipodes 
 the superabundant mutton, that in both of these 
 wealthy and teeming regions find no purchasers. 
 Ice supplies the means for effecting this much- 
 desired result, and there is reason for the hope as 
 well as for the belief that, ere many years have 
 passed, enterprising merchants will be encouraged 
 to convey to our shores fleet loads of this beef and 
 mutton, packed in ice, or chemically frozen, that 
 our population would so gladly purchase, if it could 
 be got, as it might be, at a third or even at half the 
 price of the British article. If, as has been said, 
 the man who makes a blade of grass to grow where 
 grass never grew before, is a public benefactor, who 
 shall measure the benefaction of him who shall first 
 successfully organize a plan for bringing the beef 
 and mutton of the antipodes to the mouths of the 
 English multitude ? 
 
ICE. 155 
 
 There is one other aspect of ice which we, in 
 these islands, may be excused if we look upon with 
 pride : the love of adventure which the mysteries of 
 the Northern Pole have maintained in the minds of 
 our hardy and daring mariners. lt The storm, the 
 fog, the sleet, the pitiless cold," have no terrors for 
 them, as dozens of expeditions to discover the 
 North-west Passage, and as the names of Ross, 
 Parry, Franklin, and M'Clintock, abundantly testify. 
 
MR. GOMM'S EXPERIENCE OF THE POOR. 
 
 OU must have had a large — and not, I 
 should think, a very favourable — ex- 
 perience of poor human nature/' I said 
 one day to a very worthy neighbour 
 and acquaintance of mine, with whom I sometimes 
 like to interchange opinions. The name of my 
 acquaintance is Gomm. He has a way of spelling 
 his name when he is angered — which, like the rest 
 of us, he sometimes is — and declaring very empha- 
 tically, " my name is Gomm, G-0 double M : " as if 
 he wants to convince his antagonists or opponents, 
 whomsoever they may be, that there can be no 
 possible doubt as to his identity. This double con- 
 sonant, somehow, seems to be emblematic of his 
 decision and sharpness of character, for he is a man 
 who rules his fellows, in a small way, and who seems 
 born to rule them. He is the master of a large 
 workhouse, and has filled the situation with credit 
 for a quarter of a century. He is much respected 
 
EXPERIENCE OF THE POOR. 157 
 
 alike by the magistracy, the ratepayers, and the 
 poor-law inspector of his district. He is a strong, 
 sturdy man, bordering upon sixty-five, with stubbly 
 grey hair, a clean shaven chin, broad open brow, 
 clear grey eyes, and a firmness of expression not 
 alone about his mouth and chin, and all over his 
 face, but in his whole build and deportment. He 
 looks like a double consonant, like a man who can 
 hold his own against the world, and will, in common 
 parlance, "stand no nonsense" from those above 
 or those below him, while he walks on the war path 
 of duty. There is, nevertheless, a kindly twinkle 
 in his grey eye at times ; and his firmness is by no 
 means deficient in good humour. 
 
 ' ' Yes ! " replied Mr. Gomm, in answer to my 
 observation, "I have seen a good deal of human 
 nature in my time. I suppose by poor human 
 nature, you mean the human nature of the poor ? " 
 
 " No, indeed I do not/'' I replied. ' ' Human 
 nature is the same in all of us — a poor thing — with 
 much of good as well as bad about it. And I am 
 not aware that the possession of money or rank 
 makes any very great difference in the long run, 
 unless in exceptional cases. There are bad rich 
 men and good poor ones ; just as there are bad 
 poor men and good rich." 
 
 " Well," said Mr. Gomm, " I don't want to cry 
 up the rich, or cry down the poor — God forbid ! 
 
158 MB. G OHM'S EXPERIENCE 
 
 But I do think that short of falsehood, spite, envy, 
 malice, intemperance, adultery, and occasionally 
 murder, human nature would be better than it is, if 
 everybody were comfortable — had good clothes, 
 good houses, and enough to eat." 
 
 " No doubt about that," replied I. " Cheating 
 and robbery are born of poverty, but in talking to 
 you of human nature as I did, and calling it poor 
 human nature, I merely thought that you — with 
 thousands of the destitute, the forlorn, the 
 struggling, the lost, and the vicious, brought to 
 vice by their own ungovernable passions perhaps, 
 as well as by their poverty, all passing continually 
 under your notice and management — must have 
 had opportunities, such as have fallen to the lot of 
 few, to study mankind." 
 
 " I can't say," said Mr. Gomm, " that I have 
 been much of a student, or that I have looked on 
 these matters as a philosopher might have done, 
 or as a man might do who was seeking materials 
 to write a book or a magazine article about them ; 
 as doubtless you are doing just now." 
 
 I did not blush — the power which I once pos- 
 sessed, or which, to speak more correctly, had once 
 possessed me, having been driven out of me by the 
 world and the world's ways, and my own ways, too, 
 long, long, ago — but replied with a face that was 
 not of brass, but might have been for any tinge of 
 
OF THE POOR. 159 
 
 the fine sensitiveness of the blood which it betrayed. 
 " Artists in human nature must study human nature 
 if they would describe it. Everything does not 
 come by intuition. He who would paint a tree 
 must know a tree, in its life and in its death ; and 
 none can paint a dog unless he have been to a cer- 
 tain extent caninified — forgive the word. Even the 
 great Edwin Landseer must have put his mind into a 
 dog's mind before he could paint a dog half as well 
 as he has done. And I like, I must own, to endea- 
 vour to think sometimes with the thoughts of the 
 poor and the miserable, to put myself in their places, 
 to look at the world, as it were, through their eyes, 
 rather than through my own, and see what colour it 
 has, whether bright or sombre, or perhaps dark 
 without sunlight." 
 
 " Ah, well ! " rejoined Mr. Gomm, " I can't say 
 that ever I made any attempt of the kind. It is 
 not in my line. I look at the poor with my own 
 eyes, not theirs ; or how d'ye think I should be able 
 to keep order in the house ? The poor — notwith- 
 standing all the sentiment that is talked and written 
 about them — are but a poor lot, morally as well as 
 physically. As a rule they are neither strong in 
 body nor in mind ; at least such is my experience." 
 
 He stopped as if he were not desirous to say any 
 more. I encouraged him to proceed. 
 
 " Why, you see," said Mr. Gomm, " in the way 
 
160 MB. GOMM'S EXPERIENCE 
 
 of my business I have got to dividing the world into 
 three classes : those who never come into the work- 
 house, those who ought not to come into the work- 
 house, and those who must come into the work- 
 house." 
 
 " The first of your three classes, I suppose, in- 
 cludes all the rich and well-to-do ? " 
 
 " Not necessarily the rich and well-to-do, for they 
 come to the workhouse sometimes ; but it includes, 
 of course, the great bulk of the people who pay poor- 
 rates, those who are born rich, those who know the 
 knack of keeping the money they have inherited, 
 and those who have the art of making it as well as 
 the art of taking care of it, and all the ordinarily 
 prudent, careful, and well-conducted people of the 
 upper and middle, and some of the lower ranks. 
 But my experience does not lie among these. They 
 don't pass under my care. The class that ought not 
 to come into the workhouse, but does come into it, 
 is a troublesome one to me, I can tell you ; and yet 
 I pity these poor people very much, though I take 
 precious good care not to let them know it. I have 
 had, and still have, men in the house, clad in the 
 pauper dress, subject to pauper discipline, and fed 
 upon pauper fare, who have once possessed thou- 
 sands, who have mixed in the best society, and 
 who are gifted with abilities which they have not 
 learned to put to proper account, or which they have 
 
OF THE TO OB. 161 
 
 used only to bring themselves into mischief. I 
 won't mention any real names ; but there is one 
 man, let me call him Smith, who was once a fashion- 
 able banker, a very fashionable banker indeed, and 
 lived in great style in Tyburnia. His bank broke, 
 partly by his mismanagement, partly by that of his 
 father and grandfather before him. He narrowly 
 escaped a criminal trial ; but got off by the skin of 
 his teeth, as the Bible says, and without a penny to 
 help himself in his old age. - Some of the friends 
 and acquaintances of his better days subscribed a 
 few pounds occasionally to keep him from want. 
 He was too proud to accept a clerkship which he 
 might have got, and which was offered him ; but 
 was not too proud to live upon charity. All 
 the same, he took the charity as a hard thing, 
 and began to soften it with drink. Gin, the poor 
 man's friend, and a dreadful bad friend too, the very 
 worst of friends that I ever heard of, became at last 
 much more plentiful in his cupboard than bread and 
 cheese. He and his old wife both soaked them- 
 selves in it. They took to quarrelling — a result 
 not at all surprising to me — and from bad went on 
 to worse every day of their miserable lives. Their 
 friends soon grew tired of them, and the little sub- 
 scriptions failed entirely. They are both in the 
 house now, clean, sober, in their right minds, and 
 tolerably useful. The old gentleman helps with the 
 
 M 
 
162 MB. G02I2PS EXPERIENCE 
 
 accounts ; and the old lady is a tidyish cook enough ; 
 and they both seem to have a faint glimpse of some- 
 thing like happiness when a friend, a true friend I 
 call him, who was once the head cashier in the bank, 
 sends the old man a pound of tobacco, and the old 
 wife a pound of tea. Now ; I say he's one who 
 ought not to have come into the workhouse, and 
 wouldn't have come into it except for his own defi- 
 ciency of moral strength. 
 
 " There was another man I had with me for years. 
 He died three months ago. Let me call him Mon- 
 tague, for he had an aristocratic name, as old as 
 Montague, and as high sounding. He had been a 
 parliamentary reporter for some great morning 
 paper or other, I don't know which ; and seemed to 
 me as if he could make speeches as eloquent as any 
 he had ever reported. A capital mimic he was, and 
 could speak by the hour in the character of Dan 
 O'Connell. He gave the brogue perfectly. The 
 fun was perfect too, and real Irish. When he was 
 in the humour, he could speak like Joe Hume, with 
 all the hums and hahs, and half-finished sentences ; 
 or he could f orate 5 like a Yankee, till he made the 
 tears run down my cheeks with laughing. Good 
 company, and too much of it, was the ruin of him. 
 First step down the ladder into the pit of perdition 
 — excessive drinking; second step, loss of character ; 
 third step, loss of employment; fourth step, the 
 
OF THE POOR. 163 
 
 pawnbroker ; fifth step, more drink ; sixth step, 
 desperation ; seventh step, beggary and begging 
 letters ; eighth step, prison ; ninth step, the work- 
 house. He had been a { jolly good fellow/ as the 
 saying is, but the jolly good fellows with whom he 
 loved to associate, or who loved to associate with 
 him, forgot his good fellowship as soon as his coat 
 began to grow threadbare, and he began to hint 
 that the loan of half-a-crown would be useful. No- 
 body sent him any tea or tobacco.- Nobody ever so 
 much as inquired after him. Only once a poor 
 penny-a-liner — a real penny-a-liner, with scarcely a 
 shoe to his feet, and with eyes that looked ex- 
 cessively beery — came to report an inquest on the 
 body of an old woman found dead in her bed, having 
 heard who he was, gave him a sixpence. I am sure 
 the poor young man could ill afford it. e Thank 
 you, my dear fellow/ said Montague, 'I accept 
 it as a loan. Keep out of this place, if you can ; 
 except in the way of business. There'll be an in- 
 quest on me some day, perhaps, and as you know 
 something about me, you can lengthen out your 
 report to the extent of sixpence ; and so repay your- 
 self ! * Now, this Montague was one of the class that 
 ought not to come into the workhouse, and he could 
 certainly have kept out if he would. 
 
 " There was another man with me till within a 
 short time ago, who had been a great cheese mer- 
 
164 ME. GOMM'S EXPERIENCE 
 
 chant. He knew all about cheese — nobody so well ; 
 and made a fortune out of it. His name was — 
 never mind — call him Jones; and before he was 
 fifty he had scraped up fifty thousand pounds- — all 
 out of cheese. Unluckily for him, he retired from 
 the cheese business to live quietly on his money. 
 But quietness did not suit him, and he had scarcely 
 been a twelvemonth trying to live like a gentleman 
 — his idea of a gentleman being a person who had 
 nothing to do — than he discovered that he could 
 stand that kind of life no longer, and went rioting 
 roaring mad into speculations of all kinds. What 
 it had taken him five-and-twenty years to build up 
 with honest cheeses he knocked down in three 
 years with dishonest — because rash, foolish, grasp- 
 ing speculations, that had no bottom in them. He 
 1 ' bust up," as the Yankees say, and escaped with 
 about a thousand pounds. With that he went into 
 the cheese business again. But there was another 
 man in his old shop, who had " got the pull," as they 
 say, and Jones could not rival the new man, not- 
 withstanding all his knowledge of the article. Be- 
 sides, he was down ; and I do believe, whatever the 
 world may say to the contrary, that when a man is 
 down everybody, or almost everybody, has a mali- 
 cious pleasure in trying to keep him down. The 
 world will help a young man forward, if he be 
 honest, and straightforward, and likely to do well ; 
 
OF THE POOR. 165 
 
 but it wont help an old man who has had his chance 
 and lost it. At least, this is my experience. When 
 you have come to be sixty you must have often been 
 in people's way ; and if these people live, and have 
 got you out of the way, they don't give themselves 
 much trouble to help you into the way again. You 
 are under the feet of the crowd, and the crowd rush- 
 ing on its own business, will trample you to death, 
 without thinking about you. After four or five 
 years of new struggle in the cheese line, Mr. Jones 
 gave it up as a bad job, and passed into my care. 
 He passed out of it, however, before long, not into 
 the next world — which might have been about the 
 best thing — but into the County Lunatic Asylum. 
 There he is still, and great upon cheese. He buys 
 cheese by the thousand tons at a time, in his poor 
 fancy, and drives a roaring trade. Perhaps the 
 poor old man is happy. I trust he may be ; but if 
 he had had ordinary common sense, he would 
 neither have come to the workhouse nor to the 
 lunatic asylum. 
 
 " It is good, after all/' said I, ' ' that there are 
 workhouses and lunatic asylums to receive these 
 waifs and strays of stormy and capricious Fortune. 
 But for my part, I am far more interested in the 
 last of the three classes of people into which you 
 divided the world — those who must come to the 
 workhouse, struggle against it as they will. It 
 
166 MB. GOMM'S EXPERIENCE 
 
 seems to me that these are among the very saddest 
 products of our civilization, and that such people, 
 call them what we will, are born slaves and pariahs, 
 though they may not know it, to whom the world 
 offers nothing from the outset to the end of their 
 career but toil ; toil from youth to maturity, from 
 maturity to old age, until the grave receives them, 
 and the weary are at rest." 
 
 ' ( No," said Mr. Gomm, all his double consonants 
 bristling in his face. "You are not altogether 
 right. There are such people — too many of them, 
 God knows — and I shall speak of them by-and-by ; 
 but the mass of the poor — I know them, or ought 
 to know — are not people who do, or have ever done, 
 hard work. There are people who are born va- 
 grants, and wanderers, and strollers, and vagabonds, 
 and pests, and who hate and detest work as the 
 devil does holy water. They seem to me to partake 
 of the nature of birds and wild animals, or, at best, 
 of the Red Indian savages in America, who can't, 
 or won't, dig or plough, or cultivate anything', or 
 save anything, but prefer to trust for their dinner 
 to the day's chance of snaring or shooting something 
 as wild, but better to eat, than themselves. How 
 they do hate work, to be sure ! They'd rather cadge 
 and steal for half-a- crown than gain five shillings 
 honestly. In fact, England swarms with wild 
 men and women of this class, men and women who 
 
OF THE POOR. 167 
 
 are utterly untamable, and who use workhouses just 
 as rich people use hotels, but with this difference, 
 that they pay for nothing. I do detest these pro- 
 fessional tramps and permanent poor, and I own 
 that I sometimes wish that I might order them 
 a good whipping along with the bread that they 
 rob the rate-payers of. And if they are as wild 
 as foxes, they are quite as cunning. Indeed, my 
 opinion is that a regular inveterate professional 
 tramp is as cunning and acute as an Old Bailey 
 barrister, and knows as much of the world. The 
 she-tramps, too — a plague on them, I say — are the 
 worst specimens of human nature that ever fell 
 under my notice, and some of them the most ob- 
 scene and disgusting wretches that imagination can 
 picture. And when they get into a rage, as they 
 sometimes do, their language is awful. A man, 
 the very worst that was ever hanged, is an angel 
 compared with some of the she-devils that have 
 come under my notice. They have a great fancy, 
 some of them, to strip themselves stark naked, 
 tearing up their clothes, and dancing about the 
 ward like filthy witches. Sometimes as many as 
 a dozen at a time will play at this game, and yell 
 like tigresses, if tigresses do yell as horribly, which 
 I wouldn't like to say. They do this, not only 
 for the love of destruction, and with the chance of 
 getting clean clothes for their dirty rags, but for a 
 
168 MB. GOMM'S EXPERIENCE 
 
 wicked pleasure in exposing themselves as naked as 
 the moment they were born. I must say " (and 
 here the double M was very conspicuous in Mr. 
 Gomm's tone of voice and in the angry sparkle of 
 his eye) " that I wish it was lawful to give the im- 
 pudent hussies a few rounds of the cat-o'-nine-tails ! 
 If it were I would pick out the very strongest honest 
 woman in the workhouse to administer the dose, and 
 pay her handsomely for it." 
 
 " But these, both male and female, must form a 
 very small class ? " said I. 
 
 " Not so small as you imagine," replied Mr. 
 Gomm, his double M starting oui as vividly as 
 before. " England is overrun with them, and I 
 don't see any way to England's getting rid of them 
 in the present generation. Perhaps the next — if, 
 in the meantime, we can manage to catch every 
 child over five years of age, and send it to school to 
 be taught not only reading, writing, arithmetic, 
 and geography, but its duty to itself and society — 
 may grow up better than the present ; and the race 
 of mere savages, as these men and women are, may 
 diminish amongst us. That's my hope," he went 
 on to say more softly, again relapsing into the 
 double M, when he added, "not forgetting the cat- 
 o'-nine-tails for the grown-up incorrigibles." 
 
 " But touching the honest poor, who work until 
 their strength fails them, what have you to say 
 about them ? " 
 
OF TEE POOR. 169 
 
 " Nothing but what is kindly and charitable. 
 They are the victims of our over-crowdedness, and 
 not to blame for what they cannot help. When a 
 man has toiled and striven during a long life, and 
 done his best, society would be worse than a wild 
 beast if it allowed him to perish in his old age, when 
 his right hand had lost its cunning, and his eyes 
 the sparkle of strength and hope. It is a sad thing 
 to me when I see a lusty, willing, young fellow 
 driving the plough or industriously hedging or 
 ditching or doing other farm work, to think how 
 many chances there are that he will come upon the 
 workhouse when his hair grows grey, and how few 
 mances there are that he will be able to keep out of 
 it. And yet, with all my pity for the labourer, 
 whose day's wage pays for no more than the day's 
 want, and hardly for that, I cannot say that a little 
 more education, not only in the common school 
 branches, but in his duty to himself, would not greatly 
 improve his condition. Thousands of people of this 
 class seem to have no more idea of their duty to the 
 children whom they bring into the world than if 
 they were rats. Only seven weeks ago a poor, 
 Lard-working under-gardener, at a big house I 
 know of, fell off an apple tree, and broke his right 
 arm badly in two places. He had not a penny 
 saved. All he earned was fifteen shillings a week. 
 The parson of the parish helped him on a little, and 
 
170 MB. GOMM'S EXPEBIENCE 
 
 one or two other gentlemen and ladies did the same. 
 But what good was it ? In the meanwhile another 
 man slipped into his situation, and in less than three 
 weeks this poor devil lost all heart and hope. His 
 means were exhausted, and we had to take him into 
 the workhouse ; and not only him, but his wife and 
 nine children. What right had he to beget nine 
 children if he could not tide over three weeks with- 
 out coming to the workhouse with the whole brood 
 of them ? Do you call that honest or fair either to 
 himself, his children, or to the poor-rate-payers 
 of his parish ? I don't, and I won't, though you 
 may think me heartless for saying so. If that 
 man hadn't married and hadn't had nine children 
 before he was able to support even himself, and 
 allow a little margin for sickness and accident, he 
 might Have had his margin to himself and tided 
 over the evil day without burdening the parish or 
 bringing ten innocent people into partnership with 
 his misfortune. It is not right, let soft-hearted 
 people say what they will. If such cases were not 
 so very common I shouldn't have said a word about 
 this one ; and it is only because they are the rule, 
 and not the exception, that I mention them. It 
 seems to me, and I know something of what I am 
 talking about," [here the double M came out again 
 clear and distinct,] " that the agricultural poor 
 think no more of the duties they incur towards 
 
OF THE POOE. 171 
 
 society when they marry than so many sparrows. 
 This may seem harsh, but, God knows, I don't feel 
 harsh to anybody except, perhaps, the professional 
 tramps and the she-devils who howl and yell in 
 the ward. And I think what I say is right. I own 
 I can see no remedy." 
 
 ' ' I think I can see two," replied I ; " Education 
 and Emigeation. The first will tend, if rightly ad- 
 ministered, to diminish, if it do not remove, this 
 particular kind of improvidence among the poor; 
 and the second will provide a home for the overflow 
 of our population. The world is wide enough even 
 for improvidence, if men will take the whole world 
 for their workshop. There are millions upon millions 
 of fertile acres in every part of it only awaiting the 
 willing hand to till them. The command of God to 
 our first parents, f to increase and multiply and 
 replenish the earth/ has not lost its force merely 
 because the British Isles are too small for the 
 fecundity of their people. Perhaps we may not be 
 so far from solving these two problems as most 
 people think. But we move faster than our fore- 
 fathers, and I think the day will come when the only 
 paupers in England will be the aged and infirm,, 
 and when every strong man will be able to live 
 respectably in it by his intelligent and educated 
 labour, or to get comfortably out of it to some other 
 land, where the chances are more favourable." 
 
172 EXPERIENCE OF TEE POOR. 
 
 "I am afraid/' said Mr. Gomm ; " that I shall 
 not live to see the day ; but I can imagine it, never- 
 theless, and will certainly not be such a wicked 
 and, I might say, such a false prophet as to pre- 
 dict the contrary." 
 
MUSIC AND MISERY IN LONDON. 
 
 HE more people love music, when it is 
 good and comes to their call, the more 
 they usually hate and abhor it when it is 
 not good, and comes unbidden. Even 
 the best of music, when it breaks suddenly upon 
 the ear of one who is engaged in thoughtful labour 
 or hard study of any kind, is not agreeable; but 
 when discord, instead of harmony, bursts upon the 
 outraged silence of the library, the studio, or the 
 sick-room, then is music but another name for 
 misery. 
 
 Business lately called me to London for a week ; 
 a consideration connected with its facile transaction 
 led me to take up my residence in one of the streets 
 branching southwards from the Strand to the river ; 
 a quiet street to all appearance — a highly respect- 
 able street, a street through which runs no omnibus, 
 and into which no cab or other vehicle ever pene- 
 trates, unless to set down or take up a fare, or to 
 
17-i MUSIC AND MISERY 
 
 deliver the goods duly ordered. I had not been 
 three hours within these peaceable precincts before 
 I discovered that the transaction of business in this 
 respectable street was simply impossible, I had 
 been deceived by false appearances, and that as a 
 residence it was a very pandemonium of discords 
 and evil sounds from daylight until long after dark. 
 The lodgers in every house — for it is. a street of 
 private hotels and " apartments to let " — appeared 
 to be like myself, people who had come from the 
 country, but who, unlike me, were idle, and fond of 
 the amusement to be extracted out of street music 
 and street exhibitions. One particular day, being 
 detained at home against my will, the thought struck 
 me to note down from hour to hour the arrival and 
 the departure of these nuisances, the nature of the 
 torture they inflicted, and the encouragement or 
 discouragement which they received from the lazy, 
 the silly, or the generous inhabitants. The day 
 was not an exceptional one, as I was informed by 
 my landlady, but a fair sample of every day in the 
 year. 
 
 Half-past Eight. — Sitting down to breakfast and 
 the newspaper, I hear a sudden and obstreperous 
 outburst of brazen instruments, which makes me 
 literally start to my feet and rush to the window to 
 see what is the matter. It is a German band of 
 twelve performers, all well dressed in uniform, and 
 
IN LONDON. 175 
 
 wearing each, a semi- military cap. They set up 
 their music-stands in the street, and play from 
 printed and manuscript music. Their performances 
 consist of overtures and pieces from popular operas, 
 very excellently rendered. I am told that they are 
 hired by one family to perform twice a week before 
 the door, and that they supplement the gratuity 
 or payment which they may receive for this service 
 by such smaller contributions as they can collect 
 elsewhere. They do not rely upon the crowd of 
 bystanders, or upon voluntary contributions, but 
 send round the youngest member of the party, who 
 knocks or rings at the door of every house in the 
 street, and, hat in hand, gathers whatever coppers 
 the servant girls or others are inclined to bestow. 
 He appears to be successful in about one house out 
 of three. The performances continue for about 
 twenty minutes, and would not only be tolerable, 
 but commendable, if they took place in one of the 
 parks at a seasonable hour, or if people were not 
 compelled to listen to them unless they pleased. 
 
 Nine o' clock. — A bulky Savoyard, ugly as a 
 baboon, and as dirty, with a barrel-organ. He 
 grinds, "Partant pour la Syrie," "Not for Joseph," 
 and " Champagne Charlie." His tunes are such a 
 nuisance that I put my hat on, go to the street 
 door, and order him away. He pretends not to 
 understand me. I speak to him in Italian, and let 
 
176 MUSIC AND MISERY 
 
 him know that I shall hand him over to the police 
 if he will not immediately desist from grinding. He 
 swears and scowls. I reiterate my threat. He sees 
 I am in earnest, and finally slings his heavy organ 
 upon his brawny back, and sulkily departs, followed 
 by the not very amiable wish on my part that he 
 had his box of discords in his paunch instead of on 
 his shoulders. 
 
 Twenty minutes to Ten. — Eight sham niggers 
 — white men with blackened faces — wearing the 
 usual absurd caricature of negro costume which 
 does duty in London and elsewhere, for the dress 
 of the plantation negroes in the Southern States of 
 America. The leader of the band does not blacken 
 his face, but wears a mask to represent Punchi- 
 nello. He is well made, agile, and a good low 
 comedian. This party sings both comic and senti- 
 mental songs, almost, if not quite as well, as the 
 Christy Minstrels, whom people pay their half- 
 crowns to hear. Windows are lifted right and left, 
 and pence and half-pence rattle on the pavement. 
 The cooks and servant girls appear to be the chief 
 patronesses of the show. The niggers stay for a 
 quarter of an hour, and march off at a sign from 
 Punchinello. They evidently make a good thing 
 of it, and are prime favourites. 
 
 Half- past Ten. — Two young men, ragged and 
 shoeless, invade the street, and sing, " We have no 
 
IN LONDON. 177 
 
 work to do-o-o," with the usual drawl. They are 
 not very successful, but far more so than they 
 deserve, and get a solitary penny from the house 
 that hires the brass band. Seeing they have no 
 chance, they depart, to the great satisfaction, it is 
 to be presumed, of everybody, even of the small 
 children, and of the cooks and the housemaids. 
 
 Eleven o'clock. — An old man, thinly clad and 
 feeble, with venerable grey hairs, whistling, but so 
 very faintly as to be scarcely audible. He presents 
 so forlorn an appearance, and his idea of attracting 
 anybody's attention by such a weakly performance, 
 appears to me so absurd that I pity him to the 
 extent of a penny. I throw it out to him wrapped 
 in a piece of paper. He catches it in his hat, opens 
 the paper, takes out the penny, and spits upon it three 
 times (for luck, I suppose) , and goes on whistling. 
 Poor old fellow ! He at least has not the power, 
 even if he had the will, to make the street hideous 
 with noise. It is possible that I should nofc have 
 heard his faint attempt at music, if my attention 
 were not specially directed to the subject, and am 
 very doubtful whether any one else in the street is 
 aware of his presence. 
 
 Fifteen minutes past Eleven. — A drum. An 
 abominable monotonous outrage. It is a Lascar 
 beating the tom-tom, and every now and then 
 breaking out into a moan, a whine, a grunt, a 
 
178 MUSIC AND MISERY 
 
 shriek, or all these four diabolically blended into 
 one. He is the most repulsive and savage-looking 
 creature I ever beheld. Gaunt and wiry as a hyena, 
 and with the same hideous expression of counte- 
 nance, he strongly impresses me with the idea that 
 he must be Nana Sahib, who massacred the women 
 and children at Cawnpore, or some other Eastern 
 scoundrel quite as detestable ; if prolific nature has 
 ever yet produced a match to that specimen of her 
 handiwork. There is no policeman to be seen, and 
 I think if I were a policeman, I should be rather 
 shy of tackling such an ugly customer. 
 
 Five minutes past Twelve. — Another brass band, 
 the performers boys and lads from the " Fatherland," 
 who play so loudly and so execrably that I wish the 
 " Fatherland " had them back again, or that Prince 
 Bismarck would take hold of them for the next 
 Sadowa or Sedan, that his own or his royal master's 
 ambition or vanity may compel him to fight. They 
 perform for ten minutes. At their cessation the 
 silence is delightful. 
 
 Twenty minutes to One. — A woman grinding a 
 barrel-organ, with a baby fast asleep upon the top 
 of it. The tune is the eternal "Partant pour la 
 Syrie." When she ceases for a moment to collect 
 pence the baby awakes : when she re-commences, it 
 falls asleep again. She traverses the street slowly 
 from end to end ; receives a penny. She then 
 
IN LONDON. 179 
 
 mercifully, or perhaps hopelessly, makes her way 
 out and grinds no more. 
 
 Quarter past One. — An Italian boy, apparently 
 of about fourteen years of age, with a hurdy-gurdy. 
 He whistles to it as an accompaniment. The com- 
 bination is horrible and past endurance. I go to 
 the window and order him away. He stops whistling, 
 to grin at me, and removes himself to the distance 
 of two houses, where he recommences his per- 
 formance. If there be a policeman in sight, I shall 
 assuredly have him removed par force majeure. 
 But no policeman has been seen the whole morning, 
 and none is visible now. This young tormentor 
 plagues me and the street for five minutes before he 
 goes his way. I feel towards him, as I did in the 
 case of his elder compatriot with the barrel-organ, 
 that I should have been glad if his hurdy-gurdy 
 were in his entrails, and persisted in remaining 
 there and playing for a week ! 
 
 Twenty minutes to Two. — Another Italian, with 
 a barrel-organ and a monkey. The monkey very 
 like a Fenian, the man not so good looking. Why 
 does not the Re Galantuomo keep these lazy Italians 
 to himself ? This fellow would make excellent food 
 for powder. Two little children and a nursemaid 
 at the opposite side of the street, seem delighted 
 with the monkey; but what their opinion of the 
 music is, I have no means of judging. 
 
180 MUSIG AND MISERY 
 
 Half-past Two. — A performer on the cornet-a- 
 piston, plays " The Last Eose of Summer/ 5 and 
 " Auld Lang Syne," neither very well, nor very 
 badly. His music brings up half-a-dozen female 
 heads from the areas on either side of the way. He 
 makes, what is in theatrical parlance called a succes 
 d'esUme, but does not favour the street beyond ten 
 minutes. 
 
 A quarter past Three. — A lad in shabby High- 
 land costume, exhibits a pair of legs that do not 
 show to advantage, and plays villanously on the 
 bag-pipes, the well-known air of " Bonnie Laddie." 
 The cooks, housemaids, and children, seem to be 
 well pleased ; but when he changes the air to the 
 " Eeel of Tulloch," the joy of the little ones grows 
 frantic. Three or four girls of eight or ten who 
 have strayed down the street from some of the con- 
 tiguous alleys on the other side of the Strand, get 
 up a little dance on the pavement. A policeman, 
 for the first time during the day, makes his ap- 
 pearance. What he might have done, if the per- 
 former had been a negro minstrel, singing the 
 (C Chickaleery Cove," I know not, but he evidently 
 neither admires the music of the bagpipes, nor the 
 sight of the little children enjoying themselves ; so 
 he orders away the piper in a manner that shows he 
 is not in a humour to allow his authority to be 
 trifled with. Resistance being hopeless the piper 
 

 IN LONDON. 181 
 
 departs and blessed silence once again prevails for 
 a brief space. 
 
 Five minutes to Four. — A blind old man, playing 
 the violin, led by a young woman — possibly Ms 
 daughter. His tunes are mostly Scotch, and miser- 
 ably perverted. If no one were permitted to play 
 an instrument in the streets without a licence, and 
 if none but the blind were eligible for the privilege, 
 the plague of minstrelsy in London might be bene- 
 ficially diminished. I make a present of this idea 
 to any metropolitan member who thinks well enough 
 of it, to introduce it to the legislature. 
 
 Ten minutes past Four. — Punch and Judy, the 
 most popular theatrical performance that ever was 
 invented, and known and enjoyed by millions, who 
 never heard of Macbeth or Hamlet. The street 
 suddenly seems to swarm with children, nor are 
 older people at all scarce within two minutes after 
 the familiar squeak. The policeman again turns 
 up. He has apparently no objection to Punch, or 
 if he has he makes none. The play proceeds ', and 
 as it is opposite my window, I make the most of it 
 — and if I must tell the truth, I enjoy it. The dog 
 that appears towards the last act, is a first-rate per- 
 former, cool and collected ; and when Punch hits 
 him a little too hard, he fastens upon Punch's nose 
 in a manner that impresses the audience with the 
 idea, that he thoroughly believes it to be flesh and 
 
182 MUSIC AND MISERY 
 
 blood. Good dog ! I should think that Punch 
 clears about eighteenpence by this little interlude, 
 sixpence whereof was mine, for I had been seen to 
 laugh, and could not expect to enjoy such a luxury 
 without paying for it. If the manager of this 
 ambulatory theatre repeats his performance ten or a 
 dozen times a day, with the same pecuniary results, 
 he must make what is called <e a tolerably good thing 
 of it." 
 
 Five o'clock. — Barrel - organ, <c Champagne 
 Charlie," " Not for Joseph," and " Adeste Fideles." 
 No policeman. 
 
 Twenty-five minutes past Five. — Barrel-organ. 
 " Partant pour la Syrie." How I hate it ! Fol- 
 lowed by " Adeste Fideles," which, if possible, I 
 hate still more. No policeman. 
 
 Six o'clock. — An old man with a fiddle; an old 
 woman with a concertina ; and a younger woman 
 with a baby at her breast. The young woman sings, 
 and the older performers murder the music. This 
 is even a worse infliction than the barrel-organ ; and 
 lasts for about five minutes. Much as the street 
 seems to love music, it evidently does not love this 
 specimen of harmony, and not a single halfpenny 
 rewards the trio. 
 
 Twenty minutes past Six. — A man leading a 
 Newfoundland dog, with a monkey riding on its 
 back. The man beats a big drum to attract atten- 
 
IN LONDON. 183 
 
 tion. Somebody rises from the dinner table, throws 
 a bone into the street to the dog, which speedily 
 unhorses, or I ought perhaps to say undogs the 
 monkey, and darts upon the prize in spite of the 
 opposition and the kicks of his master. The monkey 
 performs several little tricks — holds out its paw for 
 halfpence, mounts and dismounts at the word of com- 
 mand, but not until the dog has crunched the bone 
 and made an end of it, with as much relish as if it 
 were flesh ; and is altogether so popular with the 
 children and the servants, as to earn the price of a 
 dinner for his owner. The monkey gets bits of cakes 
 and ipple from the children, the dog gets another 
 bont, with a little meat on it, and the partnership 
 of tie man and two beasts, departs in peace ; to 
 amuse the children somewhere else. 
 
 &ven o'clock. — More mock niggers — seven of 
 then. They sing " Ben Bolt," " Moggie Dooral," 
 <c little Maggie May," and others, which, I presume, 
 ar< the popular favourites. A family, just arrived — 
 asis evident by the piles of boxes on the roof of the 
 tvo cabs that convey them in detachments — and 
 possibly fresh from the rural districts, where black 
 ninstrelsy is rarer than black swans, stand at the 
 vindows, and listen. To be seen listening is to be 
 ?een approving, and to be seen approving, means 
 uoney. The minstrels are asked for a repetition of 
 u Little Maggie May," and after compliance, receive 
 
184 MUSIC AND MISERY 
 
 what looks like half- a- crown, as it flashes from the 
 window to the hat of the leader. Half-a-crown is 
 not much among seven, though it is evidently a 
 much more liberal gratuity than generally falls to 
 the lot of street musicians, if an opinion may be 
 formed from the expression that gleams on the 
 sooty and greasy face of the recipient. 
 
 Half-past seven.— A barrel-organ. No policeman. 
 
 Eight o' clock. — A woman, " clad in unwonanly 
 rags/' with a thin weak voice, dolefully chauating 
 " Annie Laurie." 
 
 A quarter past Eight. — A barrel-organ. Police- 
 man in the street, for a wonder; is told to 3xpel 
 this performer, and expels him accordingly. The 
 man persists in grinding as he goes up the street to 
 get out of it. Ci Leave off," says the policenan, 
 sharply, and in the tone of a man that means nis- 
 chief if he be thwarted ; and the tune ceases. The 
 policeman walks down the street, up again, md 
 disappears, and in less than five minutes the or^an 
 fiend — for such this particularly pertinacicus 
 vagabond deserves to be called — re-enters iie 
 scene of his discomfiture, and begins to griid 
 away triumphantly at the ' ' Old Hundredth Psalm" 
 I suffer him, in an agony of spirit, for a full tea 
 minutes. He meets no encouragement, and retires. 
 May he grind organs in Pandemonium for eve* 
 and ever — Amen. 
 

 IN LONDON. 185 
 
 Nine o'clock. — The tinkling of a guitar, well 
 played, succeeded by the rick full voice of a culti- 
 vated soprano, singing tke old ballad, u Comm' 
 through the Rye." Here, at last is something worth 
 hearing. Looking out I see a well-dressed woman, 
 with a small crowd around her. She next sings, 
 ' ' Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon," and renders 
 it beautifully ; afterwards, " The Last Eose of Sum- 
 mer," equally well, followed by ei Bonnie Dundee," 
 sung with a spirit which would do credit to any 
 stage. This person is, I understand, a protegee of 
 my landlady, and visits the street regularly every 
 week. She meets otherwise with very considerable 
 encouragement. She has sought, but hitherto in 
 vain, to obtain an engagement at the music halls. 
 ' ' One reason is," she says, " that negro melodies 
 and comic songs by ladies are more popular than 
 Scotch songs, or than sentimental songs of any 
 kind, unless they are sung by a man or a woman 
 with a blackened face." Another reason, perhaps, 
 is her poverty, and the want of good introductions. 
 My landlady says she is an honest girl, and has 
 been well enough educated to read music and sing 
 at sight. Can nothing be done for her ? I ask. 
 "Many gentlemen," replies the landlady, "have 
 been greatly pleased with her singing, and promised 
 to exert themselves to get her an engagement of 
 some kind, however humble, to take her out of 
 
186 MUSIC AND MISERY 
 
 street singing ; but it has been all cry and no wool ; 
 and nothing has come of it." 
 
 A quarter to Ten o' clock. — A tremendous hulla- 
 baloo ! and loud cries of C{ Awful murder ! awful 
 murder ! Second edition — Second eddishon ! " I 
 send down to know what is the matter. It is a sell 
 — a sell — a palpable sell — and no murder at all; 
 and the servant brings me up a fly sheet, printed 
 on one side, like the halfpenny ballads. This costs 
 a penny; and is the story — I quote literally — of 
 " A married man caught in a Trap, or, the Lovers 
 Detected — a Laughable Dialogue, which took place 
 in a Railway Carriage, between a married gentle- 
 man and a young lady in this town, which was 
 overheard by a gentleman, who immediately com- 
 mitted the same to writing." The " laughable 
 dialogue " is not at all laughable, but vapid, silly, 
 puerile, and utterly contemptible. Compared with 
 the vendors of such swindling rubbish, who disturb 
 the night by their vociferous cries, the most vil- 
 lanous organ-grinder of Italy is a respectable man 
 and a saint. If I had the making of the laws and 
 the administration of them afterwards, I think such 
 fellows as these would never be able to vociferate 
 again, either on a false pretence or a true one, after 
 they got out of my clutches. 
 
 The above is a fair and true account, and an 
 unvarnished tale of a day's music and misery in 
 

 IN LONDON. 187 
 
 London. The real music was not much ; the real 
 misery was very considerable. Is there no remedy 
 for such wrong ? Cannot a prohibitive duty be put 
 upon Italians and Savoyards at the port of entry ? 
 Cannot music, or the murder of music in the streets, 
 by unauthorised performers be prevented ? Or if 
 the children and the servants, and the idle people 
 generally, must have street music, cannot the in- 
 fliction be concentrated within a couple of hours 
 every day ? People must not bathe in the Ser- 
 pentine after eight in the morning ; why should 
 people be allowed to make hideous noises anywhere 
 and everywhere in the business hours of the day ? 
 

 $i§|i 
 
 - . 
 
 THE MIRTH OF THE MILLION. 
 
 DO not object to the rnirth of the 
 million, or to mirth in anybody. I 
 hold* that innocent joy is gratitude to 
 Heaven, and that such mirth, in its 
 proper season, is a duty which every one owes to 
 himself. But to mirth that can only find its ex- 
 pression in vulgarity, obscenity, or profanity, I 
 object about as much as I do to any breach of the 
 moral laws, which society agrees to punish. The 
 mirth that finds its expression in music is, above 
 all others, wholesome and beautiful ; but the vulgar 
 mirth that desecrates music, or brings music into 
 association with sentiments and expressions that are 
 morally base and atrocious, I hold not to be good 
 for the million, or for any one individual part 
 thereof. Music in itself and by itself is of necessity 
 pure. " Songs without words," or songs of which 
 the melody is played upon an instrument, without 
 any aid from the voice, are always more or less 
 
MIRTH OF THE MILLION. 189 
 
 beautiful. Every tune gives some degree of plea- 
 sure ; and no tune or melody can of itself, without 
 association with human speech, convey to the mind 
 any ideas that are not innocent. Music can express 
 joy, hope, love, tenderness, sorrow, melancholy, 
 martial ardour, and deep religious feeling" ; or by a 
 discordant note, it may possibly express fear or 
 anger. But music cannot convey the idea of in- 
 decency, spite, malice, jealousy, hatred, falsehood, 
 revenge, or any of the mean and wicked passions. 
 All music, in fact, is sacred. It is only when 
 vulgar, silly, or indecent writers of verse asso- 
 ciate tunes to their compositions, that music be- 
 comes linked in the mind with unworthy ideas. 
 Music, in the case last mentioned, is in the pitiable 
 plight of a Venus Aphrodite, dressed against her 
 will in the dirty rags and foul garments of the 
 street virago, or the harridan of the gutter. Of late 
 years the love of music has very greatly increased 
 among all classes of the English people ; though the 
 blessing has been attended with some serious draw- 
 backs. Among the chief of these has been a vast 
 increase of so-called comic songs of the lowest 
 order, which has operated very injuriously upon the 
 taste and morals of the multitude. Before pro- 
 ceeding further with the subject, let me state at 
 once that I am no enemy of public amusements. 
 I love to see people enjoy themselves. I like fun, 
 
190 TEE MIRTH OF 
 
 provided it be funny. I like humour, provided it 
 be humourous; and I highly enjoy wit, provided 
 I can have it unadulterated with obscenity or pro- 
 fanity. But I hate vulgarity and the habitual use 
 of slang, and do not think that the language of 
 thieves, or even of costermongers, is worthy of 
 imitation. I prefer the society of gentlemen to that 
 of " cads," and think that the crowning grace of a 
 beautiful woman — without which all other charms 
 and accomplishments are of no account — is modesty ; 
 not simply of thought and dress, but of action and 
 demeanour. There is no reason among any of these 
 loves and hatreds, why I or any one else should not 
 approve of music and song for the million, and of 
 the Music Halls that have within the last few years 
 sprung up in all the populous towns and cities in 
 England. The Music Hall is the opera house of the 
 poor, and if the poor, differing in this respect from 
 the rich, enjoy their songs, their ballets, and their 
 acrobatic gymnastics much better with an accom- 
 paniment of beer and tobacco than without, there is 
 no weighty reason why any sensible person should 
 object to their recreation on that account : provided 
 always that they keep within the bounds of sobriety 
 and decorum. That the beer and the tobacco have 
 a vulgarising and demoralising tendency is obvious 
 enough ; but, on the other hand, it must be admitted 
 that the hard-working multitudes of our busy age 
 

 TEE MILLION. 191 
 
 have too little opportunity and means of recreation 
 to justify the rigid censor in objecting to a public 
 taste which he is powerless to elevate,, provided that 
 the bad taste leads to no offence against good 
 morals. 
 
 In the days when there were no Music Halls in 
 London, and when urban and suburban taverns and 
 public-houses were the resorts of tradesmen, clerks, 
 mechanics and others who required amusement 
 after their day's work, the comic muse was largely 
 represented. There never was a time in England 
 when gaiety and lightness of heart did not find 
 expression in music. The songs, sentimental or 
 comic, grave or gay, that pleased the English 
 people before the days of Queen Elizabeth, have for 
 the most part perished, but from the time of Shake- 
 speare to our own, we know exactly the style of 
 songs that amused our forefathers. Their comic 
 songs were sometimes too free .and loose for a 
 refined taste, and sometimes they were silly and 
 affected ; but in the main there was a hearty humour 
 and joyous wit about them, which removed them 
 from the imputation of coarseness. Even up to so 
 late a period as 1830, when Vauxhall Gardens, 
 White Conduit House, and other places that were 
 the direct predecessors of the Music Halls were 
 open, the songs that were sung were not wholly 
 adapted to the taste of " fast " men and women, or 
 
192 THE MIRTH OF 
 
 of " cads" and costermongers. Sentiment was not 
 utterly banished, and the comic songs, though not 
 very elevated as specimens of English composition 
 or graceful as specimens of English wit, had a 
 certain spice of fun and humour about them, that 
 amused without disgusting the hearer. A collection 
 of such songs published in 1830 in three volumes, 
 and entitled the " Apollo/' shows the wit that 
 pleased the fancy, and the pathos that touched the 
 hearts of the men and women of that day. The 
 publishers took credit to themselves, not only for 
 having carefully excluded from their pages u every- 
 thing that could disgust the eye of modesty, or 
 shock the ear of refinement," but for having " re- 
 jected every composition, however popular, that 
 was nothing but flimsy rhyme and jingling non- 
 sense." It must be admitted, however, that this 
 excellent rule of selection was not rigidly adhered 
 to, and that a large amount of very flimsy non- 
 sense, indeed, found its way into the pages of the 
 Apollo. Edmund Waller, in the days of Charles II., 
 thought it hard that he should be called upon " to 
 swear to the truth of a song," and it would be 
 equally hard if the writer of a song purporting to be 
 comic, were not allowed the privilege of harmless 
 nonsense — for nonsense may often be witty as well 
 as funny ; and convey innocent pleasure, where 
 good sense in a repulsive shape might fail to con- 
 
TEE MILLION. 193 
 
 vey either pleasure or instruction. But nonsense 
 is not to be confounded with inanity or stupidity, 
 and especially with that lowest and vilest form of 
 both, which borrows the language of pickpockets 
 and cadgers, and knows no difference between 
 mirth and blackguardism. And in this respect the 
 comic nonsense of our fathers and grandfathers 
 stands in very favourable contrast with the Music 
 Hall nonsense that has recently sprung into favour. 
 In the not very remote days when William IV. 
 was King, sentiment was not considered, as of 
 necessity, to be unmanly, unwomanly, or silly ; and 
 the expression of honest love and disinterested 
 friendship was not held to be inconsistent, either 
 with delicacy or good sense. The songs of Dibdin, 
 Burns, and Moore, continued to please all classes of 
 the people, whether their nationality were English, 
 Scotch, or Irish ; and shared with many newer 
 favourites, who endeavoured to follow in the path 
 they had traced, the applause of the town. Madame 
 Yestris, Mrs. Humby, Mrs. Waylett, Mrs. Honey, 
 Miss Love, Miss Foote, Miss Maria Tree, and others, 
 though they lent their sweet voices to comic, as well 
 as to sentimental song, never lent them to vulgarity, 
 or soiled their lips with the slang of swellmobsmen ; 
 and such singers of the other sex as Incledon, Bra- 
 ham, Sinclair, Wilson, Phillips, Templeton, and 
 Russell, endeavoured to elevate and adorn the art 
 
 o 
 
194 THE MIRTH OF 
 
 to which they devoted their lives, and never pan- 
 dered to a crapulous and depraved taste. But in 
 this respect we have changed for the worse. The 
 most notable characteristic of the public songs of 
 our day, as far as the Music Halls are concerned, 
 is their utter intolerance of sentiment. If a tender 
 or ennobling thought has to be expressed before a 
 popular audience it has to be rendered acceptable 
 to the debauched palates of cynics and rowdies by a 
 touch of farce, such as is supplied by the simple 
 expedient of translating it into the vulgarest idiom, 
 or blackening the face and hands of the singer. To 
 the negro minstrels, or to white men masquerading 
 in negro character, has been relegated all the tender 
 and romantic sentiment of popular song ; as if it 
 were derogatory to the business-like character, and 
 to the high intellect of a man with a white skin to 
 sing sentimentally of anything' so ce spoony" as 
 genuine affection or youthful faith and simplicity. 
 These simulated negro songs, contemptible as they 
 are in some respects, have a certain humour and 
 pathos which render them superior to the comic 
 songs which men with unblackened faces permit 
 themselves to sing. There is here and there to be 
 found in them a touch of manly and simple nature, 
 which not even the garb or paint of cc niggerism" 
 can wholly degrade. But when we come to the 
 songs of the very funny vocalists whose business 
 
THE MILLION. 195 
 
 does not require them to blacken their faces, and 
 who conceive that the affectionate public loves them 
 best under the familiar names of cc Joe/'' or " Tom/' 
 or " Fred," or " Charlie," as the case may be ; we 
 find an absence alike of nature, of pathos, of humour, 
 and of wit. They are not able to approach even to 
 the boundaries of farce : and in order to understand 
 their descriptions, accurate or inaccurate, f ^of the 
 manners of the day, the reader or hearer has to be 
 familiar with the lowest phases of life in the metro- 
 polis ; and be thus enabled to sympathise with the 
 pursuits, feelings, modes of thought, of cadgers, 
 costermongers, the least respectable class of servant 
 girls, and of others of their sex still less respectable 
 than they. By referring to the advertisements in 
 the public press we find that three " splendid songs" 
 called respectively <( Champagne Charlie," " Moggie 
 Dooral," and the " Chickaleery Cove," which are 
 described as having been sung before the Prince of 
 Wales, at some Music Hall unnamed, ' ' by the special 
 request of His Royal Highness." I turn to the col- 
 lection in which these alleged favourites of royalty 
 appear ; and find it described in the publisher's pre- 
 face as " a collection of gems that have called down 
 upon the singers the most vociferous applause, that 
 have found their way to the barrel organs, and been 
 sung at the corners of every street." The critic is 
 thus enabled to pass judgment upon the taste and 
 
196 THE MIRTH OF 
 
 humour which grace the comic muse of London in 
 our day, and which are supposed to find admirers not 
 alone among the needy and the seedy, the illiterate 
 and the vulgar, with an occasional sprinkling of 
 " cads and swells," who may be vulgar but are not 
 illiterate, but among the highest and best educated 
 classes. " Champagne Charlie" the first in the 
 series, is the description of a disreputable " swell," 
 with more money than brains, who haunts all the 
 " supper room# ; of London, f{ from Poplar to Pall 
 Mali," and treats every girl he meets with as much 
 champagne as she can drink. 
 
 Champagne Charlie is my name, 
 Good for any game at night, my boys, 
 Who'll come and join me in a spree? 
 
 The ' c lady's version" of this composition — said 
 to be sung by a " lady" in public, and to be adapted 
 to the use of u ladies" in private, varies the chorus : 
 
 Champagne Charlie was his name, 
 Always kicking np a frightful noise, 
 Kicking up a noise at night, my boys, 
 And always ready for a spree. 
 
 Comment upon such a song is as needless as any 
 remark upon the taste and manners of the so-called 
 " ladies' - ' who either applaud or sing it. 
 
 " Moggie Dooral" is stupider, if possible, than 
 ' ' Champagne Charlie ; " but as it was originally a 
 song of the i{ negro minstrels," and came from the 
 
THE MILLION. 197 
 
 other side of tlie Atlantic, it cannot be fairly placed 
 to the discredit of London, unless for the minor 
 offence of extending its favour and popularity. The 
 first stanza will suffice as a specimen : 
 
 Once a maiden fair, 
 She had ginger hair, 
 With her tooral, looral, la ! di ! oh ! 
 And she fell in love, 
 Did this turtle dove, 
 And her name was Dooral, 
 
 Moggie Dooral, 
 
 Cockie-Dooral, 
 
 Hoopty Dooral, 
 
 Tooral, looral, 
 Silly noodle, oh ! my ! 
 
 This " nigger" song depends for its success on 
 the blackened faces and hands, and on the good 
 comic acting of the singers, who endeavour — and 
 not unsuccessfully' — to make it grotesque. 
 
 The " Chickaleerie Cove" or the " Chickaleerie 
 Bloke" — it is known under both titles — is the 
 climax of the three royal favourites, for dismal and 
 revolting offensiveness. The language is not to be 
 understood without a garotter's or a burglar's glos- 
 sary to explain the u slang" the Cl flash," the " cant," 
 and the C( rommany," with which it is interlarded. 
 One stanza will be more than sufficient as a spe- 
 cimen. " Chickaleerie," it appears, stands for 
 Whitechapel, and " bloke" is nineteenth century: 
 
198 THE MIRTH OF 
 
 English for man, or for a thing that so calls itself 
 when it does not call itself a " swell." 
 
 I'm a Chickaleerie bloke with my one, two, three, 
 
 Whitechapel was the village I was born in, 
 For to get me on the 7wp, or on my tihby drop, 
 
 Yon mnst wake np very early in the morning ; 
 I have a rorty gal, also a knowing pal, 
 
 And merrily together we jog on, 
 I do not care SbflatcJi, as long as I've a tatch, 
 
 Some pannum for my chest and a tog on. 
 
 Let those who will, refer to Mr. Hotten's " Slang 
 Dictionary" for an explanation of the strange words 
 in this thieves' vocabulary. For myself I can say, 
 that with every disposition to be tolerant, to make 
 allowances for defects of education and for evil cul- 
 ture, and above all with a desire to discover a soul 
 of goodness in things evil, it is difficult to under- 
 stand how any one claiming, even on the most in- 
 adequate pretence, to possess an average share 
 of human intelligence can take pleasure, with or 
 without the accompaniment of beer and tobacco, in 
 the hearing or the reading of such inane trash as 
 this. I have heard it pleaded &s some excuse for 
 the disgraceful success of these songs, that the 
 melodies to which they are sung" are lively, and that 
 the public of the Music Halls tolerates the words 
 for the sake of the music. There is undoubtedly a 
 certain truth expressed in this view. But the main 
 question remains unaffected by it. What is to be 
 
THE MILLION. 199 
 
 said of the popular taste which, under any circum- 
 stances or for any reason, tolerates the words at all ? 
 A great portion of the very thin, attenuated, and 
 all but imperceptible "fun" of the comic songs 
 of the present day, or at least of such of them as 
 flourish at the Music Halls, consists in calling 
 women " feminines," or tc female women." To take 
 a walk with a " feminine" on a Sunday, or to be 
 jilted by a li false feminine," and to relieve the mis- 
 fortune by " gin," or a flirtation with a " new 
 feminine," or to steal down the area of a gentle- 
 man's liouse to visit a <c feminine," or a " female 
 woman/ who acts as cook, and to be regaled by her 
 on the cold beef and mutton of her master, until the 
 alarm is raised that the <c missus" is coming, when 
 the visitor is safely stowed away in the coal cellar 
 until the danger of discovery is past ; these are the 
 telling hits at the Music Halls, if the Music Hall 
 song-bocks tell the truth. Of course the policeman 
 does not escape caricature when any little incident 
 of this kind is to be described ; though if the comic- 
 song4>ooks are to be believed, not only policemen, 
 but mechanics, linen- drapers' assistants, and mer- 
 chants' or lawyers' clerks, are just as fond of the 
 cook's mutton as the policeman, and just as ready 
 to descend to low manoeuvres and mean arts to get 
 a share of it. It is not that this picture of the un- 
 married portion of the lower stratum of the youth 
 
200 THE MIRTH OF 
 
 of the middle class in our age is a true one -, but it 
 is the fact, that it should be accepted as true, and 
 laughed at as such, that shows the deplorable vitia- 
 tion of the popular taste of London. 
 
 Anyone who enjoys such literary offal may find 
 it at the Music Halls, where one performer is said 
 to earn his thousand or fifteen hundred pounds a 
 year, and rides in his brougham from one place to 
 another, singing the same song eight or ten times 
 in the evening, to new and delighted audiences. Or 
 if any investigator recoil from such haunts, Le may 
 read comic song-books, closely protected by a copy- 
 right that will not permit the infringement or piracy 
 of anything so valuable — and so ignoble. 
 
 The all but worn-out saying of the nameless friend 
 of Fletcher of Saltoun, who, in the days before news- 
 papers, declared that he would rather be tie song- 
 writer than the law-giver of the people, has a side 
 to it that its first utterer never imagined ; for if the 
 song-writers of the people are of the class that pro- 
 vide the Music Halls with their mirth and their 
 morality, the administrators of the law, if not the 
 law-makers, are likely to have extra work. When 
 the song-writer teaches virtue, celebrates true love, 
 exalts patriotism, and has no ridicule to throw ex- 
 cept at the harmless follies and small vices of the 
 people, he is a power in the state. When he re- 
 verses the process, sneers at virtue, ridicules the 
 
TEE MILLION. 201 
 
 great and the heroic in character, and borrows, as 
 his choicest vehicles of expression, the language of 
 burglars and beggars, he also becomes a power in 
 the state, but a power for evil. The greater the 
 popularity which he achieves, the more serious the 
 mischief he causes. The English were said, by the 
 old French chronicler, to amuse themselves sadly ; 
 and anything sadder, in every sense of the word, 
 than the comic songs that are popular in London is 
 difficult to imagine. 
 
FLIES AND MOSQUITOES. 
 
 ONSEN SE ! " said my tenderest friend 
 and life-companion, when I told her, as 
 I always do, what I was going to write 
 about. cc You cannot possibly find any- 
 thing to say about flies." This was my wife's first 
 impression of the matter. cc I should think," I re- 
 plied, Ci that a good deal might be said about flies, 
 and their uses in the economy of creation.'-' " No 
 doubt," said she ; " but flies are a nuisance, especially 
 those horrible mosquitoes, from which we suffered 
 so much in America. Indeed, now I come to con- 
 sider it, I think you might write something read- 
 able about those dreadful pests. I think the plague 
 of flies, that afflicted Egypt when Pharaoh would 
 not let the Israelites go free, must have been a 
 plague of mosquitoes/' u Very likely," said I ; 
 " and then you know that one of the names given 
 
 

 FLIES AND MOSQUITOES. 203 
 
 to the devil is Beelzebub, or the Lord of the Flies.'' 
 
 " I wish he had them all in his own dominions, 
 
 then," rejoined my wife. " What, all the flies ? " 
 
 I inquired. " Would you banish the bees and the 
 
 butterflies in all their innumerable varieties of 
 
 beauty, and the flying beetles, and the fire-flies that 
 
 make night brilliant in warm latitudes ? " " No," 
 
 she replied. " I was wrong. I would only banish 
 
 the common flies and the mosquitoes." " Then I 
 
 will write about common flies and mosquitoes, and 
 
 leave the bees and the butterflies alone." 
 
 The busy, impertinent, buzzing little creature, 
 
 known in most parts of the world as The Fly, is 
 
 chiefly remarkable for its incessant cheerful activity, 
 
 and for its constant thirstiness. It seems to have 
 
 a love for everything that is succulent and sweet. 
 
 In this respect it is honourably distinguished from 
 
 the culex, or gnat family, of which there are no less 
 
 than thirty varieties in the British Isles, none of 
 
 which have any taste for sweets, nor any relish for 
 
 anything except the blood which they suck from 
 
 the pores of animals. The house-fly is a veritable 
 
 dipsomaniac : 
 
 Busy, thirsty, curious fly, 
 Thou shalt drink as well as I, 
 
 says the old convivial chant ; and, in this predilec- 
 tion for drink, the fly very much resembles the 
 toper who apostrophises him. Nothing potable 
 
204 FLIES AND 
 
 comes amiss to Mm — from wine to brandy, from 
 milk to water. Like man in search of his gratifi- 
 cation, little musca continually comes to grief. At 
 the breakfast-table he dips into the tea or coffee 
 cup, if he have a chance, and is often scalded to 
 death for his temerity. He darts from the sugar- 
 basin to the cream-jug, and not unfrequently falls 
 into the clammy liquor and is drowned for his gree- 
 diness. Sitting alone at breakfast one morning, at 
 a country inn, with nothing particular to do, and 
 with no newspaper or book to read, I amused myself 
 by extricating an unfortunate fly from the cream 
 into which it had fallen, and placed it upon the 
 table-cloth to live or die, as fate, not I, might de- 
 termine. It was not in my power to do anything 
 more for my small fellow-creature. Its wings were 
 clogged, for the cream was not London cream. It 
 had not lain in this unhappy condition above a 
 minute, when another fly was tempted to take a 
 look. Whether the new comer understood the real 
 state of the case, or whether it was too fond of 
 cream to refuse to taste it, even when clotted over 
 the body of a moribund brother, is not easy to de- 
 cide ; but putting out its little proboscis, it began 
 to suck vigorously at the cream. Nor was it left 
 alone to its enjoyment, or to its work of mercy, 
 whichever it may have been, for it was speedily 
 joined by five or six other flies, who all sucked 
 

 MOSQUITOES. 205 
 
 away so busily at the cream on the legs, wings,, and 
 body of my little friend, that it soon began to turn 
 and flutter. Ultimately it rose on its feet, rubbed 
 its two fore-legs together, as a happy man rubs his 
 hands, and finally flew away as briskly as if nothing 
 had happened. 
 
 It is the constant thirst which besets the fly that 
 not only leads it into danger, but which principally 
 renders it so troublesome in summer, whether to 
 man or other animals. The fly settles upon your 
 hand or face, not to suck your blood for a drink, 
 like the mosquito, the gnat, or the midge, and, 
 worst of all, the gallinipper, but simply that it may 
 slake its thirst at the pearly drops upon your skin 
 — visible and tempting to the fly, though invisible 
 to yourself. When bent on an object of this kind, 
 the perseverance of the fly is wonderful. Nothing 
 but death will keep it away from you. Driven off 
 for a moment, it returns to the charge, brave in its 
 ignorance; with effects on the temper which are 
 sometimes comic to a bystander. An irascible 
 Anglo - Indian in his despair, once seized a poker 
 to demolish a bluebottle. ' ' I smashed the window," 
 he exclaimed triumphantly, "but never mind — I 
 killed the fly ! " 
 
 Naturalists tell us that the fly is stone-deaf — in 
 this respect unlike the bee, which swarms to the 
 noises made upon warming-pans or other metallic 
 
206 FLIES AND 
 
 implements. But nature is always kind. The blind 
 man receives compensation in the increased power 
 of his other senses, especially that of touch ; and in 
 like manner our deaf little friend, the fly, can see 
 both behind and before, and cannot be taken wholly 
 unawares. The inconvenience suffered in our dwell- 
 ings from the common house-fly is not great in the 
 latitude of England, unless to grocers, butchers, and 
 fishmongers ; but in the middle and southern states 
 of North America they are often as great a plague 
 as mosquitoes. They tumble into your tea, your 
 soup, your lager-beer, your wine, your gravy ; they 
 fasten upon every damp spot on the table-cloth in 
 scores and hundreds; they cover every article of 
 food, and defile your windows, your mirrors, your 
 picture-frames — everything that is bright and shiny 
 — and are the despair of the good housewife. You 
 may catch them with fly-papers, and attract them 
 with a light by a very ingenious ' ' Yankee notion," 
 and so kill them by countless thousands ; but their 
 numbers never seem to diminish. Nothing but the 
 cold weather has any effect in staying the plague. 
 The weakest are killed off by myriads when the 
 frost comes, and the strongest betake themselves 
 out of sight into little holes and corners of the walls, 
 outside and in, or in the bark of trees, and compose 
 themselves to sleep until the summer comes again. 
 The fly, like the dormouse, the bear, and many 
 

 MOSQUITOES. 207 
 
 other living creatures, hybernates. u Sleep/'' which 
 Sancho Panza says ' ' covers a man all over, thoughts 
 and all, like a cloak," performs the same kindly 
 office even for these unconsidered pests. Some- 
 times a gleam of sunshine in November or Decem- 
 ber wakes up a fly from his nap. The rash insect 
 thinks that summer has come again, crawls out, 
 shakes itself, and makes a melancholy attempt to be 
 lively and happy. The adventurer generally pays 
 with its life the penalty of its ignorance, and never 
 sees summer nor lumps of sugar more. 
 
 Field-flies are not very troublesome in England, 
 except to horses and cattle. They are mostly of a 
 larger species than the domestic fly, and are con- 
 siderably more ferocious and pertinacious. I was 
 once coming down from the top of Goatfell, in the 
 Island of Arran, one of the loveliest of the Western 
 Isles, when I was suddenly attacked by a cloud of 
 flies a little larger than the domestic fly. The cloud 
 was certainly a cube of fifteen or twenty feet, and 
 must have contained millions of flies. They fol- 
 lowed me for miles in my progress down the moun- 
 tain towards the little hostelry of Brodick, and fas- 
 tened upon every exposed part of face and neck, 
 to drink in the moisture that hard exercise had 
 brought out over all the surface of my body. I 
 unloosed my plaid from my shoulders to swing it 
 around me like a flail to scare away the invaders. 
 
208 FLIES AND 
 
 In vain ! In vain ! One down, a thousand came 
 on. I clapped my hands together in the midst of 
 the cloud, and slew my hundreds at every coming 
 together of my palms. It was of no use. You 
 can't frighten a fly, you can only kill him. On 
 they came — on, for ever on, like the rushing of 
 Niagara ! At last I struck into a belt of plantation, 
 thickly wooded with fir and larch, where my tor- 
 mentors seemed to lose their way; for in five 
 minutes I was disembarrassed of them, much to 
 my satisfaction. Since that time I have learned to 
 sympathise with horses in vehicles pursued by flies 
 for miles, in defiance of the whip of the driver ; and 
 to admire the friendly arrangement of two horses in 
 a field. cc Stand with your haunches towards my 
 head," says Dobbin to Bobbin, "and brush away 
 the flies from my ears with your beautiful long 
 tail, and I will do the same good turn for you." 
 " Agreed," says Bobbin to Dobbin; and so they 
 stand for hours under the shadow of trees in the 
 sultry summer heats, mutually helpful, and doubt- 
 less quite aware of the convenience as well as fair- 
 ness of the bargain. 
 
 The first great use of all flies in the economy of 
 nature seems to be to act the part of scavengers, 
 and consume the decaying animal matters, or ex- 
 cretions, that are not good above ground — though 
 they would be excellent under ground, if it were 
 
MOSQUITOES. 209 
 
 worth any one's while to put them there. The next 
 is, that they shall supply food for birds and fishes. 
 What is the use of the ephemera ? They are born, 
 grow old, and die in one day ; they seem to do no- 
 thing in their short lifetime but dance in the sun- 
 shine, as if there were not a particle of sorrow in 
 their little world — a large world enough for them. 
 
 A singular circumstance has lately been reported 
 by scientific men on the subject of the domestic fly 
 of Europe and America. Everybody knows that 
 the civilised man is, and always has been, more 
 than a match for the savage; and that before the 
 continually encroaching steps of the Anglo-Saxon 
 and other European races — but more especially the 
 Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian — the aborigines of 
 the American continent, of the Cape of Good Hope, 
 of Australia, and New Zealand, have been gradually 
 disappearing. If two races refuse to amalgamate, 
 the weaker goes to the wall. Civilisation is too 
 much for savages, and they retire from its presence, 
 only to linger a little while in the land of their 
 fathers, conscious of their inferiority, and driven to 
 the grave at last. That this should happen in the 
 case of men is not very surprising, but that it should 
 happen in the case of house-flies, is not a little re- 
 markable. Dr. Haast, a Fellow of the Linnasan 
 Society, writes to Dr. J. D. Hooker, from New 
 Zealand, that not only does the European drive 
 
210 FLIES AND 
 
 away the Maori or aboriginal inhabitant, but that 
 the European house-fly drives away the New Zea- 
 land fly. Of two evils, New Zealand colonists prefer 
 the less, and as the spread of the European insect 
 goes on slowly, they are actually importing house- 
 flies in boxes and bottles to their new inland sta- 
 tions. Is it that all living things that are much in 
 the society of, or in immediate contiguity to man 
 in a high state of civilisation, have their faculties 
 sharpened by the association — sharpened, as it 
 were, by danger, and the necessity of protecting 
 themselves against such formidable foes ? Is it that 
 similar animals and insects in wild countries, where 
 men are few, are not so highly educated by adverse 
 circumstances, not so acute, clever, and wary ; and 
 that when superiors of their own race are brought 
 into contact with them, the weaker flies before the 
 stronger, as we see it among men ? 
 
 Enough for the present on the subject of the fly. 
 To please my wife, I turn to the mosquito, a crea- 
 ture which has not yet made its appearance in the 
 British Isles (it is to be hoped it never will) , but 
 which has several near relations amongst us in the 
 culex family, of which the gnat and the midge are 
 the best known members. Mosquito is a Spanish 
 word signifying a little fly. Though it be little, it 
 makes up for deficiency of size by abundance of 
 venom. Some of the fairest portions of the globe 
 
MOSQUITOES. 211 
 
 are rendered all but uninhabitable by these " pesky" 
 insects. The mosquito, and his big brother the 
 gallinipper, which is said to be able to sting into 
 your leg through the leather of your jack-boot, 
 though they do not altogether banish mankind from 
 the warmer countries of the temperate zone, render 
 those regions particularly uncomfortable in the sum- 
 mer days, and, above all, in the summer nights, 
 when they not only "murder sleep," but in the 
 woods have sometimes been known to murder the 
 sleepers. 
 
 Let me ask the reader to accompany me, in 
 spirit, to a little cottage which I once occupied in 
 an island on the coast of America — one of the 
 most compact and beautiful little islands that the 
 sun shines upon — and hear what is to be said 
 about " skeeters," as many Americans call the mos- 
 quito for shortness. The cottage is a "frame," or 
 wooden one, substantially built for winter as well as 
 for summer habitation, and with a broad verandah 
 in the front and on the eastern side, on which some 
 English people — myself and wife among the num- 
 ber — and some Americans are seated in the cool of 
 the evening . Before the verandah extends a flower- 
 garden, beautifully laid out, and a reach of ground 
 sloping for about a mile towards the Atlantic. Be- 
 hind it are three acres of forest land ; two of which 
 are almost in the condition of the aboriginal wilder- 
 
212 FLIES AND 
 
 ness, and contain some stately fir-trees, under the 
 shadow of which the Eed Indians may have erected 
 their wigwams, smoked the calumet of peace, or 
 dug up the war-hatchet for bloody fight. The other 
 acre is laid out in a series of kitchen-gardens, which 
 yield a bountiful crop of most of the vegetables 
 known in Europe, and of several others which the 
 English climate is not sunny enough to produce in 
 the same excellence and profusion. Among others, 
 the oyster-plant, the egg-plant, the tomato, and the 
 ochra ; the latter famous as the main ingredient of 
 a delicious soup called iC gumbo." The verandah 
 — the pleasantest part of the house, and which in 
 these American cottages and villas is the favourite 
 resort of the family in the sultry afternoons of sum- 
 mer — is overgrown with roses and creeping vines 
 of almost every variety, among which the bignonia, 
 or trumpet-vine, is conspicuous for its beautiful red 
 flowers. 
 
 As we are new to the country, this being our 
 first summer in these sunny latitudes, we notice 
 many things that escape the attention of the 
 natives, as we sit in the verandah, look towards 
 the ocean, and survey the scene around us. Most 
 lovely is the clear blue sky, without a speck of 
 cloud to relieve the monotony of the deep cerulean. 
 The mercury in the thermometer stands at ninety- 
 six degrees in the shade, and were it not for the 
 
MOSQUITOES. 213 
 
 whiff of tlie pleasant wind that creeps over the 
 waters of the Atlantic, laden with freshness, the 
 heat would be oppressive. As it is, the ice-pitcher 
 is a valued friend, and the fan an inseparable com- 
 panion, not only for the sake of the coolness which 
 its motion imparts, but for its utility in driving 
 away mosquitoes. Were it not for these intolerable 
 plagues, the climate would be greatly preferable to 
 that of England ; but mosquitoes are a daily and a 
 nightly misery. " There is a soul of goodness in 
 things evil/' I said to a neighbour, an American 
 lady of English parentage who had come to our 
 verandah -, " and the all-wise Creator has made 
 nothing in vain. Yet with the fullest faith in this 
 doctrine, I could never find out of what use the 
 mosquito was, or what were its purposes in the 
 great scheme of the world." " Perhaps not/' re- 
 plied the fair one ; " but may not that be your own 
 fault, Mr. Philosopher ? In the first place, mos- 
 quitoes breed in the marshes. May they not teach 
 us the necessity of draining the marshes, and 
 carrying off the stagnant waters, so as to increase 
 the arable service of the land ? In the second 
 place, mosquitoes, in countries where there are no 
 marshes, breed in the running streams ; the larvse 
 of the mosquitoes are the favourite food of young 
 trout. And if you are fond of trout, why should 
 the trout not have his dinner of mosquito larvse, to. 
 
214 FLIES AND 
 
 be fatted for your enjoyment ? In the third place, 
 the sting of the mosquito inoculates against the 
 attacks of fevers that are prevalent in all marshy 
 and undrained countries ; and surely a mosquito- 
 bite is better than a fever, Mr. Philosopher ?" It 
 is always in vain to argue with a lady, so I said 
 no more, inwardly content that so much could be 
 urged in behalf even of the pestilential little crea- 
 ture, which was in those days a veritable thorn in 
 the flesh of me and mine. 
 
 The mosquito has the treacherous habit of flying 
 low. If you sit in your drawing-room (parlour 
 it is always called in the United States) in your 
 slippers, or in your library or study, if you are 
 fortunate enough to possess one, in your dressing- 
 gown and slippers, you will not be aware, if you 
 are a new comer in the land, what brings the 
 blains and swellings on your instep, and all the 
 portions of the leg and foot of which the stocking 
 is the only defence. The cause is the mosquito. 
 He flies near the carpet, sees with microscopic eye 
 through the interstices of the woollen fabric, inserts 
 his tube of suction into the flesh, and draws out as 
 much blood as he needs for his thirst. If it ended 
 there, no great harm would be done ; but after he 
 has drunken at your expense, he drops a little 
 venom into the pore which he has opened: and 
 the result is irritation, which you are prompted to 
 
MOSQUITOES. 215 
 
 relieve by counter-irritation, and constantly increas- 
 ing inflammation of the envenomed part. The best 
 alleviator is spirits of hartshorn — a phial of which 
 most people who know the bane and antidote take 
 care to have in readiness both at bed and board. 
 As for me, I was compelled to relinquish the wearing 
 of slippers, and retain my boots to the last moment 
 before going to bed ; not exonerated even then from 
 the mosquitoes, which maliciously fastened upon the 
 space — if I sat cross-legged — between the top of 
 the boot and the trousers, and sucked and poisoned 
 at their will. Ladies, less protected, suffer more 
 than men in this respect. It is not to be under- 
 stood that the mosquitoes confine themselves to the 
 floor. They fly in every stratum from floor to roof; 
 and bite whenever they get a chance. At night, 
 sleep would be liable to painful disturbances, were 
 it not for the mosquito-nets, which envelop the 
 beds of all prudent sleepers. Even then, the diffi- 
 culty is to prevent a mosquito or two from getting 
 under the net while the bed is being made. If one 
 enters, there might as well be a hundred. The 
 evil is done ; and if the intruder be not expelled, 
 sleep is impossible. He peals a triumphal horn in 
 your ear as he settles upon your forehead ; and you 
 might almost as successfully attempt to catch a 
 flash of lightning in your hand, as to try to catch 
 a mosquito. 
 
216 FLIES AND 
 
 The only way to be freed of this persecution is 
 to hunt them by daylight. They generally settle 
 upon the walls and ceiling, where a sharp and ex- 
 perienced eye can readily detect them. The most 
 approved and successful mode of dealing with them 
 is to get a common hair broom, and tie over the 
 hair a wet cloth or towel, and dab the implement 
 suddenly against the mosquito. This kills him, and 
 does not alarm his fellows. With a little patience, 
 keeping the doors and windows closed meanwhile, 
 that none of the same tribe may enter, a careful 
 servant or housewife can effectually clear a bed- 
 room in ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, and 
 render sleep possible. In the Southern States the 
 mosquito is developed in the swamps into the galli- 
 nipper — a great torment of the human race, but a 
 greater torment to the brute creation. Sometimes 
 a horse or ox, engaged in agricultural work in the 
 fields, is clad in trousers — two pairs of course — to 
 guard its legs from this maddening scourge — the 
 driver himself being tolerably well protected if he 
 have a pipe in his mouth ; for both mosquito and 
 gallinipper detest the fumes of tobacco, and keep 
 at a respectable distance from an earnest smoker. 
 Pioneers in the wilderness, land-surveyors, geolo- 
 gists, naturalists, and others, who have to explore 
 new regions, become so accustomed and hardened 
 to the mosquitoes and gallinippers as to think little 
 
MOSQUITOES. 217 
 
 of them ; but it is the pipe or the cigar by day, 
 and the camp-fire by night, which keeps them at a 
 distance ; or no amount of familiarity with the 
 nuisance would ever reconcile anybody to its in- 
 fliction. But Europe and America, though subject 
 to pests like these, are comparatively happy. The 
 grievance, if great, is to be borne; and a galli- 
 nipper, atrocious as he is, is an angel of grace and 
 mercy compared with a fly called the seroot, which, 
 Sir Samuel White Baker tells us, infests Abyssinia. 
 " The animals," he says, " are almost worried to 
 death by the countless flies, especially by that 
 species that drives the camels from the country. 
 This peculiar fly is about the size of a wasp, with 
 an orange-coloured body, with black and white 
 rings ; the proboscis is terrific ; it is double, and 
 appears to be disproportioned, being two-thirds 
 the length of the entire insect. When this fly 
 attacks an animal or man, it pierces the skin in- 
 stantaneously, like the prick of a red-hot needle 
 driven deep into the flesh, at the same time the 
 insect exerts every muscle of its body by buzzing 
 with its wings as it buries the instrument to its 
 greatest depth. The blood starts from the wound 
 immediately, and continues to flow for a consider- 
 able time; this is an attraction to other flies in- 
 great numbers, many of which lay their eggs upon 
 the wound." 
 
218 
 
 FLIES AND MOSQUITOES. 
 
 Better to endure the ills we have, than fly to 
 others that we know not of. Better English flies 
 and gnats, better American mosquitoes and galli- 
 nippers, than such a flying fiend as the Abyssinian 
 seroot. 
 
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF HAND- SHAKING. 
 
 ANY people read character by the shape 
 of the skull; almost everybody intui- 
 tively and instinctively reads it in the 
 countenance ; some affect to be able to 
 discover it in the handwriting of persons whom they 
 have never seen ; while a few are of opinion that it 
 may be ascertained by the manner in which a man 
 shakes hands. Of all these modes of studying cha- 
 racter that of physiognomy is the most to be de- 
 pended upon. The soul is the source of all beauty, 
 and never deceives ; and the face upon which the 
 soul has imprinted an unpleasing expression may be 
 safely held to be the face of one who is, more or less, 
 deficient either in intellect or in virtue. Never- 
 theless — and as an aid to, and not a substitute for, 
 physiognomy — there is much to be said for hand- 
 shaking, as a means of deciding whether he or she 
 who offers or accepts this act of friendly courtesy, 
 is cold or warm-hearted, indifferent or cordial, sin- 
 
220 THE PHYSIOLOGY 
 
 cere or hypocritical, or whether he is really glad to 
 interchange courtesies with yon, or only pretends 
 to be so. 
 
 How did people first get into the habit of shaking 
 hands ? The answer is not far to seek. In early 
 and barbarons times, when every savage or semi- 
 savage was his own lawgiver, judge, soldier, and 
 policeman, and had to watch over his own safety, in 
 default of all other protection, two friends or ac- 
 quaintances, when they chanced to meet, offered 
 each to the other the right hand — the hand alike of 
 offence and defence, the hand that wields the sword, 
 the dagger, the club, the tomahawk, or other wea- 
 pon of war. Each did this to show that the hand 
 was empty, and that neither war nor treachery was 
 intended. A man cannot well stab another while 
 he is engaged in the act of shaking hands with him, 
 unless he be a double-dyed traitor and villain, and 
 strives to aim a cowardly blow with the left, while 
 giving the right and pretending to be on good 
 terms with his victim. The custom of hand- shaking 
 prevails, more or less, among all civilised nations, 
 and is the tacit avowal of friendship and goodwill, 
 just as the kiss is of a warmer passion. 
 
 " Give me your hand, you shall, you must ! I 
 love you as a brother ! " has been written of one 
 who was brave, noble, true - hearted, and not 
 ashamed of honest poverty in himself or others. 
 
OF HAND-SHAKING. 221 
 
 When two such persons meet, each knowing" the 
 good qualities of the other , the shake of the hand 
 which they give and receive may be considered the 
 perfection of all that this mode of salutation should 
 be — neither too warm nor too cold, but full of sym- 
 pathy and satisfaction. 
 
 Ladies, as every one must have remarked, seldom 
 or never shake hands with the cordiality of gentle- 
 men ; unless it be with each other. The reason is 
 obvious. It is for them to receive homage, not to 
 give it. They cannot be expected to show to per- 
 sons of the other sex, a warmth of greeting* which 
 might be misinterpreted ; unless such persons are 
 very closely related to them by family, or affection, 
 in which cases hand-shaking is not needed ; and the 
 lips do more agreeable duty. 
 
 Every man shakes hands according to his nature, 
 whether it be timid or aggressive, proud or humble, 
 courteous or churlish, vulgar or refined, sincere or 
 hypocritical ; enthusiastic or indifferent. The nicest 
 refinements and idiosyncracies of character may not 
 perhaps be discoverable in this fashion, but the more 
 salient points of temperament and individuality 
 may be made clear to the understanding of most 
 people by a better study of what I shall call the 
 physiology or the philosophy of hand-shaking. 
 
 Some people are too " robustious" to be altogether 
 pleasant. They take the offered hand with the grasp 
 
222 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF 
 
 of a vice, and as if they had with malice prepense, 
 resolved to squeeze all the delicate little bones of 
 your knuckles into pulp or mince meat. And while 
 the tears of agony come into your eyes, and run 
 down your cheeks, they smile at you benignantly, 
 like gentle giants, unconscious of their strength, 
 and of the tyranny with which they exercise it. 
 Many of them are truly good fellows, and mean all 
 the cordiality of which their awful squeeze is the 
 manifestation. They would exert all the strength 
 that goes to waste in such hand-shaking in rescuing 
 you from danger, if you were in it, or in doing 
 battle against your enemies, if you were assailed by 
 superior numbers. Yet when such seemingly cor- 
 dial good fellows manifest the same cordiality to- 
 wards people whom they met for the first time 
 yesterday, and towards those with whom they may 
 have been intimate for a half or a quarter of a cen- 
 tury, it is impossible to avoid a suspicion that they 
 act from habit, rather than from the ebullition of 
 heart, and that their mighty squeeze ought to be 
 taken quantum valeat. But of all the men to be 
 avoided, he who squeezes your hand in this excru- 
 ciating fashion, on a false pretence, is the worst. 
 He dislocates your joints to convince you of an un- 
 truth, that he loves you very dearly, and as soon as 
 you are out of sight, forgets you, or thinks that you 
 are no " great shakes" after all, or, worse still, 
 
HAND-SHAKING. 223 
 
 abuses you behind your back to the next acquain- 
 tance whom he meets. Hint, in his turn he serves 
 in the same manner, and gradually establishes for 
 himself the character, which he well deserves, of 
 being a snob and a humbug of a particularly offen- 
 sive type. 
 
 Another, and even more odious kind of hand- 
 shaker, is he who offers you his hand, but will not 
 permit you to get fair hold of it : 
 
 With finger tip he condescends 
 To touch the fingers of his friends, 
 As if he fear'd their palms might brand 
 Some moral stigma on his hand. 
 
 To be treated with the cool contempt, or supercilious 
 scorn which such a mode of salutation implies, is 
 worse than not to be saluted at all. Better a foe- 
 man, with whom you feel on terms of equality, than 
 an acquaintance — he cannot be called a friend — 
 who looks down upon you as if he were a superior 
 being, and will not admit your social equality with- 
 out a drawback and a discount. It sometimes hap- 
 pens, however, that this result is due to the diffidence 
 of the shakee rather than to the pride of the shaker. 
 If a timid man will not hold his hand out far enough 
 to enable another to grasp it fairly, it is his own 
 fault, and betrays a weakness in his own character, 
 and not a defect in that of him who would be 
 friendly with him. 
 
224 TEE PHYSIOLOGY OF 
 
 Another hand- shaker whose method is intolerable, 
 and with whom it is next to impossible to remain 
 on friendly terms, is the one who offers yon one 
 finger instead of five, as mnch as to say I am. 
 either too pre-occnpied in myself, or think too little 
 of yon, to give yon my whole hand. With such 
 a man the interchange of any bnt the barest and 
 scantiest courtesy is rendered difficult. Friend- 
 ship is wholly out of the question. 
 
 To give the left hand to the man who offers you 
 his right, or to present the left hand for the purpose 
 of a friendly greeting is a piece of discourtesy — 
 sometimes intentional on the part of superiors in 
 rank to their inferiors, and an act that no true 
 gentleman will commit. There is no reason why it 
 should be considered more discourteous, than it 
 would be to kiss the left cheek instead of the right ; 
 but doubtless the custom that makes the right hand 
 imperative in all sincere salutation dates from those 
 early times when hand-shaking first began ; and the 
 hand that shook or was shaken in friendship was of 
 necessity weaponless. The poor left hand, that one 
 would think ought to be of as much value and 
 strength as the right, just as the left foot or leg is 
 as strong as the right foot or leg because they are 
 both used equally, has fallen into disrepute as well 
 as into comparative disuse, until it has become an 
 accepted phrase to say of any proceeding that is 
 
HAND-SHAKING. 225 
 
 inauspicious, artful, sly, or secretly malicious, that 
 it is " sinister" — that is, left handed. 
 
 To shake hands without removing the glove is 
 an act of discourtesy, which, if unintentional and 
 thoughtless, requires an apology for the hurry or 
 inadvertence which led to it. This idea would also 
 seem to be an occult remnant of the old notion that 
 the glove might conceal a weapon. Hence true 
 courtesy and friendship required that the hand 
 should be naked as a proof of good faith. 
 
 To be " hand and glove " with any one is a pro- 
 verbial expression, of which the meaning is not 
 obvious, though possibly it may signify such a 
 degree of confidence, intimacy, and familiarity be- 
 tween the parties as to make it certain that the 
 gloved hand is as free from an offensive weapon as 
 the ungloved. 
 
 To refuse pointedly to shake hands with one who 
 offers you the opportunity in a friendly manner 
 amounts to a declaration of hostility. And after a 
 quarrel — or act of open hostility — the acceptance 
 of the hand offered is alike the sign and the 
 ratification of peace. 
 
 The nations of continental Europe are scarcely 
 so much addicted to hand-shaking as the English, 
 while the English in this respect are far less de- 
 monstrative and apparently cordial than the Ameri- 
 cans, who shake hands with one another from 
 
 Q 
 
226 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF 
 
 morning to night, if even the slightest excuse or 
 opportunity arises. " Since my arrival in the 
 United States/' wrote the late Mr. Smith O'Brien, 
 " I have been surrounded by crowds of well-wishers, 
 whose greatest desire seemed to be to shake hands 
 with me. In Ireland this practice does not prevail, 
 but here it seems to be a universal custom." All 
 travellers are equally struck with the undue pre- 
 valence of this custom, as they cannot fail to be 
 after they have been a few days in the country. 
 The stranger, if a man of any eminence or renown, 
 is often introduced to forty or fifty people at a time, 
 and to omit to shake hands with any one of them 
 would be an act of disrespect. And even the Irish 
 and German waiters at the great hotels expect you 
 to shake hands with them, on your second arrival, 
 if they happen to remember your face or name, or 
 have received a gratuity at your hands for their 
 previous services or attentions. And you must 
 shake hands with the dirty as well as with the clean, 
 and with your tailor or shoemaker, equally as with 
 the man who invites you to dinner. 
 
 One of the greatest penalties attached to the by 
 no means enviable office of president, is the 
 stupendous amount of hand-shaking which that 
 functionary has to undergo. The late good-natured 
 President Lincoln was a serious sufferer, though it 
 must be confessed that he often gave some too im- 
 
HAND-SHAKING. 227 
 
 portunate hand- shaker such a squeeze of his power- 
 ful grasp as made him wince, and remember him 
 with pain for a few hours after the infliction of his 
 cordiality. Both he and other occupants of his 
 uneasy and thankless office have, on New Year's 
 Day, especially, and on many other occasions, to 
 undergo an amount of hand-shaking, sufficient al- 
 most to wrench the arm off, or at least to make it 
 ache for a fortnight afterwards. Five or six thou- 
 sand people of all ranks and classes of men — from 
 the polite European ambassadors and diplomatic 
 agents at Washington — and the legislators, bankers, 
 merchants, lawyers, newspaper editors and re- 
 porters, the military and naval officers, down to the 
 common soldiers and sailors, and, lower still, down 
 to the very rowdies and roughs of the street, are all 
 admitted without the intervention of a gold stick or 
 any other kind of stick, or a black or a white rod, 
 or any kind of usher or introduction, and in any 
 costume they please, even in that of the navvy with 
 his heavy boots and his working jacket, or the 
 sweep with the soot still on his face; — though it 
 must be admitted as a rule that the rowdies, the 
 sweeps, and the navvies, put on their best clothes 
 on such great occasions. All of them pass through 
 the reception hall, and each expects to shake hands 
 with the chief magistrate. 
 
 To shake five thousand hands in succession, and 
 
228 PHYSIOLOGY OF HAND -SHAKING. 
 
 to betray no indifference or want of cordiality in 
 the mode of doing it — to even the humblest of the 
 owners of the hands — is no easy task, either 
 physically or mentally. Were not ambition more 
 powerful to impel a man to seek high station than 
 love of formal ease, to keep him comfortable in a 
 lower walk of life, it is possible that many an aspiring 
 politician, after he has become president, would 
 gladly resign the office, to escape the hardships and 
 inflictions — the hand-shaking not the least of them 
 — that must be accepted along with it, like the 
 thorns with the roses. 
 
 I have nothing' to say against hand-shaking. It 
 is pleasant to touch the hand of an honest man or 
 woman, and to be on such terms of acquaintanceship 
 with either of these masterpieces of creation, as to 
 justify you in the thought that you are their equal ; 
 and that a moral sympathy may flow from you to 
 them, or from them to you. Even to grasp the 
 paw of an honest and intelligent dog, who holds it 
 up for you to shake, on being asked to do so, is 
 something. For the dog, unlike some men, would 
 scorn to give his paw to one, in whose eye, and in 
 whose face, he, by his fine instinct, in some respects 
 the equal, if not the superior, of reason, discovered 
 treachery or evil. 
 
THE LEFT HAND : A PLEA FOB, THE 
 NEGLECTED. 
 
 § T may be Quixotic ; but I must do battle 
 in behalf of my Dulcinea. In this 
 age, it is said that there is no wrong 
 without a remedy. This I deny. I am 
 positive, however, that there is no wrong, great or 
 small, which, when pointed out, will not elicit a 
 groan from somebody — or impel some philan- 
 thropist — or it may be, some mere grumbler, to 
 wag his tongue or dip his pen in ink, to set forth 
 their grievances. It is not only the wronged but 
 the neglected that find friends in our days. We 
 redress, or strive to redress, the wrongs of history. 
 Has not Richard the Third had his defenders and 
 advocates ? Has not Jack Cade been proved to be 
 a gentleman ? Has not Macbeth been whitewashed 
 of the crime of murder ? and have not even those 
 despised little creatures the toads, been taken 
 
230 THE LEFT RAND. 
 
 under tlie protection of philosophers, relieved of 
 the charge of being poisonous and disgusting rep- 
 tiles,, and recognized as the harmless fellow-labourers 
 of the gardener and cultivator ; a friend who de- 
 vours for him the too prolific insects that consume 
 the tender roots and shoots of his vegetables ? 
 And as for the neglected portions of the human 
 race, do not the British Parliament and the British 
 press continually ring and overflow with their sor- 
 rows, and with the woful catalogue of the dangers 
 that will or may afflict society if justice be not 
 done ? The wrongs of children, the wrongs of 
 women, the wrongs of paupers, the wrongs of 
 lunatics — the wrongs of dumb animals — find zealous 
 tongues and printing presses to set them forth ; 
 but I look in vain for any one to say a word on 
 behalf of my client — a client in whose condition 
 and treatment the whole human race is interested ; 
 men and women, old and young*, the wise and the 
 unwise, the civilized and the savage, in every clime 
 and country under the sun. As I said before, it 
 may be Quixotic in me. But I wage battle in 
 defence of my Dulcinea, the Left Hand. 
 
 How is it that this excellent member of the 
 human body is treated with an amount of neglect 
 and injustice greater than is bestowed on any 
 other ? We make no distinction in our favours 
 between the right eye and the left. The one can 
 
THE LEFT HAND. 231 
 
 see as well as the other ; and the left eye can appre- 
 ciate the charms of a lovely woman or a beautiful 
 landscape as well as the right. The left ear is as 
 acutely susceptible of the sounds of pleasure or of 
 pain as the right ; and the left nostril scents the 
 perfume of rose and lily as completely as its twin- 
 brother on the other side of the face. In walking, the 
 left leg does as much duty as the right ; and I have 
 yet to learn that there is any difference between the 
 left foot and the right, when they are alternately 
 planted on the ground, either in running, leaping, 
 or walking ; and whether they do not equally well 
 sustain the whole weight of the body, when the 
 body requires their support. But, between the 
 right hand and the left there is an appreciable 
 difference — a difference which I maintain to be the 
 work of art, of prejudice, of habit, and of igno- 
 rance ; and not of nature. It is true that the doctors 
 sometimes tell us that the position of the heart on 
 the left side of the body renders it desirable that 
 we should not use the left hand so frequently and 
 so constantly as the right, lest we should, somehow 
 or other, damage, or weary, or interfere with the 
 action of that most important organ. This is a state- 
 ment which I, for one, should feel more inclined to 
 respect, if the same reasoning were applied to the 
 left leg. But the doctors do not go this length ; 
 and, with all deference to their superior knowledge 
 
232 THE LEFT HAND. 
 
 of anatomy and physiology, I am unconvinced and 
 incredulous on this subject, and think that the 
 heart is made the scapegoat of a weakness of which 
 it is not guilty ^ and that the left hand is the inno- 
 cent victim of an unreasonable delusion. 
 
 The name in England of this neglected member 
 of the human form divine is highly suggestive of 
 the wrong committed against it. It is called the 
 " left " because it is left out of the proper course of 
 work and business ; left out of consideration ; left 
 to neglect, and even to scorn. The Eomans called 
 it " sinister," the French call it " gauche/' and the 
 Germans <{ links "j none of which words convey the 
 English meaning of abandonment. But, on the 
 principle, too often and too commonly at work in 
 the world, of giving a dog a bad name and then 
 hanging him, the word sinister, applied to the poor 
 left hand, has come to signify any course of pro- 
 ceeding that is dark, wicked, or malignant. A 
 man with a " sinister " expression of countenance 
 is held to be the reverse of amiable or agreeable ; 
 and a u sinister " report, or rumour, is one that is 
 laden with evil. To do a thing " over the left " 
 means not to do it ; a " left-handed " compliment 
 is an insult in disguise ; and a ' c left-handed mar- 
 riage " is either no marriage at all, or a marriage 
 which the lord of the creation who contracts it is 
 much too high and mighty to avow. The " bar- 
 
THE LEFT HAND. 233 
 
 sinister " in heraldry signifies illegitimacy ; and 
 " left " being in one sense the opposite of " right/' 
 has been held, with the grossest injustice, to be 
 that other opposite of right which is designated as 
 i( wrong." When a man or woman is unfortunately 
 in the position of a witness in a Court of Justice, he 
 or she is told to hold the Bible in the right hand, 
 before kissing the Book — as if the left would 
 vitiate the sanctity of the oath. The Mahomedans 
 in a similar spirit, will not even touch the Koran 
 with the left hand, on the most ordinary occasions. 
 Poor left hand ! 
 
 All faculties of mind and body suffer impairment 
 and diminution from disease. ~No man or woman 
 in civilized society can turn his or her ears back- 
 wards and forwards to catch a sound in either 
 direction, as all wild animals can who live in 
 a state of constant alarm or danger from their 
 enemies. The savage Aborigines of the American 
 continent, and other wild tribes in every part of 
 the world, where men are compelled to rely upon 
 their own vigilance and strength for protection 
 against opponents, possess this faculty, which their 
 European and other compeers, accustomed to rely 
 upon the law and upon the police for their security 
 against aggression, have completely lost. In like 
 manner the blind, who are deprived of the most 
 precious of all the faculties, are endowed with 
 
234 TEE LEFT HAND. 
 
 a more exquisite sensibility of touch, and hearing, 
 than people who can see, simply because they are 
 driven by painful necessity to cultivate and make the 
 most of such faculties as remain to them. One who 
 is deprived of bis right hand, very speedily learns 
 to use the left, and to apply it to every purpose 
 of dexterity or skill, till he makes it as efficient as 
 its fellow. Children, when they first begin to take 
 notice of the world in which they live, so commonly 
 use both hands alike, that they have to be corrected 
 by their parents and nurses, and to be taught syste- 
 matically to give the right hand the preference in 
 conveying the food to their mouths, and never to 
 let the left hand do that which it is the custom of 
 society to perform with the right. We are told in 
 the Book of Judges, that during the fearful civil 
 war between Israel and the tribe of Benjamin, there 
 were seven hundred chosen men of the latter who 
 were left-handed, and that every one of these 
 warriors could " sling stones at an hair's breadth, 
 and not miss." Thus each man was worth two in 
 battle, because he had been trained to make his left 
 hand equal to his right. If seven hundred men 
 could have been thus educated, why not seven 
 thousand, or seven hundred thousand, or the whole 
 human race ? There is no reason, but habit, pre- 
 judice, and fashion; for the doctor's reason, apropos 
 of the heart, I shall take the liberty of considering 
 
THE LEFT HAND. 235 
 
 to be unfounded until it shall be satisfactorily 
 proved in the case of any left-handed man or 
 woman, that the action of his or her heart has 
 been injuriously affected by his or her ambi-dex- 
 terity. 
 
 Of course all argument is vain on this subject. 
 The old cannot learn, and the young will not. Be- 
 sides, it may be replied that, all things considered, 
 the world gets on very well as it is, although it 
 only uses one half of the manual skill with which 
 Nature has endowed the lordly race that has subdued 
 and replenished it. All this is true. Yet did not 
 the world get on very well with oil-lamps, stage- 
 coaches, Margate hoys, and the semaphore, and 
 without gas, railways, steam-ships, and the electric 
 telegraph ? Let us be contented, however, and let 
 us rejoice that fashion and prejudice have not done 
 to the left eye, the left ear, the left nostril, the left 
 leg, and the left foot, the injustice they have done 
 to the left hand. 
 
 And, after all, the whirligig of fashion and pre- 
 judice has its revenge as well as the whirligig of 
 Time. If the male half of the world does such in- 
 justice to itself as to sacrifice fifty per cent, of its 
 working power, the female half of the world takes 
 up the co-equal limb that has been scorned, and 
 makes it a beauty and a joy for ever. On the 
 fourth finger of the hand which is not so greatly in 
 
236 THE LEFT HAND. 
 
 danger of collision with the hard facts and hard im- 
 plements of toil, as the hand that does the daily 
 work of the world, the woman places the symbol of 
 marriage, the plain gold ring, which it is the glory 
 of a trne woman to be privileged to wear ; happiest 
 of all the happy she, if conjugal love on her part, 
 and that of her husband, be as unalloyed with false- 
 hood and change as the pure gold is with dross ; 
 and if the circle of their mutual confidence and 
 affection be as complete, and without a break in its 
 continuity, as the little circle which on the long 
 wished-for bridal morn her spouse placed upon her 
 finger. It is a variety of the same old medical 
 superstition, that has so largely helped to bring the 
 left hand into disuse among mankind, that has 
 helped the better and fairer half of mankind to 
 make amends for the injustice done it. " The wed- 
 ding ring," says an ancient author, " is worn on 
 the fourth finger of the left hand, because it was 
 formerly believed that a small artery ran from this 
 finger to the heart. This," he adds, "is contra- 
 dicted by experience ; but several eminent authors, 
 as well Gentiles as Christians, as well physicians as 
 divines, were formerly of this opinion 3 and, there- 
 fore, they thought this finger the properest to bear 
 this pledge of love, that from thence it might be 
 conveyed, as it were, to the heart. Levinus Lem- 
 nius, speaking of the ring finger, says that a small 
 
TEE LEFT EANB. 237 
 
 branch of the artery and not of the nerve, as Gellius 
 thought, is stretched forth from the heart to this 
 finger, the motion whereof, you may perceive, evi- 
 dently in all this affects the heart in woman by the 
 touch of your fore-finger. I used to raise such as 
 were fallen in a swoon by pinching this joint, and 
 by rubbing the ring of gold with a little saffron, for 
 by this a restoring force passeth to the heart, and 
 refresheth the fountain of life with which the finger 
 is joined. Wherefore antiquity thought fit to com- 
 pass it about with gold." 
 
 In our day the rubbing* of the gold ring with a 
 new dress, or with a set of diamonds, might possibly 
 be more effective than the rubbing with saffron. 
 But let that pass. The right hand may be given in 
 marriage, but as far as the ladies are concerned, it 
 is the left hand that confirms and seals the bargain. 
 
A GEEAT AND A MIGHTY CITY. 
 
 HE great and mighty city of which I am 
 about to narrate a few particulars is 
 neither London nor Paris,, nor New 
 York, nor Pekin, but a far more popu- 
 lous city than any of them. London and its sub- 
 urbs may contain between three and four millions 
 of people, Paris half the number, New York about 
 a third, and Pekin about as many as London, per- 
 haps a million or two more, for we can never tell 
 how the Orientals reckon, or whether a million in 
 their fervent imaginations may not sometimes do 
 duty for a tenth part of the number. But my city, 
 considering the size of its inhabitants, is relatively 
 larger, and positively more populous than any of 
 them, or perhaps the whole of them combined. Its 
 inhabitants are industrious and intelligent, and not 
 only know how to build cities, but how to govern 
 them. My city stands upon the top of a hill, 
 within twenty-five miles to the south west of 
 
A GREAT AND MIGETY CITY. 239 
 
 London. Geographers make no mention of it. 
 The county historians know it not. In vain would 
 the eye of a traveller seek to obtain a glimpse of it 
 from afar. Not a trace of it is to be seen from the 
 railway station that stands within a mile of its 
 multitudinous domes (towers and steeples it has 
 none) , and he who wants to pay it a visit must look 
 very carefully about him before he can discover it. 
 Around it are thick woods and plantations of box, 
 juniper, and beech, and on the comparatively bare 
 summit of the hill on which it stands are acres of 
 fern and bracken, mingled with patches of purple 
 heather that would do no discredit to the breezy 
 slopes of Ben Lomond. The domes constructed by 
 the inhabitants range from one to two feet in 
 height, and look like diminutive wigwams. Some 
 of them are of fresh earth, recently turned up, and 
 others are old and overgrown with the short grass 
 and moss of many summers. Not a sound audible 
 to human ears is heard in these populous parishes, 
 for each dome may be considered a parish, or a 
 borough, of this very great city ; and during the 
 winter months, from November to April, not only 
 is there no sound, but no motion, or sign of life. 
 Within it all the busy millions compose themselves 
 for hybernation when the leaves begin to fall from 
 the trees, and sleep snugly and comfortably, without 
 waking or even turning in their beds. But though 
 
240 A GREAT AND 
 
 beneath the sod, and accessible to the influences of 
 the frost, the frost only makes their drowsiness the 
 more dense ; and if by chance — but there is no 
 chance in these matters — they were as deeply en- 
 sconced in the bosom of mother earth as to be 
 unsusceptible of the winter's cold, they would also 
 be unsusceptible of the summer sunshine, and fail 
 to awake at the time appointed. This never happens. 
 When the soft, warm rains of spring penetrate into 
 the ground, and the trees and flowers begin to 
 spread forth their tender shoots to the warm sun, 
 the teeming population of the city turn in their 
 beds, burst into renewed life and activity, and 
 begin to devote themselves to their customary 
 avocations — to marry and be given in marriage, 
 and, it must be added,, to develop e schemes of am- 
 bition and conquest, and to lay the foundations, just 
 as England is doing in a different way, though with 
 possibly the same animating motives, of new colonies 
 and empires. These industrious creatures, who 
 possess some of the intelligence and a good many of 
 the vices of humanity, for they are exceedingly war- 
 like and quarrelsome, are the ants, the emmets, or 
 the formicans, whose singular civilisation and mode 
 of life have been observed with curiosity by natu- 
 ralists in all ages, and more especially by Huber, a 
 German philosopher of the last century, who de- 
 voted the best part of his life to the study. Huber 
 
A MIGHTY CITY. 241 
 
 is their historian and philosopher, and all subsequent 
 inquirers but confirm his facts and strengthen his 
 opinions. 
 
 One noticeable thing about the ants — though it 
 is not peculiar to them, but is shared with many- 
 other creatures — is that they are utterly insensible 
 of the presence of mankind. They neither see nor 
 hear him, nor are in any way conscious of his 
 existence,, though it is quite evident from their 
 actions that they are endowed with the senses of 
 sight and feeling, and possibly of smell and hearing, 
 and that they have a means of communicating to 
 one another their wants and ideas. But man is 
 utterly beyond their sphere. Even when he ruth- 
 lessly pulls down or otherwise disturbs them in 
 their haunts, or levels with the ground the domes 
 of their cities, they are not aware of what or who 
 their enemy is, though they feel and are alarmed at 
 the physical force which the unknown power exer- 
 cises to their detriment. If a bulky monster a 
 thousand feet high, and stout in proportion, were 
 to walk through Hyde Park, all the human emmets 
 of Tyburnia and Belgravia would be aware of his 
 perilous presence, and strive to get out of his way ; 
 but if I or any other human creature cross the line 
 of march of an army of formicans — which I for one 
 have often done — they take no notice of the mons- 
 trous apparition, which is to them invisible. They 
 
 E 
 
242 A GREAT AND 
 
 cannot see an inch before their mandibles, and the 
 great foot of humanity may tread thousands of 
 them to death without causing the least alarm in 
 the multitudes immediately before or behind the 
 moving mountain that makes such terrible havoc. 
 But if any one will take a spade or a stick, and 
 penetrate into one of their mounds, or domes, the 
 busy agile community will understand that there is 
 danger abroad, and the whole surface thus exposed 
 to the light will immediately swarm with many 
 thousands of the little black and brown creatures, 
 all running hither and thither in the most palpable 
 alarm, and each bearing a cocoon bigger than itself , 
 in which a baby emmet is awaiting the next stage 
 of its development into maturity. It was formerly 
 believed by unscientific and careless observers, in 
 modern as well as ancient times, that these cocoons 
 were grains of corn, to which in shape as well as 
 size they bear a great resemblance; and that the 
 ants, when disturbed, were not so much alarmed 
 for their lives as for the safety of their winter pro- 
 vender. But, as the ants sleep all the winter, and 
 require no food, another explanation was required, 
 and science discovered the fact that this grain-like 
 treasure is no other than the rising generation of 
 formicans, and that each adult member of the com- 
 munity enacts in these seasons of peril the part of 
 the Eoman matron, who considered children the 
 
A MIGHTY CITY. 243 
 
 first objects of her care, and more valuable than all 
 the treasures and jewels of the world. 
 
 The citizens of this " great and mighty city/' on 
 the top of the hill, who know nothing of man and 
 his ways, are not, like the human race, divided into 
 two sexes — but into three. In this respect the ants 
 resemble the bees, among whom, also, there are 
 three sexes, or perhaps, more properly speaking, 
 two sexes ; and one, by far the larger part of the 
 community, which is sexless and unprolific. Both 
 the males and females are comparatively few in 
 number ; and during the short period of their hey- 
 day and prime of life, are very much respected and 
 pampered by the barren and hard-working majority. 
 The males and females are the aristocracy of the 
 republic. Like the lilies of the field, " they toil not, 
 neither do they spin." They enjoy a short life and 
 a merry one; are the pets and favourites of the 
 multitudes during their short appointed time ; are 
 endowed with many privileges and marks of honour ; 
 until they have done all that Nature intended they 
 should do, when they are solemnly, perhaps reveren- 
 tially, put to death, as being of no further use to 
 the state of Formica. The male aristocrat possesses 
 four wings ; the female possesses only two, smaller 
 than those of the males, and lose even these at the 
 end of the period of their maternity ; and the mules, 
 neuters, sexless, nursing, and laborious ants, which 
 
244 A GREAT AND 
 
 are without wings altogether. But though the male 
 ants doubtless think themselves very fine with their 
 double set of beautiful gauze-like wings, they are 
 something like the jeunesse doree among men, who 
 can neither provide for their own subsistence, nor 
 defend themselves when attacked. They have 
 neither mandibles nor stings: consequently, they 
 either die of neglect when their function is per- 
 formed, or are stung to death by the working- 
 classes. Who among us would be a (c swell " at 
 such a price ? The female ants are peculiar in the 
 matter of their single pair of wings. However 
 valuable or ornamental these may be in the happy 
 period of their courtship and marriage, they appear 
 to be incumbrances, or of no account, when mater- 
 familias has grown old. She discards them (which 
 dowagers in human life do not always do with their 
 finery, when they have fallen into the sear and 
 yellow leaf ) ; and makes a considerable and possibly 
 painful effort to be rid of them. "This curious 
 process which," says a writer in the Penny Cyclo- 
 paedia, "was first hinted at by Gould in his in- 
 teresting account of English ants, we have re- 
 peatedly witnessed ; the females extending their 
 wings, bringing them over their heads, crossing 
 them in every direction, and throwing them from 
 side to side, till at length they are disjointed from 
 the body and fall off. Those who are desirous of 
 
A MIGHTY CITY. 245 
 
 verifying the observation must procure winged 
 females immediately after pairing, and place them 
 under a glass with some moist earth." 
 
 In the construction of their mounds or ant-hills 
 — a duty which is left to the neutral or sexless for- 
 micans, and with which the males and females have 
 nothing to do — a great deal of skill, ingenuity, and 
 perseverance is displayed. The formica fusca, or 
 yellow ant, constructs a mound of earth, which it 
 raises to the height of a foot or more above the soil, 
 with a diameter varying from six inches to two feet, 
 according to the number of the population, and the 
 space required for their accommodation. They 
 quarry out the earth with their mandibles, always 
 choosing rainy weather for the purpose, lest the 
 dry and too friable soil should tumble in upon their 
 avenues and passages, and block up their cells or 
 houses. The formica rufa, or wood ant, builds his 
 cities and mounds in a different style, and may be 
 considered more of a carpenter than of a mason. 
 He collects small twigs, sticks, straws, and stalks of 
 grass and bent, with which he builds up a dome 
 that is doubtless as large, imposing, and magnifi- 
 cent to his eyes, as the domes of St. Paul's or St. 
 Peter's are to the eyes of mankind. In the interior 
 of one of them, about three feet high and three feet 
 in diameter, there is accommodation for about as 
 many formicans as there is accommodation in Paris* 
 
246 A GREAT AND 
 
 for Parisians. If the population become too great 
 for the space, and press upon the means of subsis- 
 tence, as in England, Ireland, and Germany, the 
 formicans, whether they be red, black or yellow, 
 resort to emigration — to an America of their own 
 — and a swarm of workers set forth, taking care to 
 carry some aristocratic males and females along* 
 with them. In due time a new dome, either of 
 earth or twigs, according to the nature and instinct 
 of the tribe, is reared by the colony. Another 
 and another succeeds, just as suburb after suburb is 
 added to London, or state after state to the Ameri- 
 can Union, in which these wonderful little folk live 
 the lives that all- wise and all - bounteous Nature 
 intended. 
 
 The care of the young among them, as among 
 their human superiors, is a very important matter, 
 and is entirely left to the sexless or nursing ants. 
 Paterfamilias dies and makes no sign. Materfami- 
 lias, after she has laid her eggs, cares very little 
 about them, even if she cares at all, which some ob- 
 servers have doubted. The working ant, however, 
 comes to the rescue — and lest the city should be 
 depopulated, after they themselves have ceased to 
 be, look after the prospects of a new generation 
 with the greatest care and tenderness. The ant 
 eggs, unlike those of other insects, do not adhere 
 by their viscidity to any fixed place, but lie loosely 
 
A MIGHTY CITY. 247 
 
 in parcels of eight or ten. In fine weather, when it 
 is not too hot, it is the duty of the nursing ants to 
 remove the eggs to the top of the mound or the 
 hillock, for the sake of the vivifying warmth of the 
 sun, and to carefully remove them inside at night, 
 if the weather threatens to be cold and stormy. 
 When the eggs are hatched into grubs, the nurses 
 feed them with a liquid which they disgorge from 
 the stomach. It is when this duty has to be per- 
 formed that ants become most voracious. They 
 seem to share with man, the sparrow, and the 
 ostrich, the faculty of being omnivorous. They 
 will make their way into the heart of apples, pears, 
 and other fruits that have fallen upon the ground, 
 and into strawberries that have not fallen, but are 
 conveniently grown within their reach. They will 
 pick bones of beef, mutton, and poultry, and by no 
 means disdain fresh fish, or red herring. They will 
 eat bread, sugar, or any other waifs and strays of a 
 household ; or if they be not near a household, and 
 no such dainties are attainable, they will perform 
 the part that the crab plays in the sea, and eat the 
 dead bodies of beetles and other insects, or such 
 animals of the woods that come in their way ; and 
 will soon leave the bones of a dead mouse, mole, or 
 squirrel, as bare as a specimen in the British Mu- 
 seum. Their favourite food, however, seems to be 
 honey, and those juicy portions of flowers which the 
 
248 A GREAT AND 
 
 bee selects for the manufacture of this article. They 
 are also partial to " honey-dew/' x which, by the 
 way, has no relation to honey, but is a sweet filmy 
 substance ejected and thinly spread over the leaves 
 of many plants by the aphis, or puceron, of which 
 there are many varieties, some of which infest the 
 rose, some the hop, some the cabbage, some the 
 turnip, and all of which are known under the gene- 
 ric appellation of "fly," or "blight.'-' When the 
 grubs, after a due course of feeding by the nurses, 
 have grown large and strong enough for the pur- 
 pose, they set to work and spin for themselves a 
 "cocoon," before mentioned, about as large as a 
 barleycorn, in which they lie dormant until the time 
 comes when they are to ( ' burst their cerements " 
 and become complete formicans, entitled to all the 
 rights of citizenship in the republic. But even in 
 this the last stage of their adolescence, the care of 
 the nurses is not withheld. Whether the cocoons 
 contain males, females, or neuters, it is all the same 
 to the busy little working creatures ; they are ants, 
 
 1 Coleridge, in his beautiful Dream Poem of " Kubla 
 Khan," seems to have had but vague notions of honey-dew, 
 when he exclaims 
 
 Weave a circle round him thrice, 
 
 And close your eyes with holy dread : 
 For he on honey-dew hath fed, 
 
 And drank the milk of Paradise ! 
 
A MIGHTY CITY. 249 
 
 whatever they may be, and if they are too weakly, 
 as often happens,, to make their way out of their tem- 
 porary grave-clothes, the affectionate and anxious 
 nurses bite holes in the cocoon, by means of which 
 the imprisoned captives may emerge into life, light, 
 and liberty. After this process, each individual 
 has to shift for itself, subject to the unalterable 
 laws of the community, and become a male or a 
 female aristocrat, or a member of the working- 
 classes, as Fate and Nature intended. 
 
 It is well established by the researches of Huber, 
 and confirmed by the observations of other philoso- 
 phers and students during the last hundred years, 
 that the formican republics not only make war 
 against each other, for purposes surmised rather 
 than known, most probably for no better reason 
 than those which prevail among men — difference 
 of tribe, race, or colour ; but that when their own 
 working classes diminish unduly from disease or 
 accident, they invade the neighbouring mounds and 
 hillocks, and, if successful in their aggression, take 
 the vanquished into captivity, and compel them to 
 aid the victors in the every- day work of the state. 
 And they not only make war for the sake of obtain- 
 ing adolescent or adult captives, but they form ex- 
 peditions to carry off the cocoons of a community 
 that has been more prolific than their own. The 
 battles of the ants have often been described. Those 
 
250 A GREAT AND 
 
 who are curious to learn more about them will find 
 information in all the encyclopaedias, as well as in 
 the writings of the worthy Huber, who nearly 
 seventy years ago first gave to the world the re- 
 sults of his studies on the formicans, and enabled 
 the encyclopedists to draw upon him for stores of 
 information which, but for his reverential curiosity 
 and patient assiduity, might never have been known 
 or suspected. 
 
 Instead of going over this old ground, which 
 possibly may be familiar to many who read these 
 lines, let me describe what I myself saw among a 
 colony of wood ants, or formica rufa, to which 
 nothing similar is recorded by Huber or the en- 
 cyclopaedists. The battles of the ants, and the 
 building of their cities, their care for the perpetua- 
 tion of the race, are facts of every- day occurrence, 
 and may be seen by all who have the time or the 
 taste for such small, but highly interesting studies. 
 My experience was accidental, and perhaps all the 
 more curious on that account, and what I saw, 
 proves the possession of something more than in-. 
 stinct, and of something very much like reason, in 
 these strange little beings. I stayed for a day and 
 night a few summers ago at the little inn of 
 Rowardennan in Dumbartonshire, at the foot of 
 Ben Lomond, of which, with two companions, I 
 proposed to make the ascent at the first favourable 
 
A MIGHTY CITY. 251 
 
 opportunity. We walked out in the evening after 
 dinner, proposing to scale the sublime altitudes of 
 the Ben in the morning, if the day promised to be 
 fair, and on the skirt of a large plantation of larch 
 and fir, we came suddenly upon a very large ant- 
 hill, surrounded at short distances by several others, 
 somewhat smaller than itself. It was composed 
 mainly of twigs, straw, and pine spiculse, and 
 swarmed with insect life. Poking our walking- 
 sticks into the top of the mound, and laying bare 
 the upper surface, the formicans, who, up till then 
 had been wholly unaware of our presence, began to 
 understand that calamity had come upon them. 
 Betaking themselves, as is their wont, to the care 
 of the young, countless thousands of them suddenly 
 appeared, each carrying a cocoon much bigger than 
 itself, which it was evidently anxious to deposit in 
 some place out of the reach of danger, which, al- 
 though they could not comprehend, they knew to 
 be both formidable and imminent. Such a hurry 
 skurry, such a running to and fro, such a getting 
 up and down-stairs, as the song says, such a com- 
 motion could scarcely have been known even at 
 Brussels on the memorable night of the ball on the 
 eve of the great battle of Waterloo, when it was 
 suddenly announced to the officers of the allied 
 armies that the French were advancing upon the 
 city. 
 
252 A GREAT AND 
 
 When throng'd the citizens with terror dumb, 
 Or whispering with white lips, " The foe — -they come ! 
 they come!" 
 
 We all looked on with interested curiosity, and 
 one of my companions having finished his first 
 cigar, drew a box of lucifers from his pocket, and 
 leisurely proceeded to light a second. This done,, 
 he carelessly threw the burning match upon the 
 ant-hill. It was an act as cruel as it would have 
 been in Lemuel Gulliver had that mountainous 
 traveller wilfully set fire to the city of Lilliput. 
 The formicans were- for an instant confused, and 
 appeared to know not what to do. But their per- 
 plexity was of short duration. In less than half a 
 minute scores and hundreds of ants rushed upon 
 the blazing beam — for such it must have appeared 
 in their eyes — and exerting their strength simul- 
 taneously upon it, endeavoured to thrust it from 
 their city. Many of them were burned to death in 
 the gallant endeavour, but the survivors, nothing 
 daunted, pressed forward over their dead or writh- 
 ing bodies, as if conscious that there was no safety 
 for those who still lived as long as the awful com- 
 bustible was permitted to blaze and crackle in the 
 midst of them. I was apprehensive that the whole 
 mound, built as it was of dry twigs, would take fire ; 
 but the mists had lain upon the mountain and the 
 valley, the air was moist, and the flame of the 
 
A MIGHTY CITY. 253 
 
 match burnt upwards. Onwards rushed the reso- 
 lute firemen, score upon score, hundred upon 
 hundred, till at last they rolled the match over 
 and over, and out of their precincts, charred and 
 blackened, and incapable of further mischief. We 
 all, more or less, mistrusted our eyes, and the 
 youngest, most thoughtless, and therefore the most 
 cruel, of our company, suggested that if there were 
 intelligence and design on the "part of the ants in 
 acting as we supposed they had done, there would 
 be no harm in making a second experiment. No 
 sooner said than done. Another match was ignited 
 and thrown upon the heap, and again, precisely as 
 on the first occasion, the ants rushed pell-mell upon 
 the blazing intruder, to prevent a conflagration, 
 which, had it taken firm hold, it would have been 
 impossible for them to extinguish. Again, some 
 of the foremost champions of the public safety lost 
 their limbs, and many more of them their lives ; 
 and again, by the mere force and pressure of num- 
 bers acting with a common purpose, the match was 
 extruded before much harm had been done. I 
 opposed myself to a third renewal of the experi- 
 ment, and succeeded in persuading my companions, 
 although not without difficulty, that enough had 
 been done for curiosity and natural history ; that 
 the truly merciful man was as merciful to the 
 smallest as to the largest of God's creatures; and 
 
254 A GREAT AND 
 
 that we had no right; in the mere wantonness of 
 scientific observation, to take away the life which 
 it was impossible for ns to bestow. 
 
 It struck me at the time, that supposing an ant 
 had a mind, as no doubt it has of some sort or de- 
 gree, what idea it would form to itself of this awful 
 visitation, being as it was in total ignorance of 
 man's presence and agency in the matter ? We 
 cannot easily put ourselves into the minds of our 
 human fellow- creatures, of different ages, ranks, 
 countries, modes of life, and degrees of education. 
 To do so effectually and dramatically is one of the 
 highest efforts of literary genius, yet we may by a 
 little stretch of imagination, figure to ourselves an ant 
 reasoning upon the things of his little world (great 
 to him however) as an ant might be supposed to 
 reason, and saying to its fellows, if it were a 
 preacher or a philosopher, or a leading statesman 
 among them: "We ants are wonderful creatures. 
 We are in point of fact the most civilized and in- 
 dustrious people in the world. The flies, for 
 instance, do no work. They are a very inferior 
 race ; they build no cities, they are mere savages. 
 Besides, they possess no government. Around us 
 we see no such intelligent creatures as ourselves. 
 The world was made for us, and for us it produces 
 aphides, honey-dew, and succulent fruits. Occa- 
 sionally we are afflicted with visitations of Nature 
 
A MIGHTY CITY. 255 
 
 which, create much havoc in our community, the 
 causes of which we are as yet too ignorant to dis- 
 cover. Our cities are overthrown and levelled to 
 the earth by convulsions for which we cannot 
 account ; and the fire from heaven sometimes 
 descends upon us, as it did even now. But we 
 are not unduly cast down in calamities such as 
 these, and endeavour even on the worst occasions 
 to keep up a brave spirit, and help ourselves as 
 well as we can. Anyhow, imperfect as we may be, 
 we have no superiors or even equals ! " 
 
 Vain little creature ! yet not altogether without 
 a justification for its vanity. When man talks in 
 the same strain — as he often does — though more 
 often he does not express himself with all the 
 humility which I have supposed in this formican, is 
 he also not a vain little creature ? I think he is ; 
 and many philosophers, past and present, have been 
 of the same opinion. 
 
1. 
 
 ip 
 
 THE ALPHABET OF THE LOWER 
 CREATION. 
 
 T is remarkable that no modern language 
 has a better name for the collective let- 
 ters that enter into the composition of 
 all its words than alphabet, which is an 
 abbreviation of " Alpha, Beta/' or the letters A, B, 
 C, which is the familiar English and French ex- 
 pression, sometimes used instead of the Greek 
 word. Some of the Celtic nations whose primitive 
 languages are unfortunately perishing, call the 
 alphabet the "tree of life," a poetical and by no 
 means inaccurate description of what might per- 
 haps have been still better called "the tree of 
 knowledge." The Scottish Highlanders call the 
 Gaelic alphabet u Bithluiseanean," or the "life of 
 plants," a notion derived from the fact, that the 
 name of every letter without exception is also the 
 name of a tree, plant, or shrub. It is impossible to 
 ascertain during what countless ages mankind were 
 
TEE LOWER CREATION. 257 
 
 possessed of speech, without being possessed of an 
 alphabet and the art of writing. The invention of 
 that art was unquestionably the greatest step ever 
 taken by the race in the onward march of civiliza- 
 tion; and has been the source from which all 
 the greatest improvements, and all the noblest 
 triumphs of humanity have sprung. 
 
 That these may be language, without letters, is 
 evident, with or without the experience of bar- 
 barous races. Some of the guttural and other 
 sounds that are employed by these primitive tribes, 
 are not to be easily, if at all represented by any 
 of the alphabetical signs in use among civilized 
 communities, for the human voice has a far greater 
 number of tones and inflexions, including the gut- 
 turals, than symbols have ever been invented to 
 represent. The English has nominally six vowels, 
 "a," " e/ J "i" '%" "u," "J," but by means of 
 diphthongs and triphthongs, or the combination of 
 two or three of these with each other, as many as 
 nineteen different vowel sounds in use in the Eng- 
 lish language can be exhibited in writing. (C A" 
 has at least four sounds, as in fat, fate, far, law. 
 " E " has three, as in eke, set, err. ' ' I " has three, 
 as in bite, bit, irreligious. " " has six, as in our, 
 hot, nation, moon, joy, low. "TJ" has four, as in 
 urgent, muff, refuse, dubious. The consonants in 
 a similar manner express by their combinations, a 
 
258 ALPHABET OF TEE 
 
 great variety of sounds which in a perfect language, 
 with a perfect alphabet, if such were possible, would 
 each require its own symbol; such as "fr," " gl" 
 "ch," "bl," "br," and many others which will at 
 once suggest themselves to every reader. 
 
 But man is not the only animal that has the 
 power of uttering the alphabetical sounds of vowels 
 and consonants, though he is the only one that pos- 
 sesses the art of writing them. There is, so far as 
 is known, no bird or quadruped that does not in its 
 pleasure, or its pain, its satisfaction, or its terror, 
 emit some vowel sound, sometimes in combination 
 with a consonant, and sometimes alone. The dog 
 has the guttural iC ough," and three consonants, the 
 "b," the "f," and the "w," and one vowel, " ow;" 
 as in its well-known exclamation, "bow-wow," 
 " wough," and the angry barks of " wowff" and 
 "wuff." The bovine species have but one con- 
 sonant and two vowels, as in "mu" and "ma." The 
 full-grown sheep has two consonants and one vowel, 
 as in "baa," and "maa;" while the lamb has "may" 
 and " bay." The cat has two consonants and three 
 vowels, as in " miau " and " purr ;" while many 
 animals emit guttural and other sounds, which 
 strike upon the human tympanum so imperfectly 
 and so confusedly as to be scarcely representable in 
 writing. The horse has evidently one consonant at 
 the command of his voice, which is " n," and several 
 
LOWER CREATION. 259 
 
 vowels and gutturals that glide very unmelodiously 
 into one another when he neighs, whinnies, or 
 snorts. Swift , in the only repulsive story in the 
 travels of Gulliver, represents the neighing of the 
 horse by the rugged and unpronounceable word 
 ( ' honyhnhnm." In nearly all the languages of 
 Europe, in the attempt at literal rendering of the 
 horse's utterance the letter " n " is employed. The 
 French translate it by " hennir," the Italians by 
 (( nitrire," the Germans by " wiechern," the Spanish 
 by "rinchar," and the Dutch by " runniken " and 
 (l gennishen." The pig has the thick guttural 
 sound of <c gr " combined with m and f, from 
 whence we derive the descriptive words l ' grumph " 
 and " grunt." The roar of the lion is an intensi- 
 fication of the " mu " of the bull, with a mingling 
 of the r. Smaller animals, such as the squirrel, the 
 rat, and the mouse, employ the vowel "q." with 
 two indistinct consonants, which the English lan- 
 guage imitates in the words " week " and ' c squeak." 
 The alphabet of quadrupeds is thus very limited, 
 being confined to the labial consonants, (i b," " f," 
 ' ' m," and "w," and the dental consonant " n," pe- 
 culiar to the horse. The vowels at their command 
 are "a," " aa," or "ah," " o» "oh," "oo," or 
 "u," " ee," and the gutturals "ough" or "ugh." 
 No sound of "i" appears, unless it be in the indis- 
 tinct whinnyings of the horse or ass. 
 
260 ALPHABET OF THE 
 
 The alphabet of the birds is greatly more copious, 
 both in consonants and vowels. In fact, there is no 
 vowel sound — whether single, double, or treble, 
 utterable by the human larynx, that is not utter- 
 able, and uttered by some member of the feathered 
 tribes. Although the consonants of the birds do not 
 include the two great consonants of the quadrupeds, 
 the "b " and the "m" for the all-sufficient reason 
 that these letters are labials, and birds have no lips, 
 they comprise many others which quadrupeds do 
 not possess; namely, the " c" " g" or "k;" the "&," 
 the "p," the "t," and the ""z." Neither quadrupeds 
 nor birds (with the sole exception of the parrot 
 and such birds as may be taught to imitate more 
 or less perfectly the human voice) possess the 
 sounds of ie \" cc y" and " x;" unless the skylark pos- 
 sesses " I" in its song, that resembles, as the French 
 express it, the syllables tire-lire, or as we should 
 represent it in English, teera-leera. Taking* these 
 consonants with their accompanying vowels in the 
 order which they assume in the English alphabet, we 
 come first to " c" hard, the same as " k," and almost 
 the same as " g." The rooks and crows pronounce 
 very distinctly " caw, caw ;" the cuckoo pronounces 
 " coo ! coo ! " whence its name ; the dove says 
 croo, or curroo, whence the verb croodle, to utter 
 sounds of endearment or interjections like a bird 
 or a child, and the Scottish phrase, a " croodlin 
 
LOWER CREATION. 261 
 
 doo," applied to a tender or affectionate infant. 
 The consonant " d '■' seems to find its only representa- 
 tion in the " cock-a-doodle-doo/" of onr old friend 
 the male of the barn-door fowl, though it may be 
 doubted whether this gallant and beautiful bird 
 pronounces the " d," and whether his note of joy or 
 defiance may not be accurately rendered, without 
 any consonants, as och ! a ! oo ! a ! 00-00 ! As re- 
 gards the Australian bird, which is supposed to 
 cry " more pork," as plainly as the cuckoo cries 
 coo-coo, it is quite impossible that the beak of a 
 bird can emit the labial letter u m," for the satisfac- 
 tory and single reason, that cc m " can only be pro- 
 nounced by creatures that possess lips. The words 
 more pork ! which give name to the bird in 
 question, is doubtless an effort of the imagination 
 on the part of the listeners, having no other foun- 
 dation on which to rest than i( ohr-ork," or perhaps 
 " ohr-awk." The next consonant used by the birds 
 is f 'p/' which breaks out constantly in the song 
 of the smaller birds of the finch species, and many 
 others, more especially the curlew, with its mono- 
 tonous cry of pee-wheep ! Next in order is ec t," 
 with the chaffinch in the front of those who employ 
 it, calling out continually " tu-eet," or u tweet;" 
 and the owl, with its u to-wheet, to-whoo ! " The 
 American bird which is represented as crying 
 " whip poor will," may be cited for the use of the 
 
262 ALPHABET OF THE 
 
 a w •" though its real no to, unassisted by the imagi- 
 nation or the tradition of the listeners is more like 
 " ippoo ! ee ! " than the strange request that is put 
 into its beak by the fancy of mankind. The night- 
 ingale alone among the feathered race possesses 
 the power of enunciating the hard sound of " z" 
 and will frequently repeat zu ! zu ! zu ! dozens of 
 times before it changes the note of its song into 
 any other of the consonants and vowels, of which it 
 has a greater store at its command than any but the 
 parrot and the imitative birds. 
 
 With the exception of the combined consonants 
 cl gy" as used by the raven, the dove, and the frog, 
 neither quadrupeds, nor birds, nor such reptiles as 
 may be included in the frog species, are able to 
 enunciate sounds that require two initial consonants 
 such as "br," "ft," " gl," "st," and others that are 
 common in human speech. Their vowels and con- 
 sonants are alike simple and easy of pronunciation. 
 The gutturals, however, employed by birds and beasts 
 are very numerous, and swine, frogs, turkeys, eagles 
 and all the falconidse are more distinguished for 
 the use of such sounds, than for softer and more 
 euphonious utterances. The gobble of the turkey 
 cock is almost as difficult to represent by written 
 symbols as the neighing of the horse, and seems to 
 ,set the art of Cadmus at defiance. 
 
 It will be noticed as regards quadrupeds, that 
 
LOWER QBE ATI OK 263 
 
 the sounds — we might be justified in calling them 
 words — which they severally express, are all in the 
 nature of interjections. And it is possible that in 
 the rudest ages of man upon the earth, interjections 
 were, as much for the man as the brute, the only 
 language in use. The interjections "oh!" "ah!" 
 expressions of pain or wonder, or " good heavens ! " 
 "dear me! " expressions of surprise, and many others 
 which will at once occur to the reader's mind, 
 as well as the objurgatory, minatory, and denuncia- 
 tory words or phrases, which may all be classified 
 under the one head of " cursing and swearing," 
 and by which the feelings find a vent for themselves 
 without a real language, are not, in point of fact, 
 of a higher order of language than the interjec- 
 tions of the dog, the horse, the bull, or the sheep. 
 When the "swell" of our day ejaculates "by Jove!" 
 on every occasion when other words fail him, which 
 is very frequently, he stands, as regards language, 
 on no higher level than the dog which says " bow- 
 wow," or chanticleer, that salutes the morn with his 
 " cock-a-doodle-doo ! " When a choleric or foolish 
 person exclaims " d — n it ! " in season and out of 
 season, he has no greater pretension to language 
 than the ox that bellows " moo ! " and when a lady 
 says, " oh la ! " or " dearie me !" to express her 
 wonder or her pleasure, she places herself for the 
 time being on the intellectual level of the owl or the 
 
264 ALPHABET OF THE 
 
 cuckoo. Interjections, as used by men, as gram- 
 marians have often described, are for the most part 
 monosyllabic, and most frequently consist of a vowel 
 followed by an aspirate, as oh ! ah ! but they some- 
 times, like the bark of the dog, consist of dwo syl- 
 lables, as oh dear ! oh la ! oh no ! and others ; and 
 if men and women manage by such expressions as 
 these to express their pain, their wonder, tteir plea- 
 sure, or their anger, and to be readily understood 
 by all who hear them, it may follow in the case of 
 quadrupeds and birds, who use the same sort of 
 speech, that they also can make themselves intelli- 
 gible to their own species, and have, so far as the 
 interjection goes, laid the foundation of a language. 
 The singing birds, however, go far beyond the 
 quadrupeds in this respect, and seem to have other 
 parts of speech than the interjection. When the 
 skylark breaks out into lyrical raptures, it needs no 
 extraordinary effort of the poetical imagination to 
 translate into words known to men, its joyous song 
 hovering under a cloud and straight above his nest, 
 true, as Wordsworth says, "to the kindred points of 
 heaven and home." And to interpret the sounds 
 that gush forth from its musical throat as phrases 
 of joy and gratitude to the great Creator of the 
 universe, 
 
 We see it not, but we hear its voice 
 Singing aloud, " Eejoice ! rejoice !" 
 
LOWER CREATION. 265 
 
 The song of the nightingale, far richer both in 
 vowels and consonants than that of the lark, has 
 been the theme of poetry in all ages of the world, 
 among such civilized nations as have furnished a 
 climate which the beautiful bird frequents. Joy, 
 sorrow, love, supplication, lamentation, adoration, 
 ecstasy, all are expressed in the song of a nightin- 
 gale, in full voice, on a balmy moonlight night, and 
 to deny to such an utterance the inherent quality 
 of ideas, merely because the words, for words they 
 must be, are not intelligible except in the abstract 
 to the listeners, is as unreasonable as it would be 
 to deny for the same reason the poetry and the 
 passion of a speech or a song in Italian, merely 
 because the separate words of the great concrete 
 discourse or hymn were unknown to the listeners. 
 
A SPECIMEN OF A NEW MYTHOLOGICAL 
 DICTIONARY. 
 
 VERY excellent friend of mine, who 
 lives in London — bnt who delights to 
 visit me in the country occasionally, 
 and have a gossip on affairs in general 
 — is one Doodoobhoy Rumsetjee, of Bombay, a 
 Parsee and a philosopher, who has a way of looking 
 at English things which gives a peculiar interest 
 and piquancy to his ideas and expressions. The last 
 time he visited me he made a little autobiographical 
 statement of his youthful studies, and read me a very 
 curious manuscript. 
 
 ff In my youth/' he said, "I studied long and 
 earnestly the mythology of the ancient peoples of 
 India, and endeavoured to find a clue to the appa- 
 rent confusion into which the old religions had been 
 thrown by the lapse of time, and the ignorance or 
 perversity of historians and commentators. At a 
 
MYTHOLOGICAL DICTIONARY. 267 
 
 later period of my life I studied the equally in- 
 teresting mythology of the Egyptians and Greeks, 
 and the coarser and more vulgar forms of idolatry 
 which took root among the Etruscans and Romans. 
 Since I have been in England, I have been much 
 struck with the similarity of the superstitions of the 
 modern English with those of the ancient races, 
 both of Europe and Asia, and have amused myself 
 from time to time by setting down in my note-book 
 the names of the gods and goddesses, the nymphs, 
 satyrs, and demons, held in reverence by this great 
 and powerful, but unhappily most heathen and ido- 
 latrous people. I have also taken pains to ascertain 
 the particulars from trustworthy sources, oral and 
 historical, of the popular worship rendered to these 
 gods at their several shrines, temples, and sanc- 
 tuaries; and also of the local or general festivals 
 occurring during the year in their honour in various 
 parts of the country. A diligent study of men and 
 manners has enabled me to bring many curious 
 facts together in elucidation of this subject. As 
 amid all the superstition and idolatry of the ancient 
 Greeks there was a worship of the Supreme God, 
 which such philosophers as Solon, Lycurgus, Pytha- 
 goras, Plato, Socrates, and others, endeavoured to 
 inculcate among the ignorant and benighted people, 
 so in this country of Britain there seems to be a 
 vague idea prevalent, both among the upper and 
 
268 A NEW MYTHOLOGICAL 
 
 lower classes,, of a purer form of religion than the 
 popular mythology would seem to indicate. But as 
 I have not yet devoted much of my time to the 
 study of the faith taught in the inner circle by the 
 high priests and learned men of the realm, I leave 
 that part of the subject for the present, and merely 
 write down a few of the names of the gods and 
 demigods,, or deifications of natural forces, which 
 are worshipped in various parts of the British isles. 
 You will observe that, as amongst the ancients, 
 there are among this modern people many benefi- 
 cent and many maleficent deities. The English have 
 gods whose blessing they implore, and gods whose 
 curse they deprecate. They have lucky and unlucky 
 days ; auguries, omens, and sacred birds. They also 
 have festivals duly appointed, on Avhich certain 
 meats must be eaten, and certain drinks drunken, 
 on pain of the displeasure of the divinities. I take 
 the facts at random from my note-book, just as they 
 have come under my observation ; and at some 
 future time, if leisure and opportunity serve, and 
 my materials accumulate upon my hands, shall ar- 
 range them in alphabetical order, and upon some 
 systematic plan, so as to present a complete dic- 
 tionary of English mythology. This mythology, I 
 venture to affirm, is as ridiculous in some respects, 
 and as debasing in others, as those ancient myth- 
 ologies which so many of the pretended wise men 
 
DICTIONARY. 269 
 
 of Britain affect to hold in contempt for their ab- 
 surdity and puerility. I do not hope to be entirely 
 accurate in my information. You know well that no 
 wild animal is so difficult to catch as a true and real 
 fact. For a fact has a greasy tail, like the unclean 
 pig that, at some of their rural Saturnalia in this 
 land, the rustic populace are incited to catch ; and 
 often when they think they have him fast by that 
 particular part — the most prominent and manage- 
 able portion of his body — he wriggles and shakes 
 himself so vehemently, that the tail glides through 
 their hands, leaving nought behind but some dirty 
 tallow or soap upon their fingers. Happy for them 
 if it be no worse than soap, unscented and un- 
 poisoned. But the pig — or fact — is nowhere to be 
 found. He has vanished utterly away into the empty 
 air, and is of no more value than a leaf that grew 
 and rotted in the first year of the life of Zoroaster. 
 Yet I have striven to be correct, and if I am not 
 entirely so in every instance, I feel that I am gene- 
 rally as accurate as those German, French, and 
 English writers upon mythology who have favoured 
 the Western nations with their ideas upon the 
 poetry, the arts, and the idolatry of Asia. 
 
 " The Supreme God is worshipped by this people 
 in a variety of temples, and with many different 
 rites ; but as my present object is not to show the 
 religion of the few, but the superstition of the many, 
 
270 A NEW MYTHOLOGICAL 
 
 I sliall confine myself to the best enumeration I can 
 make of the minor gods whom they hold in most 
 esteem, and to whom they pay the most particular 
 homage. Beginning with a benevolent and bene- 
 ficent god, I find — 
 
 " Respectability. 
 
 " This deity is worshipped all over the country, 
 and many sacrifices are daily and nightly offered up 
 to him. His followers are exceedingly zealous in 
 his cause, and I have heard — and have no reason to 
 doubt the fact — that he' is worshipped with offerings 
 of gigs and curricles. He is particularly the patron 
 god of elegant town mansions and country villas. 
 He presides over carriages, horses, and footmen. 
 Dinner-parties and balls are under his especial care. 
 There are certain parts in the large cities where no 
 votary of this god will condescend to abide. The 
 god has not sanctified them, and it is considered irre- 
 ligious, and otherwise wrong and improper, to dwell 
 in the unhallowed precincts. Bloomsbury and Rus- 
 sell Squares, Gower Street, Harley Street, and other 
 parts of London, are held to be obnoxious to this 
 god, and are consequently avoided. His present 
 most favoured temples are in the precincts called 
 Belgravia and Tyburnia. All dukes, lords, bishops, 
 and other titled persons belong, by right of birth or 
 nomination, to this sect. Those not born into it 
 
DICTIONARY. 271 
 
 may buy themselves into it by offerings of gigs and 
 other sacred objects. The devotees of this god 
 always worship him with clean linen, and consider it 
 a sacrilegious act to eat their food with a steel fork. 
 To these religionists a steel fork is as odious as lard 
 is to a Hindoo. 
 
 " Custom. 
 
 "This god is one to whom stringent homage is 
 paid. He is a tyrant who must be propitiated at 
 any cost, and who rules with absolute sway over 
 the interior of households and the general inter- 
 course of society. To do or say anything not laid 
 down in their code by the high-priests of this god 
 is almost as bad, in a social point of view, as to 
 break any one of the ten commandments of the true 
 and Supreme God. 
 
 " Fashion. 
 
 "This is a female divinity, cruel as Moloch or 
 Juggernaut, as frivolous as Zephyr, and as change- 
 able as Proteus — to all of whom she bears some 
 resemblance. Both sexes pay her homage, espe- 
 cially the women, and expend large sums in offer- 
 ings at her shrine. It was once a point of religious 
 belief among her votaries that the waist of a woman 
 should resemble that of a wasp, and that her heart 
 
272 A NEW MYTHOLOGICAL 
 
 and lungs should be compressed till she could 
 scarcely breathe. Perhaps many millions of maidens 
 and matrons have heroically sacrificed their lives to 
 this preposterous delusion. And yet these same 
 people laugh at the Chinese ladies for the unnatural 
 compression of their feet ! At other times it was 
 decreed by the female priests of this divinity, who 
 are called modistes and milliners — words of which I 
 have not been able to ascertain the correct deriva- 
 tion — that the fair devotees should wear powder in 
 their hair, so as to imitate the grey locks of vene- 
 rable age. On another occasion it was decreed that 
 black patches should be worn on various parts of 
 the face or neck ; at another, that it was irreligious 
 to allow the feet or ankles to be seen — though a 
 small foot and neat ankle are charms of which in 
 this country the women may be justly proud. 
 
 il It has lately been decreed by this imperious and 
 imperial goddess, that living women shall wear upon 
 their heads the hair of dead women, in addition to 
 their own, to make it appear that Nature has been 
 superabundantly bounteous to them in this the most 
 graceful adornment of the sex; and this command 
 they scrupulously obey, though neither man nor 
 woman believes that any woman is, in this respect, 
 any other than a cheat and impostor. A recent 
 dogma of the faith was, that women should encase 
 themselves in enormous hoops, and waddle about 
 
DICTIONARY. 273 
 
 public places with garments as large, ungraceful, 
 and unwieldy, as balloons, and which utterly destroy 
 all grace and symmetry of person. 
 
 " The oracles who utter their dark and mysterious 
 sayings at several shrines — the most noted being 
 at Paris — predicted that every week or fortnight, 
 a woman, young or old, should be solemnly burnt to 
 death in what was called her { crinoline ' (what the 
 word means I do not know). The prediction was 
 cruelly verified, and many victims of all ages duly 
 perished. Sometimes the goddess orders the women 
 to limp ; and once the edict has gone abroad, she 
 who does not limp is no longer ranked among the 
 faithful. Opposition to the fanatical observances 
 of these bigots but increases their fervour. Eather 
 than not obey what they believe to be the behests 
 of this fiendlike but powerful goddess, they will 
 sacrifice the happiness of their firesides, their hus- 
 bands' fortunes, their own lives — everything that 
 the world holds sacred. Sooner than be seen in a 
 public place with garments such as their mothers 
 wore, or one that a sculptor could imitate in 
 marble, or a painter, without ridicule, paint upon 
 canvas, these fair zealots would lay their heads upon 
 the block, and wear, as they fondly imagine, the 
 crown of martyrdom. To me, individually, this is 
 one of the most distressing of all the forms of super- 
 stition which I have observed in this country. 
 
 T 
 
274 A NEW MYTHOLOGICAL 
 
 " FlVE-PER-CENT. 
 
 " This is considered to be a great and powerful 
 god. He is worshipped principally by the male sex. 
 It is said of this people that they wonld grind the 
 bones of their fathers, and sell the dust for manure, 
 to propitiate this divinity. No particular days are 
 set apart for his worship ; he is to be adored at all 
 times and in all places, and is held to be never 
 absent from the thoughts of those who love him. 
 He is worshipped with heart and hand, and all 
 faculties of mind and body. The devotees of this 
 god are no hypocrites : they thoroughly believe in 
 his all-powerfulness, all-goodness, and all-sufficiency. 
 They place him in the highest throne of their whole 
 Olympus, and travel to the remotest ends of the 
 earth, and into the wildest regions, in search of him 
 or of his oracles. 
 
 " Gosh, Jimminy, and Jingo. 
 
 " These are three demigods whose peculiar func- 
 tions or sanctity I have never been able to explain 
 to myself in a satisfactory manner; but they are 
 evidently favourites with the common sort of people, 
 and their names are used to give force to an as- 
 severation. If a man's word be doubted, he asserts its 
 truth by ' Jingo/ by { Jimminy/ or by ' Gosh/ and 
 
DICTIONARY. 275 
 
 it is strengthened to the extent of Jingo, Jimminy, 
 or Gosh, and no further. 
 
 " Bath, Jericho, and Blazes. 
 
 ' f These three places appear to be names of pits in 
 the infernal regions, to which angry men are in the 
 habit of consigning those who offend them. 
 
 " Coventry. 
 
 "Any one who commits a fault not punishable by 
 the ordinary law and justice of the country is sent 
 to this place, which is near the centre of the island 
 — and no doubt selected for that reason — where he 
 is kept in solitude and misery until his offence be 
 purged. Many sensitive persons have been known 
 to commit suicide rather than dwell there. 
 
 " Brown, Jones, and Robinson. 
 
 "I have been much puzzled to account for the 
 existence of these personages, who are evidently 
 mythological. I do not know whether they are of 
 the female, or of the male sex ; but, to the best of my 
 belief, they represent the Anglo-Saxon idea of the 
 Three Graces. 
 
 " Valentine. 
 
 " This god, or demigod, is worshipped annually on 
 the 14th of February. His votaries are principally 
 
276 A NEW MYTHOLOGICAL 
 
 silly youths and girls, police constables, artizans and 
 cooks. He seems to be in some degree the Cupid of 
 this people. Homage is rendered to him by means 
 of scraps of paper, with foolish rhymes and em- 
 blematic designs or caricatures drawn or engraved 
 upon them. Great license is allowed on this day, 
 and every kind of absurdity is written or spoken. 
 His principal shrine is a large temple called Great 
 St. Martin's, in the City of London, which is an- 
 nually encumbered with many millions of votive 
 offerings, from which the State itself, and the Post- 
 Master- General, or high-priest of St. Martin's, derive 
 considerable advantage in the shape of revenue. 
 
 " Kobin Hood. 
 
 ( ' This is a sylvan god, and partakes partially of the 
 character of Pan and Diana, as well as of the Fauns 
 and Satyrs. He is supposed to be attended by a 
 beautiful wood-nymph, called Maid Marian. He 
 haunts ancient trees ; and some oaks in a portion of 
 Sherwood Forest, still remaining, and known to be 
 at least three hundred years old, are believed to be 
 his particular favourites. Many hymns and songs 
 are made in his honour. 
 
 " St. Monday, or Blue Monday. 
 " This divinity is the especial god of artisans and 
 labouring men. Festivals are held every Monday in 
 
DICTIONARY. 277 
 
 his honour. His votaries religiously abstain from 
 work on that day, and devote themselves to intem- 
 perate drinking and various other forms of idleness, 
 and what they call pleasure. Even although their 
 wives and families be starving at home, and the 
 day's wage would rescue them from misery, the 
 god must be propitiated. ' Better offend your wife 
 than the gods' is the maxim upon which the de- 
 votees of Blue Monday are always willing to act. 
 
 " St. Swithin. 
 
 " This god presides over the weather and the at- 
 mosphere. He is the patron of rain and storms. 
 His festival is celebrated on the 15th of July. 
 
 " Omens and Augukies. 
 
 " It is impossible, within narrow limits, to detail 
 sufficiently the numerous omens and auguries 
 dreaded or believed by the people of this coun- 
 try. There are no regularly appointed augurs or 
 interpreters connected either with the State or 
 the Church, but in every town and village there 
 are to be found persons who pretend to look 
 into futurity, mostly aged women — they may 
 be called sibyls — who divine by palmistry or by 
 the teacup. But some of these omens and au- 
 guries are of such daily observance, and enter so 
 largely into the life of the vulgar people, that even 
 
278 A NEW MYTHOLOGICAL 
 
 in the most cursory and fragmentary notice of the 
 subject they cannot be passed over. It is con- 
 sidered lucky to meet a piebald horse, to find a 
 horse-shoe, or inadvertently to put on the stocking- 
 inside out. It is unlucky to spill the salt, or to be 
 helped to it; to be one of thirteen at a dinner party; 
 to set out on a voyage on a Friday ; to pass under a 
 ladder ; to have two knives laid across one another 
 at dinner ; and to meet a drove of swine, a funeral 
 procession, or a person who squints. It is con- 
 sidered unlucky not to eat plum-pudding and mince- 
 pie at Christmas, or in the days intervening between 
 that festival and the New Tear; equally unlucky 
 not to eat goose at Michaelmas, pancakes on Shrove 
 Tuesday, and salt fish on Good Friday. There are 
 many more silly superstitions of this kind, but it 
 will serve no particular purpose to narrate them at 
 any greater length. 
 
 " Sacred Animals. 
 
 "Among the Egyptians, the cow, the ibis, and 
 the scarabeus, were held sacred. In this country the 
 only sacred animals of whose existence I have been 
 able to inform myself are the hare, the grouse, the 
 pheasant, the partridge, the woodcock, and the deer. 
 These creatures are guarded from the profanation 
 of plebeian and irreligious touch by very stringent 
 laws. Any common man may kill a sheep or an ox, 
 
DICTIONARY. 279 
 
 but the privilege of killing the peculiarly sacred 
 animals above mentioned is reserved for the aristo- 
 cracy. Particular days are appointed for the purpose 
 of hunting or shooting them, before which time not 
 even the greatest and proudest in the land may 
 dare to slay them, though he should find them 
 on his own grounds. I am not positive in affirming 
 the stringency of this law as regards the deer, but 
 the correctness of my statement in the case of the 
 birds is not to be impugned. As the owl was to 
 wisdom among the ancient Greeks, so the partridge 
 and the grouse are to privilege among the moderns. 
 There is another animal which partakes in some de- 
 gree of the character of sanctity amongst the singu- 
 lar Islanders, and that is the fox. He is generally 
 worshipped on horseback, by men in red coats, with 
 top-boots, though women have sometimes, but very 
 rarely, been admitted to the mysteries. 
 
 "Easter Monday. 
 
 " You have read, of course, of the Saturnalia and 
 Lupercalia of the Romans, and of the Dionysian, the 
 Isthmian, and the Olympic games of the Greeks. 
 The great religious festival of Easter Monday in 
 England partakes largely of the characteristics of 
 all these. It seems to be a popular welcome to the 
 goddess of Spring, when the multitude shake off the 
 torpor of the winter, and, renouncing their usual 
 
280 A NEW MYTHOLOGICAL 
 
 pursuits, avocations, and trades, devote themselves 
 to idleness, drunkenness, and jollity. The sacred 
 grove where the rites are celebrated by the largest 
 crowds and with the greatest earnestness is at a place 
 called Greenwich, or Grinnidge. Here there is a 
 celebrated Temple of the Sun, where the people 
 love to congregate — doubtless from the fact that 
 the festivity is purely zodiacal and astronomical in 
 its origin. The high-priest of this temple is always 
 called ' Airy/ — from aer, or air, the atmosphere — 
 which, with the heavenly bodies that gyrate in its 
 infinite profundities, he makes his especial study. 
 From the peculiar sanctity of this place, the British 
 people calculate the longitude from it. A second 
 festival, called Whit- Monday, is celebrated in and 
 around the same spot ; but it is not so important, or 
 held in such high veneration, as the spring festival. 
 The orgies of the Roman Saturnalia are equalled, if 
 not exceeded, on these occasions ; and drunkenness 
 and other forms of vice take, for twenty-four hours, 
 undisturbed possession of the minds and bodies of 
 both male and female. 
 
 " John Barleycorn. 
 
 " This hero, or demi-god, is held in great repute. 
 Many marvellous stories are recorded of him. It is 
 said that he was ground to death in a mill, and yet 
 revived ; that his blood was drunk by his enemies, 
 
DICTIONARY. 281 
 
 and drove them frantic ; that he was buried deep 
 under the earth in the autumn, and rose again to 
 life in the spring more vigorous than ever. He is 
 principally worshipped in the great cities, where 
 his most famous temples are built. He seems to 
 be the Bacchus of this people, but is represented 
 in drawings and statues more after the model of 
 Silenus. The State takes his religion under its 
 especial care, and derives, it is reported to me by 
 men learned in statistics, no less than £5,000,000 
 sterling from the tax annually paid by his disciples 
 for liberty to worship him in their own way. Lately, 
 however, two new sects have arisen, who oppose 
 John Barleycorn as a false god. The members of 
 the first call themselves Teetotalers, but I know not 
 what the word means ; the other sect is under the 
 leadership of a northern prophet called Forbes 
 Mackenzie; but these faiths are not extensively 
 popular." 
 
GROWTH OF A LONDON MYTH. 
 
 Y friend Doodoobhoy Rumsetjee has his 
 own notion, as will have been seen, on 
 the subject of Mythology among the 
 English, — notions possibly quite as well 
 founded as those which the modern English, and all 
 European nations entertain on the mythology of 
 Greece and Rome. But what he read to me as spe- 
 cimens of his dictionary set me thinking on the 
 subject of " myths " generally, and how " myths " 
 grew like seed, from small beginnings into lofty 
 trees. And this brought to my recollection a veri- 
 table London " myth," which came within the scope 
 of my experience in the following manner. 
 
 Once upon a time, ' ' when I was a little tiny boy," 
 I was brought from the country to a lodging in Kirby 
 Street, Hatton Garden. It was before the railway 
 era, and I travelled by the mail coach, and had 
 a seat with the guard, and the privilege of admiring 
 his red coat and handling his bugle. At that period 
 
A LONDON MYTH. 283 
 
 Kirby Street was not wholly unfashionable. There 
 was then as now a very considerable population of 
 Italians in the neighbouring courts and alleys, en- 
 gaged in the manufacture of optical instruments, 
 and of plaster images and casts ; but Hatton Garden, 
 Ely Place, and Kirby Street, still contained private 
 dwelling houses where native Londoners of a certain 
 social position resided. It was in one of these that 
 I dwelt for about two months, pet and favourite of 
 the kindly and garrulous old lady who was mistress 
 of the establishment. Of all the stories she told me, 
 that of Lady Hatton fixed itself most firmly in my 
 mind, partly because it was tragical and super- 
 natural, but in a great degree because the very 
 stones of the street seemed to prate of it, and 
 Bleeding Heart Yard, a place with a ghastly name 
 and a weird reputation, the scene of the final cata- 
 strophe, was within a stone's throw of the room 
 where I sat listening to the dreadful recital. It was 
 a " myth," though at the time I had no idea of what 
 a " myth " meant. It was to this effect : 
 
 In the reign of Queen Elizabeth there stood in what 
 is now Cross Street, Hatton Garden, the suburban 
 mansion of Sir Christopher Hatton, who by the 
 favour of his sovereign— -some people say because 
 he was the most graceful dancer, and not because 
 he was the ablest lawyer of his time — had been ad- 
 vanced to the position of Lord Keeper. 
 
284 GROWTH OF A 
 
 In this house., which was surrounded with plea- 
 sant gardens, and appears to have stood in about 
 the centre of a space bounded by Holborn on the 
 south, by Saffron Hill and Baldwin's Gardens on the 
 east, by Leather Lane on the west, and by Hatton 
 Wall on the north, Sir Christopher was accustomed 
 at all proper seasons to hold high revel and enter- 
 tain the principal people of his day. 
 
 When this eminent person was in his sunny 
 youth, when he had neither acquired name nor fame 
 nor royal favour, he was a constant attendant at the 
 theatres of London. Oranges had been in the first 
 year of Elizabeth newly introduced into Europe from 
 China by the Portuguese, and had but recently found 
 their way to England. Then, as now, a trade in the re- 
 freshing fruit was carried on both at the doors and in 
 the interior of the theatres. Among the girls who 
 plied this industry was one very handsome person, 
 very poor, but very proud, with beautiful long dark 
 hair, and dark eyes, that could flash either with holy 
 or unholy fire. The gallant Sir Christopher bought 
 some oranges of her one day, and made her a pretty 
 speech upon the happiness of the man, whoever he 
 might be, who could hope to gain her affections. 
 Thoughtless Sir Christopher ! From the moment 
 that her eyes met those of the gay young gentleman 
 the lovely orange-girl became the victim of one all- 
 consuming desire. Sir Christopher bought many 
 
LONDON MYTH. 285 
 
 oranges of her as, every day when he came to the 
 theatre, she threw herself in his path to attract 
 his notice. Every day he made her many little 
 flattering speeches. After a time he became some- 
 what annoyed to learn that the girFs attachment to 
 him was so obvious as to have become a subject of 
 banter among his friends. He was in no humour 
 for an intrigue. But the colder he became the 
 warmer she grew. When he retreated she pursued. 
 When he was indifferent she was enthusiastic. 
 When he froze she burned, and desperate thoughts 
 took possession of her mind. It seemed to her as 
 if she could neither live nor die, and that life with- 
 out his love was infinitely worse than all the pangs 
 of death. At this time, and long previously, the 
 Tragical History of Dr. Faustus — a very doleful 
 ballad — was commonly sung in the streets : 
 
 The devil in fryar's weeds appeared to me, 
 And straight to my request he did agree, 
 That I might have all things at my desire, 
 If I gave soul and body for his hire. 
 
 She knew this woful piece of doggerel by heart. 
 If Faustus could find a devil to buy his soul — for 
 the price of love and a term of earthly felicity — 
 could she not find a devil to do her the same good 
 turn ? 0, that she could ! For many days and 
 nights she called upon the Prince of Darkness, upon 
 Satan, upon Lucifer, upon Mephistopheles, by every 
 
286 GROWTH OF A 
 
 name that she thought powerful, to come to her 
 assistance. There was no answer. At last, upon 
 one cold and rainy night, when she was more than 
 usually desperate and unhappy, she strayed towards 
 the watermen's stairs at London Bridge, and was 
 about to drown herself, when she became aware of 
 a stranger, who was standing by her side. He was 
 a young man in the bloom of beauty, and had very 
 sparkling blue grey eyes of the colour of wood 
 smoke, and a thick bushy beard and moustache of a 
 hue between yellow and red, white regular teeth, a 
 smile that was rather haughty and condescending 
 than attractive or fascinating, and such beautiful 
 white hands as might have belonged to a lady, and 
 never could be supposed to have been employed in 
 hard or dirty work. He was dressed in a suit of 
 black velvet — all black from top to toe — with the 
 exception of his hose and shoe ribbons and the 
 jaunty feather in his cap, all of which were of 
 scarlet. 
 
 " So you think of jumping into the river/' he 
 said, in a grave tone of voice ; ' ' but would not that 
 be foolish as well as wicked ? " 
 
 She started, though she did not in the least 
 imagine who he could be. He looked kind, how- 
 ever, and she simply replied, C( I am very mise- 
 rable." 
 
 (f But you are young and lovely, and you may 
 
LONDON MYTH. 287 
 
 yet find happiness, and plenty of it, if you will only 
 seek it in the right manner. I know your history. 
 You love Sir Christopher Hatton. Yes, you love 
 him, and he does not love you in return. A very 
 
 common case ! 
 
 I" 
 
 "Mine is no common case," replied the dark- 
 eyed girl, with startling emphasis, looking straight 
 at her visitor. " If he cannot love me, I will die. 
 Life without him is hourly misery." 
 
 "And with him would be hourly bliss, of course. 
 I know all that," continued the stranger, very coolly ^ 
 if not sarcastically. " Listen to me ! I am a bliss 
 merchant. I deal in the article. I have a great 
 stock at my disposal." 
 
 ' ' Then give me some of it, for the love of Hea- 
 ven," she said, clasping her hands, looking up in 
 his face, and appearing even to his eyes to be ex- 
 ceedingly beautiful. 
 
 "Merchants don't give/' said he. "You, for in- 
 stance, don't give away oranges. You sell them. 
 Giving is not in my line, or I should soon be a 
 bankrupt, rich as I am ; and if I were fool enough 
 to be liberal, it would not be for love of the place 
 you mention." 
 
 Sell me joy, then ; sell me the love of Sir Chris- 
 topher Hatton ; make him love me as I love him, 
 and if the bliss can be but mine for seven days, you 
 shall name your own price, even if it be my soul, 
 
288 GROWTH OF A 
 
 provided you can get his also, and we can both go 
 to perdition together ." 
 
 " Fair and softly," said Lucifer, if it were indeed 
 he, and who else could it be ? "I can only deal 
 with one person at a time. You and I can do our 
 business first. He and I, if possible, can do our 
 business afterwards. In my little transactions with 
 human kind, I have but one price — which is the 
 soul. Will you sell me yours ?" 
 
 " I will," she replied, with a slight shudder, " for 
 his love; warm, passionate, undivided, for seven 
 days." 
 
 tc Stupid girl ! you must have a very bad opinion 
 of me, to think I could entrap you into such a mise- 
 rable bargain as that. No ! no ! I have some heart 
 and conscience, though you may not believe it. 
 What do you say to seven weeks ? " 
 
 "Better, oh better!" 
 
 " Seven months ? " 
 
 " Bliss indescribable ! " 
 
 u Seven years ? " 
 
 " Oh, do not mock me ! If I had seven souls, 
 I would sell them all to you, for such a price as 
 that." 
 
 There was not much talk between the two after 
 this. Seven years was the term agreed upon, and 
 the price was to be her immortal soul at the end 
 thereof. The stranger produced a parchment, wrote 
 
LONDON MYTE. 289 
 
 out the agreement in a very neat lawyer-like hand, 
 read it over to her, and all was ready for her mark. 
 This, as everybody knows, must in such transactions 
 be made with blood. 
 
 " You are not afraid of the prick of a needle ? " 
 asked her companion, smiling ; and before she could 
 reply, he took hold of her by her beautiful plump 
 arm, squeezed a sharp diamond ring that was on his 
 finger against it, and drew just one drop of red, 
 ripe, rich blood. He produced a pen from his dou- 
 blet, dipped the point in the liquid, placed it in her 
 hand, and showed her where to place her mark. 
 She did as she was requested. The stranger blew 
 upon the mark to dry it — his breath was hot, no 
 doubt — then folded up the document, and placed it 
 carefully in his pocket. 
 
 "Now," said he, "fair and noble lady — for I 
 hereby create you a countess — let me see what title 
 would suit you best ? The Countess di Sidonia San 
 Felice ? That will do ! See you don't forget it ! 
 You will want a great deal of money. ISTo thing is 
 to be done without gold. I myself, though I do not 
 value it, cannot manage my business without it. 
 Were there no gold in the world, I verily believe 
 there would be little work left for me. Take this 
 ring, and whenever you want cash, however much 
 or however little, rub it all round with the tip of 
 your right forefinger, and you will find in your 
 
 u 
 
290 GROWTH OF A 
 
 purse, or at your feet, the exact sum you have 
 thought of. Just try the experiment." 
 
 She took the ring, rubbed it as directed, and said, 
 "One hundred gold pieces." She felt a sudden 
 weight in her pocket, and looked both alarmed and 
 
 " Take them out and count them," said he. "If 
 you had named a million it would have been just 
 the same ; but as you would have found the mass 
 rather heavy, I think you need not call for such a 
 quantity, except on the great occasions when less will 
 not suffice. And now, countess, you must act the 
 part of a great lady — I know you can do it — and 
 leave me to work for you in the proper quarter. I 
 will perform my part of the contract like a gentle- 
 man. My word is my bond. Having done so, I will 
 not trouble you with my company uninvited, for the 
 full term of seven years, at the expiry of which, 
 whether you invite me or not, I shall come and 
 pay my respects to you. It will be necessary, 
 however, in the meanwhile, until I have made the 
 man of your choice your own for seven years, 
 which I truly hope may be happy and delicious 
 years to you — on my honour as a gentleman I 
 swear it — that you and I should sometimes be 
 seen together. I am, remember it well, the Duke 
 di Sidonia San Felice, and you are my niece. I 
 shall introduce you into good society. If I am at 
 
LONDON MYTH. 291 
 
 any time disagreeable to you, or if the thought of 
 our little bargain causes you any annoyance, just 
 give me a look — I am skilful in looks, and need no 
 language to tell a person's thoughts — and I will re- 
 lieve you of my presence. But don't, for your own 
 sake, try to get rid of me in a pet or temper. And 
 before I say farewell let me give you a word of 
 advice. Don't make love to Sir Christopher. Don't 
 run after him. Don't let him know that you care a 
 straw for him. Let him be the wooer. Let him sigh 
 his soul away at your feet - } and if you have a little 
 scorn to bestow upon him, not too much, mind you, 
 just a little judicious tiny bit*of scorn, dart it at him 
 from those lovely black eyes of yours, and he will 
 come to you as slavishly and affectionately as if he 
 were your lapdog. I am an old stager in these mat- 
 ters, and have been in love myself — a long, long- 
 time ago. Farewell, sweet countess ! " 
 
 The next time that Sir Christopher went to the 
 theatre there was no orange girl to offer him or any 
 one else oranges, at which, to say truth, he was 
 rather pleased than otherwise, for the orange girl, 
 in consequence of the jests of his friends had be- 
 come a bore. He met, at the entrance, his friends, 
 the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke, both great 
 patrons of the drama. They asked him if he had 
 seen the new Spanish beauty, who, for the last two 
 days, had dazzled the eyes of all beholders. She 
 
292 GROWTH OF A 
 
 had suddenly appeared in London, no one exactly 
 knew from whence, and was accompanied by her 
 uncle, a Spanish grandee and magnifico of the high- 
 est class, a grave old gentleman, with a highly in- 
 tellectual face, who dressed in black velvet, with red 
 hose, and shoe ribbons, wore a red plume in his cap, 
 and a cross of diamonds upon his breast worth mil- 
 lions of money. Sir Christopher had neither seen 
 nor heard ; but, entering the theatre, the lady and 
 her uncle were pointed out to him. Such glorious 
 beauty in a woman, such calm dignity and serene 
 wisdom in a man, he thought his eyes had never 
 before beheld. Long before the performances were 
 over, he had asked Lord Southampton to introduce 
 him personally to the duke, who had, as he was 
 told, brought letters of introduction both to him 
 and Lord Pembroke. The fair countess was an apt 
 scholar, and before three weeks had passed, she had 
 half of the iC golden youth " of London at her feet, 
 attracted quite as much by her reputed wealth as by 
 her undoubted beauty. And she possessed not only 
 these two great magnets for attracting and fixing 
 men's admiration, but a ready wit, and could hold 
 her own worthily against all the beaux-esprits and 
 amiable cynics of the time. The duke, on his part, 
 favoured Sir Christopher greatly, took pleasure in 
 his society, entertained him with his learning, and 
 charmed him with his conversation, for the duke 
 
LONDON MYTH. 293 
 
 had seen so much of the world, and was such a deli- 
 cately flavoured cynic., that it was impossible for 
 any one to be long in his society without recog- 
 nising in him a very remarkable as well as a very 
 charming person. Encouraged by the countenance 
 of this high personage, and daily more and more 
 smitten with the charms of the countess, who gave 
 him, however, but very slight encouragement, while 
 she threw her brightest smiles and most winning 
 glances at some one or other of his many rivals, Sir 
 Christopher became, what the countess had become 
 when an orange girl, head over ears in love. He 
 finally took courage to offer heart and hand, name 
 and fortune, to his brilliant enslaver, and, to his 
 great distress, though scarcely to his surprise — ■ 
 considering from how many suitors, young, hand- 
 some, noble, and rich, she might choose — was sum- 
 marily rejected. 
 
 "I will not be married for money," said the 
 countess, " but for myself alone. Could you love me 
 if I were poor ? If, for instance, I earned my daily 
 bread by selling oranges at the doors of the theatre ? 3 * 
 
 " I could," said Sir Christopher, not without some 
 surprise at the mention of oranges — [and he put a 
 question to himself without words, " Had she, too, 
 heard that silly gossip about the orange-girl, and 
 was she jealous ? "] — " and only wish that you were 
 a peasant girl, with no other dowry than you:? 
 
294 GROWTH OF A 
 
 loveliness and your angelic sweetness of disposition, 
 that I might make yon the offer I make now, and 
 prove to you how dearly and how truly I love you." 
 
 The countess looked incredulous, though she was 
 beginning to feel very happy ; but having, from the 
 company she had lately kept, learned to add the 
 cunning of the serpent to the gentleness of the 
 dove, and thinking, moreover, that Sir Christopher 
 was fast coming into the right road in which she 
 wished him to travel, she dallied with him yet a 
 little. 
 
 "I am too young to marry," she said. "I do 
 not know whether I shall marry at all. If I do, I 
 am not sure whether I should like to marry an 
 Englishman. In any case, I cannot marry without 
 my uncle's consent, and I think he objects to Eng- 
 lishmen." 
 
 Sir Christopher, as may be supposed, did not lose 
 heart. Seeking an interview with the duke, who 
 seemed to take an almost paternal interest in his 
 fortunes, he ascertained that so far from having any 
 dislike to Englishmen, or Englishwomen, this great 
 magnifico esteemed them both very highly, espe- 
 cially the ladies ; and next to being a Spanish gran- 
 dee, he thought it the finest thing" in the world 
 to be an English nobleman. He also ascertained — 
 or, rather, hoped he had ascertained — that the saucy 
 countess was not nearly so indifferent to himself as 
 
LONDON MYTH. 295 
 
 she pretended, and that there was no one among- 
 her many suitors upon whom she looked with greater, 
 if with so much favour. 
 
 ( ' When I was your age/'' said the duke, c ' I was 
 Lever very satisfied to take no for an answer in 
 matters of the heart, unless I discovered that the 
 superior attractions of a rival had not left me a 
 chance. In the latter case I summoned philosophy 
 to my aid, and cooled myself with it as speedily as I 
 might. It seems to me, signor, that you do not 
 require any cooling' at present, and that, on the 
 contrary, a little more heat might possibly be ad- 
 vantageous. My fair niece is, as you may have 
 observed, a proud woman, and the prouder a woman 
 is the more ardently she loves, if she loves at all. 
 That, at least, is my experience. As for proud wo- 
 men, they are my special favourites. I love them 
 dearly ; for of such is my kingdom." 
 
 The duke and the countess managed so well, and 
 Sir Christopher became so importunate a wooer, that 
 the marriage was agreed upon, and for a wonder, 
 Queen Elizabeth did not object to it. Higher powers 
 than the majesty of England were at work, and the 
 marriage, though not made in Heaven, was made in 
 a place where a great deal of passionate work is 
 done. It was celebrated with much pomp and fes- 
 tivity, though it was remarked as unfortunate that 
 the good Duke of Sidonia San Felice was taken very 
 
296 GROWTH OF A 
 
 suddenly ill on the night preceding the ceremony, 
 and could not attend in church to give away the 
 bride. Sir Christopher considerately and respect- 
 fully hinted that the marriage might be delayed for 
 a day or two to permit of the duke's presence. 
 " No, no ! " said the duke, " that would be unlucky. 
 Even were I at the point of death, which I am not 
 — though sometimes in my sad moments I feel that 
 I should like to die — I would not consent to be suck 
 a mar-joy as that, and to stand between two loving 
 hearts, with my miserable ailments. Go, my son, 
 and get married, and may joy go with you." Tlie 
 duke recovered next day so suddenly, and looked so 
 remarkably well, that ill-natured people (people 
 always are ill natured) began to think it strange, 
 and to recall the fact that no one had ever seen him 
 at church or chapel since he came to England. He 
 was not a religious man evidently. 
 
 Tradition, if her voice were truly represented by 
 the good old dame from whom I gathered this story, 
 has not recorded whether in this instance the course 
 of true love ran smooth, and whether they were 
 happy ; but that they lived together, to all outward 
 appearance, as man and wife should, decently and 
 honourably, according to their station, seems ob- 
 vious, from the fact that Sir Christopher, seven years 
 after the nuptials, gave a splendid ball, of which his 
 wife did the honours, and at which all the notabili- 
 
LONDON MYTH. 297 
 
 ties of London were present. Lady Hatton had for 
 the last year been in very indifferent health. She 
 seemed unhappy, but her lord could never under- 
 stand exactly what was the matter ; and though she 
 was attended by the most eminent physicians of the 
 day, the only explanation they could give of her 
 malady was that it was mental, and that she was 
 suffering from some secret sorrow, which she seemed 
 disinclined to divulge. Her uncle had disappeared 
 from England very shortly after her marriage, and ex- 
 plained to Sir Christopher, as a reason for not keep- 
 ing up a correspondence with him, that he had made 
 up his mind to see the world, to travel to the re- 
 motest ends of the earth in search of adventures. 
 " In fact," he said, in a jocose humour, " I am like 
 a roaring lion, I like to go about the earth seeking 
 whom I may devour. I speak metaphorically, of 
 course, and mean what I may devour in the shape of 
 new excitement, and fresh experience of men and 
 their ways." He promised, however, to leave Lady 
 Hatton a clue to his whereabouts, in case he should 
 ever be wanted. But he never was wanted. Sir 
 Christopher mentioned him but rarely, and noticed 
 particularly whenever he did so that Lady Hatton 
 seemed uneasy, as if she would be glad to banish 
 his remembrance from her mind. Sir Christopher, 
 after an ineffectual attempt to discover whether 
 there had been a quarrel between them, forbore to 
 
298 GROWTH OF A 
 
 speak upon the subject after the first two years of 
 their marriage, and had almost forgotten that such 
 a person as the Duke of Sidonia San Felice had ever 
 existed. For the month preceding the great ball 
 Lady Hatton had seemed more than usually un- 
 happy. She could not bear to be left alone even for 
 an instant, and would often break out into hysterical 
 sobs, followed by hysterical laughter distressing to 
 witness. 
 
 "Do you think," she said one evening to Sir 
 Christopher, as they sat in the library, after a day 
 in which some portion of her old happiness seemed 
 to have revisited her, "that there is any truth in 
 the story of Dr. Faustus, who sold himself to Lucifer 
 for worldly power and dominion ? " 
 
 "A stupid old legend," said the practical Sir 
 Christopher — " an absurd superstition. No doubt 
 people do give their souls to the devil, when they 
 commit sin, persist in sin, and die unrepenting." 
 
 "Repentance makes a difference, then?" said 
 the lady. "And suppose I sold my soul to Lucifer, 
 for love of you, and were to repent that I did so, 
 could Lucifer claim my soul ? " 
 
 Sir Christopher smiled. "My dear good wife," 
 said he, "you are certainly unwell. Your health is 
 injured because you have been left too much alone 
 lately. I shall give half-a-dozen grand dinners and 
 balls, and invite a large company each time. We 
 
LONDON MYTH. 299 
 
 shall be merry, and you shall be the very queen of 
 all the joy and festivity. Cheer up, love. You have 
 youth, beauty, riches, friends, and your husband's 
 heart. What more do you require ? " 
 
 " Peace of mind ! " she replied with a shudder, as 
 some painful thought flashed upon her brain, and 
 lighted up her dark eyes with a tragic light. " I 
 have sold myself to Lucifer, or I have dreamt so." 
 
 " But it is silly — pardon the expression — to lose 
 your peace of mind for a dream." 
 
 ' c My dream was a reality, or so like a reality 
 that I cannot tell the difference." 
 
 "Many dreams are. I have had such dreams 
 myself, especially when I have been out of health. 
 We shall cure all that for you if you will trust to my 
 care and attention." And Sir Christopher gave her 
 as warm an embrace as if they had only been mar- 
 ried seven days, instead of close upon seven years, 
 and the lady for awhile was comforted. 
 
 The great ball at last took place, and it seemed 
 to all present that never had Lady Hatton looked so 
 exceedingly beautiful; that her dark full eyes had 
 never gleamed with such vivid lightning glances 
 upon her hosts of flatterers and admirers, and that 
 her pretty little feet had never twinkled so elegantly, 
 so joyously, and so deftly in the dance. Sir Chris- 
 topher was delighted, and convinced, moreover, that, 
 after all, her only ailments were the results of the 
 
300 GROWTH OF A 
 
 too great solitude, in which his increasing avoca- 
 tions had compelled him to leave her — a solitude 
 which he firmly resolved should not continue, if 
 wealth could bring amusement, or change of scene, 
 or any possible recreation that might divert her 
 mind and occupy her best faculties. It was five 
 minutes before midnight by the great hall clock, 
 when a new and important visitor was announced — 
 no less a person than the long-lost Duke di Sidonia 
 San Felice, in the well-known and graceful costume in 
 which he was so familiar to Sir Christopher, the suit 
 of black velvet, the scarlet hose and shoe ribbons, 
 and the jaunty scarlet plume in his cap. Lady Hat- 
 ton turned red, then ghastly pale, at the sight, and 
 it was thought by those close to her that she would 
 drop to the ground. But she braced up her nerves 
 as the duke approached her, and took her by the 
 hand. He smiled with a grave sweet smile, and said 
 softly, yet in a voice that all around could distinctly 
 hear : "lam punctual/'' Then turning to Sir Chris- 
 topher, he said : " You did not expect me. Of course 
 not ! Do not disturb the dance. How lovely your 
 wife looks ! She has been a good wife to you, I am 
 sure." Sir Christopher put his hand upon his heart. 
 " I knew she would be," continued the duke. " Such 
 women as she are rare in this wicked world. I have 
 a little bit of family news to communicate to her. 
 We can sit together for a few minutes, can we not, 
 
LONDON MYTH. 301 
 
 in the ante-room yonder among the flowers ? What 
 lovely flowers you have got, Sir Christopher. My 
 taste exactly." He had taken Lady Hatton by the 
 hand, and he led her with the utmost respect and 
 gallantry from amid the crowd. The dance went on, 
 but Lady Hatton never re-appeared ; neither did the 
 Duke di Sidonia San Felice. After the lapse of an 
 hour, Sir Christopher, not knowing what had be- 
 come of her, and ardently desiring not to make a 
 scene or a scandal, informed his guests that my lady 
 had been taken unwell, but not seriously, and had 
 gone to bed. The dance went on; every one was 
 joyous except poor Sir Christopher, who was glad 
 when the last of the guests had departed, and he 
 was left alone to ponder over the very singular dis- 
 appearance of his lady, and to wonder when she 
 would return to him. 
 
 In the morning a very horrible sight presented 
 itself in the yard of Hatton Garden. The great 
 pump that stood in the middle was all stained and 
 beclotted with blood and brains, as if some one's 
 head had been dashed and broken against it. On 
 the ground lay a human heart in a pool of blood, 
 and round about were shreds and tatters of female 
 attire, and fragments of gold chains and loose dia- 
 monds and other jewels such as had been worn by 
 Lady Hatton on the previous evening. There were 
 no traces of a body, but there was a deep hole in 
 
302 GROWTH OF A 
 
 the ground as if it had been made by a thousand 
 thunderbolts, and the whole place smelt sulphurous 
 and mephitic. Lucifer had claimed his own. Thus 
 had ended the bright career of the beautiful but 
 wicked Lady Hatton. " And, to this day," added 
 the good old lady who told me the legend, " ' Bleed- 
 ing-heart Yard ; stands close by to prove the story 
 true." 
 
 It was clearly a case — though it was not till 
 many years afterwards that I was wise enough to 
 understand it — like that of Tenterden Steeple and 
 the Goodwin Sands. The story had not made 
 Bleeding Heart-yard, but Bleeding Heart-yard had 
 made the story. The name impressed the popular 
 imagination, and the popular imagination evolved 
 and produced the legend that was to account for it. 
 And what, asks the practical reader who does not 
 believe in ghosts or devils (though he may, perhaps, 
 have some degree of faith in Mr. Home the medium) , 
 is the true origin of cc Bleeding Heart-yard ? 3> Two 
 explanations are presentable, either of which may 
 be the correct one. The first is that the ancient 
 names of the wall-flower — that sweet-smelling orna- 
 ment of the garden — that in the Language of 
 Flowers is emblematic of "poverty," were the 
 ' ' Blood-wort " and the ' e Bleeding Heart,'' and that 
 one of the yards of Sir Christopher Hatton' s resi- 
 dence having been overgrown with it, acquired in 
 

 LONDON MYTH. 303 
 
 early times a name to which later superstition, 
 interpreting too literally, gave a ghastly interpreta- 
 tion. The second is that, in the days before the 
 Reformation, there stood at a corner of the Hatton- 
 garden domain an inn or hostelry known as " The 
 Bleeding Heart," and that the courtyard of the 
 aforesaid hostelry, when it had ceased to be a 
 hostelry, retained its ancient name among a new 
 generation. "The sign of the Bleeding Heart," 
 say Messrs. Larwood and Hotten, in their interest- 
 ing History of Signboards, " was the emblematical 
 representation of the five sorrowful mysteries of the 
 Rosary, viz., the heart of the Holy Virgin pierced 
 with five swords." 
 
 Thus do myths grow ; and thus, perhaps, from as 
 small beginnings, combined with the love of the 
 mystic and the supernatural, that seems inherent in 
 human nature, have sprung up nine-tenths of the 
 legends of Greece and Rome, and of all the great 
 nations of antiquity. 
 
NEW LIGHT ON AN OLD SUBJECT. 
 
 ANDERING alone on the border of 
 Kent and Sussex, I came into the 
 vicinage of the garden where the 
 traditional Jack Cade was killed, and 
 began to think on his remarkable and little under- 
 stood history. Justice has not been done to this 
 unfortunate reformer : a man with a great name, a 
 great cause, a great purpose, and a great following. 
 His real name was said to be John Cade. His 
 assumed name was John Mortimer. He claimed to 
 be a son of the royal House of Plantagenet, and 
 first cousin to Richard Duke of York — he of the 
 White Rose — whose quarrel with the Red Rose 
 kept England in a turmoil, and let loose the hounds 
 of civil war for more than a quarter of a century. 
 This personage, a great reformer in his day — popu- 
 larly known as the Captain of Kent — and " John 
 Amend- All/' has received but sorry treatment at the 
 hands of history, while at the hands of poetry, as 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 305 
 
 represented by Shakespeare, or whosoever was the 
 real author of the then national play of Henry the 
 Sixth, of which Shakespeare was the reviser and 
 adapter, he has received very great injustice. Had 
 he been left to history alone, no more harm would 
 have been done to his memory than such as is 
 usually inflicted upon those who are guilty of the 
 political crime of unsuccess ; but poetry, unluckily 
 for " the Captain's u fame, has warped history aside, 
 and presented us with a caricature instead of a true 
 picture. Let us endeavour, by the light of dis- 
 coveries recently made, to show Cade as he was, 
 and not as Shakespeare has depicted him. 
 
 The earnest political reformers, or rebels as it 
 was the fashion to call them, who arose in the early 
 days of English history to do battle against oppres- 
 sion, never received fair treatment at the hands of 
 historians. Having no printing-press, by means of 
 which to detail and discuss their grievances, and no 
 means of organizing public opinion to operate upon 
 the minds of men in power, there were no means 
 open to them for the remedy of intolerable abuses 
 but the rough and unsatisfactory arbitrament of 
 physical force. Those early reformers knew the 
 risks they ran. If they would speedily achieve 
 their ends, and kings were obstinate in denying 
 them justice, they had no resource but rebellion. 
 If they succeeded, which they did sometimes, ;t was 
 
 x 
 
306 NEW LIGHT ON 
 
 well. If they failed, and were so unhappy as not 
 to die on the battle-field, they suffered the rebel's 
 doom, and left their name and fame to posterity, 
 which did not always care to remember them. 
 
 Among the most notable of these English 
 cc rebels/' who would be called reformers if they 
 lived in our day, was John Cade. In the second 
 part of King Henry the Sixth, he is represented as 
 an illiterate and brutal ruffian, sprung from the very 
 dregs of the populace, with the manners of an 
 American " rowdy," or of that equally detestable 
 product of our own modern civilization, the Eng- 
 lish " rough." The author of Henry the Sixth in- 
 variably speaks of him under the familiar and 
 contemptuous epithet of " Jack," and though he 
 adheres with more or less exactitude to the truth 
 of history as regards the leading facts of his career, 
 he wholly misrepresents his character and objects ; 
 and is about as unfair as a dramatist of our day 
 would be if he introduced George Washington to 
 the stage in the character of a clown or a Sheffield 
 trades-unionist. 
 
 In the year 1450, when Cade made his appearance 
 as a reformer of abuses, very great discontent pre- 
 vailed among the commons. This, however, was 
 by no means an abnormal state of affairs. At no 
 time between the Conquest and the Reformation, 
 were the commons particularly well affected to the 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 307 
 
 Norman kings or satisfied with the state of England, 
 and such vigorous but unsuccessful leaders of revolt 
 had from time to time appeared as William Fitzos- 
 bert, surnamed Longbeard, in the reign of Richard 
 the First, Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, and John Ball, in 
 the reign of Eichard the Second, and one Cheney 
 or Thaney, a fuller of Canterbury, calling himself 
 c ' Bluebeard, " a few months prior to the time when 
 Cade himself appeared as the more formidable oppo- 
 nent of the government. 
 
 Bluebeard's career was short. He was taken in 
 arms in Canterbury, sent to London for trial, con- 
 demned to death, and beheaded. With the view of 
 striking terror into the minds of his fellow-citizens, 
 who were suspected of too much sympathy with his 
 cause, the sheriffs of London were ordered to send 
 the traitor's head to Canterbury, to be fixed on a 
 pole over the gate; but so great was his popu- 
 larity in Kent, that the sheriffs had the greatest 
 difficulty in fulfilling this part of their duty, 
 most people being afraid to take charge of the 
 head, lest their lives should be taken by the 
 mob. The discontent in England at this time was 
 remarkably bitter. It was partly occasioned by 
 the inglorious issues of the war in France, and 
 the cession of the Duchies of Anjou and Maine, 
 once appanages of the crown of England; partly 
 by the misgovernment of the king at home — 
 
308 NEW LIGHT ON 
 
 the consequence of his own weakness of character 
 — his subjection to his stronger minded and impe- 
 rious queen and the sway that he allowed unworthy 
 favourites to exercise over him ; partly by the pre- 
 tensions of the House of York to the throne, and 
 partly , if not chiefly, by the constant illegal and 
 extortionate demands which were made upon that 
 very sore place in the estimation of all Englishmen, 
 then as now — the pocket of the people. The Duke 
 of Suffolk, the queen's favourite, who had long 
 exercised a malign influence, had been banished and 
 slain — to the great displeasure of the king, and 
 more especially of Queen Margaret ; and Humphrey, 
 Duke of Gloucester, the protector of England during 
 the king's long minority, had been treacherously 
 murdered, to Henry's exceeding shame and sorrow. 
 The sturdy commons of Kent were louder in their 
 dissatisfaction than the commons in other parts of 
 England ; though the discontent elsewhere was by 
 no means of a gentle character. The anger of the 
 Kentish men was particularly excited by a report 
 that the whole county was to be laid waste, and 
 turned into a deer forest, in punishment for the 
 murder of the Duke of Suffolk, with which the men 
 of Kent had nothing to do. The Duke of York, 
 with an eye to his own interest, took advantage of 
 the growing ill-will of the commons, and fostered 
 and fomented it by every means in his power. He 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 309 
 
 found an instrument ready to his hands in John 
 Cade, a gentleman of Ashford, in Kent,, supposed 
 by some to be a near relative of his own, and a true 
 scion of the House of Mortimer. However that 
 may be, Cade had served under the duke in the 
 Irish expedition in 1449 with great honour and 
 bravery. " About this time/' says honest John 
 Stow, in his " Annales of England/' " began a new 
 rebellion in Ireland, but Richard Duke of York, 
 being sent thither to appease the same, so assuaged 
 the furie of the wild and savage people there, that 
 he won such favour among them, as could never 
 be separated from him and his lineage." Cade's 
 gallant behaviour on the battle field, and his striking 
 personal resemblance to the Mortimers, marked him 
 out to the ambitious Duke of York as a person who 
 might be safely trusted with his cause among the 
 Kentish commons ; and Cade, assuming the name 
 of Mortimer, lent himself heartily to the project. 
 The fires of discontent smouldered all over England, 
 and in Kent needed but a strong breath to blow 
 them into a blaze. Such a breath was found in the 
 person and the pretensions of Cade. 
 
 On Whit- Sunday, the 24th of May, all measures 
 for an outbreak having been previously taken by the 
 adherents of the Duke of York and the personal 
 friends of Cade, the commons of Kent in large 
 numbers flocked to Ashford, where Cade resided,. 
 
310 NEW LIGHT ON 
 
 well armed, and ready to serve under his banner. 
 Day by day their numbers increased, and by the 
 Saturday following he found himself at the head of 
 a host so numerous as to warrant him in marching 
 upon London. On Sunday, the 31st of May, he 
 encamped upon Blackheath, his army amounting, in 
 the computation of the time, which was probably 
 much exaggerated, to one hundred thousand men. 
 He took the title of Captain of Kent, and aspired 
 to talk with the king, as potentate with potentate. 
 
 The city of London sympathised with his cause. 
 The rising spread from Kent to Essex, Sussex, and 
 Surrey ; and in a short time Cade had force at his 
 command sufficient, if judiciously handled, to revo- 
 lutionise the kingdom, and seat the Duke of York 
 upon the throne. His first proceedings were emi- 
 nently cautious, prudent, and statesmanlike. His 
 great error was that he did not boldly march into 
 London when the time was ripe and the Londoners 
 favourable, but was content to establish his head- 
 quarters in Southwark. His misfortune was that 
 he was unable to control his followers, and prevent 
 them from pillaging the merchants; and that he 
 was not supported in proper time by the Duke of 
 York. For a month he lay encamped on Black- 
 heath, to the great consternation of the king and his 
 court, and levied contributions on the country round, 
 granting free passes to all who were well affected 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 311 
 
 to Ms cause; promising future payment for all goods 
 and provisions supplied for the use of his army; 
 forbidding pillage and robbery under the penalty of 
 death, which he more than once inflicted upon a dis- 
 obediert follower ; and acting in all respects as if he 
 were a legally-appointed general, waging a legitimate 
 war. Towards the king's person he expressed the 
 utmost devotion, and declared that his sole purpose 
 in taking arms was the removal of evil counsellors 
 from the loyal presence, and the peaceable redress of 
 the grievances of the people. His " Complaint of 
 the Commons of Kent and Cause of the great 
 Assembly on Blackheath," as textually set forth in 
 Stow's " Innales," are ranged under seventeen dis- 
 tinct heads. This document asserted that the com- 
 mons of Kent were not guilty of the murder of the 
 Duke of Suffolk, and protested against the threat 
 of converting the county into a " wilde foreste," in 
 punishmsnt thereof. It furthermore alleged that 
 the king wasted the revenues of the crown upon his 
 favourit3s, and laid taxes upon the people to supply 
 the defciency thus created ; that the lords of the 
 blood royal {i.e. of the house of York) were put out 
 of the royal presence, and other mean persons of 
 lower nature exalted and made of his privy council ; 
 that the people of the realm were not paid for the 
 stuff ind purveyance taken for the use of the king's 
 household ; and that the king's retainers and favour- 
 
312 NEW LIGHT ON 
 
 ites made a practice of accusing innocent Jews 
 of treason and other crimes, in order to gain 
 possession of their estates. One chief cause of the 
 disaffection was the harsh and unjust collection of 
 a tax called the " fifteen penny/' amounting to the 
 fifteenth of every Jew's annual income. Another 
 was the illegal interference of the court in the free 
 election of the knights of the shire ; and another, 
 the gross venality and corruption of the officials in 
 every department of the state. This " complaint/' 
 whether drawn up by Cade himself or inspired by 
 him, was highly creditable to his ability.; It was 
 accompanied by another paper, entitled jThe Re- 
 quests by the Captain of the Great Assembly in 
 Kent." This document consisted of five fcerse and 
 significant paragraphs. The first set forth the Cap- 
 tain's loyalty to his sovereign lord the king, and 
 all his true lords, spiritual and temporal, and his 
 design that he should reign like a "king royal" 
 and a true christian king anointed ; the second 
 expressed the Captain's desire that the king- should 
 avoid all the false progeny and affinity of the Duke 
 of Suffolk, and take to his person the true brds of 
 the realm, notably the high and mighty prince the 
 Duke of York ; the third, his desire that immediate 
 punishment should be inflicted upon the murierers 
 of the excellent Duke of Gloucester (Duke Hum- 
 phrey) \ the fourth was an accusation of treason 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 313 
 
 against, and demand of punishment on, all who 
 were concerned in the loss or alienation of Anjou 
 and Maine, and the other possessions of the English 
 crown in France. The fifth — a comprehensive article 
 — denounced the extortion daily used among the 
 common people : and " that gr eerie waxe, was freely 
 used to the perpetual destruction of the king's true 
 commons of Kent." It is this mention of green 
 wax, with which exchequer writs, so loudly com- 
 plained of by Cade, appear to have been sealed, 
 that excited the mirth of the dramatist — when he 
 makes Cade say, ' c Is not this a lamentable thing, 
 that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made 
 parchment, and that parchment scribbled o'er should 
 undo a man ? Some say the bee stings, but I say 
 it is the bees' wax, for I did but seal once to a thing, 
 and I was never mine own man since." 
 
 This paragraph further complained of several 
 kinds of extortion to which the commons were 
 subjected, and specially named four extortioners 
 and false traitors, who were to be punished as an 
 example to similar evil-doers, — one of whom named 
 Cromer, Sheriff of Kent, afterwards fell into 
 Cade's hands, and was decapitated. 
 
 King Henry, urged on by his strong-minded 
 queen and by the people in her interest — whose 
 heads would have been in very considerable danger 
 had Cade been triumphant — resolved, after misgiv- 
 
314 NEW LIGHT ON 
 
 ings which, to a man of his easy, amiable nature, 
 were probably both sore and long-protracted, to 
 take the field against Cade. He could muster, 
 however, no more than fifteen thousand men against 
 Cade's one hundred thousand. Cade, who did not 
 wish to fight the king, for whose (< sacred person " he 
 expressed much affection, retired unexpectedly from 
 Blackheath to Sevenoaks. Henry did not follow; 
 but despatched a force under Sir Humphrey 
 Stafford, to do battle with the formidable rebel. 
 Sir Humphrey and his brother were killed, and 
 their force routed with great loss. Cade, highly 
 elated, returned to Blackheath ; and the poor king, 
 losing courage, retreated to the very heart of 
 England — to Kenilworth Castle, leaving to others 
 the task, either of fighting or parleying with 
 the leader of the commons. The king-, as Hall's 
 Chronicle reports, was not quite certain of the 
 fidelity of his own troops. " The king's army," 
 says the historian, " being at Blackheath, and hear- 
 ing of his discomfiture (that of Sir Humphrey 
 Stafford), began to grudge and murmur among 
 themselves ; some wishing the Duke of York at 
 home to aid his cousin (the Captain of Kent), some 
 desiring the overthrow of the king and his counsel, 
 others openly crying out on the queen and her 
 accomplices." The circumstances were evidently 
 serious, and Cade was well nigh master of the 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 315 
 
 situation. To allay the popular excitement, the 
 king was advised to commit several of the persons 
 against whom the tide of indignation ran strongest 
 to the Tower — notably, the Lord Saye, and his son- 
 in-law, Cromer, the sheriff of Kent ; both of whom 
 were held in particular disesteem by the commons 
 of Kent. This concession, however, was not suffi- 
 cient to satisfy either Cade or the commons, and 
 Cade marched back from the scene of his little 
 victory at Sevenoaks to his old quarters at Black- 
 heath, to confer with his friends in the city of 
 London. On the part of the king, or rather of 
 the queen, two powerful nobles were deputed to 
 wait upon him in his camp, and ascertain on what 
 conditions he would lay down his arms, and disband 
 his followers. Cade was equal to the encounter of 
 argument, and though described by Shakespeare as 
 a coarse and illiterate ruffian, he was found to be a 
 person of a very different stamp by the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury and Humphrey Duke of Buckingham, 
 the two great peers who sought a conference with 
 him. Hall describes Cade as " a young man of a 
 goodly stature and a pregnant wit." The lords 
 " found him," he adds, " sober in communication, 
 wise in disputing, arrogant in heart, stiff in opinion, 
 and by no means possible to be persuaded to dis- 
 solve his army, except the king in person would 
 come to him, and consent to all things which he 
 would require." 
 
316 NEW LIGHT ON 
 
 Cade was now at the very zenith of his fortunes, 
 and had the Duke of York, then absent in Ireland, 
 hastened over to his support, it is likely that the 
 White Eose would have taken the place of the Eed, 
 and that Henry the Sixth would have had to mora- 
 lise sooner than he did upon the miseries that 
 encompassed anointed kings in the troublous age 
 in which he lived and suffered. But the Duke of 
 York did not make his appearance, and Cade was 
 left to himself to fight the battle of the commons, 
 rather than the battle of the claimant to the crown. 
 But as it happens in all times, there are men whose 
 heads are turned with prosperity, and Cade was of 
 the number. He struggled bravely against adver- 
 sity, but good fortune was too much for him. He 
 made a triumphal entry from Southwark into the 
 city over the bridge, which was then the sole means 
 of ingress for an army ; and, passing London Stone 
 in Watling Street, struck it with his sword in the 
 pride of his heart, as if to take possession, exclaim- 
 ing, " Now is Mortimer Lord of this City ? " And 
 he was lord of it : and, could he have held his fol- 
 lowers in order, might have made himself dictator 
 of the kingdom, and locum-tenens for his royal 
 master, the duke. But he could not control the 
 passions of the Kentish men, who thirsted for the 
 blood of Lord Saye, the high treasurer, and of his 
 son-in-law Cromer, the sheriff. The king, on taking 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 317 
 
 his departure, had not left the city entirely at the 
 mercy of the insurgents, but had left a valiant 
 commander, one Matthew Gough, whom Stow 
 quaintly calls " a manly and warly man/' in com- 
 mand of the Tower when he and his court effected 
 their ignominious retreat to Kenilworth, with strict 
 orders to watch the movements of the citizens, and 
 prevent them from lending effective assistance to 
 Cade. All but the very wealthiest of the inhabi- 
 tants were on the side of the rebellion, and even 
 some of these wavered in their allegiance to the 
 weak sovereign and his corrupt courtiers. On 
 the 3rd of July, Cade, for the second time, entered 
 the city from Southwark, amid the acclamations of 
 the people ; and proceeding to the Guildhall, where 
 the Lord Mayor sat for the administration of jus- 
 tice, ordered rather than requested that functionary 
 to send for Lord Saye to the Tower, and have him 
 arraigned forthwith, for malfeasances in his office 
 and for oppressing the people. Lord Saye took 
 objection to the Lord Mayor's jurisdiction, and 
 demanded to be tried by his peers ; but Cade's 
 followers — whether with or without the order or 
 concurrence of the Captain does not very clearly 
 appear — laid violent hands on the unhappy noble- 
 man, led him out to the conduit in Cheapside, 
 where they struck off his head and placed it upon a 
 pole. They afterwards drew his naked body through 
 
318 NEW LIGHT ON 
 
 the streets from Cheapside to Cade's head- quarters 
 in South wark. A similar fate befell Cromer, the 
 unpopular sheriff of Kent; and the ferocious mul- 
 titude, bearing his head upon a pole, presented his 
 dead lips to the dead lips of Lord Saye, as if the 
 two were kissing, to the great delight of the rabble 
 and to the disgust of the respectable citizens. That 
 evening Cade dined with Philip Malpas, an alder- 
 man and wealthy draper, well affected to his cause ; 
 but unluckily, some of his unruly followers, setting 
 at nought Cade's edict against pillage, despoiled 
 the rich merchant's house, and carried off his plate 
 and other valuables. This and a similar robbery, 
 committed on the following day at the house of 
 another wealthy citizen named Gherstis, proved to 
 be the turning point of Cade's fortunes. The lead- 
 ing citizens, though alarmed at the turbulence of 
 the mob in the murder of Lord Saye and the sheriff 
 of Kent, might have forgiven murder, but could 
 not forgive pillage ; and it was resolved by the Lord 
 Mayor and aldermen, counselled by the " manly 
 and warly " soldier at the Tower, that when Cade 
 next left the city for Southwark, his departure 
 should, if possible, be final, and that his re-entry 
 over the bridge should be opposed by the whole 
 available force both of the Tower and of the city. 
 Had Cade, in the first flush of victory, established 
 himself in the heart of London, as he might easily 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 319 
 
 have done,, this difficulty would have been avoided. 
 Matthew Gough seems to have been well aware of 
 the strategic mistake the Kentish leader had thus 
 committed, and undertook to defend the bridge the 
 next time that Cade and his followers attempted to 
 cross it. He had not to wait long for his opportu- 
 nity. At nine o'clock in the evening of Sunday, 
 the 5th of July; having in the morning caused one 
 of his followers to be beheaded for pillage, with a 
 view no doubt of conciliating the wealthy Lon- 
 doners and proving to them that he individually 
 had no part in such acts, Cade, at the head of a 
 company, attempted to enter the city. Stow thus 
 tells what ensued : 
 
 " On the fifth of July, the Captaine being* in 
 Southwarke, caused a man to be beheaded there, 
 and that day entred not the Citie. When night 
 was come, the Mayor and the Citizens with Mathew 
 Gough, kept the passage of the bridge and defended 
 the Kentishmen which made great force to re-enter 
 the Citie. Then the Captaine seeing this bicker- 
 ing, went to harness, and assembled his people, and 
 set so fiercely upon the Citizens, he drave them 
 back from the stoupes in Southwarke, or bridge 
 foote, unto the drawbridge, in defending whereof 
 many a man was drowned and slaine. Among the 
 which was John Sutton, alderman, Mathew Gough, 
 a squire of Wales, and Roger Hoisand, citizen. 
 
320 NEW LIGHT ON 
 
 This skirmish continued all night till nine of the 
 clocke on the morrow, so that sometime the Citi- 
 zens had the better, and sometimes the other, but 
 ever they kept them on the bridge so that the Citi- 
 zens never passed much the bulwarke at the bridge 
 foote, nor the Kentishmen no farther than the 
 drawbridge ; thus continuing the cruel fight, to the 
 destruction of much people on both sides. Lastly, 
 after the Kentishmen were put to the worst, a truce 
 was agreed for certaine houres." 
 
 The disaffection of the citizens of London, and 
 its hourly if not momentary increase, becoming 
 known to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was 
 at the same time Lord High Chancellor of England 
 — a man who combined the wariness of a priest 
 with the astuteness of a lawyer — that eminent func- 
 tionary, having full powers from the king, took 
 advantage of the opportunity to proclaim a pardon 
 to Cade and all his followers, if they would lay 
 down their arms and disperse. The offer acted 
 magically upon Cade's force, disheartened alike by 
 the defection of the Londoners, the non-arrival of 
 the Duke of York, and their own repulse on London 
 Bridge, and they began to desert. Cade, however, 
 was not wholly disheartened, but consented to meet 
 the Lord Chancellor at the church of St. Margaret's, 
 Southwark, and discuss the matter amicably. The 
 Lord Chancellor insisted upon absolute and un- 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 321 
 
 qualified submission: Cade, on Lis part, insisted 
 that all the seventeen articles of the complaint of 
 the Commons, as set forth by him, should be ac- 
 cepted and acted upon by the king. The Lord 
 Chancellor, having fought out the matter as long as 
 he could, and finding Cade not to be won over by 
 flattering speeches and fine promises, agreed to the 
 terms imposed. The fact was notified to Cade's 
 army, who, forthwith, imagining the ends of the 
 insurrection to have been achieved, began in large 
 numbers to take their departure to their homes. 
 Cade, however, mistrusted the Lord Chancellor's 
 powers, and prevailed upon a certain portion of his 
 followers to hold by him and remain under arms 
 until the king and parliament, assembled at West- 
 minster for the purpose, should solemnly ratify the 
 agreement. But Cade was not sufficiently sup- 
 ported. The defection, the lukewarmness, or the 
 open hostility of the Londoners, perhaps a combi- 
 nation of all these, had so disheartening an effect 
 upon the " Commons," that his once mighty hosts 
 melted almost entirely away, and he found himself 
 within less than two days at the head of a poor 
 remnant, numbering less than a thousand men. "Not 
 wholly beaten, having still a hope left of the Kentish 
 people, Cade made his way to Eo Chester, with the 
 intention of making a new appeal to the oppressed 
 Commons 3 but it was too late. His followers had 
 
 y 
 
222 NEW LIGHT 02T 
 
 not their leader's courage or honesty of purpose, and 
 fell to fighting about the miserable military chest 
 which they had carried away with them. In five 
 days Cade was wholly deserted, and fled for his life*. 
 A proclamation was forthwith published, offering a 
 reward for his head, dead or alive, on the ground that 
 he had scorned the king's pardon, and persisted in 
 waging war against the royal authority after terms 
 of surrender and compromise had been agreed upon. 
 Proclamations for the arrest of offenders, whether 
 in civil or criminal cases, are proverbially unfavour- 
 able in their descriptions of the personal appearance 
 ?,nd antecedents of the persons whom it is sought 
 to capture. In Cade's case there was no exception 
 to this ancient, and it may be added, this modern, 
 rule. He was described as an Irishman, which he 
 was not; as one who had in Surrey, while in the 
 service of Sir Thomas Dacres, feloniously slain a 
 woman with child, and of having fled to France to 
 escape the consequences of this act, and while there 
 of taking up arms on " the French part " against 
 the English. A thousand marks were offered for 
 the head of this false traitor. The proclamation 
 produced speedy effect. The once popular idol was 
 deserted on every hand : none were so poor as to 
 do him reverence, none so charitable as to give him 
 a crust of bread, or a glass of water, in his need ; 
 and, like Masaniello and Rienzi, he found that the 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 323 
 
 same voices, wliicli could clieer and shout in the 
 days of his prosperity, could curse him as lustily in 
 the hour of his calamity. The proclamation was 
 issued on the 10th of July, and on the 15th he was 
 discovered in the garden of one Alexander Iden or 
 Eden, in Heathfield, in Sussex, and slain after a 
 gallant and desperate attempt to defend himself. 
 His head was taken to London, affixed upon the 
 bridge, and his quarters distributed among the 
 various towns and districts, where the disaffection, 
 of which he was the leader, was supposed to be the 
 most widely spread. One quarter was sent to 
 Blackheath ; a second to Norwich, where the bishop 
 (Walter Harpe) was supposed to favour the cause 
 of the Duke of York ; a third to Salisbury ; and the 
 fourth to Gloucester, where the abbot of St. Peter's 
 bad influence over the people, and was known, or 
 suspected, to be a Yorkist. 
 
 Thus lived and died John Cade, the victim of 
 the violence which he provoked ; but in his career 
 no more worthy of blame than many more illus- 
 trious personages who shared his opinions, and 
 brought them to a more successful issue. The Duke 
 of York, as readers of English history will remem- 
 ber, though he did not aid his faithful Captain, as he 
 ought to have done, at the right moment, lived for 
 years afterwards to keep England in a state of agi- 
 tation and civil war by his pretensions ; but did not 
 
324 NEW LIGHT ON 
 
 mount the uneasy throne to which he aspired, but 
 left his pretensions to his son Edward, who made 
 them good by his strong right arm, and wore the 
 regal crown, which, in those days, was but too often 
 a crown of agony both to those who inherited or 
 conquered it. 
 
 The last mention of Cade in history appears in 
 Stow, under the date of January, 1451, seven months 
 after the collapse of the great rebellion of the com- 
 mons. The discontent, even then, appears to have 
 smouldered ; for the merciful King Henry, who 
 loved not to take life, was induced by the advice of 
 the queen and her evil counsellors, whom it was the 
 object of Cade and the Duke of York to remove 
 from his person, to take a journey into Kent, for the 
 purpose of striking terror. 
 
 cc The 18th of January, the king* with certain 
 lordes, and his justices rode towards Kent, and 
 there indicted and arraigned many, whereof to the 
 number of twenty- six were put to death, eight at 
 Canterbury, and the residue in other townes of 
 Kent and Surrey. And the king returning out of 
 Kent on the 23rd of Februarie, the men of that 
 countrey, naked to their shirtes in great numbers, 
 met him on the Blackheath; and there on their 
 knees asked mercy, and had their pardon. Then 
 the king rode royally through the citie of London, 
 and was of the citizens joyfully received; and the 
 
AN" OLD SUBJECT. 325 
 
 same clay against the king's coming to the citie, 
 nine heads of the Kentishmen that had been put to 
 death were set on London Bridge; and the cap- 
 tained s head, that stood there before was set in the 
 middest of them." 
 
 But as long as the Duke of York lived, all the 
 efforts of the king's counsellors — whether they were 
 conciliatory or the reverse — were of little avail for 
 the tranquillization of the commons; and seven 
 years after the death of Cade a proclamation was 
 issued for the apprehension of one Eobert Poynings, 
 uncle of the Countess of Northumberland, who had 
 acted as Cade's carver and sword-bearer, and who, 
 during the whole of this time, had been actively 
 engaged in stirring up the commons of Kent to new 
 rebellion, though with but slight success. 
 
 It has hitherto been considered, on the authority 
 of Shakesj)eare and the early historians — not only 
 that Cade was a vulgar " rowdy" and a man of no 
 education or acquirements — but that his followers 
 were a mere mob and rabble of the very lowest 
 order. It appears, however, — from the Patent Eoll 
 of the twenty- eighth year of Henry the Sixth, which 
 has recently been examined, and formed the subject 
 of an interesting paper, which was read by Mr. Wil- 
 liam Durrant Cooper, at a meeting of the Archaeolo- 
 gical Society of Kent, at Ashford in that county, the 
 scene of Cade's earliest exploits, — that this is a mis- 
 
328 NEW LIGHT ON 
 
 take, and that among those who were pardoned for 
 their participation in Cade's rebellion, are the names- 
 of several of the richest and most influential people of 
 the county. There were knights, abbots, esquires, 
 gentlemen, and yeomen, besides handicraftsmen of 
 all sorts. " Cade's army was not a disorganized 
 mob," says Mr. Cooper, " nor a chance gathering. 
 In several hundreds the constables duly, and as if 
 legally, summoned the men and many parishes.) 
 particularly Marden, Penshurst, Hawkhurst, North- 
 fleet, Boughton, Smarden, and Pluckley, furnished 
 as many men as could be found in our own day, fit 
 for arms." Among the mayors, bailiffs, and con- 
 stables, pardoned for having summoned the people 
 to join Cade's standard — first at Ashford, and 
 second at Blackheath, after his victory at Seven- 
 oaks — were the mayors of Canterbury, Chatham,. 
 Maidstone, Rochester, Sandwich, and Queens- 
 borough; the bailiff of Folkestone, and the con- 
 stables of eight-and-twenty hundreds and villages, 
 which are duly set forth in the roll. Among the 
 gentlemen pardoned were several who had been, 
 and several who afterwards became, sheriffs of Kent. 
 Many families, who to this day hold their heads- 
 high in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, will find the 
 names of their ancestors in this document — if they 
 choose to look for them ; while in the list will be' 
 found many names once common that have now 
 
AN OLD SUBJECT. 327 
 
 wholly disappeared, to crop up, perhaps, in unex- 
 pected places in America, 
 
 Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the dying 
 Cade, after his fatal combat with Iden in the gai- 
 den, the words : 
 
 Tell Kent, from me, she hath lost her best man — 
 
 and it does not appear, from an impartial review of 
 his whole story and the light thrown upon it by 
 documentary evidence, that the boast was at all 
 uu founded. 
 
01M SOME POPULAB AND UNPOPULAR 
 POETS. 
 
 T is a great thing to be a popular poet. 
 Your name is in the mouths of young 
 ladies (if there be any good to you in 
 
 J that)_, and your words are sometimes 
 quoted with approval by statesmen and philosophers", 
 and may help to mould the public opinion of your 
 time — an advantage which is pleasant, if it be not 
 always profitable. But will your popularity last be- 
 yond your lifetime ? Will it last even until you die ? 
 There's the rub-a-rub, which, if unaccompanied by 
 substantial reward, is apt to infuse a little, just a 
 little drop of gall and bitterness into the cup of 
 your apparent good fortune. In the reign of 
 Charles the Second there flourished four poets : 
 three of them were popular, and one was not. Let 
 me say a few words about each of them, and see 
 what the popularity of the three was worth, and 
 
ON SOME POETS. 329 
 
 what came of it. After that we shall consider the 
 unpopularity of the fourth. 
 
 The first was one Thornas, better known as ' ' Tom " 
 D'Urfey, just as people now talk affectionately, 
 though possibly somewhat irreverently, of Ci Tom 3i 
 Moore, " Tom " Campbell, and " Tom " Hood. He 
 was the pet and idol of his age; and Charles II. 
 was more than once seen walking in the Mall in 
 St. James's Park in familiar talk with him, his dogs 
 and his courtiers falling behind. Nay, the merry 
 monarch carried his complaisance still further, and 
 condescended to sing duets with him, Tom and he 
 holding the music sheet between them- — a fact which 
 the poet has recorded in his memoirs with great 
 gusto and satisfaction. D'TJrfey was principally 
 known for his songs, which he wrote to old and 
 popular tunes — sometimes, if not invariably, adopt- 
 ing as much as was quotable of the old words and 
 choruses to new themes, and otherwise altering and 
 amending, as Robert Burns did with the popular 
 songs of Scotland more than a century later. The 
 king was partial to the fiddle, as the violin was then 
 called both by the fashionable and the unfashionable, 
 and to those lively airs and jig tunes of which the 
 fiddle was the best exponent. When in exile, with 
 but slight chance of ever sitting on the throne of 
 his ancestors, and when he could but ill afford 
 luxuries of any kind, he lavished such money as he 
 
330 POPULAR AND 
 
 could command upon fiddles and fiddlers. When 
 after the death of the Great Protector, the Common- 
 wealth of England found itself without a strong 
 hand to rule it, and "the king enjoyed his own 
 again," one of the first things he did, after General 
 Monk had made things perfectly safe for him, was 
 to engage a corps of four-and-twenty fiddlers, to play 
 for him during dinner and at his pleasant little pri- 
 vate parties and conversations in the evening. It 
 was on these occasions that D'TJrfey's services were 
 called into requisition to sing his own songs; not for 
 reward and emolument, but wholly for the honour 
 and glory of amusing the king and basking in the 
 pleasant sunshine of his countenance, and that of 
 the fair and frail ladies in whose society he took 
 most pleasure. At the time of the Eestoration, Tom 
 was a gay young fellow of twenty-three, who had 
 abandoned the study of the law for the pursuits of 
 literature and conviviality. During the whole reign 
 of Charles he lived like a prosperous gentleman, 
 making small means go a long way in keeping up 
 appearances; and being always a welcome guest, 
 not only at the palace, but at the houses of the 
 nobility and rural gentry, where, after dinner, he 
 would sing his own songs without much, if any, 
 pressing, and where the hosts and other guests 
 would join lustily in the chorus. A collection of his 
 songs, under the somewhat coarse title, though not 
 
UNPOPULAR POETF. 331 
 
 considered coarse in that age,, of "Pills to purge 
 Melancholy/' was published by Tom, and had a 
 highly remunerative sale. Tom was not in such 
 favour with the gloomy James II. and the taciturn 
 William III. as he was with the merry monarch ; 
 but in the reign of Queen Anne he was again taken 
 notice of by the Court, and received fifty guineas 
 from Her Majesty for writing some verses in ridicule 
 of the Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dow- 
 ager of Hanover, and mother of George I. A sample 
 verse will suffice : 
 
 The crown's far too weighty 
 
 For shoulders of eighty ; 
 She could not sustain such a trophy. 
 
 Her hand, too, already 
 
 Has grown so unsteady ; 
 
 She can't hold a sceptre, 
 
 So Providence kept her 
 Away — poor old Dowager Sophy ! 
 
 Ten times as much for this vile doggrel as Milton 
 received for " Paradise Lost ! " But Tom's songs 
 were better than his satirical pieces, and had a joy- 
 ous ring about them, which commended them to the 
 gay cavaliers and " Anonymas" of the period. Four 
 of them, out of a vast multitude, have survived, in a 
 lingering state of quasi- vitality, to our day — " The 
 Brave Men of Kent," " Dame Durden," " The Bonny 
 Milk Maid," and " Within a Mile of Edinburgh." 
 The Kentish men, sometimes over their cups and in 
 
332 POPULAR AND 
 
 their ale-houses, sing the song that Tom wrote in 
 their honour, with its roystering chorus : 
 
 The men of Kent, 
 
 So loyal, brave, and free, 
 'Mong Britain's race, if one surpass, 
 
 A man of Kent is he. 
 
 " Dame Durden" makes a capital glee, and the 
 words and music rattle along together in a manner 
 that King Charles heartily approved of, and which 
 will long preserve the little ditty in popular favour. 
 
 Dame Durden kept five serving girls 
 
 To carry the milking pail ; 
 She also kept five labouring men 
 To use the spade and flail. 
 'Twas Moll and Bet, and Doll and Kate, and Dorothy 
 
 Draggletail, 
 And Tom and Dick, and Joe and Jack, and Humphrey 
 
 with his flail ; 
 And Kitty is a charming girl to carry the milking pail. 
 
 " The Bonny Milk Maid " is a good description 
 of a country lass by a poet who was pre-eminently a 
 cockney. But like other cockneys of his day and 
 ours, he took much real enjoyment in rural scenes ; 
 and his milkmaid is a true picture of a rustic, and 
 not such a caricature of a high-born damsel mas- 
 querading as a shepherdess, as was the fashion of 
 that very artificial age. 
 
UNPOPULAR POETS. 333 
 
 "When cold bleak winds do roar, 
 And flowerets spring no more, 
 
 The fields that were seen, 
 
 So pleasant and green, * 
 By winter all candied o'er ; 
 
 Oh, how the town lass 
 
 Looks with her white face 
 
 And lips so deadly pale ; 
 But it is not so with those that go 
 Through frost and snow, with cheeks that glow, 
 
 To carry the milking pail. 
 
 ' ' Within a Mile of Edinburgh Town " was writ- 
 ten to please Queen Anne, who was fond of Scottish 
 music, as became a scion of the House of Stuart. 
 But little of it 3 as now sung, was written by D'Urfey, 
 and the air in imitation of the Scottish manner was 
 composed for Vauxhall Gardens towards the end of 
 the last century by Hook, the father of Theodore 
 Hook, the wit and novelist. 
 
 Tom, who had ceased to be able to sing* in the 
 sere and yellow leaf of his age, fell into neglect, if 
 not into penury, and a benefit was arranged for him 
 at Drury Lane Theatre, which both Steele and Ad- 
 dison recommended and publicly supported. The 
 latter was particularly cordial in the " Spectator." 
 " Tom D'Urfey," he said, ' c has made the world 
 merry ; and I hope they will make him easy as long- 
 as he stays amongst us. This I will take upon me 
 to say, they cannot do a kindness to a more divert- 
 ing companion, or a more cheerful, honest, or good- 
 
334 POPULAR AND 
 
 natured man." Tom was never married, and as a 
 man abont town, and a frequenter of the coffee- 
 houses, was the best known personage of his day. 
 But he long outlived his popularity, and his name 
 and his works are now scarcely known except to 
 literary antiquaries. The poet lived to the good 
 old age of seventy-four, and is buried in St. Jameses 
 Church, Piccadilly, where a stone, with the simple 
 inscription — "Tom D'Urfey, dyed Feb. ye 26, 
 1723," points out the spot where he lies. 
 
 The second of the popular poets of the time was 
 n young Welsh lady, a Mrs. Katherine Phillips, who 
 was known under the pseudonym of " Orinda." By 
 her contemporaries she was called " the matchless 
 Orinda," and " the most deservedly admired Mrs. 
 Katherine Phillips." John Evelyn in his Diary, 
 under date of the 4th of February, 1667-8, records 
 that he saw the tragedy of Horace, written by the 
 virtuous Mrs. Phillips, acted before their majesties. 
 He underscored and emphasised the word "vir- 
 tuous" to give point to his allusion that "the 
 
 Castiemaine," the king's mistress, who was present, 
 wore diamonds worth £40,000, " far outshining 
 those of the queen." Pepys in his Diary expresses 
 his opinion that " Horace " was " a silly tragedy." 
 In this opinion it was evident that Evelyn did not 
 coincide, for he afterwards cited Orinda "as among 
 the most illustrious persons of our nation," and his 
 
TJNTOPTJLAU POETS. 335 
 
 wife, good Mrs. Evelyn, in contrasting her talents 
 and character with that of the Duchess of New- 
 castle, to whom she had lately been introduced, 
 gives Orinda the palm. " The duchess is an ori- 
 ginal. I hope she may never have a copy. Never 
 did I see a woman so full of herself, so amazingly 
 vain and ambitious. What contrary miracles does 
 •our age produce ! This lady, and Mrs. Katherine 
 Phillips. ;J The poems of " the matchless Orinda " 
 circulated in manuscript among her friends, and 
 some speculative and dishonest bookseller, having- 
 contrived to procure copies of them, published them 
 without her knowledge. The law of copyright was 
 neither very clear nor very stringent in those days 
 (Shakespeare's sonnets were printed without his 
 consent) ; and instead of suing the printer or the 
 publisher for this breach of the seventh command- 
 ment, Mrs. Phillips was driven to the necessity of 
 publishing her poems herself. She wrote to a friend 
 whom, in the fashionable affectation of the day, she 
 addressed as " Poliarchus," from a place in Wales, 
 where she resided, setting- forth the annoyance that 
 this surreptitious publication had caused her. " Is 
 there," she querulously asked,." no retreat from the 
 malice of this world ? I thought a rock in a moun- 
 tain might have hidden me, and that it had been 
 free for all to spend their solitudes in what reserves 
 they pleased, and that our rivers, though they are 
 
336 POPULAR AND 
 
 babblings would not have betrayed the follies of 
 impertinent thoughts upon their banks; but 'tis 
 only I who am that unfortunate person that cannot 
 so much as think in private, but must have my 
 imagination rifled, and exposed to play the mounte- 
 bank, and dance upon the ropes to entertain all the 
 rabble ; to undergo all the raillery of the wits and 
 all the severity of the wise, and to be the sport of 
 some that can, and of some that can't read a verse. 
 This is a most cruel accident, and hath made so pro- 
 portionate an impression upon me, that really it 
 hath cost me a sharp fit of sickness since I heard it." 
 Her friend Poliarchus contrived to stop the sale 
 of the piratical edition, and undertook to bring out 
 a correct one ; but the lady died of small-pox be- 
 fore the book appeared, to the great sorrow of all 
 the wits and fine ladies of the court. " The small- 
 pox," says Poliarchus, in his introductory essay, 
 " that malicious disease, as knowing how little she 
 would have been concerned for her handsomeness, 
 when at the best, was not satisfied to be as in- 
 jurious a printer of her face as the other had been 
 of her poems, but treated her with a more fatal 
 cruelty than her stationer had treated them ; for 
 though he, to her most sensible affliction, surrepti- 
 tiously possessed himself of a false copy, and sent 
 those children of her fancy into the world so mar- 
 tyred that they were more unlike themselves than 
 
UNPOPULAR POETS. 337 
 
 she could have been made had she escaped ; that 
 murderous tyrant (the small-pox) with greater 
 barbarity, seized unexpectedly upon her, the true 
 original, and to the much juster affliction of all the 
 world, violently tore her out of it, and hurried her 
 untimely to the grave, upon the 22nd of June, 1664, 
 she being then but thirty-one years of age." 
 
 Poliarchus mentions to her praise, as something 
 unusual in a lady, that her handwriting was good 
 and her spelling correct. " She wrote familiar let- 
 ters with strange readiness and facility, in a very 
 fair hand and with perfect orthography. We might 
 well have called her the English Sappho — she of all 
 the female poets of former ages, being for her verses 
 and her virtues both, the most highly valued. But 
 she has called herself Orinda, a name that deserves 
 to be added to the number of the Muses, and to live 
 as long as they! Her merit should have had a 
 statue of porphyry, wrought by some great artist 
 equal in skill to Michael Angelo, that might have 
 transferred to posterity the lasting image of so 
 great a person ! " 
 
 Cowley was as complimentary in verse as Po- 
 liarchus was in prose; and in an elegy on her 
 death, after rating the small-pox in round terms for 
 its cruelty and spite in attacking so beautiful, witty, 
 and inspired a person, he raised her high above all 
 
 z 
 
338 POPULAR AND 
 
 the poets and poetesses of her time, himself alone 
 excepted : — 
 
 The certain proofs of our Orinda's wit 
 In her own lasting characters are writ, 
 And they will long my praise of them survive, 
 Though long, perhaps, too that may live ! 
 The trade of glory managed by the pen, 
 Though great it be, and everywhere is found, 
 Does bring in but small profit to us men ; 
 'Tis by the number of the sharers drown'd ; 
 Orinda, on the female coasts of Tame, 
 Engrosses all the goods of her poetic name - T 
 She does no partner with her see, 
 Does all the business there alone, which we 
 Are forced to carry on by a whole company. 
 
 The phrase, " the female coasts of Fame/' is a 
 vile phrase, as vile as the " mobled queen" in 
 Hamlet, though the conceit that there was but one 
 poetess in England and many poets, does credit to 
 Cowley's proficiency in the art of flattery. 
 
 It is difficult to procure a copy of the poems of 
 this paragon of poetesses, sole possessor of " the 
 female coasts of Fame," nor does the surmounting 
 of the difficulty repay the trouble it costs. Orinda 
 was a devoted royalist, and her poems consist prin- 
 cipally of odes and addresses to the king and queen, 
 and to the great lords and ladies of the court, on 
 their marriages, and other interesting personal 
 events. One specimen of the talent, the wit, the 
 
UNPOPULAR POETS. 339 
 
 cleverness, the genius, whichever it may be, of 
 which our ancestors thought so highly, may serve 
 to prove that they were easily pleased, and that 
 the taste for poetry in their day was something 
 very different from the taste of ours. She addresses 
 a friend, one Mrs. Anne Owen, under the name of 
 u Lucaria : " 
 
 I did not live until this time 
 
 Crown'd my felicity, 
 When I could say without a crime, 
 
 I am not thine, but thee. 
 
 This carcass breath'd, and waked, and slept. 
 
 So that the world believed 
 There was a soul the motions kept, 
 
 But they were all deceived. 
 
 For as a watch by art is wound 
 
 To motion, such was mine, 
 But never had Orincla found 
 
 A soul till she found thine. 
 
 There is more in the same style, neither much 
 worse nor much better. Where are now the works 
 of " the matchless Orinda," delight of her age ? 
 They sleep in her forgotten folio, and are as un- 
 known to the people of the nineteenth century as 
 the poems, if there be any, of the dwellers in 
 another planet. 
 
 Abraham Cowley, the last of the popular trio, is 
 a poet of much greater mark than Tom D'Urfey and 
 Mrs. Phillips, though his fame, or what is left of it, 
 
340 POPULAR AND 
 
 depends more upon the account given of him in 
 " Johnson's Lives of the Poets " than upon his own 
 writings. If Mrs. Phillips was " the matchless f* 
 to Cowley was reserved the epithet of " the incom- 
 parable." He was essentially a man of his own 
 time, and of no other, and neither looked before 
 nor after — as all great poets do. His poems abound 
 in conceits and prettinesses, in wordy quirks, in 
 quibbles, and in quodlibets ; and when he gives birth 
 to a great thought, as he sometimes does, he is apt 
 to overlay it with words — to smother his Yenus, as 
 it were, under the weight of her ribbons, her laces, 
 her velvets, and her furbelows, till the poor beauty 
 is scarcely able to waddle under the mass of finery. 
 A tone of melancholy pervades his writings ; and 
 as he calls himself " the melancholy Cowley," it is 
 to be supposed that such was the real character of 
 his mind, as well as of his poems. In one of- 
 his compositions he asks, half ambitiously, half 
 despondently, 
 
 What shall I do to be for ever known, 
 And make the age to come mine own ? 
 
 Posterity, without thinking of him, has replied " No- 
 thing ! " He was, however much he may have been 
 admired in his own age, for his age, and for his age 
 only. He was born in London in 1618, the son of 
 a grocer in Meet Street. He died in 1667, in his- 
 
UNPOPULAR POETS. 341 
 
 forty-ninth year, at his country house in Chertsey,. 
 whither he had retired to live a life of rural and 
 philosophic solitude. In his youth and early prime 
 he was a royalist, involved in the troubles of the 
 Revolution. His first step in life was an appoint- 
 ment as private secretary to Lord Jercnyn, after- 
 wards Earl of St. Albans, with whom he went to 
 Paris in 1646, his principal duty being to translate 
 from secret cipher the confidential correspondence 
 of the king and queen. He remained abroad for 
 ten years, living no one very well knew how. At 
 the end of that time he returned to England,, 
 ostensibly to pursue the practice of medicine, which 
 he had studied, or feigned to study, while on the 
 Continent, but, in reality, it is supposed, to' report 
 the state of affairs in England to the exiled royal 
 family and their friends in Paris. On the death 
 of Cromwell, and the subsequent restoration of 
 Charles II., he expected to obtain the Mastership 
 of the Savoy, which it appears had been promised to 
 him by Charles I. and by Charles II. But Charles II, 
 forgot him, as he did so many other friends, though 
 some tardy and inefficient amends were made for his 
 zealous services by the grant of a beneficial lease of 
 the queen's lands at Chertsey . Here he wrote poems, 
 and cultivated flowers and vegetables ; but having 
 overheated himself at haymaking in one of his own 
 fields, he caught a violent cold, of which he died. 
 
£42 POPULAR AND 
 
 All the minor poets and litterateurs of the day 
 rushed into print, and sang odes and elegies in 
 praise of the "incomparable" writer who had de- 
 parted. And oblivion, stealing silently over his 
 memory, left him, like others as great or greater, 
 to the antiquarians of literature, a mere name, with 
 the vaguest of memories attached to it. The late 
 Sir Robert Peel, in a memorable speech in Par- 
 liament, exhumed from the musty tomes where 
 Cowley's poems slumber undisturbed, a very beau- 
 tiful and striking passage, which, with a faint 
 twinkle, will doubtless tend to preserve his memory 
 as long as books of poetical extracts continue to be 
 published. The poet speaks of a period of national 
 peril, of impending civil strife, and of a deed un- 
 perpetrated that, if perpetrated, would be one of 
 national disgrace: 
 
 Come the eleventh plague rather than this should be ! 
 
 Come, sink us rather in the sea ! 
 
 Come rather pestilence, and mow us down ! 
 
 Come God's sword rather than our own ; 
 
 Let rather Eoman come again, 
 
 Or Saxon, Norman, or the Dane. 
 
 In all the bonds we ever bore, 
 
 We groan'd, we sigh'd, we wept — we never blush'd before ! 
 
 I now arrive at the unpopular poet. All this 
 time, when these and others of even a smaller 
 calibre appeared as large as tritons to the critical 
 minnows of that debased age, a truly great poet was 
 
UNPOPULAR POETS. 343 
 
 alive. The people were not great readers, and 
 nobody knew his poems. Few had ever heard of him. 
 Those who had heard of him — King Charles and 
 his courtiers among the number — shrugged their 
 shoulders at mention of his name. He had mingled 
 in politics, had made himself a power — in prose if 
 not in verse, and had, unluckily for his fortunes, 
 taken the losing side. He had been for Cromwell 
 and the Commonwealth, and his fortunes had been 
 wrecked by the Eestoration. He kept a little 
 school for day-scholars in Bride Court, Fleet Street. 
 He was old and blind. To speak of him, except 
 with disrespect as a Roundhead and a bad subject,, 
 was to incur the suspicion of the court and of all 
 the fashionable people who took their tone from 
 it. He earned his bitter and too scanty bread in 
 agony and tears ; and was only too glad to accept a 
 very mean and paltry dole, from a speculative book- 
 seller who had faith in him (to the extent of five 
 pounds) , for a work that has put many hundreds of 
 thousands of pounds into the pockets of the printers 
 and booksellers of the last two centuries. The 
 name of this poor unpopular poet was John Milton. 
 Few knew him in his own day. Everybody 
 knows him in ours. His fame extends wherever 
 the English language is spoken ; and his Lycidas, 
 his Comus, his Sonnets, and his Paradise Lost, are 
 part of the mind and education of every person of 
 
344 UNPOPULAR POETS. 
 
 British blood or descent, who aspires to hold the po- 
 sition of a gentleman or a lady, or to the possession 
 of ordinary information on the subjects of English 
 poetry and literature. Not to know Tom D'Urfey, 
 Katherine Phillips,, and Abraham Cowley, the idols 
 of their time, is neither a wonder nor a disgrace 
 among well-educated people. JSTot to know John 
 Milton and his immortal works, is to be a dunce or 
 an ignoramus, or at least an exceedingly illiterate 
 person. Popular poets, look to your laurels ! Un- 
 popular poets, take heart of grace, and gain such 
 satisfaction as you can from the hope that if this 
 age knows you not, a wiser posterity will do you 
 justice. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 CHIS-SVICK PRESS: — PRINTED BY WHITTTXGHAM AXE WILK1>"S, 
 TOUKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE. 
 

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