\ruWFLLS THE ESSAYS OF ELIA THE ESSAYS OF ELIA WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY ALFKED AINGEE 12^ontion MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1894 AU n/jhts reserved Tills Edition of ilic Essays of FJia ivas first printed in i£ RcJ^riniiui 1884, 1887, 1888, i88g, 1891, 1892, 1894 PR UN1VFT?SITY OF CALIFORNIA S^Nr iVr;?ARA COLLEGE LIBRAK^ INTKODUCTION. The two volumes of miscellaueous writings by Charles Lamb, published by the Olliers in 1818, contained a variety of prose suflfieient to prove once more that the study and jwactice of verse is one of the best trainings for a prose style. In his dedication of the poetical volume t o Colerid gc^_LauibV lialt apoloHses" for Eav iug^oi'ial^en his old call ing^ and forha ving '" dwindled int o_proscand cxiticisju.'^^'TIie apology, as I have elsewhereremark'ed, was hardly needed. If we except the lines to Hester Savary and a few of the sonnets and shorter pieces, there was little in the vohune to weigh against the two essays on Hogarth and the tragedies of Shakspcare. It was the residt of the miscellaneous and yet thorough character of Lamb's reading from a boy that the critical side of his mind was the first to mature. The shorter papers con- tributed by Lamb to Leigh H.imfs Bcjiedo)' in 1811 — the year to which belong the two critical essays just mentioned — more o r less frame d on t he model of the Tatler and it ro- iuisc ojlJlxa -i-ichii css an d variety of thcEl ja series of ten years lat er. On tlie other hand, there are passages in tlie critical essays, siich as that on Lear, as represented on the stage, and the vindication of Hogarth as a moral teacher, which represent Lamb at his highest. On the republication of these miscellanies in 1818, it could not be overlooked that a prose writer of something like genius was coming to the front. One of the younger critics of the day, Henry Nelson Coleridge, reviewing the VI INTRODUCTION. volumes in the fifth number of the Etonian, in 1821, does not hesitate to declare that " Charles Lanib writes the best, the jjurest, and most genuine English of any man living," and adds the following acute remark : — " For genuine Anglicism, which amongst all other essen- tials of excellence in our native literature, is now recover- ing itself from the leaden mace of the liambler, he is quite a study ; his prose is absolutely perfect, it conveys tliought, without smothering it in blankets." Lamb was indeed to do more than any man of his time to remove the Johnsonian iucxdius from our periodical literature. But the full scope of the writer's powers was not known, l^erhaps even to himself, till the opportunity afforded him by the establishment of the London Magazine in 1820. It did credit to the discernment of the editors of that publication, that no control seems to have been exercised over the matter or manner of Landj's contributions. The writer had not to see all that made the individuality of his style disappear under the editor's hand, as his review of the Bxcursion in the Quarterly/ had suffered under Gilford's. To " wander at its own sweet Avill " was the first jieces- sity of Lamb's geni us. And this miscel l aue £)us ness of s ubject and treatnie nt i s the first siu'prise and delight felt by the reader oFLam b! It seems as if tiic choice of subject came to him almost at haphazard, — as if, like Shakspeare, he found the first plot that came to hand suitable, because the hand that was to deal with it was absolutely secure of its power to transmute the most unpromising material into gold. '"Boast Pig, The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers, A Bachelor'' s Complaint of the Con- duct of Married People, Grace before Meat — the incon - gruity of the titles at once declares th_e _J iumorist's confidence in the certainty of his to ucLTo have been co mmonijlace on such topics \vould_hav e been cert ain failure. \. \In the Character of the late Elia, by a Friend, which Lamb wrote in the interval between the publica- tion of the first and second series of essays, he hits off INTRODUCTION. Vll the characteristics of his style in a tone half contemptuous, half apologetic, wliich yet contains a criticism of real value. " I am now at liberty to confess," he writes, " that much which I have heard objected to ixiy late friend's writings was well founded. Crude, they are, I grant you — a sort of unlicked, incondite things — villainously pranked in an aliected array of antique words and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than such ; and better it is that a writer should be natural in a self- pleasing quaintuess than to aftect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him." No better text could be found from which to discourse on Charles Lamb's English. The plea put forth almost as a paradox is nevertheless a simple truth. What appears to the hasty reader artific ial in Lamb's style wa s natural to juni. For in this matter of style he was the product of his reading, and from a child his reading had lain in the dramatists, and gener- ally in the great imaginative writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sliakspeare and Milton he knew almost by heart : Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, and Webster, were hardly less familiar to him ; and next to these, the writers of the so-called meta- physical school, the later developments of the Euphuistic fashion, had the strongest fascination for him. Where the Fantastic vein took the pedantic -humorous shape, as in Burton ; or the metaphysical - humorous, as in Sir Thomas Browne ; or where it was combined with true poetic sensibility, as in Wither and Marvell, — of these springs Lamb had drunk so deeply that his mind was saturated with them. His own nature became " subdued to what it worked in." For him to bear, not only on his style, but on the cast of his mind and fancy, the mark of these writers, and many more in whom genius and eccentricity went together, was no matter of choice. It was this that constituted the "self - pl easing quaintness " of his literary man ner. The phrase could not be improved. Affectation is a manner put on to impress others. Lamb's m anner pleased himself — ancL iNTi;oi)rcTioN. _ \\liy, to use II fiimiliur phrase, he was '- lux])p .y To one of the writers just named Lamb stands in a special relation. Sir Thomas Browne was at once a scholar, a mj\stic, and a humorist. His humour is so grave that, when he is enunciating one of those jiaradoxes he loves so well, it is often impossible to tell whether or not he wears a smile upon his face. To Lamb this com- bination of characters was irresistible, for in it he saw a reflection of himself. He knew the writings of Browne so well that not only does he quote him more often than any other author, but whenever he has to confront the mysteries of life and death his mental attitude at once assimilates to Browne's, and his English begins to dilate and to become sombre. The dominant influence on Lamb in his reflective mood is Browne. His love of paradox, and the colour of his style, derived from the use of Latinised words never thoroughly acclimatised, is also from the same soiu-ce — a use which, in the hands of a less skilful Latinist tlian Lamb, might have been hazard- ous. We do not resent his use of such Avords as agnize, arride, rduct, reduce (in the sense of " bring back"), or even such portentous creations as sciential, cognition, in- tellectuals, and the like. Lamb could not have lived so lo^ig among the writers of the Renascence without sharing their fondness for word-coinage. And the flavour of the antique in style he felt to be an almost indispensable accomjxxnimeut to the antique in fancy. f Anotlier feature of his style is its allusiveness. / He is rich in quotations, and in my notes I have succeeded in tracing most of them to their source, a matter of some difticulty in Lamb's case, iov his inaccuracy is all but perverse. But besides those avowedly introduced as such, his style is full of (juotations held — if the expression may be allowed — in solution. One feels, rather tlian i-ecogniscs, that a i)hrase or idiom or turn of ex{)rcssiou is an echo of something tliat one has heard or read before. Yet such is the use made of his material, that a charm i s added b y LMTtODUCTION. IX the very fiict that wc are thus continually renewing our cxperieiu'c ot' an okter d ay! llis style becomes aroniatic, like the perfume of faded rose-leaves in a china jar. With such allusiveness as this, I need not say that I liave not meddled in my notes. Its whoh; charm lies in our recognising- it for ourselves. The '• ])rosi)erity " of a n allusion^_jis_of _a jest, " lies in the e.^r of him tlin t_hears it," and itj vere doing a poor service to La iiib--Jii:-Iiis readers to_dnv \v out and arrange in order the threads h e hiij^_wi Tino;1it into tlin very fahric of his Engl 1 sh . But although Lamlj's style is essentially the product of the authors he had made his own, nothing would be more untrue than to say of him that he read nature, or anything else, " through the spectacles of books." Words- worth would never have called to him to leave his books that he might come forth, and bring -with him a heart " That watches and receives." I t is to his own keen insight and intense sympathy t hat ■\\;^owc everything o f value in his wri_t ing. His obsei3 ^a- tion was lus own, tllougii when he gave it b ack into the world, the manner of it was the creation of his reading. Where, for ins tance, he describes (and it is seldom) the impression_jjr ociucecL on him" by country si ghts and so unds, thex eis not a tr ace discoverable of that co n- ventional treatment of natur e which had been so coinmon with _mere book -men, b e fore burns and Wordswort h. Lamb did not care greatly for the country and its associa- tions. Custom had made the jiresence of society, streets and crowds, the tlieatre and the picture gallery, an absolute necessity. Yet if he has to reproduce a memory of rural life, it is with the precision and tenderness of a Wordsworth. Take, as an example, this exquisite glim])se of a summer afternoon at Blakesware : — "The cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plot before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it, about me — it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer re- X INTRODrCTION. turns : " or again, the s-\vect garden scene from Dream Children, where the spirit of Wordsworth seems to con- tend for mastery with the fancifulness of Marvell, " because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries and the fir api)le,s, which were good for nothing but to look at — or in lying about upon the fresh grass, with all the fine garden smells around me — or bask- ing in the orangery, till I could almost fancy mjiself ripening too along with the oranges and limes in that grateful warmth — or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish pond at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their imperti- nent friskings." I t is hard to say whether t ha— poet's e V-S- or the painter's is more surely~exhibited her e. The " solitary wasp " an d the '^ sulky jjike " are master-toucli es ; and in the following passage it is perhaps as much of Cattermole as of Goldsmith or Gray, that we are re- minded : — " But would'st thou know the beauty of holi- ness 1 — go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church : think of the piety that has kneeled there — the meek pastor — the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble eSigies that kneel and weep around thee." The idea that some readers might derive from the casual titles and sxibjects of these essays, and the discur- siveness of their treatment, that they are hasty things thrown off" in a moment of high spirits, is of course erroneous. L and) somew h ere ^v rites of tlie essay mst quot ed, as a " fu ti le cflVi r FwriiTiTr fronnrnii with slo w )) :uTi7^ Perhaps tbis was an extreme case, but it isj jear t hat most ( jfjhejgsa ys; nm tin' vcKult of careful nianipnla - tiom_The y are elaborate studies in s tyle, and OVCU ill . colom\ Nothing is more remarkable^ about ,lhe_£Sisays INTRODUCTION, XI tlui ll the C0ntra sts_of_i:o1"iii' tln'.y pvp!m--nt, — n.nnf,]inr jUns- tr aBou of Lamb's sympathy with the ))ainter'8 a rt. The essay on the Cldmney-lSiveepers is a study in black : — " I like to meet a sweep — understand me — not a grown sweeper — old chimney-sweepers are hy no means attractive — but one of those tender novices, blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal Avashings not quite effaced from the cheek — such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little profes- sional notes sounding like the j^^^l^ P^T of a young si)arrow ; or liker to the matin lark, shall I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom anticipating the sunrise '? I have a kindly yearning towards those dim specks — poor blots — innocent blacknesses — I reverence these yoiuig Africans of our ovni growth — these almost clergy imps, who sjjort tlieir cloth without assumption." And if one would understand Lamb's skill as a colour- ist, let him turn as a contrast to the essay on Quakers, which may be called a study in dove-colour : — " The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily ; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metro- polis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones." T he essay o n ( '//hiim //-S/rccpers is one blazeofwit, which yet may jklss uiKibsrr velT'from the very richne ss ofjt s setting. How surprising, and at the same time how picturesque, is the following: — "I seem to re- member having been told that a bad sweep was once left in the stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle, certainly, not much unlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the 'api>arition of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, rises.'" Lamb's wit, original as it is, shows often enough the influence of particular models. Of all old writers, none had a firmex hold on his affection than Xll INTRODUCTION. Fuller. Now and then he has passages in (k'lil)erate imitation of Fuller's manner. T |ie descri]jtions, in. de- t ached sentences , of the Poor Relation anil the Con- vaJescent are Fuller all over. When Lamb writes of the Poor llelatiun — " He cntereth .smiling and embar- rassed, lie holdetli out his hand to you to shake, and draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time, when the table is full," — and so on, there can be no doubt that he had in mind such '•characterisation ' as Fuller's in the Good Yeoman, or the Dvgenerous GentUman. The manner is due originally, of course, to Theophrastus, but it was from Fidler, I think, that Lamb derived his fondness for it. And throughout his writings the influence of this humorist is to be traced. How entirely in the vein of Fuller, for instance, is the follow- ing : — " They (the sweeps), from their little pulpits (the tops of (chimneys), preach a lesson of patience to man- kind ; " or this, again, from the essay Grace Before Meat: — "Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving. When Jesluu'un waxed fat, we read that he kicked ;" or, once more, this fine comment on the stillness of the Quaker's worship : — " For a man to refrain even from good words and to hold his peace, it is commendable ; but for a nuiltitude, it is great mastery."' "R^ ] |;, T.niiib's wjt , ^ \\\^ h in F . n g1 i - h, i n PrntpriU j n u fl jtn t a s we think we have fixe il its ch nv.nctpr and source, i t e scapes into iiewjcmna. Lud mile he finds op pnrtnnii-y fm^_jt__th at is all his o am. What, for instance, _can be mQre_giirpiging in its iim^paatftfhiagii.-tlLflii tjio. dpRcrj p- tion \\iThe Old Marcjate Hoy oi the ubicpiitous sailor on board : — " How busily didst thou ply thy nuiltifarious occupation, cook, mariner, attendant, cliamlierlain ; here, there, Hhe another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck'"? Again, what wit — or shall we call it humour — is there in the gravity of his detail, by which he touches springs of delight unreached even by Defoe or Swift ; as in Roast Pig, where he says that the " father and son were summoned to take their trial at Pekin, then INTR0DU(^TTON. an inconsiderable assize toivn ;" or more delightful .still, later ou : — " Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, lil-e our Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of consum- ing a whole house to dress it."- Or, for another vein, take the account of the mendacious traveller he affects to remember as a fellow-passenger on his early voyage in the old Margate Hoy, who assures his admiring listeners that, so far from the Phoenix being a unique bird, it was by no means uncommon "in some parts of Upper Egypt," where the whole episode is not one jot the less humorous because it is clear to the reader, not that the traveller invented his facts, but that Lamb invented the traveller. Oryctonce more, ho w exqiiisitely unforeseen, and j jow ricTi in~~Eeird6l'lieijfrTs~thc Jf(^llowing remark as_ to Jli e domestic lia])]nness of him self and his " cou sin Bridget " in~31ac/ier// End: — jj' We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings — as it should be among near rela- tions." What is the name for this antithesis of iro ny — t his hiding of a sweet afterta ste in a bitter wor d *? AVha t- evpr its name,_iLia-a ^miiKm"t flav ourJiL LainVs humo ur, think, of Lamb's method which He T here are tw o features, I ^ dist ingu ish h im f ro iii so~inanv hu ni orists of to -day, ta kes homely and familiar things/and makes the m fresh a nd beai vti ful. The fashion of to-day is to v ul garise g reat and noble things Tjy burl esque associations. '^The hu mor- is t's conj T;isEIIg_ obtained" i n both cases ; only that in the o ne it elevates"' the commonplace, and iiTTlie othe r it d egrades the excellent. And, secondly, in this generati on, w hen ^vllat Js_m eant tojaise a laugh has, nine times o ut of tejyitil^SQtJiui yiLicisin, it should b ejgjxa shiug to turn ag ain and dwell in the humane atmosphere of these essay s ofLElia. To many other qualities that go to make up that highly composite thing, Lamb's humour — to that featiu'e of it that consists in the unabashed display of his own uncon- XIV INTRODUCTION. ventionality — his difference from other ]:)eoi)le, and to tliat " luetapliysical " quality of his wit wliicli belongs to him in a far truer sense than as applied to Cowley and his school, it is sufficient to make a passing reference. But the mention of Cowley, by whom with Fuller, Donne, and the rest, his imagination was assuredly shaped, re- minds us once more of the charm that belongs to the "old and antique " ^train heard through all his more earnest utterances. ' As we listen to Elia the moralist , now wi tli the terse yet stately egotism of one . old master, now in thelong-drawn-out harmonies o f auoth e r, we liv e again with the t hinkers and dreamers of tj ^o c cnturi(!s jigo. iS ometimes Jie confides to us weaknes ses t hat few men are l)old enougTi to n vnw^ nw when he tel ls h ow he dreaded death and clung to life . " I am not con- tent to i^ass away ' like a weaver's shuttle.' These meta- phors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth ; the face of town and country ; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets." jThere is an essay by Lamb's friend Hazlitt on the Fear of Death, which it is interesting to compare with this. The one essay may have been possibly sug- gested by the other. Hazlitt is that one of Lamb's con- temporaries with whom it is natural to compare him. There are, indeed, obvious points of resemblance between them. Hazlitt wrote a vigorous and flexible st yle ; he could quote Shakspeare and Milton as cojjiously as Lamb; he wrote on Lamb's class of subjects ; he shared his love of par adoxes and hi s frank__e gotistical~me{lT o(I But liere aTnikeness endsr HazlTEFs essay is on the text that, since it does not pain us to reflect that there was once a time when we did not exist, so it should be no pain to tliinkr that at some future time the same state of things shall be. But this light-hearted attemi)t at consolation is found to be more depressing than the melancholy of Lamb, for it lacks the two things needful, t he accen t INTRODUCTION. XV of a bsolute sincerity, and a nature iinsourcd 1)y t he world! But Lamb had his s ere ner mo ods, and in one of these let us i>art from liini. T lie essay on the Old Benchers of t he Inner Tem yde is one of the most varied and beautiful pieces of i)rose that English literature can boast. Emi- nently, m(nvov(>r, does i ^show us Landj as the pro duct o f two different ages — the child of the Renasce nce of the si xteenth century and of that of the_ ninetcenth. It is as if both Spenser and Wordsworth had laid hands of blessing ujjon his head. This is how he writes of his childhood, when the old lawyers paced to and fro before him on the Terrace Walk, making up to his childish eyes " the mythology of the Temple : " — "In those days I saw Gods, as ' old men covered with a maiitle,' walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish — extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling — in the heart of childhood there will for ever spring up a well of innocent or whole- some superstition — the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital, from everyday forms educing the un- known and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality. While childhood, and while dreams reducing childhood, shall be left, ima- gination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to •fly the earth." y It is in such jjassages as these that Lamb shows him- self, what indeed he is, 'the last of the Elizabethans.'' He had "learned their great language," and yet he had early discovered, with the keen eye of a humorist, how effect- ive for his purpose was the touch of the pedantic and the fantastical from which the noblest of them were not wholly free. He was thus aide to make even their weak- nesses a fresh source of delight, as he dealt with them from the vantage ground of two centuries. It may seem strange, on first thoughts, that the fashion of Lamb's style should not have grown, in its turn, old-fasliioued ; XVI INTRODUCTION. that, oil the contrary, no literary reputation of sixty years' standing should seem more certain of its continu- ance. But it is not the antique manner — the " self- pleasing quaintness " — that has embalmed the substance. Rather is there that in the substance which ensures immortality for the style. It is one of the rewards of piu-ity of heart that, allied with hunioiir, it has the promise of perennial charm. " Saint Charles !" exclaimed Thackeray one day, as he finished reading once more the original of one of Lamb's letters to Bernard Barton. There was much in Lamb's habits and manners that we do not associate with the saintly ideal ; but patience luider suffering and a boundless symijatliy hold a large ])lace in that ideal, and in Charles Lamb these were not f'lund wanting. I would add a few words on the kind of information I have sought to furnish in my Notes. The impertinence of criticism or comment, I hope has been almost entirelj^ avoided. But there was a cpi-tnin w-nyAvnrdnoHs mid lovn o f ])raetieal ioking in Charles Lamb tliat l('(l_ 2iiiLL often to treat matters of fact with delil )erate falsification. / His essays are full of autobiograr)hvJl)ut often pui'poscly'nT s- guised, whether to amuse those who were in the secret , or to per])lex those who Avere not, it is imuossib leto say. In his own day, therefore, corrections of fact would have been either superfluous, or would have spoiled the jest ; but now that Lamb's contemporaries are all but passed away, much of the humour of his method is lost without some clue to the many disguises and perversions of fact mth Avhich the essays abound. They are full, for in- stance, of references to actual persons, by means of initials or other devices. To readers foirly conversant with the literary history of Lamb's time, many of these disgiuses are transparent enoiigh ; but for others, notes here and there are indispensable. We have an authentic clue to most of the initials or asterisks employed in the first series of Elia. There is in existence a list of these initials INTRODUCTION. XVll drawn up by some unknown hand, and filled in with the real names hy Land) himself. Thront;h the kindness of its possessor, Mr. Alexander Ireland of JManehester, the orij;'inal of this interestini;' relic has been in my hands, and I can vou<'h for the handwritin,i;', ])hraseology, and (it may be added) the spelling, being indubitably Lamb's. There is much information in these essays, more or less disguised, about Lamb's relatives, and I have tried to illustrate these points by details of his family history for which I had not space in my Memoir of Lamb. In a few instances I have permitted myself to repeat some sentences from that memoir, where the same set of cir- cumstances had to be narrated again. But apart from changes of names and incidents in the essays, there is in Lamb's humour the constant element of a mischievous l ov^c of hoaxing. H e loves nothing so m uch as to mingl e r omance with rea jity, so Tliat it sh a ll l>el]if!icu lt_Jo]:^the reade i; to" disentangle the m. ^ Sonietimes h e_dealsjv\ith fiction as if it were fact ;"~and sometimes, afteT~siipplyin g li teral facts , he encjg_with.J he insinuation that they are fictitious. And besides these deliberate mystificat ions, the£ e is lound _ai80_ in Lamb a certain natural Jncapacity forbejn g accurate— an ii iyetera te turn for the opposite. V" Whatdoes Elia care for dates 1 " he asksMii one of h is le tters, antt^nKTcedabout accuracy inWy su ch_ti-ifl£s he d id not greatly care. In the matter of quotation, as already remarked, this is curiously shown. He seldom quotes even a hackneyed passage from Shakspeare or Milton correctly ; and sometimes he half- remembers a passage from some old author, and re-writes it, to suit the particular subject he wishes it to illustrate. I have suc- ceeded in tracing all but two or three of the many quota- tions occurring in the essays, and they serve to show the remarkable range and variety of his reading. It is generally known that when Lamb collected his essays, for pul;)lication in book form, from the pages of the London and other magazines, he omitted certain passages. These I have thought it right, as a rule, not XVI U • INTRODUCTIOX. to restore. In most cases the reason for their omission is obvious. They were excrescences or digressions, injur- ing the effect of the essay as a whole. In the few in- stances in wliich I have retained a note, or other short passage, from the original versions of the essays, I have shown that this is the case by enclosing it in brackets. I have to thank many friends, and many known to me only by their higli literary reputation, for courteous and ready help in investigating points connected with Lamb's writings. Among these I would mention Mr. Alexander [reland of Manchester ; Mr. Eichard Garnett of the British Museum ; and, as before, my friend Mr. J. E. Davis, counsel to the Commissioners of Police, who has given many valuable suggestions and constant assistance of other kinds. I must also express my acknowledg- ments to Mr. AV. J. Jeaffreson, of Folkestone, and to the fomily of the late Mr. Aiihur Loveday of Wardington, Banluuy, for permission to make extracts from unpub- lished letters of Lamb's in their possession. 1SS3. NOTE TO NEW EDITION. Several corrections and additions liave been made in the Notes to the present Edition. Jnn. 1887. PREFACE TO THE LAST ESSAYS. BY A KEIEND OF THE LATE ELIA. This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid liis final tribute to nature. To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if ever tliere was much in it, was pretty well exhausted ; and a two years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom. I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well founded. Cruclejhey are, I grant you — a so rt of unlicked, incondit e things^ — villainously pranked jn an affected a rray of antiqu e modes mid p hrnj^pg^ They had not been /^^s^Jf_^^^PY h^,(] hppn nthpr tlimi surh ; fiiid better If is, t hat" a w i'i ter should be nat ural in a s^elf-jjleasing quaint- ness, than to affect a na turalne ss (s o called ) that should be_strange to hiiu. EgotigjicaHhe y hav e bee n pronounced by some wlio did not kn ow, th at what he tells us, as of himself, 'was often true only^histoncally} ojT auothLer,;__as in a former Essay (to save many instances) — where under the first person (his favourite figure) he shadows fortli the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and connections — in direct opposition to his own early histoiy. If it be egotism to imply and t\vine with his own identity the griefs and aftec- tions of another — making himself many, or reducing many unto himself — then is the skilful novelist, who all along b XX PREFACE. brings in his hero or heroines, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all ; who" yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how sliall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, Avho, doubtless under cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blameless vent to his mo.st inward feelings, and expresses his o^^^l story modestly 1 My late friend was in many respects a singular cha- racter. Those who did not like him, hated him ; and some, who once liked him, afterwards became his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time nor place, and would e'en out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionist he would pass for a free-thinker ; while the other fixction set him. down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood him ; and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure — irony. He sowed doubtful si)eeches, and reaped plain, uneqiuvocal hatred. He Avould interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest ; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrele.vaut in ears that could understand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The informal habit of his mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of speedy forbade him to be an orator ; and he seemed determined that no one else shoidd play that part when he was present. He was 2:)etit and ordinary in his person and api^earance. I have seen him sometimes in what is called good company, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd fellow ; till some unlucky occasion provoking it, he woidd stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether senseless, perhajDS, if rightly taken), which has stamped his character for the evening. It was hit or miss with him ; but nine times out of ten he contrived by this de- vice to send away a whole company his enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his haj)- 2)iest impromptuH had the ap])earance of efl'nrt. He has PREFACE. XXI been accused of trying to be witty, wlien in tnith he was bnt struggling to give his poor thoughts articuhition. He chose his companions for some iiuli\'iduality of clia- racter which they manifested. Hence, not many persons of science, and few jirofcssed Literati, were of his coun- cils. They were, for the most part, persons of an un- certain fortune ; and, as to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) income, he passed with most of them for a great miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake. His intimados, to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged regiment. He found them floating on the surface of society ; and the colour, or something else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs stuck to him — but they were good and loving burrs for all that. He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these Avere scandalised (and offences wei'e sure to arise) he could not help it. When he has been remon- strated with for not making more concessions to the feel- ings of good people, he would retort by asking, what one point did these good people ever concede to him 1 He was temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he might l^e thought a little ex- cessive. He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry — as the friendly vapour ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes with it ! the ligaments wliich tongue-tied him were loosened, and the stammerer pro- ceeded a statist ! I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend is departed. His jests were beginning to grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. He felt the approaches of age ; and while he pretended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him Discoursing with him latterly on this subject, he ex- pressed himself with a pettishness, which I thought un- worthy of liim. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he called it) at Shacklewell, some children belonging XXll PREFACE. to a school of industry had met us, and bowed and curt- seyed, as he thought, in an especial manner to hivi. " They take me for a visiting governor," he muttered earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything important and parochial. He thought that he ai^proached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He herded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself. He did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of inflincy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood. These were weak- nesses ; but such as they were, they are a key to expli- cate some of his writings. CONTENTS. FIRST SERIES. The South-Sea House ... .1 Oxford in the Vacation . .10 Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago . 17 i The Two Races of Men . . . . .31 New Year's Eve . . . . . .37 Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist . .44 A Chapter on Ears . . . .52 All Fools' Day . . . , . .58 A Quakers' Meeting . . . . .62 The Old and the New Schoolmaster . . .67 Imperfect Sympathies . . . . . 76 v Witches and other Night Fears . . .85 Valentine's Day . . . . .93 My Relations . . . . . .96 Mackery End in Hertfordshire . . . 103 My First Play . . . . . .108 Modern Gallantry . . . . .113 The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple . . 118 Grace Before Meat ..... 130 XXIV CONTENTS. Ukeam-Childiikn ; A Hkverie . Distant Corresi'ondents The Praise of Chimxf.y-Sweepeks A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis .... A Dissertation upon Roast Pig A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People .... On Some of the Olu Actors On the Artificial Comedy of ihe Last Century On the Acting of Munden LAST ESSA VS. BlAKESMOOR in H SHIRE Poor Relations . Detached Thoughts ox Books .\nd Reading Stage Illusion . To the Shade of Elliston Ellistoniana The Old Margate Hoy The Convalescent Sanity of True Genius Captain Jackson -The Superannuated Man The Genteel Style in Writing Barbara S . CONTENTS. XXV PAGE Til K Tom US IN THE Abbey .... 278 Amicus Redivivus ..... 281 Some Sonnets of Siii Philip Sydney . . . 286 Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago . . . 295 Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the PnoDUCTioNs OF MoDERN Art . . . 303 The Wedding ...... 315 Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age . 321 Old China . . . . . . 327 ' The Child Angel ; A Dream .... 333 Confessions of a Drunkard • . , . 336 Popular Fallacies : I. That a Bully is always a Coward . 346 II. That Ill-Gotten Gain never prospers . 347 III. That a Man must not laugh at his own Jest . . . . .347 IV. That Such a one shows his Breeding. — That it is easy to perceive he is no Gentleman .... 348 V. That the Poor copy the Vices of the Rich 349 VI. That Enough is as good as a Feast . 350 VII. Of Two Disputants, the warmest is gen- erally in the wrong . . . 351 VIII. That Verbal Allusions are not "Wit, be- cause they will not bear a Translation 352 IX. That the Worst Puns are the Be.st . 353 X. That Handsome is that Handsome does . 355 XXVI CONTENTS. PAOK Popular Fallacies : XI. That we must not look a Gift House in THE Mouth ..... 358 XII. Tii.vr Home is Home tiiovch it is never so Homely ..... 360 XIII. That YOU must love Me and love my Dor; 365 XIV. That wk should rise wrni the Lark . 369 XY. That we should lie down with the Lamb 371 XVI. That a Sulky Temper is a Misfortune . 373 Notes ...... 377 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. THE SOUTH -SEA HOUSE. Keader, in thy passage from the Bank — where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself) — to the Flower Pot, to seciu"e a ])lace for Dalston, or Sliacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly — didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left, where Threadneedle Street abuts upon Bishops- gate 1 I dare say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out — a desolation something like Bal- clutha's.^ This Avas once a house of trade — a centre of busy interests. The throng of merchants was here — the qu ick p ulse of gain — and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticoes ; imposing stau'cases, ofl&ces roomy as the state apartments in palaces — de- serted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks ; the still more sacred interioi's of coiu't and committee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers — directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend) at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather coverings, support- ' I passed by the walls of Balclutlia, and they were desolate. — OssiAN. e B y THE ESSAYS OF ETJA. iug massy silver inkstands long since dry ; — the oaken wainscots hung with iiictiires of deceased governors and sub-governors, of Queen Anne, and the two fii'st monarchs of the Bnuls^^^ck dynasty ; — huge charts, which subse- quent discoveries have antiquated ; — dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, and soundings of the Bay of Panama ! The long passages hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might defy any, short of the last, conflagration : with vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an " unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal — long since dissipated, or scat- tered into air at the blast of the breaking of tliat fomous Bubble. Such is the South-Sea House. At least such it was forty years ago, when I knew it — a magnificent relic ! What alterations may have been made in it since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I take for granted, has not freshened it. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that were then battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have rested from their depredations, but other light generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfoetation of dirt !) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore the mode of book-keeping in Queen Anne's reign ; or, with less hallowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremen- dous HOAX, whose extent the petty peculators of our day look back upon with the same expression of incredulous admiration and hopeless ambition of rivalry as would become the puny face of modern conspiracy contemplating the Titan size of VaiLx's superhuman plot. Peace to the manes of the Bubble ! Silence and destitution are upon thy walls, ]jroud house, for a memorial ! Til [5 SOTTTir-SEA TIOUSE. 3 Situated, as thou art, in tlie very heart of stirring and living counnerce — amid the fret and fever of speculation — with the Bank, and the 'Cliange, and the India House about tliee, in tlie heyday of present prosperity, with thei r i mportant faces, as it were, insul ting thee, their 2^'^>'>'>' nekfM nyiir out of business — to the idle and merely con- templati vc — to such as me, old hous e ! there is a cha rm iiitli y quiet :— a cessation — a coolness from busine ss — -an iiiclo lencc almost cloistral^ — which is delightf ul ! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and com'ts at eventide ! They spoke of the past : — the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and acco unt- ant s jjuzzle me. I have no skill in figuring . But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves — with their old fantastic floiu-ishes and decorative rubric interlacings — their sums in triple columniatious, set dowai with formal superfluity of ciphers — with pious sentences at the beginning, without which oiu' religious ancestors never ventiu'ed to open a book of business, or bill of lading — the costly vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some better library- are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can look upon these defunct dragons with complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled penknives (our ancestors had everytliing on a larger scale than we have hearts for) are as good as anything from Herculaneimi. The pomice- boxes of om- days have gone retrograde. The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House — I speak of forty years back — had an air very dififerent from those in the public oflices that I have had to do with since. They partook of the genius of the place ! They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of superfluous salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not much to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reason mentioned 4 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. before ; liumourist.s, for they were of all desoriptioiis ; ami, not liaviug been broui,'lit together in early life (which has a tendency to assiiuilate the members of corporate bodies to each other), but, for the most part, placed in this house in ripe or nnddlc age, they necessarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a comimou stock. Hence they formed a sort of Noah's ark. Odd fishes. A lay-mon- astery. Domestic retainers in a great house, kept more for show than use. Yet pleasant fellows, full of chat — and not a few among them had arrived at considerable proficiency on the German flute. The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro- Britou. He had something of the choleric complexion of his countrymeu stamped on his visage, but was a worthy, sensible man at liottom. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed out, in the fashion which I remem- ber to have seen in caricatures of what were termed, in my yoiuig days, Maccaronies. He was the last of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I see him making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if he feared every one about him was a defaulter ; in his hjqiochondry, ready to imagine himself one ; hamited, at least, with the idea of the possil)ility of his becoming one : his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Auderton's at two (where his pictm^e still hangs, taken a little before his death by desire of the master of the coffee-house which he had frequented for the last five-and- tAventy years), but not attauiiug the meridian of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened w\t\\ his presence. Then was his forte, his glorified horn* ! How would he chirp and expand over a muffin ! How would he dilate into secret history ! His countryman, Pennant himself, in THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. 5 pnrtioular, could not be more eloquent tlian he in relation to old and new London— the site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to decay — where Rosamond's pond stood — the Mulberry-gardens — and the Conduit in Cheaj) — with many a pleasant anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalized in his pictm'e of JVoon— the worthy descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hog Lane and the vicinity of the Seven Dials ! Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster Hall. By stoo ]), I mean that \^ gentle bending of the body forwards, which, in great men, ' must be supjDosed to be the eff'ect of an habitual con- descending attention to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over, you were at leism'e to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had ji;st awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have posed him. What was it then ? Was he rich ? Alas, no ! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. She had a neat meagi'e person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-jiampering ; but in its veins was nolile blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly under- stood, — much less can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day,— to the illustrious but unfortimatc house of Derweutwater. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. This was the thought — the sentiment — the bright solitary star of yom* lives, — ye mild and happy pair, — which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the 6 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. obscurity of your station ! This was to you instead of riclics, instead of rank, instead of glittering attainments : and it was worth them all together. You insulted none with it ; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armom- only, no insult likewise coidd reach you througli it. Decus ct solamen. Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He " thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and him- self the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hom-s. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean IjTe. He did, indeed, scream and scrapie most abomi- nably. His fine suite of official rooms in Tln-eathieedle Street, which, without anything very substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's notions of him- self that lived in them (I know not who is the occupier of them now ^), resounded fortnightly to the notes of a concert of "sweet breasts," as our ancestors would have called them, cidled from club-rooms, and orchestras — chorus singers — fii'st and second \'ioloncellos — double basses — and clarionets — who ate his cold mutton and drank his punch and praised his ear. He sat like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that were l^urely ornamental, were l^anislied. You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. Politics were ex- cluded. A newspaper was thought too I'cfined and abstracted. The whole duty of man consisted in writing oft* dividend warrants. The striking of the annual balance in the company's books (which, pci"]iai)s, differed from the '• [I liave since been informed, that the present tenant of them is a Mr. Lamb, a gentleman who is happy in the possession of some choice pictures, and among them a rare portrait of Milton, which I mean to do myself the pleasure of going to see, and at the same time to refresh my memory with the sight of old scenes. Mr. Lamb has the character of a right courteous and communicative collector. ] THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. 7 balaiioe of last year in the sum of £25 : 1 : 6) oocui)i('(I liis (lays and niglits for a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as they called them in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a retm'u of the old stirring days when South -Sea hopes were young (he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most nourishing com- pany in these or those days) : but to a genuine accountant the diti'crence of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional farthing is as dear to his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity. With Tipp form was everything. His life was formal. His actions seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. He made the best executor in the world : he was plagued with incessant executorships accordingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand that commended their interests to his pro- tection. With all this there was about him a sort of timidity (his few enemies used to give it a worse name) — a something which, in reverence to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp \vith a sufficient measure of the principle of self-preserva- tion. There is a cowardice which we do not despise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements ; it betrays itself, not you : it is mere temperament ; the absence of the romantic and the enterprising ; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, " greatly find quarrel in a straw," when some supposed honour is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life ; or leaned against the rails of a balcony ; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet ; or looked down a precipice ; or let off a gim ; or went upon a water-party ; or would willingly let you go if he could have helped it : 8 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. neither was it reoordcd of liiiu, that for hicre, or for intimi(hitioii, he ever forsook friend or principle. Whom next sliall we sunamon from tlie . that, being nothing, art evcn-ything ! When thou wrrt, thou wert not antiquity — then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquiti/, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration ; thou thyself being to thy- self flat, jejune, modem ! What mystery hu-ks in this retroversion ? or what half Januses ^ are we, that cannot look forward Avith the same idolatry with which we for ever revert ! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything ! the ])ast is everything, being nothing ! What were thy dm^k ages ? Surely the sun rose as brightly then as now, and man got him to his work in the morning ? Why is it we can never hear mention of them without an accompanying feeling, as though a pal- pable obscm-e had dimmed the ftice of things, and that om- ancestors wandered to and fro groping ! Above all thy rarities, old Gxenford, what do most arride and solace me, are thy repositories of mouldering learning, thy shelves ■ What a i^lace to be in is an old library ! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have be- queathed their labours to these Bodleiaus, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profene the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learn- ing, walking amid their foliage ; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. Still less have I cm'iosity to distm-b the elder repose of MSS. Those varice lectiones, so tempting to the more erudite palates, do but distirrb and unsettle my fiiith. I am no Herculanean raker. The credit of the three ^ Januses of one face. — Sir Thomas Browne. 14 THE ESSAYS OF ELTA. witnesses might liave slept uniinpcaclicd for me. I leave these curiosities to Porsou, and to G. D. — whom, by the way, I fonud busy as a moth over some rotten archive, riimmagod out of some seldom-explored i^ress, in a nook at Oriel. With long poring, he is grown almost into a. book. He stood as i:)assive as one by the side of the old shelves. I longed to new-coat him in russia, and assign him his place. He might have mustei-ed for a tall Scapula. D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats of learning. No inconsiderable portion of his moderate fortune, I ii])prchend, is consumed in journeys between them and Clifford's Inn — where, like a dove on the asp's nest, he has long taken up his unconscious abode, amid an incon- gruous assembly of attorneys, attorneys' clerks, apparitoi's, promoters, vermin of the law, among whom he sits, " in calm and sinless peace." The fangs of the law pierce him not — the winds of litigation blow over his hmnble chambers — the hard sheriff's officer moves his hat as he passes — legal nor illegal discom-tesy touches him — none thinks of offering violence or injustice to liim — you would as soon "strike an abstract idea." D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a course of laborious years, in an investigation into all ciuious matter connected with the two Universities ; and has lately lit upon a MS. collection of charters, relative to C , by which he hoi^es to settle some disputed jDoints — particu- larly that long controversy between them as to priority of foundation. The ardour with which he engages in these liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met with all the encom-agement it deserved, either here or at C . Your caputs, and heads of colleges, care less than any- body else about these cpiestions. — Contented to suck the milky fountains of their Alma ]\Iaters, without inquiring into the venerable gentlewomen's years, they rather hold such curiosities to be impertinent — unreverend. They have their good glebe lands in mami, and care not nuich to rake into the title-deeds. I gather at least so much from other sources, for D. is not a man to complain. OXFORD IN TIIK VACATION. 15 D. started like an unbroken heifer, when I interrui)te(l him. A priori it was not very probable tliat we should have met in Oriel. But D. woulil have clone the same, had I accosted hini on the sudden in his own walks in Cliftbrd's Inn, or in tlie Temple. In addition to a pro- voking short-sightedness (the effect of late studies and watchings at the midnight oil) D. is tlie most absent of men. He made a call the other morning at our friend M.'s in Bedford S(iuare ; and, finding nobody at honie, was ushered into the hall, where, asking for pen and ink, with great exactitude of purpose he enters me his name in the book— which ordinarily lies about in such places, to record the failiu'es of the untimely or unfortunate visitor — and takes his leave with many ceremonies, and professions of regret. Some two or three lioiu'S after, his walking destinies retiu"ned him into the same neigh- boiu'hood again, and again the quiet image of the fireside circle at M.'s — Mrs. M. i^residhig at it like a Queen Lar, with i^retty A. S. at her side — striking irresistibly on his fancy, he makes another call (forgetting that they were " certainly not to retmni from the country before that day week "), and disappointed a second time, inquires for pen and paper as before : again the book is brought, and in the line just above that in which he is about to print his second name (his re-script) — his first name (scarce dry) looks out upon liim like another Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly encounter his own duplicate ! — The eftect may be conceived. D. made many a good resolu- tion against any such lapses in futiu'e. I hope he will not keep them too rigorously. For with G. D. — to be absent from the body, is some- times (not to speak it profirnely) to be present with the Lord. At the very time when, personally encountering thee, he passes on with no recognition or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised — at that moment, Reader, he is on Moimt Tabor — or Parnassus — or co- sj^hered with Plato — or, with Harrington, framing "immortal commonwealths" — devising some plan of 16 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. amelioration to thy country, or thy species perad- venture meditating some individual kindness or coiu'tesy, to be done to thee thyself, the returning consciousness of which made him to start so guiltily at thy obtruded personal presence. [D. commenced life, after a com'se of hard study in the house of " pure Emanuel," as usher to a knavish fanatic schoolmaster at * * * , at a salary of eight poimds per annum, with board and lodging. Of this poor stipend, he never received above half in all the lal^orious years he served this man. He tells a pleasant anecdote, that when poverty, staring out at his ragged knees, has sometimes compelled him, against the modesty of his nature, to hint at arrears. Dr. * * * would take no immediate notice, but after supper, when the school was called together to even- song, he would never fail to introduce some instructive homily against riches, and the corruption of the heart occasioned through the desire of tliem — ending with " Lord, keep Thy servants, above all things, from the heinous sin of avarice. Having food and raiment, let us therewithal be content. Give me Agur's wish " — and the like — which, to the little auditory, somided like a doctrme full of Christian prudence and simplicity, but to poor D. was a receipt in fidl for that quarter's demand at least. And D. has been under-working for himself ever since ; — drudging at low rates for imappreciating booksellers, — wasting his fine erudition in silent corrections of the classics, and in those unostentatious but solid services to learning which commonly fall to the lot of laborious scholars, who have not the heart to sell themselves to the best advantage. He has published poems, which do not sell, because their character is unobtrusive, like his own, and because he has been too much absorbed in ancient literature to know what the popular mark in poetry is, even if he could have hit it. And, therefore, his verses are properly, what he terms them, crotchets ; voluntaries ; odes to liberty and spring ; effusions ; little tributes and offerings, left behind him upon tables and window-seats Christ's hospital five and thirty years ago. 17 at parting from friends' houses ; and from all the iinis of hos])itality, where he has been courteously (or l)ut toler- ably) received in his pilgrimage. If his muse of kindness halt a little behind the strong lines in fashion in this excitement-loving age, his prose is the best of the sort in the world, and exhibits a faithful transcript of his own healthy, natural mind, and cheerful, innocent tone of con- versation.] D. is delightful anywhere, but he is at the best in siich places as these. He cares not much for Bath. He is out of his element at Buxton, at Scarborough, or Harrowgate. The Cam and the Isis are to him " better than all the waters of Damascus." On the Muses' hill he is happy, and good, as one of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains ; and when he goes about with you to show you the halls and colleges, you think you have with you the Interpreter at the House Beautiful. CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. In Mr. Lamb's " Works," published a year or two since, I find a magnificent eidogy on my old school, ^ such as it was, or now appears to him to have been, between the years 1782 and 1789. It happens, very oddl y, that my own standing at Christ's was nearly corresi3onding with liis ; and, with all gratitude to him for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring to- gether whatever can be said in praise of them, dropping all the other side of the argument most ingeniously. I remember L. at school ; and can well recollect that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town, and were near at hand ; and he had the privilege of going to ^ Recollections of Christ's Hospital. C 18 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. see tliem, almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction, which was denied to lis. The pre- sent worthy sub-treasurer to the Inner Temple can explain how that haj)pen('d. He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, wdiile we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf — our cnig — moistened with attenuated small beer, in wooden jjiggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it w^as poured from. Our IMonday's milk iiorritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of " ex- traordinary bread and butter," from the hot-loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant (we had three banyan to fom* meat days in the week) — was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack of ginger (to make it go down the more glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our half-picMed Sundays, or quite fresh boiled beef on Thursdays (strong as euro equina), with detestable mari- golds floating in the i)ail to i:»oison the broth — our scanty mutton scrags on Fridays — and rather more savom-y, but grudging, portions of the same flesh, rotten -roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays (the only dish wdiich excited our appetites, and disappointed oiu' stomachs, in almost equal proportion) — he had his hot plate of roast veal, or the more temj^ting griskin (exotics unknown to oiu" palates), cooked in the paternal kitchen (a gi'eat thing), and brought him daily by his maid or aunt ! I remember the good old relative (in whom love forbade pride) squat- ting down upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the clois- ters, disclosing the viands (of higher regale than those cates which the ravens ministered to the Tishbite); and the contending passions of L. at the imfolding. There Avas love for the bringer ; shame for the thing brought, and the manner of its bringing ; sympathy for those who were too many to share in it ; and, at top of all, hunger (eldest, strongest of the passions !) predominant, breaking down the stony fences of shame, and awkwardness, and a troubling over-consciousness. Christ's iiosi'itai> five and thirty years aoo. 19 I was a poor IVioiidless boy. My parents, and those •\vlio sliould care for nic, were far away. Those few acquaintances of tlicirs, whicli they could reckon upon as l)eiii^^ kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, wliich they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I tliouglit them few enough ; and, one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six himdred play- mates. the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead ! The yearnings which I used to have to- wards it in those unfledged years ! How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, and faces ! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire ! To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the recollection of those friendless holidays. The long- warm days of smnmer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those whole- day leaves, when, by some strange arrangement, we were tm-ued out, for the live-long day, upon om- own hands, whether we had friends to go to, or none. I remember those bathing-exciu'sions to the New River, which L. recalls with such relish, better, I think, than he can — for lie was a home-seeking lad, and did not much care iox such water-pastimes : — -How merrily we would sally forth into the fields ; and strip mider the first warmth of the sun ; and wanton like yomig dace in the streams ; getting us appetites for noon, which those of us that were penniless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the means of allaying — while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes, were at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings— the very beauty of the day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a keener edge upon them ! — How faint and lan- guid, finally, we would retiuu, towards night-flill, to our 20 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. desired morsel, half- rejoicing, half- reluctant, that the hours of our uneasy liberty had exjjired ! It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets objectless — shivering at cold windows of print shojis, to extract a little amusement ; or haply, as a last resort, in the hopes of a little novelty, to pay a fifty- times repeated visit (where om* individual faces should be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the Lions in the Tower — to whose levde, by com'tesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission. L.'s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the foimdation) lived in a manner under his paternal roof Any complaint which he had to make was sm^e of being attended to. This was imderstood at Christ's, and was an effectual screen to him against the severity of masters, or worse tyranny of the monitors. The oppres- sions of these young brutes are heart-sickening to call to recollection. I have been called out of my bed, and waked for the jmiyose, in the coldest winter nights — and this not once, but night after night — in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the power to hinder. — The same exe- crable tyranny drove the younger part of us from the fires, when our feet were perishing with snow ; and, under the criiellest penalties, forbade the indulgence of a drink of water, when we lay in sleepless summer nights, fevered with the season and the day's sjDorts. There was one H , who, I learned in after days, was seen expiating some maturer offence in the hulks. (Do I flatter myself in fancying that this might be the planter of that name, who suffered — at Nevis, I think, or St. Kitts, — some few years since ? My friend Tobin was the benevolent instrument of bringing him to the gallows.) This petty Nero actually branded a boy, who had offended Christ's nosriTAL five and tiiirtv years ago. 21 him, with a red-hnt iron ; and nearly starved forty of us, witli exacting contributions, to the one lialf of our bread, to iianiper a young ass, which, incrcdibh! as it may seem, with the connivance of the nurse's daughter (a young tiame of his) he liad contrived to snuiggle in, and keep U2>on the h^ads of tlie ward, as they called o\u' dormitories. This game went on for better than a Aveek, till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but he must cry roast meat — hapjiier than Caligula's minion, could he have kept his own counsel — but, foolisher, alas ! than any of his species in the fables — waxing fat, and kicking, in the ful- ness of bread, one unlucky minute would needs proclaim his good fortune to the workl below ; and, laying out his simple throat, blew such a ram's horn blast, as (toppling down the walls of his own Jericho) set concealment any longer at defiance. The client was dismissed, with certain attentions, to Smithfield ; but I never understood that the patron underwent any censure on the occasion. This was in the stewardship of L.'s admired Perry. Under the same facile administration, can L. have for- gotten the cool impmrity with which the nm-ses used to carry away openly, in open platters, for theu' own tables, one out of two of every hot joint, which the careful matron had been seeing scrupulously weighed out for oiu* dinners ? These things were daily practised in that magnificent apartment, which L. (grown connoisseur since, we presume) praises so highly for the grand paintings " by Verrio and others," with which it is " hung romul and adorned." But the sight of sleek well-fed blue-coat boys in pictures was, at that time, I believe, little con- solatory to him, or i;s, the living ones, who saw the better part of our provisions carried away before oiu- faces by harpies ; and om-selves reduced (with the Trojan in the hall of Dido) To feed our niiud with idle portraiture. L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to gags, or the fat of fresh beef boiled ; and sets it down to some 22 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. superstition. But these luictuous morsels are never grate- ful to yoiuig jialates (children are universally fot-haters), and in strong, coarse, boiled meats, imsalied, are detest- able. A gag-eater in our time ^^'as equivalent to a goule, and held in equal detestation. suffered under the inii:»utation : .... 'Twas said He ate strange flesh. He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather uj) the remnants left at his table (not many, nor very choice fragments, you may credit me) — and, in an especial manner, these disreputable morsels, which he would convey away, and secretly stow in the settle that stood at his bed- side. None saw when he ate them. It was rumoured that he privately devom-ed them in the night. He was watched, liut no traces of such midnight practices were discoverable. Some reported, that, on leave-days, he had been seen to carry out of the bounds a large blue check handkerchief, full of something. This then must be the accursed thing. Conjecture next was at work to imagine how he could dispose of it. Some said he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally prevailed. He went about moping. None spake to him. No one Avould play with him. He was excommunicated ; put out of the pale of the school. He was too powerful a boy to be beaten, but he imderwent every mode of that negative punishment, which is more grievous than many stripes. Still he persevered^ At length he was observed by two of his schooTlellows, who were determined to get at the secret, and had traced him one leave-day for that iim-pose, to enter a large worn-out building, such as there exist specimens of in Chancery Lane, which are let out to various scales of jiauperism, with open door, and a conmion staircase. After him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened by an aged woman, meanly clad. Suspicion was now ripened into certainty. The informers had secm'ed their victim. They Christ's hospital five and thirty years ago. 23 had him in their toils. Accusation was formally preferred, and retribution most signal was looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then steward (for this happened a little after my time), \\itli that patient sag'aeity^whirh temi)cred all his conduct, determined to investigate the matter, before he proceeded to sentence. The result was, that the supposed mendicants, the receivers or purchasers of the mysterious scraps, tiu'ned out to be the parents of , an honest couple come to decay, — whom this seasonable supply had, in all proba- bility, saved from mendicancy : and that this young stork, at the expense of his own good name, had all this while been only feeding the old birds ! — The governors on this occasion, much to their honom-, voted a present relief to the fomily of , and i)resented him with a silver medal. The lesson which the steward read upon kash judgment, on the occasion of i^ublicly delivering the medal to • , I believe, would not be lost upon his auditory. — I had left school then, but I well remember ■ . He was a tall, shambling youth, with a cast in his eye, not at all calculated to conciliate hostile prejudices. I have since seen him carrying a baker's basket. I think I heard he did not do quite so well by himself as he had done by the old folks. I was a hyi^ochondriac lad ; and the sight of a boy in fetters, upon the day of my first putting on the blue clothes, was not exactly fitted to assuage the natural terrors of initiation. I was of tender years, barely turned of seven ; and had only read of such things in books, or seen them but in dreams. I was told he had run away. This was the punishment for the first offence. — As a novice I was soon after taken to see the dungeons. These were little, square, Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket — a mattress, I think, was afterwards substituted — with a peep of light, let-in askance, from a prison-orifice at top, barely enough to read by. Here the poor boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of any but the porter who brought him his bread and water — who miyld not sjjealc to him ; — or of the 24 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to receive his i:)ei"io(lical chastisement, which was almost welcome, because it sejiarated him for a lirief interval from solitude : — and here he was shut up by himself of nights, out of the reach of any sound, to sutler whatever horrors the weak nerves, and superstition incident to his time of life, might subject him to.^ This was the penalty for the second offence. Woiildst thou like. Rea der, to see what beca me of him in the next degree 1 The~ciLirprit, who mid been a third time an offender, and whose expulsion was at this time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, as at some solenm auto da fe, arrayed in uncouth and most apjialling attire, all trace of his late " watchet-weeds " carefully effaced, he was exposed in a jacket, resembling those which London lamplighters for- merly delighted in, with a cap of the same. The effect of this divestitm-e Avas such as the ingenious devisers of it could have anticipated. With his pale and frightened features, it was as if some of those disfigm-ements in Dante had seized upon him. In this disguisement he was brought into the hall {L.'s favourite, state-room), w\\Qi-e awaited him the whole number of his schoolfellows, whose joint lessons and sjjorts he was thenceforth to share no more ; the awful presence of the steward, to be seen for the last time ; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state robe for the occasion ; and of two faces more, of direr import, because never but in these extremities visible. These were gov- ernors ; two of whom, by choice, or charter, were always accustomed to officiate at these Ultima Bupplicia ; not to mitigate (so at least we understood it), but to enforce the uttermost stripe. Old Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert, I remember, Avere colleagues on one occasion, when the beadle tm-ning rather pale, a glass of brandy was ■• One or two instances of lunacy, or attemiited suicide, accord- ingly, at length convinced the governors of the impolicy of this jiart of the sentence, and the midnight torture to the spirits was dispensed with.- — This fancy of dungeons for children was a sprout of Howard's brain ; for which (saving the reverence due to Holy Paul) methinks I could willingly spit xxpon his statue. Christ's hospital five and thirty years ago. 25 ordered to prepare him for the mysteries. The scourging was, after the ohl liomaii fashion, long and stately. The lictor ac('omi)anied the eriminal (piite round the hall. We were generally too faint with attending to the previous disgusting eireumstanees to make accurate rejjort with our eyes of the degree of corporal suffering inllicted. Eeport, of com-se, gave out the back knotty and livid. After scoiu'ging, he was made over, in his San Benito, to his friends, if he had any (but commouly such poor run- agates M^ere friendless), or to his parish ofiicer, who, to enhance the effect of the scene, had his station allotted to him on the outside of the hall gate. These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as to spoil the general mirth of the comnumity. We had I^lenty of exercise and recreation after school hours ; and, for myself, I must confess, that I was never happier than in them. The Upper and the Lower Grammar Schools were held in the same room ; and an imaginary line only divided their boimds. Their character was as different as that of the inhabitants on the two sides of the Pyrenees. The Rev. James Boyer was the Upper Master, but the Rev. Matthew Field presided over that portion of the apartment, of which I had the good fortune to be a mem- ber. We lived a life as careless as birds. W^e talked and did just what we pleased, and nobody molested us. We carried an accidence, or a grammar, for form ; but, for any troidile it gave us, Ave might take two years in getting through the verbs deponent, and another two in forgetting all that we had learned about them. There was now and then the formality of saying a lesson, but if you had not learned it, a brush across the shoulders (just enough to disturb a fly) was the sole remonstrance. Field never used the rod ; and in truth he wielded the cane with no great good will — holding it " like a dancer." It looked in his hands rather like an emblem than an instrument of autho- rity; and an emblem, too, he was ashamed of. He was a good easy man, that did not care to ruffle his own peace, nor perhaps set any great consideration upon the value of 26 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. juvenile time. He cauie among us, now and then, but often staid away whole days from us ; and when he came, it made no diilerence to us — he had his private room to retire to, the short time he staid, to be out of the sound of our noise. Our mirth and uproar went on. We had classics of our own, without being beholden to " insolent Greece or haughty Rome," that jxissed current among us — Peter Wilkins — ^The Adventm-es of the Hon. Captain Robert Boyle — the Fortunate Blue-coat Boy — and the like. Or we cultivated a tm'u for mechanic and scientific operations ; making little sun-dials of paper ; or weaving those in- genious parentheses, called cat-cradles ; or making dry peas to dance upon the end of a tin pipe ; or studying the art military over that laudable game " French and English," and a hundred other such devices to i^ass away the time — mixing the useful with the agreeable — as would have made the soids of Rousseau and John Locke chuckle to have seen us. Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest divines who affect to mix in equal proportion the gentle- man, the scholar, and the Christian ; but, I know not how, the first ingredient is generally found to be the jire- dominating dose in the composition. He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at some episcopal levde, when he should have been attending upon us. He had for many years the classical charge of a hundred child- ren, dming the fom- or five first years of their education ; and his very highest form seldom proceeded further than two or three of the introductory fables of Phtedrus. How things were suftered to go on thus, I cannot guess. Boyer, who was the proper person to have remedied these abuses, always aftected, perhaps felt, a delicacy in interfering in a province not strictly his own. I have not been without my suspicions, that he was not altogether displeased at the contrast we presented to his end of the school. We were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans. He would sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the Under Master, and then, with Sardonic grin, observe Christ's hospital five and thirty years ago. 27 to one of his upj^cv boys, " how neat and fresli the twigs Ii)oked." While liis pale students were battering their brains over Xenophon and I'lato, with a silence as deej) as that enjoined liy the Samite, we were enjoying our- selves at our ease in our little Goshen. We saw a little into the secrets of his discipline, and the jirospect did but the more reconcile us to our lot. His thunders rolled innocuous for us ; his storms came near, but never touched us ; contrary to Gideon's miracle, while all around were drenched, our fleece was dry.^ His boys tiu-ned out the better scholars ; we, I suspect, have the advantage in temper. His pupils cannot speak of him without some- thing of terror allaying their gratitude ; the remembrance of Field comes back with all the soothing images of indolence, and summer slumbers, and work like play, and innocent idleness, and Elysian exemptions, and life itself a "playing holiday." Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were near enough (as I have said) to under- stand a little of his system. We occasionally heard sounds of the Ululantes, and caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His English style was crampt to barbar- ism. His Easter anthems (for his duty obliged him to those lieriodical flights) were grating as scrannel i^ipes.- — He woidd laugh — ay, and heartily — but then it must he at Flaccus's quibble about Ilex ■ or at the tristis severitas in vultu, or inspicere in patinas, of Terence — thin jests, which at their first broaching could hardly have had vis enough to move a Roman muscle. — He had two ^ Cowley. - lu this and everything B. was the antipodes of his coadjutor. \Vlule the former was digging his brains for crude anthems, worth a pig-nut, F. would be recreating his gentlemanly fancy in the more flowery walks of the Muses. A little dramatic eft'usiou of his, under the name of Vertumuus and Pomona, is not yet forgotten by the chroniclers of that sort of literature. It was accepted by Garrick, but the town did not give it their sanction. — B. used to say of it, in a way of half-complimeut, half-irony, that it was too classical for rejyresentation. 28 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. wigs, both pedantic, but of different omen. The one serene, smiling, frcsli powdered, betokening a mild day. The other, an old discoloured, imkempt, angry caxon, de- noting frecpicnt and bloody execution. Woe to the school, when he made his morning apjKiarance in his passy, or 2)asmonate wig. No comet expounded siu'er. — J. B. had a heavy hand. I have known him doultle his knotty fist at a poor trcnnbling child (the maternal milk hardly dry upon its lijjs) Avith a " Sirrah, do you i^esume to set your Avits at me V — Nothing was more common than to see him make a headlong entry into the school-room, from his inner recess, or library, and, ■with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, " Od's my life, sirrah" (his fiivourite adjm'ation), " I have a great mind to whij) you," — then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into his lair — and, after a cooling lapse of some minutes (dming which all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context) drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been some Devil's Litany, with the expletory yell — " and I will too." — In his gentler moods, when the rahidus furor was assuaged, he had resort to an in- genious method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to him- self, of whipping the boy, and reading the Debates, at the same time ; a paragraph and a lash between ; which in those times, when parliamentary oratory was most at a height and flourishing in these realms, was not calculated to imjiress the patient with a veneration for the diffriser graces of rhetoric. Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known to foil ineff'ectual from his hand — when droll squinting AV having been caught putting the inside of the master's desk to a use for which the architect had clearly not designed it, to justify himself, with great simplicity averred, that he did not know that the thing had been forewarned. This exquisite irrecognition of any law antecedent to the oral or declaratory, struck so irresistibly upon the fancy of all who heard it (the pedagogue himself not excepted) that remission was unavoidable. Christ's hospital five and thirty years ago. 29 L. has given credit to B.'s gTeat merits as an instructor. Coleridge, in liis literary life, has pronounced a more in- telligil)le and ample encomium on them. Tlie autlior (if tlie Country Spectator doubts not to compare him witli the ablest teachers of antiipiity. Perhaps we cannot dis- miss him lietter than with the pious ejaculation of C. — when he lieard that his old master was on his death-bed : " Poor J. B. ! — may all his faults be forgiven ; and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sublunary in- firmities." Under him were many good and sound scholars Ijred. — First Grecian of my time was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kindest of Ixiys and men, since Co-grammar-master (and inseparal)le companion) with Dr. T e. What an edif>ang sijectacle did this brace of friends present to those who remembered the anti-socialities of their predecessors ! — You never met the one Ijy chance in the street without a wonder, Avhich was quickly dissipated by the almost immediate subappearance of the other. Generally arm- in-arm, these kindly coadjutors lightened for each other the toilsome duties of their profession, and when, in advanced age, one found it convenient to retire, the other was not long in discovering that it suited him to lay down the fasces also. Oh, it is pleasant, as it is rare, to find the same arm linked in yours at forty, which at thirteen helped it to turn over the Cicero De Amicitid, or some tale of Antiq^le Friendship, which the young heart even then was burning to anticipate ! — Co-Grecian with S. was Th , who has since executed with ability various diplomatic functions at the Northern courts. Th was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing of speech, with raven locks. — Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed him (now Bishop of Calcutta), a scholar and a gentleman in his teens. He has the reputation of an excellent critic ; and is author (besides the Coimtry SjDectator) of a Treatise on the Greek Article, against Sharpe.- — M. is said to bear his mitre high in India, where the regni novitas (I dare 30 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. say) sufficiently justifies the bearing. A luuiiility quite as primitive as that of JeAvel or Hooker might not be exactly fitted to impress the minds of those Anglo- Asiatic diocesans with a reverence for home institutions, and the church which those fathers Avatered. The manners of M. at school, though firm, were mild and unassuming. — Next to M. (if not senior to him) was Richards, author of the Aboriginal Britons, the most spirited of the Oxford Prize Poems ; a pale, studious Grecian. — Then followed poor S , ill-fated M ! of these the ]\Iuse is silent. Finding some of Edward's race Unhappy, pass their annals by. Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day- spring of thy fimcies, with hope like a fiery colmnn before thee — the dark pillar not yet tiu-ned — Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Logician, Metaphysician, Bard ! — How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the dispro- portion between the speech and the garh of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philo- sophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar while the walls of the old Grey Friars re- echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-hoy f — Many were the "wit-combats" (to dally awhile with the words of old Fuller), between him and C. V. Le G , " which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon, and an English man of war : Master Coleridge, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. 0. V. L., M'ith the English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could tm-n with all times, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his \Y\t and invention."' Nor shalt thou, their compeer, be quickly forgotten, Allen, with the cordial smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which thou wert wont to make the old Cloisters THE TWO RACES OF MEN. 31 shake, ill thy oognitidii of some poignant jest of theirs ; or the anticipation of some more material, and peratlven- tiire i)raetical one, of tliinc own. Extinct are tliose smiles, with that beautiful countenance, with whii-h (for thou wert the JVireiis fo)-mosus of the school), in the days of thy maturer waggery, thou didst disarm the wrath of infuriated town-damsel, who, incensed by jn-ovoking pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly converted by thy angel-look, exchanged the half-formed terrible " M ," for a gentler greeting — " Idcss thy handsome face ! " Next follow two, who ouglit to be now alive, and the friends of Elia — the junior Le G and F ; who imijclled, the former by a roving teiniier, the latter by too quick a sense of neglect — ill capable of enduring the slights poor Sizars are sometimes subject to in om* seats of learning— exchanged their Alma Mater for the camp ; perishing, one by climate, and one on the i^laiiis of Sala- manca : — Le G , sanguine, volatile, sw^eet-natured ; F , dogged, faithful, anticipative of insult, warm- hearted, wdth something of the old Roman height about him. Fine, frank-hearted Fr , the present master of Hertford, wdth Marmaduke T , mildest of Missionaries — and both my good friends still — close the catalogue of Grecians in my time. THE TWO EACES OF MEN. The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races , the men wh o horrou\ an d th^iiienivho l end. To these two original diversities may be reduced all those impertinent classi- fications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon earth, " Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in with one or other of these primary distinctions. 32 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. The iiifiuite superiority of tlie former, which I chose to designate as the great race, is discernible in their figiu'e, port, and a certain instinctive sovereignty. The hitter are born degraded. " He shall serve his brethren." There is something in the air of one of this cast, lean and suspicious ; contrasting with the open, trusting, generous manners of the other. Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all ages — Alcibiades — Falstaft" — Sir Richard Steele — oiu* late incomparable Brinsley — what a family likeness in all four ! What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower ! what rosy gills ! what a beautiful reliance on Providence doth he manifest, — taking no more thoiight than lilies ! What contempt for money, — accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross ! What a liberal confounding of those pedantic distinctioiLS of meum and tuxmi ! or rather, what a noble simplification of language (beyond Tooke), resolving these supposed oj^posites into one clear, intelligible pronoun adjective ! — What near approaches doth he make to tlic primitive community, — to the extent of one half of the principle at least. He is the true taxer who " calleth all the world up to be taxed;" and the distance is as vast between him and one of us, as subsisted between the Augustan Majesty and the poorest obolary Jew that paid it tribute-pittance at Jerusalem ! — -His exactions, too, have such a chcerfid, voluntary air ! So far removed from yoiu" soiu* parochial or state -gatherers, — those ink-horn varlets, who carry their want of welcome in their faces ! He cometh to you with a smile, and troubleth you with no receipt ; confining himself to no set season. Every day is his Candlemas, or his feast of Holy Michael. He ajiplieth the lene tormentum of a pleasant look to yoiu- purse, — which to that gentle warmth expands her silken leaves, as natm'ally as the cloak of the traveller, for which sun and wind contended ! He is the true Propontic which never ebbeth ! The sea which taketh handsomely at each THE TWO RACES OF MEN. 33 man's liand. In vain the victim, whom he delightcth to lionom-, struggles with destiny ; he is in the net. Lend tlierefore cheerfully, man onhiined to lend — that thou lose not in the end, with tliy worldly penny, the reversion promised. Combine not preposterously in thine own person the penalties of Lazai-us and of Dives ! — but, when thou seest the proper authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it were half-way. Conre, a handsome sacrifice ! See how light he makes of it ! Strain not courtesies with a noble enemy. Reflections like the foregoing were forced upon my mind by the death of my old friend, Ralph Bigod, Esq., who parted this life on Wednesday evening ; dying, as he had lived, without much trouble. He boasted himself a de- scendant from mighty ancestors of that name, who here- tofore held ducal dignities in this realm. In his actions and sentiments he belied not the stock to which he i^re- tended. Early in life he found himself invested with ample revenues ; which, with that noble disinterestedness which I have noticed as inherent in men of \hQ great race, he took almost immediate measures entirely to dissipate and bring to nothing : for there is something revolting in the idea of a king holding a private purse ; and the thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus furnished, by the very act of disfurnishment ; getting rid of the cujii- b ersomo lug gnge of-riches, more apt (as one sings) To slacken virtue, and abate her edge, I Thau prompt her to do anght may merit praise, he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his great enter- prise, " borrowing and to borrow ! " In his periegesis, or triumphant jirogress throughout this island, it has been calculated that he laid a tythe part of the inhabitants under contribution. I reject this estimate as greatly exaggerated : — but having had tlie honour of accompanying my friend, divers times, in his perambulations about this vast city, I own I was gi-eatly struck at first with the jirodigious number of faces we D 34 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. met, who claimed a sort of respectful acquaintance with us. He was one day so obliging as to explain the phe- nomenon. It seems, these were his tributaries ; feeders of his exchequer ; gentlemen, his good friends (as he was pleased to express himself), to whom he had occasionally been beholden for a loan. Their multitudes did no way disconcert him. He rather took a pride in numbering them ; and, with Comus, seemed pleased to be " stocked with so fair a herd." With such soiu'ces, it was a wonder how he contrived to keep his treasury always enijjty. He did it by force of an aphorism, which he had often in his mouth, that "money kept longer than three days stinks." So he made use of it while it was fresh. A good part he drank away (for he was an excellent toss-pot), some he gave away, the rest he threw away, literally tossing and hmiing it violently from him — as boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious, — into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes, inscrutable cavities of the earth ; — or he would bury it (where he would never seek it again) by a river's side imder some liank, which (he would facetiously observe) paid no interest — but out away from him it must go peremptorily, as Hagar's oftspring into the wilderness, while it was sweet. He never missed it. The streams were perennial which fed his fisc. When new sujiplies became necessary, the first person that had the felicity to fall in with him, friend or stranger, was sure to contri- bute to the deficiency. For Bigod had an undeniable way with him. He had a cheerful, open exterior, a quick jovial eye, a bald forehead, just touched wath grey {cana fides). He anticipated no excuse, and found none. And, waiving for a Avhile my theory as to the great race, I would put it to the most untheorising reader, who may at times have disposable coin in his pocket, whether it is not more repugnant to the kindliness of his natiu^e to refuse such a one as I am descrilting, than to say no to a poor petitionary rogue (your bastard borrower), who, by his mmuping visnomy, tells you that he expects nothing THE TWO RACES OF ]\rEN. 35 better ; and, therefore, whose i)reeoiiceive(l notions and expectations you do in reality so much less shock in the refusal. When I think of this man ; his iiery glow of heart ; his swell of feeling ; how magnificent, how ideal he was ; how great at the midnight hour ; and when I compare with him tlie companions with whom I have associated since, I grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and think that I am fiillen into the society of lenders, and little men. To one like Elia, whose treasm'es are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon ; I mean your horroivers of books — those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There is Comber- batch, matchless in his depredations ! That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth knocked out — (you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbmy, Reader !) — with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, in their reformed postm'e, guardant of nothing) once held the tallest of my folios, Ojiera Bonaventurce, choice and massy divinity, to which its two supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre, — Bellarmine, and Holy Thomas), showed but as dwarfs, — itself au Ascapart ! — that Comberbatch abstracted ui)on the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that " the title to property in a book (my Bonaventure, for instance) is in exact ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the same." Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of om* shelves is safe 1 The slight vacuum in the left-hand case — two shelves from the ceiling — scarcely distingiiishable but by the (piick eye of a loser — was whilom the commodious resting- place of Browne on Urn Burial. 0. will hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed the first (of the 36 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. modems) to discover its beauties — but so have I kuowu a foolish lover to praise his mistress iu the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her off than himself. — Just below, Dodsley's dramas want their fom'th volume, where Vittoria Corombona is ! The remainder nine are as dis- tasteful as Priam's refuse sons, when the Fates horroived Hector. Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state. — There loitered the Complete Angler ; quiet as in life, by some stream side. In yonder nook, John Buncle, a widower-volume, with " eyes closed," mom'ns his ravished mate. One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small mider-collection of this nature (my friend's gatherings in his various calls), picked up, he has for- gotten at what odd places, and deposited with as little memory at mine. I take in these orphans, the twice- deserted. These proselytes of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. Tliere they stand in conjunction ; natives, and naturalised. The latter seem as little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am. — I charge no warehouse-room for these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses. To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. You are sm'e that he will make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can give no account of the platter after it. But what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K., to be so importunate to carry off Avitli thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret New- castle — knowing at the time, and knowing that I knew also, thou most assuredly wouldst never turn over one leaf of the illustrious folio : — what but the mere sjiirit of contradiction, and childish love of getting the better of thy friend ^ — Tlien, worst cut of all ! to transport it with thee to the Galilean land — NEW year's eve. 37 Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness, A virtue in whidi all ennobling thoughts dwelt, Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sex's wonder ! -hadst thou not thy play-books, aud books of jests and fancies, about thee, to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest all companies with thy quips and mirthful tales 1 Child of the Green-room, it was imkindly done of thee. Thy wife, too, that part-French, better -part -English- woman ! — that she could fix upon no other treatise to bear away, in kindly token of remembering us, than the works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brook — of which no French- man, nor woman of France, Italy, or England, was ever by natm'e constituted to comprehend a tittle ! Was there not Zimmerman on Solitude ? Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it ; or if thy heart over- floweth to lend them, lend thy books ; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. — he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had ex- perience. Many are these precious MSS. of his — (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) in no very clerkly hand — legible in my Daniel ; in old Bmlon ; in Sir Thomas Browne ; aud those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas ! wandering in Pagan lands. — I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C. NEW YEAR'S EVE. Every man hath tM'o birth-days : two days at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of 38 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. solemnizing our i^roper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anythnig in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with inditference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. Of all sound of all bells — (bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven) — most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth ; all I have done or suftered, performed or neglected, in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal colour ; nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary, when he exclaimed — I saw tlie skirts of the departing Year. It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to be conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night ; tliough some of my companions aflected rather to manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year, than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who — Welcome the coming, sjieed the jiarting gnest. I am natm-ally, beforehand, shy of novelties ; new books, new faces, new years, — from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope ; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former years). I plunge into fore- gone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappointments. I am armour -proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again for love, as the gamesters NEW year's eve. * 39 plirase it, games for which I once paid so dear. • I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. , I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well- contrived novel. Me- thinks, it is better that I sliould have ])iii('d away seven of my goldenest years, wlicn I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W — n, than that so passionate a love adventure should be lost. It was better that om- family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco, and be without the idea of that specious old rogue. In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox when I say, that, ski2)ping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love /timse/f without the inqjutation of self-love 1 If I know auglat of myself, no one whose mind is intro- spective — and mine is painfully so— can have a less re- spect for his present identity than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humour- some ; a notorious * * * ; addicted to •;- * * ; averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it ; — * * * 1 lesides ; a stammering buftbon ; what you will ; lay it on, and spare not ; I subscribe to it all, and nuich more, than thou canst be willing to lay at his door — but for the child Elia — that " other me," there, in the background — I must take leave to cherish the remem- brance of that young master — with as little reference, I protest, to his stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medicaments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ's, and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleej). I know how it shrank from any the least colour of false- hood. — God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed ! — 40 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Thou art sopliisticated. — I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was — how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful ! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself, — and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regidate the tone of my moral being ! That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the sjrmptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause : simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite '? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, Reader (a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia. The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution ; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. — In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life ; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to om- imagination the freezing days of December. But now, shall I confess a truth ? — I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like misers' farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen NEW year's eve. 41 and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and Avould fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of tlu; great wheel. I am not content to pass aM^ay " like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the uni)alatal)le draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth ; the face of town and country ; the luispeakable nmal solitudes, and the sweet secmity of streets. I woidd set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived ; I, and my friends : to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age ; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. — Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and I'roni/ itself — do these things go out with life 1 Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him 1 And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios ; must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge arm- fuls) in my embraces 1 Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading 1 Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here, — the recog- nisable face — the " sweet assurance of a look " ? In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying — to give it its mildest name — does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, lieneath a swelter- 42 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. ing sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and bm'geou. Then we are as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling ; cold, numbness, dreams, per- plexity ; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances, — that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles : — I am none of her minions — I hold with the Persian. Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death unto my mind. All partial evils, like hmuours, run into that capital plague-sore. — I have heard some profess an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge ; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death but out upon thee, I say, thoii foul, ugly phantom ! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as an universal viper ; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more frightful and confounding Positive ! Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfiiction hath a man, that he shall " lie down with kings and emperors in death," who in his lifetime never greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows 1 — or, forsooth, that " so shall the fairest face ui^jjear" ? — ■ why, to comfort me, must Alice W — n be a goblin '? More than all, I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon yom* ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take ui)on himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that " Such as he now is I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend. NEW year's eve. 43 perhaps, as thou imagiuest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters ! Thy New Years' days are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine — and while that turncoat bell, that just now mourn- fully chanted the obsequies of 1820 dejjarted, with changed notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton. THE NEW YEAR. Hark, the cock crows, and yon bright star Tells us, the day himself s not far ; And see where, breaking from the night. He gilds the western hills with liglit. With him old Janus doth appear, Peeping into the future year, With such a look as seems to say The prospect is not good that way. Thus do we rise ill sights to see, And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy ; When the prophetic fear of things A more tormenting mischief brings, More full of soul-tormenting gall Than direst mischiefs can befall. But stay ! but stay ! methinks my siglit, Better informed by clearer light, Discerns sereneness in that brow That all contracted seemed but now. His revers'd face may show distaste. And frown upon the ills are past ; But that which this way looks is clear. And smiles upon the New-born Year. He looks too from a place so high, The year lies open to his eye ; And all the moments open are To the exact discoverer. Yet more and more he smiles upon The happy revolution. Why should we then suspect or fear The influences of a year, So smiles upon us the first morn. And speaks us good so soon as born ? Plague on't ! the last was ill enough. 44 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. This cannot but make better proof ; Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through The Last, why so we may this too ; And then the next in reason shon'd Be superexcellently good : For the worst ills (we daily see) Have no more perpetuity Than the best fortunes that do fall ; Which also bring us wherewithal Longer their being to support. Than those do of the other sort : And who has one good year in three, And yet I'epiues at destiny, Appears ungrateful in the case. And merits not the good he has. Tlien let us welcome the New Guest With lusty brimmers of the best : Mirth always should Good Fortune meet. And renders e'en Disaster sweet : And though the Princess turn her back, Let us but line ourselves \vith sack, We better shall by far hold out. Till the next year she face about. How say you, Reader — do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of the old English vein'? Do they not fortify like a cordial ; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction 1 Where be those piding fears of death, just now expressed or affected ? — Passed like a cloud — ab- sorbed in the pm-ging sunlight of clear poetry — clean washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, yom* only Spa for these hypochondries. And now anotlicr cup of the generous ! and a merry New Year, and many of them to you all, my masters ! MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. "A CLEAR fire, a clean hearth,^ and the rigour of the game." This was the celebrated ivish of old Sarah Battle [' This was before the introduction of rugs. Reader. You must MRS. BATTLE S OPINIONS ON WIIIST. 45 (now with God), who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of whist. Slie was none of youi- hdvewann game- sters, your half-and-half j^laycrs, who have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to make up a rubber ; who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning ; that they like to win one game and lose another ; that they can whil(! away an liour very agreeably at a card-table, but are inditterent whether they play or no ; and will desire an adversary, who has slipped a wrong card, to take it up and play another.^ These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them. Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from her heart and soul, and would not, save upon a striking emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table with them. She loved a thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy. She took, and gave, no concessions. She hated fixvours. She never made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in her adversary without exacting the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight : cut and thrust. She held not her good sword (her cards) "like a dancer." She sate bolt upright; and neither showed you her cards, nor desired to see yours. All people have their blind side — their superstitions ; and I have heard her declare, under the rose, that Hearts was her favourite suit. I never in my life — and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best years of it — saw her take out her snuff'-box when it was her tmii to play ; or snuff a candle in the middle of a game ; or ring for a servant, till it was fixirly over. She never introduced, or connived at, miscellaneous con- versation during its process. As she emphatically ol> served, cards were cards ; and if I ever saw unmingled remember the intolerable crash of the imswept cinders betwixt yonr foot and the marble.] [^ As if a sportsman should tell you he liked to kill a fox one day and lose him the next.] 46 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. distaste in her fine last-centmy couuteuauce, it was at the airs of a young gentleman of a literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand ; and who, in his excess of candour, declared, that he thought there was no liarni in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in recreations of that kind ! She could not bear to have her noble occu]:)ation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do, — and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards — over a book. Pope was her favourite author : his Rape of the Lock her favourite work. She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem ; and to explain to me how far it agi'eed with, and in what points it would be found to differ from, tradi'ille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant ; and I had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles ; but I suppose they came too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes upon that author. Quaibille, she has often told me, was her first love ; but whist had engaged her matm'cr esteem. The former, she said, Avas showy and specious, and likely to alhu'e young persons. The uncertainty and quick shifting of partners — a thing which the constancy of whist abhors ; the dazzling supremacy and regal investitiu-e of Spadille — absmxl, as she justly observed, in the piu-e aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power above his lirother-nobility of the Aces ; — the giddy vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of plajdng alone ; above all, the overpowering attractions of a Sans Prendre Vole, — to the triiunph of which there is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the contingencies of wliist ; — all these, she woidd say, make quadrille a game of capti- vation to the young and enthusiastic. But whist was the solider game : that was her word. It was a long meal ; not like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or MRS. battle's opinions on whist, 47 two rubbers iui^t;lit co-exteiul in duration witli an evening. They gave time to form rooted iriendsliip.s, to cultivate steady enmities. She despised tlie clianee-started, capri- cious, and ever-fluctuating alliances of the otlier. The skirmislu^s of quadrille, slie would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral endjroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel : perpetually changing postures and connexions ; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow ; kissing and scratching in a breath ; — but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational antipathies of the great French and English nations. A grave simjtlicity was what she chiefly admired in her favourite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage — nothing superfluous. No flushes — that most irrational of all i)leas that a reasonable being can set up : — that any one should claim foiu* by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and colour, without refer- ence to the Inlaying of the game, or the individual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves ! She held this to be a solecism ; as pitiful an ambition at cards as alliteration is in authorship. She despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colom-s of things. — Suits were soldiers, she would say, and must have a iiniformity of array to distinguish them : \>\\i what should we say to a foolish squii'e, who should claim a merit from dressing w]} his tenantry in red jackets, that never were to be marshalled — never to take the field 1 — She even wished that whist were more simple than it is ; and, in my mind, would have stripped it of some appendages, which, in the state of human frailty, may be venially, and even com- mendably, allowed of. She saw no reason for the decid- ing of the trump by the turn of the card. Why not one suit always trumps ? — Why two colours, when the mark of the suit would have suflicieutly distinguished them without it 1 " But the eye, my dear madam, is agreeably refreshed with the variety. Man is not a creatm-e of pure reason — 48 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. he must have liis senses delightfully appealed to. We see it iu Romau Catholic countries, where the music and the paintings draw in many to worship, whom your quaker spirit of unsensualising would have kept out. — You your- self have a pretty collection of paintings — but confess to me, whether, walking in yom* gallery at Sandham, among those clear Vandykes, or among the Paul Potters iu the ante-room, you ever felt your bosom glow with an elegant delight, at all comparable to that you have it in your power to experience most evenings over a well-arranged assortment of the court-cards 1 — the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a procession — the gay trivmiph-assuring scarlets — the contrasting deadly-killing sables — the ' hoary majesty of spades' — Pam in all his glory ! — "All these might be dispensed with ; and Avith their naked names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well, pictureless ; but the beauty of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, they must degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine a didl deal board, or drum head, to spread them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet (next to natm-e's), fittest arena for those courtly combatants to play their gallant jousts and tm'ueys in ! — Exchange those delicately-tm-ned ivory markers — (woi'k of Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol, — or as profonely slighting their true application as the arrantest Ephesian journey- man that turned out those little shrines for the goddess) — exchange them for little bits of leather (our ancestors' money), or chalk and a slate !" — The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic ; and to her approbation of my argmnents on her favourite topic that evening I have always fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a curious crilibage-board, made of the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence :• — this, and a trifie of five hundred pounds, came to me at her death. The former bequest (which I do not least value) I MRS. battle's opinions ON WIIIST. 49 have kept with religious care ; though slie lierself, to con- fess a trutli, was never greatly taken with (tribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say, — disputing with her uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to proiKuuice " (^o," or " Thi(fs a f/o." She called it an ungranunatical game. The pegging teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five-dollar stake) because she woidd not take advantage of the timi-up knave, which would have given it her, but Avhich she must have claimed by the disgrace- ful tenm-e of declaring ^Hivo for his heels.''' There is something extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman born. Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, though she would ridieide the pedantry of the terms — such as pitjue — repique — the capot — they savoured (she thought) of atiectation. But games for two, or even three, she never greatly cared for. She loved the quad- rate, or square. She would argue thus : — Cards are war- fare : the ends are gain, with glory. But cards are war, in disgiiise of a sport : when single adversaries encounter, the ends proposed are too palpable. By themselves, it is too close a fight ; with spectators, it is not much bettered. No looker-on can be interested, except for a bet, and then it is a mere aft'air of money ; he cares not for your luck sympatheticdlhj, or for your play. — Three are still worse ; a mere naked war of every man against every man, as in cribbage, without league or alliance ; or a rotation of i:)etty and contradictory interests, a succession of heartless leagues, and not much more hearty infractions of them, as in tradrille. — But in square games [she meant ichist), all that is jiossible to be attained in card-jilaying is accom- plished. There are the incentives of profit with honoiu-, common to every species — though the latter can be but very imperfectly enjoyed in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a participator. But the j^arties in whist are spectators and principals too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted. He is rather E 50 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. worse than nothing, and an imiiertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold — or even an interested — bystander Avitnesses it, but because yoiu* iKirtnvr sympathises in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph for two. Two are ex- alted. Two again are mortified ; which divides their disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by taking oft" the invidiousness) your glories. Two losing to two are better reconciled, than one to one in that close butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened by nudtiplying the channels. War becomes a civil game. By such reasonings as these the old lady was accustomed to defend her favourite pastime. No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any game, where chance entered into the composition, for nothing. Chance, she would argue — and here again, admire the subtlety of her conclusion ; — chance is nothing, but where something else depends upon it. It is obvious that cannot be glory. What rational cause of exultation could it give to a man to turn up size ace a hundred times together by himself? or before spectators, where no stake was depending 1 — Make a lottery of a hundred thousand tickets with but one fortunate nimiber — and what possible principle of om' natm-e, except stupid wonderment, could it gratify to gain that number as many times successively without a prize ? Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in backgammon, where it was not played for money. She called it foolish, and those people idiots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such circumstances. Games of pm-e skill were as little to her fancy. Played for a stake, they were a mere system of over-reaching. Played for glory, they were a mere setting of one man's Mat, — his memory, or combination-faculty rather — against another's ; like a mock-engagement at a review, bloodless and profit- less. She could not conceive a game wanting the spritely infusion of chance, the handsome excuses of good fortune. Two people playing at chess in a corner of a room, whilst jiRs, battle's opinions on whist. 51 whist was stirring in the centre, would inspire her with insufterable horror and ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles and Knights, the imagery of the board, she would argnie (and I think in this case justly), were en- tirely nii,s])laced and senseless. Those hard-head contests can in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject form and colom-. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were the proper arena for such combatants. To those puny objectors against cards, as niu'turing the bad passions, she would retort, that man is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get the better in something or other : — that this passion can scarcely be more safely expended than upon a game at cards : that cards are a temporary illusion ; in truth, a mere drama ; for we do but /)^aj/ at being mightily concerned, where a few idle shillings are at stake, yet, dm-ing the illusion, we are as mightily concerned as those whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. They are a sort of dream-fighting ; much ado ; great battling, and little bloodshed ; mighty means for disproportioned ends : quite as diverting, and a great deal more innoxious, than many of those more serious games of life, which men play without esteeming them to be such. With great deference to the old lady's judgment in these matters, I think I have experienced some moments in my life when playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable. When I am in sickness, or not in the best spuits, I sometimes call for the cards, and play a game at i^iquet for love with my cousin Bridget — Bridget Elia. I grant there is something sneaking in it ; but with a tooth-ache, or a sprained ankle, — when you are subdued and humble, — you are glad to put uji with an inferior spring of action. There is such a thing in natiu^e, I am convinced, as sich ivhist. I grant it is not the highest style of man — I dejirecate the manes of Sarah Battle — she lives not, alas ! to whom I should apologise. 52 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, come iu as something admissible — I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an inferior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me. That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her) — (dare I tell thee, how foolish I am ■?) — I Avished it miglit have lasted for ever, though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of jDlay : I would be content to go on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should be ever boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game was over : and, as I do not much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble Bridget and I should be ever plajdng. A CHAPTER ON EARS. I HAVE no ear. — Mistake me not, reader — nor imagine that I am by natm-e destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hang- ing ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. — I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those condiiits ; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his jjlenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets — those indispensable side-intelligencers. Neither have I incurred, or done anything to incm-, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon assm-ance — to feel " quite unabashed," ^ and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory ; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of my destiny, that I ever should be. When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will ^ ["Earless ou liigli stood, uuaba.slifd, Defoe." — Dtcnciad.] A CHAPTER ON EARS. 53 uiidorstand mc to meau — for innsic. To say tliat tliis lunvrt never melted at the concord of sweet sounds, would be a foul self-libel. " Water parted from tJie sea" never foils to move it strangely. So does "//?. infancy." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the old- fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentle- woman — the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appel- lation—the sweetest — why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S , once the blooming Fanny Weatheral of tlie Temiile — who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats ; and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorbing sentiment which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite for Alice W n. I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to har- mony. But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising " God save the King " all my life ; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners ; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached. I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlour, — on his retm-n he was pleased to say, "he tho\ight it cotddnot he the maid!" On his fii'st surprise at hearing the keys touched in some- what an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched from a sui^erior refinement, soon convinced him that some being — technically perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all the fine arts — had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less culti- vated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any view of disparaging Jenny. Scientifically I could never be made to imderstand (yet 54 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. have I taken some pains) what a note in music is ; or how one note should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the thorough-bass I contrive to guess at, from its being supereminently harsh and disagreeable. I tremble, how- ever, for my misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obsciuity to me ; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjm'ing as Baralijiton. It is hard to stand alone in an age like this, — (consti- tuted to the quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut,) to remain, as it were, singly unimi:>ressible to the magic influences of an art, which is said to have such an especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions. — Yet, rather than break the candid cm-rent of my confessions, I must avow to you that I have received a gi-eat deal more pain than pleasm-e from this so cried-up fl^culty. I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpen- ter's hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those vmconnected, imset sounds, are nothing to the measured malice of music. The ear is passive to those single strokes ; willingly endur- ing stripes while it hath no task to con. To music it can- not be passive. It will strive — mine at least will — spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze ; like an im- skilled eye j^ainfully poring upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren atten- tion ! 1 1 take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest common-life sounds ;-«-and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes my paradise. A CHAPTER ON EARS. 55 I have sat at an Oi-atorio (that profanation of the pur- poses of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience !) immoveable, or affecting some faint emotion — - till (as some have said, that om- occupations in the next world will be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades, where some of the fo7-ms of the earthly one should be kept up, \yith. none of the enjoyment ; or like that Party in a parlour All sileut, and all damned. Aliove all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my ajjprehensiou. — Words are someth mg ; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a dying; to lie stretched upon a rack of roses ; to keep up languor by uuintermitted effort ; to pile honey ui)ou sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness ; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it ; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yoiu'self ; to read a book, all stop.?, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter ; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime — these are foint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable : — afterwards foUowetli the languor and the oppression. — Like that disappointing book in Patmos ; or, like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches : — " Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall aftect him most, amahilis insania, and mentis gratissimus error. A most incom- 56 THE ESSAYS OF El.IA. parable delight to bTiiltl castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they su2)pose, and strongly imagine, they act, or that they see done. — So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantastical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them — winding and unwinding theni selves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, vmtil at the last the SCENE turns upon a sudden, and they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, sidrusficics pudoi; discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else : continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their soids, representing some dismal object to their minds ; which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions, they can avoid, they cannot be rid of, they cannot resist." Something like this " scene turning " I have expe- rienced at the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend JS^ov ; who, by the aid of a capital organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week days into Siindays, and these latter into minor heavens.^ When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which jieradventm-e struck x\])on my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim Abbey, some five- and-thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young apprehension — (whether it be that, in which the Psalmist, weary of the persecu- tions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings — or that other which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse ^ I have been there, and still ■would go — 'Tis like a little heaven below. — Dk. Watts. A CHAPTER ON EARS. 57 his mind) — a holy calm pcrvatk'th me. — I am for the time rapt above eaitli, And possess joys not promised at my Lirtli. But when thi.s master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive — impatient to overcome her " earthly " with his " heavenly," — still pour- ing in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhansted German ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Jfo:arf, with their attendant Tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps, — I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wits' end ; — clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me — priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me — the geniiis oihis religion hath me in her toils — a shadowy trij^le tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous — he is Pope, — and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too, — tri-coronated like himself ! — I am converted, and yet a Protestant ; — at once malleus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch : or three heresies centre in my person : — I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus — Gog and Magog— what not? — till the coming in of the friendly supper-tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once recon- ciles me to the rationalities of a purer faith ; and restores to me the genuine unterrifying aspects of my pleasant- countenanced host and hostess. 58 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. ALL FOOLS' DAY. The complimeuts of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of April to ns all ! Many happy retm-ns of this day to you — and you — and yoxi^ Sir — nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another ? what need of ceremony among friends % we have all a touch of that same — you imderstand me — a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the corjioration, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with no wise-acre, I can tell him. Stultns sum. Translate me tliat, and take the meaning of it to yom-self for yoiu- pains. What ! man, we have four quarters of the globe on oiir side, at the least computation. Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry — we will drink no wise, melancholy, politic port on this day — and let us troll the catch of Amiens — due ad me — due ad me — how goes it 1 Here shall he see Gross fools as he. Now would I give a trifle to know, historically and authentically, who was the greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him in a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the party. Remove your cap a little fiuther, if you ])lease : it hides my bauble. And now each man bestride his hobby, and dust away his l)ells to what tune he pleases. I will give you, for my part, -The crazy old church clock, And the bewildered chimes. ALL FOOLS* PAY. 59 Good jnastcr Empcdoclos,'^ you arc welcome. It is long since you went a salamander-gathering down iEtna. Worse than sanii)liire-])icking by some odds. 'Tis a mercy yom' worship did not singe your mustachios. Ha ! Cleombrotus !- and what salads in faith did ydu light upon at the bottom of the -Mediterranean 1 You were fomidcr, I take it, of the disinterested sect of the Calenturists. Gebir, my old free-mason, and prince of plasterers at Babel,'^ bring in yom- trowel, most Ancient Grand ! You have claim to a seat here at my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. You left yom* work, if I remember Herodotus correctly, at eight himdred million toises, or thereabout, above the level of the sea. Bless us, what a long bell you must have pidled, to call yom- top work- men to their nuncheon on the low grounds of Shinar. Or did you send up your garlic and onions by a rocket 1 I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to show you oiu- Monu- ment on Fish-street Hill, after yoiu' altitudes. Yet we think it somewhat. What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears t — cry, baby, put its finger in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as an orange, pretty moppet ! Mister Adams 'odso, I honour your coat — pray do us the favour to read to us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slipslop — the twenty and second in your portmanteau there — on Female Incontiuence^the same — it will come in most irrelevantly and imj^ertinently seasonable to the time of the day. Good Master Raymund Lully, you look wise. Pray correct that error. Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a paradox. We will have nothing said or [^ He who, to be deem'd A god, leap'd foudly into Etua flames — ] [- He who, to enjoy Plato's Elysium, leap'd into the sea — ] P The bnilders next of Babel on the jilain Of Senaar — ] 60 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. (lone syllogistically this day. Remove those logical forms, waiter, that no gentleman break the tender shins of his apprehension stumbling across them. Master Stephen, you are late. — Ha ! Cokes, is it you 1 — Aguecheek, my dear knight, let me pay my devoir to you. — Master Shallow, your worship's poor servant to command. — Master Silence, I will use few words with you. — Slender, it shall go hard if I edge not you in somewhere. — You six will engross all the poor wit of the company to-day. — I know it, I know it. Ha ! honest R , my fine old Librarian of Ludgate, time out of mind, art thou here again '? Bless thy doublet, it is not over-new, threadbare as thy stories : — what dost thou flitting about the world at this rate 1 — Thy customers are extinct, defunct, bed-rid, have ceased to read long ago. — Thou goest still among them, seeing if, peradven- ture, thou canst hawk a vohune or two. — Good Granville S , thy last patron, is flown. King Pandion, he is dead, All thy friends are lapt in lead. — Nevertheless, noble R , come in, and take your seat here, between Armado and Quisada ; for in true com-tesy, in gravity, in ftintastic smiling to thyself, in com'teous smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-api^arelled speech, and the commendation of wise sentences, thou art nothing inferior to those accomplished Dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for ever, when I forget thy singing the song of Macheath, which declares that he might be happy with either, situated between those two ancient spinsters — when I forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst make, turning now to the one, and now to the other, with that Malvo- lian smile — as if Cervantes, not Gay, had wi-itten it for his hero ; and as if thousands of periods must revolve, before the mirror of courtesy could have given his invidi- ous preference between a pair of so goodly-propertied and meritorious-equal damsels. * * * * ALL fools' day. 61 To descerifl from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fools' Banqu(>t beyond its appropriate day, — for I fear the second of April is not many hoiu-s distant — in sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool — as naturally as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with childdike apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables — not guessing at the involved wisdom — I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbour : I grudged at the hard censm-e pro- nounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent ; and — prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my api^rehensiou, somewhat unfeminhie wariness of their competitors — I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a temlre, for those five thoughtless virgins. — I have never made an acquaintance since, that lasted : or a friendship, that answered ; with any that had not some tincture of the absmxl in their characters. I ven- erate an honest obliquity of luiderstanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety which a palpable hallu- cination warrants ; the secm'ity, which a word out of sea- son ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you i^lease, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. It is observed, that " the foolisher the fowl or fish, — woodcocks, — dotterels — cods'- heads, etc., the finer the flesh thereof," and what are commonly the Avorld's received fools but such whereof the world is not worthy"? and what have been some of the kindliest patterns of om- species, but so many darlings of absurdity, minions of the goddess, and her white boys ? — Reader, if you wi-est my words beyond their fair construc- tion, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool, 62 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. A QUAKERS' MEETING. still-born Silence ! tlion that art Flood-gate of the deeper heart ! Offsjjring of a heavenly kind ! Frost o' the month, and thaw o' the mind ! Secrecy's conlidant, and he Who makes religion mystery! Admiration's speaking'st tongue ! Leave, thy desert shades among, Eeverend hermit's hallow'd cells, Where retired devotion dwells ! With thy enthusiasms come, Seize our tongues, and strike iis dumb ! ^ Reader, "would'st thou know what true peace and quiet mean ; wouhl'st thou find a refuge from the noises and clamom's of tlie multitude ; would'st thou enjoy at once solitude and society ; would'st thou possess the depth of thine own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species ; would'st thou be alone and yet accompanied ; solitary, yet not desolate ; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in coimte- nance ; a unit in aggregate ; a simple in composite :— come with me into a Quakers' Meeting. Dost thou love silence deep as that " before the winds were made"? go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the earth ; shut not u}) thy case- ments ; nor pom' wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faith'd self-mistrusting Ulysses. — Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting. For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable ; but for a multitude it is gi'eat mastery. What is the stillness of the desert compared with this place 1 what the uncommunicatiug muteness of fishes 1 — here the goddess reigns and revels.—" Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their interconfomiding 1 From "Poems of all sorts," by Richard Fleckno, 1653. A QUAKERS' MEETINO. G3 xiproars more augment the brawl — nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds — than their oppo- site (Silence her sacred self) is nudtiplieil and rendered more intense by numbers, and l)y sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less ; and closed eyes would seem to obscm-e the great obscmity of midnight. There are woimds which an imi)erfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers' Meeting. — Those first hermits did certaiidy understand this principle, when they retired into Egy]5tian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by — say, a wife — he, or she, too, (if that be probable,) reading another without interruption, or oral communica- tion ? — can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words ? — away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and- cavern-haimting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmer- man, a sympathetic solitude. To pace alone in the cloisters or side aisles of some cathedi'al, time-stricken ; Or under hanging mountains, *"" Or by the fall of fountains ; is but a vulgar luxury compared with that which those enjoy who come together for the purposes of more com- plete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness " to be felt." — The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions. -Sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruined sides of kings- G4 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. but here is something which throws Antiquity herself into the fore-ground — Silence — eldest of things — language of old Night — primitive discom-ser — to which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatm'al progression. How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, Looking tranr^uillity ! Nothing - plotting, nought - caballing, unmischievous synod ! convocation without intrigue ! parliament without debate ! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to consistory ! — if my pen treat of you li.u'htly — as haplv it will wand er—yet my spirit hath gravel j; ^felt the wisdom ot your custom , when, sitting among you in deepest pea ce, which soiiie oi Tt-weliing tears would rather confirm than distui-l37-[ J^^V6 reve rted to the tunes of your begilTT liugs", and the so^dngs of~Ihe seed by I'ox and Lewesbury. — 1 have witnessed that which brought before my eyes yoiu- heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you — -for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and oft'-scouring of church and presbytery. — I have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into yom* receptacle with the avowed intention of distm'bing yoiu* quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remember Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and " the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet." Eeader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all chiu'ch-narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the joirrnals of Fox and the jirimitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than anything you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no susjiicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the A QUAKERS' MEETING. G5 worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the t'rue story of that inuch-iujurod, ridiculed man (who per- haps hath been a byword in your mouth) — ^James Naylor: what dreadful sufteriugs, with what patience, he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons, without a mimmu"; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had follen into, which they stig- matised for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still ! — so different from the practice of yom* common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough from the society of then- former errors, even to the re- nimciation of some saving truths, with ^^dlich they had been mingled, not implicated. Get the writings of John Woolman by heart ; and love the e_arly Quakers. How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the jirimitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others, again, I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could jjossibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to imanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings. — If the spiritual pre- tensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hy|:)ocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom, indeed, that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is heard— you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds — with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying out a few words which "she thought might suit the condition of some present," with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that anything of female vanity F GG THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty. — The men, for Avhat I have observed, sjjeak seldomer. Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxiau orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced "from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit — I dare not say of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were imuttei'- able — he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail — his joints all seemed loosening — it was a figm'e to set off against Paul i:)reaching — the Avords he uttered were few, and sound — he was evidently resisting his will — keeping down his own word-wisdom with more mighty effort than the world's orators strain for theirs. " He had been a WIT in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the im- pression had l)egun to wear away that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking incon- gruity of the confession — understanding the term in its worldly acceptation — with the frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levities — the Jocos Risus-que — -fiister than the Loves fletl the flxce of Dis at Enua.- — By unt, even in his youth, I will l)e sworn he understood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty. More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius ; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that unruly memlier, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with still- ness. — 0, when the spii'it is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is to go and seat yom'self THE OLD AND TTIR NEW SCHOOLMASTER, 67 for a quiet lialf-hour upon some uii(lis];)Ute(I corner of a Ijench, auiong tlie gentle Quakers ! Their garb and stillness conjoined, present a uniformity, tranquil and herd-like — as in the pastiu'e — " forty feeding- like one." — The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of re- ceiving a soil ; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily ; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metrojjolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones. THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. My reading has been lamentably desultory and imme- thodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supi)lied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia ; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions; nor can form the remotest conjectm-e of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terrce Incognitse. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charles's Wain ; the place of any star ; or the name of any of them at sight. I giiess at Venus only by her lirightness — and if the sim on some portent- ous morn were to make his first appearance in the West, I verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping 68 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the coiuse of miscel- laneous study; but I never deliberately sat dovm to a chronicle, even of my own covmtry. I liave most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies ; and some times the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest conjee tm-es concerning Egy|)t, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely imacquaiuted with the modern languages ; and, like a better man than myself, have " small Latin and less Greek." I am a stranger to the shapes and textm'e of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers — not from the circumstance of my being to■w^l-born — for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I fii'st seen it "on Devon's leafy shores," — and am no less at a loss among purely town objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes. — Not that I affect ignorance — but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious ; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder how I have jDassed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be foimd out, in mixed company ; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of yoiu* acquisitions. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. The truth ynW out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man, that does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma of this sort. — In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shacklewell, the coach stopped to take up a staid-looking THE OI.D AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTEi;. G9 gentleman, about tlie wrong side of thirty, who was giving his parting directions (while the stci)s were adjusting), in a tone of mild authority, to a tall youth, wdio seemed to be neither his clerk, his son, nor his servant, but some- thing partaking of all three. The youth was dismissed, and we drove on. As we were the sole passengers, he natiu-ally enoiigh addressed his conversation to me ; and we discussed the merits of the fare ; the civility and punctuality of the driver ; the circumstance of an opposi- tion coach having been lately set up, with the probabilities of its success — to all which I was enabled to return pretty satisfactory answers, having been drilled into this kind of etiquette by some years' daily practice of riding to and fro in the stage aforesaid — when he suddenly alarmed me by a startling question, whether I had seen the show of prize cattle that morning in Smithfield ? Now, as I had not seen it, and do not greatly care for such sort of exhibi- tions, I was obliged to return a cold negative. He seemed a little mortitied, as well as astonished, at my declaration, as (it appeared) he was just come fresh from the sight, and doubtless had hoped to compare notes on the subject. However, he assiu^ed me that I had lost a fine treat, as it for exceeded the show of last year. We were now approaching Norton Folgate, when the sight of some shop-goods ticketed freshened him up into a disser- tation upon the cheapness of cottons this spring. I was now a little in heart, as the nature of my morning avoca- tions had brought me into some sort of familiarity with the raw material ; and I was surprised to find how eloquent I was becoming on the state of the India market ; M-hen, presently, he dashed my incipient vanity to the earth at once, by inquiring whether I had ever made any calculation as to the value of the rental of all the retail shops in London. Had he asked of me what song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, I might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have hazarded a "wide solution." ^ ' Urn Burial. 70 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. My companion saAV my embarrassment, and, the alms- houses beyond Shorcditch just coming in view, with great good-nature and dexterity shifted his conversation to the subject of public charities ; which led to the com- parative merits of provision for the poor in past and present times, with observations on the old monastic institutions, and charitable orders ; but, finding me rather dimly impressed A^ath some glimmering notions from old poetic associations, than strongly fortified with any specu- lations reducible to calculation on the subject, he gave the matter up ; and, the country beginning to open more and more upon us, as we approached the turnpike at Kingsland (the destined termination of his jom-ney), he put a home thrust upon me, in the most unfortunate position he could have chosen, by advancing some Cjueries relative to the North Pole Expedition. While I was muttering out something about the Panorama of those strange regions (which I had actually seen), by way of parrying the question, the coach stopping relieved me from any fiu'tlier appreliensions. ]\Iy companion getting out, left me in the comfortable possession of my ignor- ance ; and I heard him, as he went oft", putting questions to an outside passenger, who had alighted ■R'ith him, regarding an epidemic disorder that had been rife aliout Dalston, and which my friend assm'ed him had gone through five or six schools in that neighbourhood. The truth now flashed upon me, that my companion was a schoolmaster ; and that the youth, whom he had parted from at om' first acquaintance, must have been one of the bigger boys, or the usher. — He was evidently a kind- hearted man, who did not seem so much desirous of pro- voking discussion by the questions which he put, as of obtaining information at any rate. It did not appear that he took any interest, either, in such kiud of inquiries, for their own sake ; but that he was in some way bound to seek for knowledge. A greenish-coloured coat, which he had on, forbade me to surmise that he w\as a clergy- man. The adventure gave birth to some reflections on THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 71 the difference between persons of liis profession in past and present times. Rest to the sonls of tliose fine ohl Pcdagogncs ; the breed, long since extinct, of the Lilys, and the Linacres : who believing that all learning was contained iu the lan- guages which they taught, and despising every other acquirement as superficial and useless, came to their task as to a sport ! Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed away all their days as in a grammar-school. Revolving in a perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies ; renewing constantly the occupations which had charmed their studious childhood ; rehearsing con- tinually the part of the past ; life must have slipped from them at last like one day. They were always in their fii'st garden, reaping harvests of thek golden time, among their Flori- and theu' Spici-legia ; in Arcadia still, but kings ; the ferule of their sway not much harsher, but of like dignity with that mild sceptre attributed to kiilg Basileus ; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philoclea ; with the occasional duncery of some un- toward tjTO, serving for a refreshing interlude of a Moj^sa, or a clown Damcetas ! With what a savom- doth the Preface to Colet's, or (as it is sometimes called) Paul's Accidence, set forth ! " To exhort every man to the learning of grammar, that intendeth to attain the understanding of the tongues, wherein is contained a great treasuiy of wisdom and knowledge, it would seem but vain and lost laboiu* ; for so much as it is known, that nothing can surely be ended, whose beginning is either feeble or faulty ; and no build- ing be perfect whereas the foundation and groundwork is ready to fall, and unable to uphold the burden of the frame." How well doth this stately preamble (compar- able to those which Llilton commendeth as " having been the usage to prefix to some solenm law, then first pro- mulgated by Solon or Lycurgus ") correspond with and illustrate that pious zeal for conformity, expressed in a succeeding clause, which would fence about grammar- 72 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. rules with the severity of faith-articles! — "as for the diversity of grammars, it is well profitably taken away by the King's Majesties wisdom, who foreseeing the in- convenience, and fjxvourably providing the remedie, caused one kind of grammar by sundry learned men to be dili- gently drawn, and so to be set out, only everywhere to be taught for the use of learners, and for the hurt in changing of schoolmaisters." What a gusto in that which follows : " wherein it is profitable that he (the pupil) can orderly decline his noim and his verb." Ills uomi ! The fine dream is fading away fast ; and the least concern of a teacher in the jiresent day is to inculcate grammar-rules. The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of everything, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. He must be superficially, if I may so say, omniscient. He is to know something of pneumatics ; of chemistry ; of whatever is curious or proper to excite the attention of the youthful mind ; an insight into mechanics is desu'able, with a touch of statistics ; the quality of soils, etc., botany, the con- stitution of his country, cum multis aliis. You may get a notion of some part of his expected duties by consult- ing tlie famous Tractate on Education, addressed to Mr. Hartlib. All these things — these, or the desire of them — he is expected to instil, not by set lessons from professors, which he may charge in the bill, biit at school intervals, as he walks the streets, or saunters through green fields (those natural instructors), with his pupils. The least part of what is expected from him is to be done in school- hom's. He nmst insinuate knowledge at the mollia tempora fandi. He must seize every occasion — the season of the year — the time of the day — ji passing cloud — a rainbow- — a waggon of hay — a regiment of soldiers going by — to inculcate something useful. He can receive no pleasure from a casual glimpse of Natm-e, but must catch at it as an object of instruction. He must inter- THE OLD AND TllJi NEW SCHOuLArARTER. 73 pret beauty into the pictni'esqno. He cannot relish a beggar-man, or a gipsy, for tliinking of the siiital:)le im- provement. Notliing comes to him, not spoiled by the sopliisticating niedinni of moral uses. The Universe — that Great Book, as it has been called — is to him, indeed, to all intents and ixu'poses, a book out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting schoolboys. — Vacations themselves are none to him, he is only rather worse off than before ; for commonly he has some in- ti"usive uj^pcr-boy fastened upon him at such times ; some cadet of a great fomily ; some neglected lumi) of nobility, or gentry ; that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr. Hartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's house, or his fovoiu-ite watering-jjlace. Wherever he goes this mieasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy. Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates ; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people. The restraint is felt no less on the one side than on the other. — Even a child, that "plaything for an hour," tires alivays. The noises_jaflchiklren, plajdng their owni foncies — as I no^\^learken to thcm,1by fits, sporting on the green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave specidations at my neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell — by distance made more sweet — inexpressibly take from the labom' of my task. It is like writin;:; to music. They seem to modulate mv period s. They ought at least to do so — for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far unlike the harsh prose-accents of man's conversation. — I shoidd but spoil their sport, and diminish my o^ti sjani)atliy for them, by mingling in their jjastime. I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very superior capacity to my own — not, if I know my- self at all, from any considerations of jealousy or self-com- parison, for the occasional communion with such minds has constituted the fortune and felicity of my life — but 74 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. the habit of too constant intercourse with spirits above you, instead of raising you, keeps you down. Too frequent doses of original tliinking from otliers restrain what lesser portion of that facidty you may possess of your own. You get entangled in another man's mhid, even as you lose yoiu-self in another man's groimds. You are walking with a tall varlet, whose strides out-pace yovurs to lassi- tude. The constant 025eration of such potent agency would reduce me, I am convinced, to imbecility. You may derive thoughts from others ; yom* way of thinking, the mould in which yom* thoughts are cast, must be yoiu' OAvn. Intellect may be imparted, but not each man's intellectual frame. — As little as I sliould wish to be always thus dragged ujiward, as little (or rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downwarcls by yoiu- associates. The ti^umpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility. Why are we never quite at om* ease in the presence of a schoolmaster 1 — liecause we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in oiu-s. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the statiu-e of his understanding to yoiu-s. He cannot meet you on tlie square. He wants a point given him, like an in- different whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that he wants to be teaching i/02t. One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything biit methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes. The jests of a schoolmaster are coarse, or thin. They do not e/l out of school. He is under the restraint of a formal or didac- tive hypocrisy in company, as a clergyman is under a moral one. He can no more let his intellect loose in society than the other can his inclinations. He is forlorn among his coevals ; his juniors cannot be his friends. THE OT.D AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 75 "I take blame to niy.sclf," f^aid n. seii.sil)le man of tliis profession, writing to a friend respecting a youth who had quitted his school abruptly, " that your ncjihew was not more attached to me. But persons in my situation are more to be pitied than can well be imagined. We are surrounded by young, and, consequently, ardently affec- tionate hearts, but ive can never hope to share an atom of their affections. The relation of master and scholar forbids this. Hoiv fleasing this must be to you, hoio I en vi/ your feelings I my friends will sometimes say to me, when they see young men whom I have educated, retm-u after some years' absence from school, their eyes shining with pleasure, while they shake hands with their old master, bringing a present of game to me, or a toy to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms for my care of tlicir education. A holiday is begged for the boys ; the house is a scene of happiness ; I, only, am sad at heart. — This fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, who fancies he repays his master with gratitude for the care of his boyish years — this young man — in the eight long years I watched over him with a parent's anxiety, never could repay me Avith one look of genuine feeling. He was proud, when I praised ; he was submissive, when I reproved him ; but he did never love me — and what he now mistakes for gi'atitude and kindness for me, is but the pleasant sensation which all ])ersons feel at revisiting the scenes of their boyish hopes and fears ; and the seeing on equal terms the man they were accustomed to look up to with reverence. My wife, too," this interesting cor- respondent goes on to say, " my once darling Anna, is the wife of a schoolmaster. — When I married her — knowing that the wife of a schoolmaster ought to be a busy notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna Avould ill supply the loss of my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who never sat still, was in every part of the house in a moment, and whom I was oltliged sometimes to threaten to fasten down in a chair, to save her from fatiguing herself to death — I expressed my fears that I was bring 76 TTTE ESSAYS OF ELIA. ing her into n, way of life unsuitable to her ; and she, who loved me tenderly, promised for my sake to exert herself to perform the duties of her new situation. She promised, and she has kept her word. What wonders will not woman's love perform *? — My house is managed with a propriety and decorum unknown in other schools ; my boys are well fed, look healthy, and have every proper accommodation ; and all this performed with a careful economy, that never descends to meanness. But I have lost my gentle helpless Anna ! When we sit down to enjoy an hovu' of repose after the fatigue of the day, I am compelled to listen to what have been her useful (and they are really useful) employments through the day, and wliat she proposes for her to-morrow's task. Her heart and her features are changed by the duties of her situation. To the boys, she never appears other than the master^s u'ife, and she looks up to me as the hoys^ 7naster ; to whom all show of love and affection would be highly improper, and unbecoming the dignity of her situation and mine. Yet this my gratitude forbids me to hint to her. For my sake she submitted to be this altered creature, and can I reproach her for it V — For the commimication of this letter I am indebted to my cousin Bridget. IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympa- tliiseth with all things ; I have no antijiathy, or rather idiosyn- crasy in anything. Those natural repugnancies do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — Religio Medid. That the author of the Religio Medici mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectiu-al essences ; in whose categories of Being the possible took the uijper hand of the actual ; should have IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 77 overlooked the impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to be wondered at, tliat in the genus of animals he should liave condescended to distinguish that species at all. For myself — earth-liound and fettered to the scene of my activities,- Standing ou eailli, not rapt above tlie sky, I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifterent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste ; or when once it becomes indifferent it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices — made up of likings and dislikings — the veriest thrall to sym])athies, apatliies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species. I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all equally. The more pm-ely-English word that expresses sympathy, will better explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who upon another account cannot be my mate or fellow. I cannot lilce all people alike. ^ ^ I would be imderstood as coufiniiig myself to the subject of imperfect sijmiJathies. To nations or classes of men there can be no direct antipathy. There may be individuals born and constel- lated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting (who never saw one another before in their lives) and instantly lighting. -We by proof find there should be 'Twixt man and man such an antipathy, That though he can show no just reason why For any former wrong or injury. Can neither find a blemish in his fame, Nor aught in face or feature justly blame, Can challenge or accuse him of no evil. Yet notwitlistanding hates hira as a devil. The lines are from old Hey wood's "Hierarchie of Angels, " and he subjoins a curious story in confirmation, of a Sj^auiard who attempted to assassinate a king Ferdinand of Spain, and being put 78 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. I have been trying till my life to like Scotclimen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me — and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There is something more plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under which mine must be content to rank) which in its constitution is essentially anti- Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess f;iirly) has few Avhole pieces in it. They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth, She presents no full front to them — a featm-e or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradventiu'e — and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and shifting : waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is accordingly. They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for what it is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were upon their oath — 'but must be understood, speaking or Avinting, with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proiDosition, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their full development. They are no systematizers, and would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merely. Tlie brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is constituted upon quite a different jilan. His Minerva is to the rack could give no other reason for the deed but an inveterate antipathy which he liad taken to the first siglit of the king. The cause which to that act compell'd him Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him. IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 79 liorn in panoply. You are never adniitted to see liis ideas in tlieir growth — if, indeed, tliey do grow, and are not rather put together upon prineijjles of clock-w^ork. You never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests anything, but luihidcs liis stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness. He brings his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always about him. He never stoops to catch a glittering something in yom- presence to share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry halves to anything that he finds. He does not find, but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His miderstanding is always at its meridian — you never see the first dawn, the early streaks. — He has no falterings of self-suspicion. Siu-- mises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-conscious- nesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo con- ceijtious, have no place in his brain or vocabulary. Tlie twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox — he has no doubts. Is he an infidel — he has none either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover witli him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keejis the path. You cannot make excursions with him — for he sets you right. His taste never fluctiiates. His morality never abates. He cannot comin-omise, or understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book. His affirmations have tlie sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's country. " A healthy book I " — said one of his country- men to me, who had ventm'ed to give that appellation to John Buncle, — " Did I catch rightly what you said ? I have heard of a man in healtli, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can be proi)erly applied to a book." Aliove all, you must lieware of in.- direct ex])ressions before a Caledonian. C'i;ip an ex- 80 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. tinguislier upon yoiir irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a ]irint of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr. * * * * After he had examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked my beauty (a foolish name it goes by among my friends) — when he very gravely assm-ed me, that "he had considerable respect for my character and talents " (so he was pleased to say), " but had not given himself much thought about the degi-ee of my personal pre- tensions." The misconception staggered me, but did not seem much to disconcert him. — Persons of this nation are particularly fond of affirming a trutli — which nobody doiibts. They do not so jjrojjerly affirm, as annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it were valua])le for itself) that all truth becomes eqiially vtduable, whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to become a subject of disputation. I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; and happened to drop a silly ex- pression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son — when fovu- of them started up at once to inform me, that " that was im- possible, because he was dead." An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has liit off this part of their character, namely their love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illibcrality that necessarily confines the passage to the margin. ^ The ^ There are some people wlio think they sufficiently acquit themselves, and entertain their company, with relating facts of no consequence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day ; and this I have observed more frequently among tlie Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of time or jilace ; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture, peculiar to that country, would be hardly tolerable. — Hints toivards an Essay on Con- versation. IMPERFECT SYMrATIIIKS. 81 tcdiousness of these people i« certainly provokii)g. I wonder if they ever tiro one another ! — In my eai'ly life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of Biu-ns. I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with his countrymen by expressing it. But I have always found that a true Scot resents your admii-ation of his com})atriot even more than he would yoiu* contempt of him. The latter he imputes to your " imperfect acquaint- ance Anth many of the words which he uses ; " and the same objection makes it a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire him. — Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven, for his delmeation of Rory and his companion, iipon their first introduction to our metroi)olis. — Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume's History compared with his Continuation of it. What if the historian had continued Humphrey CHnker? I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their synagogues. Old i^rejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centm-ies of injiu-y, con- tempt, and hate, on the one side, — of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, must and ought to aftect the blood of the children. I cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet ; or that a few fine words, such as candour, liberality, the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He is least distasteful on 'Change — for the mer- cantile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess that I do not relish the api)roximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, to me, a 82 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. something li}i:)Ocritical and iinuatiiral in them. I do not like to see the Cliurch and Synagogue kissing and con- geeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If they are converted, why do they not come over to us altogether? Why keej) up a form of separation, when the life of it is fled % If they can sit with us at table, why do they keck at our cookery % I do not understand these half convertites. Jews christianizing — Christians judaizing — puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separa- tive. B- — - would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which natiu-e meant to be of Chris- tians. — The Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in si)ite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, " The Children of Israel jiassed through the Red Sea !" The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyjitians to him, and he rides over oiu" necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him. B has a strong expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is sense. He sings with understand- ing, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the Commandments, and give an apjoropriate character to each prohibition. His nation, in general, have not over- sensible countenances. How should they? — but you seldom see a silly expression among them. — Gain, and the pursuit of gain, shaipen a man's visage. I never heard of an idiot being born among them. — Some admire the Jewish female-physiognomy. I admire it — but with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes. In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces — or rather masks — that have looked out kindly upon one in casual en- counters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls — these " images of God cut in ebony." IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES, 83 But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good nights with them — because they are black. I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate the Quaker principles. It docs me good for the rest of the day when I meet any of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or distiu-bcd by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desde- mona would say) " to live with them." I am all over sophisticated — with hmnom's, fancies, craving homdy sympathy. I must have books, pictixres, theatres, chit- chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim- whams, which their simpler taste can do withoi;t. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My appetites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel ; my gusto too excited To sit a guest with Dauiel at Lis piilse. The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to retm-n to a question put to them may be explained, I think, without the vulgar assvunption, that they are more given to evasion and equivocating than other people. They natiirally look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of conunittiug themselves. They have a peculiar character to keej) up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. The custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to intro- duce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of tmth — the one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but trutli, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. 84 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, " You do not expect me to s^ieak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorrect- ness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation ; and a kind of secondary or laic- truth is tolerated, where clergy-tmth — oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirmation being received upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to iise upon the most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, natm\ally, witli more severity. You can have of him no more than his word. He knows, if he is cauglit tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for himself at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He knows that his syllal)les are weighed — and how fixr a consciousness of this particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to proctuce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by honest means, might he illustrated, and the practice justified by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this occasion. Tlie admirable presence of mind, Avhich is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be traced to this imposed self- watchfulness — if it did not seem rather an humble and secidar scion of that old stock of religious constancy, which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave way to the winds of perse- cution, to the violence of judge or accuser, mider trials and racking examinations. " You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till midnight," said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting law-eases Avith a puzzling subtlety. " Thereafter as the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composiu'e of this people is sometimes ludi- crously displayed in lighter instances. — I was travelling in a stage-coach uith three male Quakers, Inittoned uj) in the straitest nonconformity of tlieir sect. "We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 85 partly supper, was set before us. ]\Iy friends coufined themselves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered that she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recijiient. The guard came in with his usual jjeremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their money and formally tendered it — so much for tea — I, in humble imitation, tendering mine — for the supper which I had taken. She would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put uj) their silver, as did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and gTavest going fijst, with myself closing up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the ex- ample of such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went up. The coach drove off. The mm'murs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or ambigu- ously pronounced, became after a time inaudible — and now my conscience, which the whimsical scene had for a while suspended, beginning to give some twitches, I waited, in the hope that some justification would be offered by these serious j^ersons for the seeming injustice of their conduct. To my great surjirise not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sat as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke silence, by inquiring of his next neighbom', " Hast thee heard how indigos go at the India House V and the question operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as far as Exeter. WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the 86 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. relations of tins visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was sup- posed to be open, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fit- ness, or pro}:)ortion — of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absui'd — could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testi- mony 1 — That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire — that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed — that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest — or that sjjits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring — were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and jjomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld — has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood d 2^riori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolised by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he should come sometimes in that body, and assert his metajihor. — That the intercom"se was opened at all between both worlds was iierhaps the mistake — but that once assumed, I see no reason fiw disl)elieving one attested story of this nature more than another on the score of absmxlity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised. I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received witchcraft ; that I could not have sle^^t in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the imiversal belief that these wretches wa>re in league with the author of all evil, holding hell trilxitary to their mut- tering, no simple justice of the peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly headborougli serving, a warrant WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 87 upon them — as if they should subpoena Satan ! — Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand about him, sufters himself to bo conveyed away at the mercy of his enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, Avc think, on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-resistance of witches to the con- stituted powers. — What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces — or who had made it a condition of his prey that Guyon must take assay of the glorious bait — we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that country. From my childhood I was extremely inqiiisitive about witches and Avitch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my ciu-iosity originally into this channel. In my father's book-closet the history of the Bible by Stackhouse occupied a distingiiished station. The pictiu-es with which it abounds— one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temi^le, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if tlie artist had been upon the spot — attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhonse is in two huge tomes ; and there was a pleasm-e in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from tliat time to this, but I remember it consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the objection appended to each story, and the sohdion of the objection regularly tacked to tliat. The objection was a suumiary of whatever diificulties had been opposed to the credibility of the history by the shrewdness of ancient or modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candonr. The solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were both before you. To doubts so put, and so 88 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to tramjile on. But — like as Avas rather feared than real- ized from that slain monster in Si:)enser — from the womb of those crushed errors young dragouets would creep, exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. The habit of expecting objections to every passage set me upon starting more objections, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and perplexed, a sceptic in long-coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many historic or chronologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but — the next thing to that • — I was to be quite sm'e that some one or other would or had disbelieved them. Next to making a child an infidel is the letting him know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength. 0, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling ! — I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with such unfit sustenance as these husks aftbrded, but for a fortunate i)iece of ill-fortune which about this time befell me. Timung over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric — driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds, the elephant and the camel, that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architectm-e. Stackhouse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With the book, the objections and solutions gi'adually cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me. But there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse which no lock or bar could shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more seriously. — That detestal)le jticture ! WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 89 I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night- time, solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufier- ings I endm-ed in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life — so fitr as memory serves in things so long ago — without an assm'ance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhousc then acquitted in part, if I say, that to this i)icture of the Witch raising up Samuel — (0 that old man covered with a mantle !) — I owe — not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy — but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow — a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and fomid the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my ■o'itch-ridden pillow was. Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm — the hoping for a familiar voice — when they wake screaming — and find none to soothe them — Avhat a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves ! The keeping them up till midnight, through candle-light and the imwholesome hours, as they are called, — would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. — That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the flxshion to my dreams — if dreams they were — for the scene of them was invarial)ly the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other — Headless bear, black man, or ape — but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. — It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which 90 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition — who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story - — finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own " thick-coming fancies;" and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse- child of optimism will start at shapes, imborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell- damned murderer are tranquillity. Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimseras dire — stories of Oelseno and the Harpies — may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition — Imt they were there before. They are transcripts, types — the archetyijes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at alU — or Names, whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not V Is it that we natm^ally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? — 0, least of all ! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body — or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante — tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons — are they one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him — Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once tnrn'd round, walks on And turns no more his head ; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.' Tliat the kind of fear here treated of is j^urely spiritual ' ]Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 91 — that it is strong in proportion as it is olgcctless upon earth — that it predoniiuates iu the period of sinless infancy — are difticulties, the solution of which might aflfbrd some probable insight into onr ante-mundane con- dition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre- existence. My night fancies liavc long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional nightmare ; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me ; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings— cities abroad, which I have never seen and hardly have hoped to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon ■ — their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight — a map-like distinctness of trace, and a day-liglit vividness of vision, that was all but being awake.- — I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells ^ — my highest Alje, — but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recogni- tion ; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape, in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that coimtry, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns. Where Alpli, tlie sacred river, runs, to solace his niglit solitudes — when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him iu nocturnal visions, and proclaim- 92 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. iiig sons born to Neptune — when my stretch of imagina- tive activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light — it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine sjDectra ; and the poor plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work to liumom- my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god), and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsid- ing, fell from a sea roughness to a sea calm, and thence to a river motion, and that river (as hapi^ens in the familiarization of dreams) was no other than the gentle Thames, which landed me in the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace. Tlie degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a jjoet, his first question would be, — " Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein returning npon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding ncreids, and that inauspicious inland landing. valentine's day. 93 VALENTINE'S DAY. Hail to thy rctiiniing festival, old Bishop Valentine ! Great is thy name in the rubric, thou venerable Arcli- flamen of Hymen ! Immortal Go-between ; who and what manner of person art thou ? Art thou but a name, typifying the restless principle which impels poor humans to seek perfection in union 1 or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, with thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, and decent lawn sleeves ? Mysterious personage ! Like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other mitred father in the calendar ; not Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril ; nor the consigner of undipt infants to eternal torments, Austin, whom all mothers hate ; nor he who hated all mothers, Origen ; nor Bishop Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended wath thousands and ten thousands of little Loves, and the air is Brusli'd witli the liiss of rustling ■\viiigs. Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors ; and instead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee. In other words, this is the day on which those charm- ing little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and inter- cross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all forspent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his owm. It is scarcely credible to what an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment of knockers and bell- wires. In these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart, — that little three-cornered exponent of all our ho^jes and fears, — the bestuck and bleeding heart ; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and aftectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for placing the headquarters and metropolis of god Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any 94 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. other, is not very clear ; but wc have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which miglit have prevailed for anything which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, " Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal ;" or jiutting a delicate question, " Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow ?" But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of senti- ment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbours wait at animal and anatomical distance. Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door. It " gives a very echo to the throne where hope is seated." But its issues seldom answer to this oracle within. It is so seldom that just the person we want to see comes. But of all the clamorous visitations the welcomest in expectation is the sound that ushers in, or seems to usher in, a Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that announced the fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on this day is light, airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth good tidings. It is less mechanical than on other days ; you will say, " That is not the post, I am sure." Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymens ! — delightful eternal commonplaces, which "having been will always be;" which no school- boy nor school-man can write away ; having yom- irrever- sible throne in the foncy and afiections — what are your transports, when the happy maiden, opening with careful fijiger, carefiil not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well-designed allegory, some type, some youthful fancy, not wdthout verses — Lovers all, A madrigal, or some such device, not over-abimdant in sense — young Love disclaims it, — and not quite silly — something between wind and water, a chorus where the sheep might valentine's day. 95 almost join the slicpliord, as tliey did, or as I apprcliciid they did, in Arcadia. All Valentines are not foolish ; and I shall not easily forget thine, my kind friend (if I may have leave to call you so) E. B . E. B. lived opposite a young maiden whom he had often seen, imseen, from his parlour window in C e Street. She was all joyousness and innocence, and just of an age to enjoy receiving a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the disai:)pointment of missing one with good humour. E. B. is an artist of no common powers ; in the fancy parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none ; his name is known at the bottom of many a Avell-executed vignette in the way of his profession, but no further ; for E. B. is modest, and the world meets nobody half way. E. B. meditated how he could repay this young maiden for many a favour which she had done him unknown ; for when a kindly face greets us, though but passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should feel it as an obligation : and E. B. did. This good artist set himself at work to please the damsel. It was just Ijefore Valentine's day three years since. He wrought, unseen and unsuspected, a wondrous work. We need not say it was on the finest gilt paper with borders — full, not of common hearts and heartless alle- gory, but all the i^rettiest stories of love from Ovid, and older poets than Ovid (for E. B. is a scholar). There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not for- got, nor Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottoes and fixnciful devices, such as beseemed — a work, in short, of magic. Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the all-swallowing indiscriminate orifice (0 ignoble trust !) of the common post ; but the humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful stand the next morning he saw the cheerfid messenger knock, and by-and-by the precious charge delivered. He saw, unseen, the happy girl unfold the Valentine, dance about, clap her hands, as one after one the pretty emblems unfolded themselves. She 96 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. danced about, not with light love, or foolish expectations, for she had no lover ; or, if she had, none she knew that could have created those bright images which delighted her. It was more like some fairy present ; a God-send, as our fixmiliarly pious ancestors termed a benefit received where the benefactor was unknown. It woidd do her no harm. It would do her good for ever after. It is good to love the unknown. I only give this as a specimen of E. B. and his modest way of doing a concealed kindness. Good morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia ; and no better wish, but with better auspices, we wish to all foithful lovers, wdio are not too wise to despise old legends, but are content to rank themselves humble diocesans of old Bishop Valentine and his true church. MY RELATIONS. I AM arrived at that point of life at which a man may account it a blessing, as it is a singidarity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have not that felicity — and sometimes think feelingly of a passage in "Browne's Christian Morals," where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. " In such a com- pass of time," he says, " a man may have a close appre- hension what it is to be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember his fother, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see with what a. face in no long time Oblivion will look ixpon himself" I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one Avhom single blessedness had som-ed to the world. She often used to say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved ; and, when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with mother's tears. A i)artiality quite so exclusive my reason cannot altogether apjjrove. She was from morning till night poring over good books and dcvotion;d exercises. Her favourite volumes Avere, MY RELATIONS. 97 " Thomas a Kempis," in Stanlinpe's translation ; and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, with the matins and com- plines regularly set de oil shop (now Davies's) at the corner of Featherstone-buildiugs, in Holborn. F. was a tall grave person, lofty in speech, and had pretensions above his rank. He associated in those days with John Palmer, the comedian, whose gait and bearing he seemed to copy ; if John (which is quite as likely) did not rather borrow somewhat of his manner from my godfather. He was also known to and visited by Sheridan. It was to his house in Holborn that young Brinsley brought his first wife on her elopement with him from a boarding-school at Bath — the beautiful Maria Linley. My parents were present (over a quadrille talile) when he arrived in the evening with his harmonious charge. From either of these connections it may be inferred that my godfather could command an order for the then Drury-lane theatre at pleasure — and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, in Brinsley's easy autograph, I have heard him say was the sole remmieration which he had received for many years' nightly illumination of the orchestra and various avenues of that theatre — and he was content it should be so. The honour of Sheridan's familiarity — or supposed familiarity — was better to my godfather than money. F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen ; gTandiloquent, yet com-teous. His delivery of the commonest matters of fact was Ciceronian. He had two Latin words almost constantly in his mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an oilman's lips !), which my better knowledge since has enabled me to correct. In strict pronunciation they 110 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. should have lieeu sounded vice versd — but in those young years they impressed me with more awe than they would now do, read aright from Seneca or Varro — in his own peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically elaborated, or Anglicised, into something like verse verse. By an im- posing manner, and the help of these distorted syllables, he climbed (but that was little) to the highest parochial honom-s which St. Andrew's has to bestow. He is dead — and thus much I thought due to his memory, both for my first orders (little wondrous talis- mans !— slight keys, and insignificant to outward sight, but opening to me more than Arabian paradises !) and, moreover, that by his testamentary beneficence I came into possession of the only landed property which I could ever call my own — situate near the road-way village of pleasant Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire. When I journeyed down to take possession, and planted foot on my own ground, the stately habits of the donor descended upon me, and I strode (shall I confess the vanity ?) with larger paces over my allotment of three quarters of an acre, with its commodious mansion in the midst, with the feel- ing of an English freeholder that all betwixt sky and centre was my own. The estate has passed into more prudent hands, and nothing but an agrarian can restore it. In those days were pit orders. Beshrew the imcom- fortable manager who abolished them ! — with one of these we went. I remember tlie waiting at the door — not that which is left — but between that and an inner door in shelter — when shall I be such an expectant again ! — with the cry of nonpareils, an indispensable play-house accompaniment in those days. As near as I can recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of the theatrical fruiteresses then was, " Chase some oranges, chase some mmiparels, chase a bill of the play;" — chase ^j?'o chuse. But when we got in, and I beheld the gi-een curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to lie disclosed — the breathless anticipations I endured ! I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and MY FIRST TLAY. Ill Ci'cssida, in Rowc's Shakspcarc — the tent scene with Dioniede — and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a measure the feeling of that evening. — The boxes at that time, fnll of well-dressed women of qnality, projected over the pit ; and the pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistening snbstance (I know not what) nnder glass (as it seemed), resembling — a homely ftxncy — but I judged it to be sugar-candy — yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it api^eared a glorified candy ! — The orchestra lights at length rose, those " foir Auroras !" Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again — and, incapable of the anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resigna- tion upon the maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew up — I was not past six years old, and the play w^as Artaxerxes ! I had dabbled a little in the Universal History — the ancient jmrt of it — and here was the court of Persia. — It was being admitted to a sight of the past. I took no proper interest in the action going on, for I understood not its import — but I heard the word Darius, and I was in the midst of Daniel. All feeling w^as absorbed in vision. Gorgeous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, passed before me. I knew not players. I was in Perse- polis for the time, and the bmiiing idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. I w^as awe- struck, and believed those significations to be something more than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams. ^Harlequin's invasion followed ; wdiere, I remem- ber, the transformation of the magistrates into reverend beldams seemed to me a piece of grave historic justice, and the tailor carrying his own head to be as sober a verity as the legend of St. Denys. The next play to wdiich I was taken was the Lady of the Manor, of which, with the exception of some scenery, very faint traces are left in my memory. It was followed by a pantomime, called Lun's Ghost — a satiric touch, I 1 1 2 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. apprclicml, upon Rich, not long since dead — but to my apprehension (too sincere for satire), Liin was as remote a piece of antitpiity as Lud — the father of a line of Har- lequins — transmitting- his dagger of lath (the wooden sceptre) through countless ages. I saw the primeval Motley come from his silent tomb in a ghastly vest of white jxitcliwork, like the apparition of a dead rainbow. So Harlequins (thought I) look when they are dead. My third play followed in cpiick succession. It was the Way of the AVorld. I think I must have sat at it as grave as a judge ; for I remember the hysteric affectations of good Lady Wishfort aftected me like some solemn tragic passiou. Robinson Crusoe followed ; in which Crusoe, man Friday, and the parrot, were as good and authentic as in the story. — The clowneiy and pantaloonery of these pantomimes have clean passed out of my head. I believe, I no more laughed at them, than at the same age I should have been disposed to laugh at the grotesque Gothic heads (seeming to me then replete with devout meaning) that gape and grin, in stone around the inside of the old Round Church (my church) of the Templars. I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was from six to seven years old. After the intervention of six or seven other years (for at school all play-going was inhibited) I again entered the doors of a theatre. That old Artaxerxes evening had never done ringing in my fancy. I expected the same feelings to come again with the same occasion. But we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six. In that interval what had I not lost ! At the first period I knew nothing, understood nothing, disc-riminated nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all — Was noiirislu'd, 1 could not tell liow— I had left the temi)le a devotee, and was retimied a rationalist. The same things were there materially ; but the emblem, the reference, was gone ! — The green curtain was no longer a veil, drawn between two worlds, the un- MODERN GALLANTRY. 113 folding of whicli was to bring' back i^ast ages, to present a "royal ghost," — but a certain quantity of green baize, which was to separate the audience for a given time from certain of their fellow-men who were to come forward and pretend those jiarts. The lights — the orchestra lights — came up a clumsy machinery. The first ring, and the second ring, Avas now l)ut a trick of the promi)ter's bell — which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a voice, no hand seen or guessed at which ministered to its warning. The actors were men and women painted. I thought the fault was in them ; but it was in myself, and the alteration which those many centuries — of six short twelvemonths — had M'rought in me.^ — Perhaps it was fortunate for me that the play of the evening was but an indifferent comedy, as it gave me time to crop some mireasonable expectations, which might have inter- fered with the genuine emotions with which I was soon after enabled to enter upon the first appearance to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella. Comparison and retrospection soon yielded to the present attraction of the scene ; and the theatre became to me, ujjon a new stock, the most delightful of recreations. MODERN GALLANTRY. In comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased to compliment ourselves upon the jioint of gal- lantry; a certain olisequiousness, or deferential respect, which we are supposed to pay to females, as females. I shall believe that this ])rinciple actuates our conduct, wdien I can forget, that in the nineteenth century of the era from Avhicli we date oiu' civility, we are but just be- ginning to leave oft" the veiy frequent practice of whip- ping females in public, in connnon Avith the coarsest male ottenders. I shall believe it to be influentinl, when T can shut lU THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. my eyes to the fixct that in England women are still occa- sionally — hanged. I shall believe in it, when actresses are no longer sub- ject to be hissed off a stage by gentlemen. I shall l>elieve in it, when Dorimant hands a fisli-wife across the kennel ; or assists the ajiijle-wonian to ]>ick up her wandering fruit, which some unhu-ky dray has just dissipated. I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humbler life, who would be thought in their way notable adepts in this refinement, shall act upon it in places where they are not known, or think themselves not observed — when I shall see the traveller for some rich tradesman part with his admired box-coat, to spread it over the defence- less shoulders of the poor woman, who is passing to her parish on the roof of the same stage-coach with him, drenched in the rain — when I shall no longer see a woman standing up in the pit of a London theatre, till she is sick and fixint with the exertion, with men aliout her, seated at their ease, and jeering at her disti*ess ; till one, that seems to have more manners or conscience than the rest, significantly declares " she should be welcome to his seat, if she were a little younger and handsomer." Place this dapper warehouseman, or that rider, in a circle of their own female acquaintance, and you shall confess you have not seen a politer-bred man in Lothbury. Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such principle influencing our conduct, when more than one- half of the drudgery and coarse servitude of the world shall cease to be performed by women. Until that day comes I shall never believe this boasted point to be anything more than a conventional fiction ; a pageant got up between the sexes, in a certain rank, and at a certain time of life, in which both find their account equally. I shall be even disposed to rank it among the salutary fictions of life, when in polite circles I shall see the same attentions paid to age as to youth, to homely featiu'es as MODERN GALLANTRY. 115 to handsome, to coarse complexions as to clear — to the woman, as she is a woman, not as she is a beauty, a for- tune, or a title. I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when a well-dressed gentleman in a well-dressed company can advert to the topic oi female old age without exciting, and intending to excite, a sneer : — when the phrases "antiquated virginity," and such a one has " overstood her market," prouoimced in good company, shall raise immediate offence in man, or woman, that shall hear them spoken. Joseph Paice, of Bread-street-hill, merchant, and one of the Directors of the South Sea company — the same to whom Edwards, the Shakspeare commentator, has ad- dressed a fine sonnet — was the only pattern of consistent gallantry I have met with. He took me imder his shelter at an early age, and bestowed some pains upon me. I owe to his precepts and example whatever there is of the man of business (and that is not much) in my composi- tion. It was not his fault that I did not profit more. Though bred a Presbyterian, and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time. He had not one system of attention to females in the drawing-room, and another in the shoi>, or at the stall. I do not mean that he made no distinction. But he never lost sight of sex, or overlooked it in the casualties of a disadvantageous situation. I have seen him stand Ijareheaded — smile if you please — to a poor servant-girl, while she has been inquiring of him the way to some street — in such a pos- tm'e of unforced civility, as neither to embarrass her in the acceptance, nor himself in the offer, of it. He was no dangler, in the common acceptation of the word, after women ; but he reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came before him, ivomanhood. I have seen him — nay, smile not — tenderly escorting a market-woman, whom he had encountered in a shower, exaltmg his um- brella over her poor basket of fruit, that it might receive no damage, with as much carefulness as if slie had been 116 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. a countess. To the reverend form of Female Eld he would yield the wall (though it were to an ancient beggar- woman) with more ceremony than we can afford to show oiu- grandams. He was the Preux Chevalier of Age ; the Sir Calidore, or Sir Tristan, to those who have no Calidores or Tristans to defend them. The roses, that had long faded thence, still bloomed for him in those withered and yellow cheeks. He was never married, but in his youth he paid his addresses to the beautiful Susan Winstanley — old Win- stanley's daughter of Clai^ton — who dying in the early days of their courtship, confirmed in him the resolution of perpetual bachelorsliip. It was dming their short courtship, he told me, that he had been one day treating his mistress with a profusion of civil speeches — the com- mon gallantries — to which kind of thing she had hitherto manifested no repugnance — but in this instance with no effect. He could not obtain from her a decent acknow- ledgment iu return. She rather seemed to resent his compliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown herself above that littleness. When he ventiu-ed on the following day, finding her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her coldness of yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frank- ness, that she had no sort of dislike to his attentions ; that she could even endm-e some high-flown comiiliments ; that a young woman placed in her sitxtation had a right to exjiect all sorts of civil things said to her ; that she hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, short of insin- cerity, with as little injuiy to her humility as most young women ; but that — a little before he had commenced his compliments — she had overheard him by accident, in rather rough langxiage, rating a young Avoman, who had not Ijrought home his cravats quite to the appointed time, and she thought to herself, " As I am Miss Susan Win- stanley, and a young lady — a reputed beauty, and known to be a fortune — I can have my choice of the finest speeches from the mouth of this very fine gentleman who ]\10UEKN GALLANTRY. 117 is courting mo— Init if I had licen jioor Mary Sucli-a-oiie (naming the miUiner), — and had failed of bringing homo the cravats to the ajipointed hour — thougli perliaps I liad sat up lialf the night to forward tliem — what sort of com- pliments should I have received then 1 — And my woman's pride came to my assistance ; and I thought, that if it were only to do me honour, a female, like myself, might have received handsomer usage ; and I was determined not to accept any fine speeches to the compromise of that sex, the belonging to which was after all my strongest claim and title to them." I think the lady discovered both generosity, and a just way of thinking, in this rebuke which she gave her lover ; and I have sometimes imagined, that the uncom- mon strain of courtesy, which through life regiilatcd the actions and behaviour of my friend towards all of woman- kind indiscriminately, owed its happy origin to this season- able lesson from the lips of his lamented mistress. I wish the whole female world would entertain the same notion of these things that Miss Winstanley showed. Then we should see something of the spirit of consistent gallantry ; and no longer witness the anomaly of the same man — a pattern of true politeness to a wife — of cold con- tempt, or rudeness, to a sister — the idolater of his female mistress — the disparager and despiser of his no less female aunt, or mifortmiate — still female — maiden cousin. Just so much respect as a woman derogates from her own sex, in whatever condition placed — her hand-maid, or deiDcnd- ent — she deserves to have diminished from herself on that score ; and probal^ly will feel the diminution, when youth, and beauty, and advantages, not inseparable from sex, shall lose of their attraction. What a woman should demand of a man in courtshi}), or after it, is first — respect for her as she is a woman ; — and next to that — to be respected by him above all other women. But let her stand upon her female character as upon a foundation ; and let the attentions, incident to individual preference, be so many pretty additaments and ornaments— as many. 118 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. and as fanciful, as you please— to that main structiUT. Let her first lesson be with sweet Susan '^^^instanley — to reverence her sex. THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. I WAS born, and joassed the fii'st seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its chitrch, its halls, its gardens, its fountains, its river, I had almost said — for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered oiu* pleasant places 1 — these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot : — There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide, Till they decayed through pride. Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a countryman visiting London for the fii'st time — the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green recesses ! What a cheer- fid, liberal look hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden ; that goodly pile Of building strong, albeit of Paper higlit, confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fmtastically-shrouded one, named of Harcom't, with the cheerful Crown-Oftice-row (place of my kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden- foot with her yet scarcely trade-polhited waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades ! a man would give something to have been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall. THE OLD r.ENCHERS OF THE INNER, TEMPLE. 119 where the fountain i)lays, which I Iiave made to ri^c and Ml, liow many times ! to the astoundment of the young m'chin.s, my contomporaiics, who, not being able to guess at its recondite macliinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic ! What an antique air had the now almost effiiced sun-dials, with their moral in- scriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of liglit ! How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catclied, nice as an evan- escent cloutl, or the first arrests of sleep ! All ! yet doth beauty like a dial hand Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous em- bowelmcnts of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of commmiication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-langiiage of the old dial ! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished ? If its business -use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasiu-es not protracted after sunset, of temperance, and good hours. It was the primitive clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measm-e appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pastm-e and be led to fold by. The shepherd "carved it out quaintly in the sun ;" and, tiu'ning philo- sopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, for they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty delicacy. 120 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. They will not come in awkwardly, I lioix\ in a talk of fountains and snn-dials. He is speaking of sweet garden scenes : — What wondi'oiis life is this I lead ! Ripe apples drop about my head. Tlie luscious clusters of the viue Upon my mouth do crush their wiue. The nectarine, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach. Stumbling on melons, as I pass, lusuared with flowers, I fall on grass. Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less Withdraws into its hapi)iness. The mind, that ocean, where each Icind Does straight its own resemblance find ; Yet it creates, transcending these. Far other worlds and other seas ; Annihilating all tliat's made To a green thought in a green shade. Here at the fountain's sliding foot Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root. Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide ; There, like a bird, it sits and sings, Then whets and claps its silver wings, And, till lU'epared for longer flight. Waves in its plumes tlie various light How well the skilful gardener drew Of flowers and herbs, this dial new Where, from above, the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodiac run : And, as it works, the industrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers?' The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like manner, fast vanishing. Most of them are dried xq> or bricked over. Yet, where one is left, as in that little green nook behind the South-Sea House, what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile ! Four little winged marble boys used to play their virgin fancies, spouting out ever fresh streams from their innocent-wanton lips in the sqiiare ' From a copy of verses entitled "The Garden." THE OM) BENCHERS OK THE INNER TEMPLE. 121 of Lincoln's Inn, when I was no bigger than they were fignred. They are gone, and the spring choked up. The fashion, they tell me, is gone by, and these things are esteemed childish. Why not, then, gratify children, by letting them stand 1 Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. Tliey are awakening images to them at least. Why mnst every tiling smack of man, and mannish ? Is the world all grown iip 1 Is cliildhood dead 1 Or is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments ? The figures were grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged living figm'es, that still flitter and chatter about that area, less Gothic in appearance 1 or is the splutter of their hot rhetoric one-half so refreshing and innocent as the little cool playful streams those exploded chend)s uttered 1 They have lately gotliiciscd the entrance to the Inner Temple-hall, and the library front ; to assimilate them, I suppose, to the body of the hall, which tliey do not at all resemble. What is become of the winged horse that stood over the former ? a stately arms ! and who lias removed those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianised the end of the Paper-buildings 1 — my first hint of allegory ! They must account to me for these things, which I miss so greatly. The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade ; but the traces are passed away of the footsteps which made its pavement awful ! It is become common and profane. The old benchers had it almost sacred to themselves, in the forepart of the day at least. They might not be sided or jostled. Their air and dress asserted the parade. You left wide spaces betwixt you when you passed them. We walk on even terms Avith their successors. Tlie roguish eye of J 11, ever ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar diu'st have mated Thomas Coventry 1 — whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and path-keeping, in- 12-2 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. divcrtible from his way as a moving column, the scare- crow of his inferiors, tlie browbeater of equals and sujjeriors, who made a solitude of children wherever he came, for they fled his insuff"erablc presence, as they would have shimned an Elisha bear. His growl was as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them in mirth or in rebuke ; his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the most repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff", aggravat- ing the natural terrors of his speech, broke from each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He took it, not by pinches, but a jDalmful at once, — diving for it under the mighty flajjs of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket ; his waistcoat red and angry, his coat dark rappee, tinc- tured by dye original, and by adjuncts, with buttons of obsolete gold. And so he paced the terrace. By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen ; the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and Iiad nothing but that and their benchership in com- mon. In politics Salt was a whig, and Coventry a staunch tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out — for Coventry had a rough spinous humour — at the political confederates of his associate, which rebounded from the gentle bosom of the latter like cannon-balls from wool. You could not ruffle Samuel Salt. S. had tlic reputation of being a very clever man, and of excellent discernment in the chamber practice of the law. I suspect his knowledge did not amount to much. When a case of diflicult disposition of money, testamentary or otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily handed it over, with a few instructions, to his man Lovel, who was a quick little fellow, and woiUd despatch it out of hand by the light of natural understanding, of which he had an un- common share. It was incredible what repute for talents S. enjoyed by the mere trick of gravity. He was a shy man ; a child might pose him in a minute — indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet men woidd give him credit for vast application, in spite of himself He was not to be trusted with himself with impunity. He THE OLD r.RNCHERS OF TJIK INNER TEMPLE. 123 never dressed for a dinner party but he forgot his sword — they wore swords then — or some other necessary ])art of liis equipage. Lovel liad his eye upon him on all these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his cue. If there was anything which he could speak unseasonably, he was sure to do it. — He was to dine at a relative's of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on the day of her execution ; — and L., who had a wary foresight of his probable hallucina- tions, before he set out schooled him, with great anxiety, not in any possible manner to allude to her story that day. S. promised faithfully to observe the injimction. He had not been seated in the parlour, where the com- pany was expecting the dinner summons, four minutes, when, a i^ause in the conversation ensuing, he got up, looked out of window, and pulling down his ruffles^an ordinary motion with him — observed, " it was a gloomy day," and added, " Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I sujjpose." Instances of this sort were perpetual. Yet S. was thought by some of the greatest men of his time a fit person to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the law, but in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments of conditct — from force of manner entirely. He never laughed. He had the same good fortune among the female world, — was a known toast with the ladies, and one or two are said to have died for love of him — I suppose, because he never trifled or talked gallantly with them, or paid them, indeed, hardly common attentions. He had a fine fiice and person, but wanted, methought, the spirit that should have shown them off" with advantage to the women. His eye lacked lustre. — Not so, thought Susan P ; who, at the advanced age of sixty, was seen, in the cold evening time, imaccompanied, wetting the i3avement of B d Row, with tears that fell in drops which might be heard, because her friend had died that day — he, whom she had pm'sued with a hopeless passion for the last forty years — a passion which years could not extinguish or abate ; nor the long-resolved, yet gently-enforced, puttings oflt" of unrelenting bachelorhood 124 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. dissuade from its clicrislicd purpose. Mild Susan P , thou hast now thy friend in heaven ! Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of that name. He passed his youth in contracted circum- stances, which gave him early those parsimonious habits which in after life never forsook him ; so that with one windfall or another, about the time I knew him, he was master of four or five lumdred thousand pounds ; nor did he look or walk worth a moidore less. He lived in a gloomy house opposite the pum]) in Serjeant's-inn, Fleet-street. J., the counsel, is doing self-imposed penance in it, for what reason I divine not, at this day. C. had an agree- able seat at North Cray, where he seldom spent above a day or two at a time in the summer; but preferred, dm'ing the hot montlis, standing at his window in this damji, close, well -like mansion, to watch, as he said, " the maids drawing water all day long." I suspect he had his within-door reasons for the preference. Hie currus i't anna fuere. He might think his treasures more safe. His house had the aspect of a strong box. C. was a close hunks — a hoarder rather than a miser — or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes breed, who have broixght discredit upon a character which cannot exist without certain admirable points of steadiness and unity of pur- pose. One may hate a true miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By taking care of the pence he is often enabled to part with the pounds, upon a scale that leaves us careless generous fellows halting at an im- measurable distance behind. C. gave away 30,000^. at once in his lifetime to a blind charity. His house- keeping was severely looked after, but he kept the table of a gentleman. He would know who came in and who went out of his house, but his kitchen chimney was never .suffered to freeze. Salt was his opposite in this, as in all— never knew what he was worth in the world ; and having but a com- ])etency for his rank, which his indolent habits were little calculated to imiirove, might have suffered severely THE OLD BENCIIRRS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 125 if he luul not li;ul honest i^eoijle about him. Lovcl took cure of everytliing. He wtis at once his clerk, liis good servant, his dresser, his friend, liis " flapper," Ids guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer. lie did notlniig without consulting Lovel, or failed in anything without expecting and fearing his admonishing. He ])ut himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world. He resigned his title almost to respect as a master, if L. could ever have forgotten for a moment that he was a servant. I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal, and " would strike." In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents. He once wrested a sword out of the hand of a man of quality that had drawn upon him, and pommelled him severely vnth. the hilt of it. The swordsman had oflFered iusidt to a female — an occasion upon which no odds against him could have prevented the interference of Lovel. He would stand next day bareheaded to the same person modestly to excuse his interference — for L. never forgot rank where something better was not con- cerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed a fine turn for humorous jioetry — next to Swift and Prior — moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural genius merely ; turned cribbage boards, and such small cabinet toys, to perfection ; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility ; made piuich better than any man of his degree in England ; had the merriest quips and con- ceits ; and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr. Izaak Walton would have chosen to go a-fishing with. I saw him in his old age and the decay of his facidtics, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of 126 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. human weakness — -" a remnant most forlorn of what he was," — yet even then his eye would light up upon the mention of his favourite Garrick. He was greatest, he would say, in Bayes — "was upon the stage nearly throughout the whole performance, and as busy as a bee." At intervals, too, he would speak of his former life, and how he came up a little lioy from Lincoln, to go to service, and how his mother cried at parting with him, and how he returned, after some few years' absence, in his smart new livery, to see her, and she blest herself at the change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it was " her own bairn." And then, the excitement sub- siding, he would weep, till I have wished that sad second- childhood might have a mother still to lay its head upon her lap. But the common motlier of us all in no long time after received him gently into hers. With Coventry and witli Salt, in their walks upon the terrace, most commonly Peter Pierson would join to make up a third. They did not walk linked arm-in- arm in tliose days — "as now our stout triumvirs sweep the streets," — biit generally with both hands folded behind tliem for state, or with one at least behind, the other carrying a cane. P. was a benevolent, but not a prepossessing man. He had that in his foce which you could not term imhappiness ; it rather implied an incapa- city of being happy. His cheeks were colourless, even to whiteness. His look was luiinviting, resembling (but without his somiiess) that of our great ]ihilanthroi)ist. I know tliat he did good acts, but I could never make out what lie was. Contemporary with these, but subordi- nate, was Daines Barrington — another oddity — he walked burly and square — in imitation, I think, of Coventry — howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he did jiretty well, upon the strengtli of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brotlier a bishop. Wlien the account of his year's treasurership came to be audited, the following singular charge was imanimously disallowed by the bench : " Item, disbursed THE OLD r.ENCTIERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 127 Mr. Allen, the gai-deiier, twenty shillings for Btull" to ])oison the siJarrow.s, by my orders." Next to him was old Barton — a jolly negation, who took upon him the ordering of the bills of fare for the jiarliament chamber, where the benchers dine — answering to the combination rooms at College — much to the easement of his less epicurean brethren. I know nothing more of him. — Then Eead, and Twopenny^ — Read, good-humom-ed and jiersonable — Twopenny, good-humoured, but thin, and felicitous in jests upon his own figm-e. If T. was thin, Wliarry was atteniiatcd and Meeting. Many must re- member him (for he was rather of later date) and his singular gait, which was j^erformed by three steps and a jump regularly succeeding. The stei)S were little efforts, like that of a child beginning to walk ; the jump com- paratively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. Where he learned this figure, or what occasioned it, I could never discover. It was neither graceful in itself, nor seemed to answer the purpose any better than common walking. The extreme tenuity of his frame, I susjject, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising. Twopenny would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail him as Brother Lusty ; but W. had no relish of a joke. His features were spiteful. I have heard that he would ])inch his cat's ears extremely when anything had oftended him. Jackson — the omniscient Jackson, he was called — was of this period. He had the reputation of possessing more multifarious knowledge than any man of his time. He was the Friar Bacon of the less literate portion of the Temple. I remember a pleasant passage of the cook applying to him, with much formality of apology, for instructions how to write down edge bone of beef in his bill of commons. He was supposed to know, if any man in the world did. He decided the ortho- graphy to be — as I have given it— fortifying his authority with such anatomical reasons as dismissed the mancijjle (for the time) learned and happy. Some do spell it yet, perversely, aiteli bone, from a ftinciful resemblance be- 128 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. twecn its shai^c and that of the asijirate so donominated. I had almost forgotten Miugay with the iron hand — but he was somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by some accident, and supplied it with a grappling-hook, which he wielded witli a tolerable adroitness. I detected the substitute before I was old enough to reason whether it were artificial or not. I remember the astonishment it raised in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking per- son ; and I reconciled the iihenomeuou to my ideas as an emblem of power — somewhat like the horns in the fore- head of Michael Angclo's Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) in the costume of the reign of George the Second, closes my imperfect recollections of the old benchers of the Inner Temple. Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled 1 Or, if the like of you exist, wliy exist they no more for me 1 Ye inex- plicable, half- understood appearances, why comes in reason to tear away the preternatm-al mist, bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you 1 Why make ye so sony a figm-e in my relation, who made up to me — to my childish eyes — the mythology of the Temjile 1 In those days I saw Gods, as " old men covered with a mantle," walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idol- atry perish, — extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling, in the heart of childhood there will, for ever, spring up a well of innocent or wholesome superstition — the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital — from every- day forms ediicing the unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality. While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth. P.S. — I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt. See what it is to trust to imiierfect memory, and the erring notices of childhood ! Yet I THE OLD BENCIIEnS OE THE IXXElt TEMPLE. 129 protest I always thouglit tliat he had been a bachelor ! This geutlemaii, R. N. informs me, married young, and losing his lady in childbed, within the first year of their union, fell into a deep melancholy, from the effects of wliich, probably, lie never thoroughly recovered. In what a new light does this phice his rejectidii (0 call it by a gentler name !) of mild Susan P , unravelling into beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring character ! Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia for true records ! They are, in tnith, but shadows of fact — verisimilitudes, not verities — or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history. He is no such honest chronicler as R. N., and woidd have done better perhaps to have considted that gentleman before he sent these incondite reminiscences to press. But the worthy sub-treasurer — who respects his old and his new masters — would but have been puzzled at the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not, peradventure, of the licence which Magazines have arrived at in this plain-speaking age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the Gentleman's — his furthest monthly excursions in this nature having been long con- fined to the holy ground of honest Urhmi's obituary. May it be long before his own name shall help to swell those columns of unenvied flattery ! — Meantime, ye New Benchers of the Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is himself the kindliest of human creatiu'es. Should infirmities overtake him — he is yet in green and vigorous senility — make allowances for them, remember- ing that "ye yom'selves are old." So may the Winged Horse, your ancient badge and cognizance, still flourish ! so may futiu"e Hookers and Seldens illustrate your cluu'ch and chambers ! so may the sparrows, in default of more melodious quiristers, unpoisoned hop about your walks ! so may the fresh-coloured and cleanly nursery-maid, who, by leave, airs her playful charge in yoiu: stately gardens, drop her prettiest blushing courtesy as ye pass, reductive of juvenescent emotion ! so may the younkers of this K 130 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. generation eye you, pacing your stately terrace, with the same superstitious veneration with wliich the child Elia gazed on the Okl Worthies that solemnized the parade Ijcforc ye ! GRACE BEFORE MEAT. The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its origin in the early times of the world, and tlie hunter- state of man, when dinners w^ere precarious tilings, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing ! when a belly-full was a wind-fall, and looked like a spe- cial providence. In the shouts and triumphal songs with which, after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky booty of deer's or goat's flesh would naturally be ushered home, existed, perhaps, the germ of the modern grace. It is not otherwise easy to be miderstood, why the blessing of food — the act of eating — should have had a particular ex2Dression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and silent gratitude with which we are ex- pected to enter \ipon the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence. I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts — a grace before Milton — a grace before Shaksijeare — a devotional exercise i^roper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen 1 — but the received ritual having pre- scribed these forms to the solitary ceremony of manduca- tiou, I shall confine my observations to the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so called ; com- mending my new scheme for extension to a niche in the grand philosophical, poetical, and perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now compiling by my friend Homo GRACE BEFORE MEAT. 131 Ilumaims, for tlie use of a certain snug congregation of Utopian Rabelajsian Christians, no matter where assembk^I. The form, tlien, of the hcuediction before eating has its beauty at a jioor man's table, or at tlie simple and un- provocative repast of children. It is here that the grace becomes exceedingly graceful. The indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare w^th a present sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some extreme theory, have entered. The proper end of food — the animal sustenance — is barely contemplated by them. The poor man's bread is his daily bread, literally his bread for the day. Their courses are perennial. Again, the plainest diet seems the fittest to be pre- ceded by the grace. That which is least stimulative to a])petite, leaves the mind most free for foreign considera- tions. A man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of plain nuitton with turnijis, and have leisure to reflect upon the ordinance and institution of eating ; when he shall confess a pertm'bation of mind, inconsistent wdth the piu'poses of the grace, at the presence of venison or turtle. When I have sate (a varus hospes) at rich men's tables, with the savoury soup and messes steaming uji the nostrils, and moistening the lips of the guests with desire and a distracted choice, I have felt the introduction of that ceremony to be unseasonable. With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a re- ligious sentiment. It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. The heats of epi- curism put out the gentle flame of devotion. The in- cense which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god inter- cepts it for its own. The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and means. The giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning 132 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. thanks — for what ?— for having too much while so many starve. It is to praise the Gods amiss. I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce con- sciously i)erhai)S, by the good man who says the grace. I have seen it in clergymen and others — a sort of sliame —a sense of the co-presence of circumstances which un- hallow the blessing. After a devotional tone put on for a few seconds, how rapidly the speaker will fall into his comnion voice ! helping himself or his neighboiu", as if to get rid of some vmeasy sensation of hypocrisy. Not that the good man was a hypocrite, or was not most con- scientious in the discharge of the duty ; but he felt in his inmost mind the incompatibility of the scene and the viands before him with the e:^ercise of a calm and rational gratitude. I hear somebody exclaim, — Would you have Christians sit down at table like hogs to their troughs, without remembering the Giver? — no — I would have them sit down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like hogs. Or, if their appetites must run riot, and they must pamper themselves with delicacies for which cast and west are ransacked, I would have them postpone their bene- diction to a fitter season, when appetite is laid ; when the still small voice can be heard, and the reason of the grace returns — with temperate diet and restricted dishes. Gluttony and siu'feiting are no proper occasions for thanks- giving. When Jeshmim waxed fot, we read that he kicked. Virgil knew the harpy-natiu'e better, when he put into the mouth of Celaeno an.ything but a blessing. We may be gratefully sensible of the deliciousuess of some kinds of food beyond others, though that is a meaner and inferior gratitude : but the proper object of the grace is sustenance, not relishes ; daily bread, not delicacies ; the means of life, and not the means of pampering the carcass. With what frame or composure, I wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his benediction at some great Hall- feast, when he knows that his last concluding pious word— and that in all probability, the sacred name which CRACE BEFORE JIEAT. 133 he preaches — is but the signal for so many impatient hari)ics to commence their foul orgies, with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is tenii)erance) as those Virgiliiui fowl ! It is well if tlie good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensu- ous steams mingling with and polluting the pure altar sacrifice. The severest satire iipon full tal)les and surfeits is tlie l)an(iuet which Satan, in the "Paradise Regained," provides for a temptation in the wilderness : A table richly spread iu regal mode With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort And savour ; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, In pastry built, or from the sjiit, or boiled, Gris-amber-steamed ; all fish from sea or shore, Freshet or iiurling brook, for which was drained Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go down without the recommendatory preface of a benediction. They are like to be short graces where the devil plays the host. I am afraid the poet wants his usual decorum in this place. Was he thinking of the old Roman luxiuy, or of a gaudy day at Cambridge 1 This was a temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus. The whole banquet is too civic and culinary, and the accompani- ments altogether a jirofanation of that deep, abstracted, holy scene. The mighty artillery of saixces, which the cook-fiend conjiu'es up, is out of joroportion to the simple wants and plain hunger of the guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from his dreams might have been taught better. To the temperate fantasies of the fixmished Son of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves? — He dreamed indeed, As appetite is wont to dream, Of meats and drinks, nature's i-efreshment sweet. But what meats ^ — Him thought he by the brook of Ciierith stood, And saw the ravens with their horny beaks 134 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Food to Elijah Lriugiug even and morn ; Tliougli ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought. He saw the prophet also how he fled Into the desert, and liow there he slept Under a juniper ; then how awaked He found his supper on the coals prepared, And by the angel was bid rise and eat. And ate the second time after repose. The sti-engtli whereof sufficed him forty days : Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook. Or as a guest with Daniel at his pidse. Nothing ill Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate dreams of the divine Hiuigerer. To which of these two visionary banquets, think you, would the introduction of what is called the grace have been the most fitting and l^ertiuent ? Theoretically I am no enemy to graces ; but i^ractically I own that (before meat esjoecially) they seem to involve something awkward and unseasonable. Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and continuing the species. They are fit blessings to be contemplated at a distance with a becom- ing gratitude ; but the moment of appetite (the judicious reader Avill apprehend me) is, perhaps, the least fit season for that exercise. The Quakers, who go about their busi- ness of every description with more calmness than we, have more title to the use of these benedictory prefaces. I have always admired their silent grace, and the more because I have observed their applications to the meat and drink following to be less passionate and sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons nor wine-bibbers as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopped hay, with indiffer- ence, calmness, and ch^anly circumstances. They neither grease nor slop themselves. When I see a citizen in his bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice. I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not in- different to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh were not made to be received with dispassion- ate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not GRACE J'.EFOKK JIEAT. 135 to know wliat he is oatint;'. I 8usi)0ct liis taste in liiylicr matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical character in the tastes for food. C holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is right. With the decay of my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost tlieir gust with me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. I am impatient and rpierulous under culinary disappointments, as to come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some savoury mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill melted — that commonest of kitchen failures — puts me beside my tenor. — The author of the Rambler used to make inarticulate animal noises over a favourite food. Was this the music quite proper to be preceded by the grace 1 or woidd the pious man have done better to postpone his devotions to a season when the blessing might be contemplated with less perturbation 1 I quarrel with no man's tastes, nor would set my thin tace against those excellent things, in their way, jollity and feasting. But as these exercises, however laudable, have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man shoidd be sure, be- fore he ventures so to grace them, that while he is pre- tending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing his hand to some great fish — his Dagon — with a special consecration of no art but the fat tiu-een before him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the banquets of angels and children ; to the roots and severer repasts of the Chartreuse ; to the slender, but not slenderly acknow- ledged, refection of the poor and Inunble man : but at the heaped-up boards of the pampered and the luxiuious they become of dissonant mood, less timed and tuned to the occasion, methiuks, than the noise of those lietter befit- ting organs would be which children hear tales of, at Hog's Norton. We sit too long at our meals, or are too curious in the study of them, or too disordered in our 136 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. a])plicatiou to them, or engross too great a portion of those good things (which should be common) to our share, to be alile with any grace to say grace. To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion, is to add Iiypocrisy to injustice. A liu'king sense of this truth is what makes the performance of this duty so cold and spiritless a service at most tables. In houses where the grace is as indispensable as the napkin, m-Iio has not seen that never-settled question arise, as to luho shall say it 'I while the good man of the house and the visitor clergyman, or some other guest belike of next authority, from years or gravity, shall be baiidying about the office between them as a matter of compliment, each of them not unwilling to shift the awkward burthen of an equivo- cal duty from his own shoidders % I once drank tea in company with two Methodist divines of different persuasions, whom it was my fortune to introduce to each other for the first time that evening. Before the first cup was handed round, one of these reverend gentlemen put it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether he chose to say anything. It seems it is the custom with some sectaries to put up a short prayer liefore tliis meal also. His reverend brother did not at first riiiite apprehend him, but upon an cxjjlanation, with little less importance he made answer tliat it was not a custom known in his church : in which courteous evasion the other acquiescing for good manners' sake, or in compliance with a weak lirother, the sujiplementary or tea grace was waived altogether. With what spirit might not Lucian have painted two priests, of his re- ligion, playing into each other's hands the compliment of performing or omitting a sacrifice, — the hungry God meantime, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils hovering over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) going away in the end without his supper. A short form upon these occasions is felt to want re- verence ; a long one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge of impertinence. I do not quite approve of the DUEAM CHILDREN ; A REVERIE. 137 cpigriuniuatic conciseness with which that equivocal wag (but my pleasant scliool-fellow) C. V. L., when impor- tuned for a grace, \iscd to inquire, first slyly leering down the table, "Is there no clergyman here T' — sig- nificantly adding, "Thank G — ." Nor do I think our old form at si-liool quite pertinent, where we were used to preface our bald bread-and-cheese-suppers witli a pre- amlile, connecting with that luunble blessing a recognition of benefits the most awful and overwhelming to the imagination which religion has to ofter. Non tunc illis erat lonis. I remember we were put to it to reconcile the phrase "good creatures," upon which the blessing rested, with the fixre set before us, wilfully understanding that expression in a low and animal sense,- — till some one recalled a legend, which told how, in the golden days of Christ's, the young Hospitallers were wont to have smok- ing joints of roast meat upon their nightly boards, till some pious benefactor, commiserating the decencies, rather than the palates, of the children, commuted our flesh for garments, and gave us — /i07'resco ref evens — trousers instead of mutton. DREAM CHILDREN; A REVERIE. Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children ; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in which they and papa lived) which liad been the scene — so at least it was generally lielieved in that part of the country — of the tragic incidents which they had lately become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the 138 THE ESSAYS OE ELI A. children and their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out iu wood upon the cliimney-piece of tlie great hall, the whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts ; till a foolish rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story tipon it. Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender to be called iipbraiding. Then I went on to say, how religious and how good their great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by everybody, though she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects she might be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and more fixshionable mansion which he had pur- chased somewhere in the adjoining county ; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house in a sort while she lived, which afterwards came to decay, and was nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some one were to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Laily C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, " that woidd l)e foolish indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was attended by a concoiirse of all the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the neighbourhood for many miles round, to show their respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and religious woman ; so good indeed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay, and a great part of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great - grandmother Field once was ; and how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer — here Alice's little right foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted — the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cniel disease, called a cancer, came, and bowed her DREAIM CIIILDHKN ; A KKVERIE. 139 down with pain ; luit it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house; and how she believed that an ap})arition of two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and doAvn the great staircas(^ near Avhere she slept, Imt she said "those innocents would do her no harm;" and how frightened I used to be, though in those days I had my maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or religious as she — and yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded all his eyebrows and tried to look courageous. Then I told how good she was to all her grandchildren, having us to the great house in the holy- days, where I in particular used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve Csesars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with them ; how I never could be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, mth their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out — sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, luiless when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross me — and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever oft'ering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then, — and because I had more pleasm-e in strolling about among the old melancholy- looking yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries, and the fir-apples, which were good for nothing but to look at — or in lying about iipon the fresh grass with all tlie fine garden smells around me — or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth — or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the 140 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. water in silent state, as if it mocked at their inipcrtincut friskings, — I Iiad more pleasure in these busy - idle diversions than in all the sweet flavours of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such -like common baits of children. Here John slyly deposited back upon the plate a Ininch of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. Then, in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, though their great-grandmother Field loved all her grand- children, yet in an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John L , because he was so hand- some and spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us ; and, instead of moping about in solitary corners, like some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half over the county in a morning, and join the hunters when there were any out — and yet he loved the old great house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to be always pent up within their boundaries — ■ and how their uncle grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to the admiration of everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field most especially ; and how he used to carry me upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy — for he was a good bit older than me^many a mile when I could not walk for pain ; — and how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was impatient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed ; and how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death ; and how I bore his death as I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me ; and though I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how DREAM CHILDREN ; A REVERIE. 141 much I had loved him. I missed his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive again, to be quarrelling with him (for we quarrelled some- times), rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy without him, as he, their poor uncle, must have been when the doctor took ott' his limb. — Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if their little mourning which they had on was not for uncle John, and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some stones about their pretty dead mother. Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet ])ersisting evei', I coiu'ted the fair Alice W — n ; and as nuu'h as children coidd under- stand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and denial, meant in maidens — when suddenly turning to Alice, the soid of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was ; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, I'eceding, and still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, with- out speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech : "We are uot of Alice, uor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum fiither. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name " and immediately awak- ing, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm- chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the foithfid Bridget unchanged by my side — but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever. 142 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. IX A LETTER TO Ti. F. ESQ., AT SYDNEY, NEW KOUTH WALES. My dear F. — When I think how Avcleome the sight of a letter from the world where yon were born mnst be to you in that strange one to which yon have been transplanted, I feel some compunctious visitings at my long silence. But, indeed, it is no easy effort to set about a correspond- ence at our distance. The weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination. It is difficult to conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption to exjiect that one's thoughts should live so far. It is like writing for pos- terity ; and reminds me of one of Mrs. Rowe's super- scriptions, "Alcander to Strephon in the shades." Cowley's Post-Angel is no more than would be ex- pedient in such an intercom-se. One drops a packet at Lombard -street, and in twenty -four hours a friend in Cumlierland gets it as fresh as if it came in ice. It is only like whispering through a long trumpet. Biit suppose a tube let down from the moon, with yourself at one end and the man at the other ; it Avould be some balk to the spirit of conversation, if you knew that the dialogue exchanged with that interesting theosojihist would take two or three revolutions of a higher luminary in its passage. Yet, for aught I know, you may be some parasangs niglier that primitive idea — Plato's man — than we in England here have the honour to reckon ourselves. Epistolary matter usually comimseth three topics ; news, sentiment, and puns. In the latter, I include all non-serious subjects ; or subjects serious in themselves, but treated after my fashion, non-seriously. — And first, for news. In them the most desirable circumstance, I suppose, is that they shall be true. But what security can I have that what I now send you for truth shall not, DISTANT CORRKSI'ONDEXTS. 143 before you get it, unaccouuttibly turn into a lie ? Fur instance, oiir mutual friend P. is at this present writing — my Koxo — in good health, and enjoys a fair share of worldly reputation. You are glad to hear it. This is natural and friendly. But at this present reading — your Now — he may possibly be in the Bench, or going to ho, hanged, wliich in reason ouglit to abate something of your transport [i.e., at hearing he was well, etc.), or at least consitlerably to modify it. I am going to the play this evening, to have a laugh with Munden. You have no theatre, I think you told me, in your land of d d realities. You natm-ally lick your lips, and envy me my felicity. Think but a moment, and you will correct the hateful emotion. Why, it is Sunday morning with you, and 1823. This confusion offenses, this grand solecism of two presents, is in a degree common to all postage. But if I sent you word to Bath or Devizes, that I was exjiecting the aforesaid treat this evening, though at the moment you received the intelligence my full feast of fun would be ovei-, yet there woidd be for a day or two after, as you woiild well know, a smack, a relish left upon my mental jjalate, which would give rational encoiu'agement for you to foster a portion, at least, of the disagreeable passion, which it was in part my intention to produce. But ten months hence, your envy or yoiu- sympathy would be as useless as a passion spent upon the dead. Not only does truth, in these long intervals, imessence herself, but (what is harder) one cannot ventm'e a crude fiction, for the fear that it may ripen into a truth upon the voyage. What a wild improbable banter I jjut upon you, some three years since, of Will Weatherall having married a servant-maid ! I remember gravely consulting you how we were to receive her — for Will's wife was in no case to be rejected ; and your no less serious replica- tion in the matter ; how tenderly you advised an ab- stemious introduction of literary topics before the lady, with a caution not to be too forward in bringing on the carpet matters more within the sphere of her intelligence ; 144 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. your deliberate judgment, or rather wise suspension of sentence, how far jacks, and si^its, and mops, could, with propriety, he introduced as subjects ; whetlier the con- scious avoiding of all such matters in discourse would not have a worse look than the taking of them casually iu our way ; in what manner we should carry ourselves to our maid Becky, Mrs. William Weatherall being by ; whether we should show more delicacy, and a truer sense of respect for Will's wife, by treating Becky with our customary chiding before her, or by an unusual deferential civility paid to Becky, as to a person of great worth, but thrown by the caprice of fate into a humble station. There were difficulties, I rememlier, ou both sides, which you did me the favom* to state with the precision of a lawyer, united to the tenderness of a friend. I laughed in my sleeve at your solemn pleadings, when lo ! while I was valuing my- self upon this flam put upon you in New South Wales, the devil iu England, jealous possibly of any lie-children not his own, or working after my copy, has actually in- stigated our friend (not three days since) to the commission of a matrimony, which I had only conjm-ed up for your diversion. William Weatherall has married Mrs. Cotterel's maid. But to take it in its truest sense, you will see, my dear F., that news from me must become history to you ; which I neither profess to wilte, nor indeed care much for reading. No person, under a diviner, can, with any l^rospect of veracity, conduct a correspondence at sxich an arm's length. Two prophets, indeed, might thus inter- change intelligence with eftect ; the epoch of the writer (Habakkuk) falling in 'svith the true present time of the receiver (Daniel) ; but then we are no prophets. Then as to sentiment. It fares little better with that. This kind of dish, above all, requires to be served up hot, or sent off" in water-plates, that your friend may have it almost as warm as yourself. If it have time to cool, it is the most tasteless of all cold meats. I have often smiled at a conceit of the late Lord C. It seems that travelling somewhere aliout Geneva, he came to some pretty green DISTANT CORRESrONDENTS, U5 spot, or nook, where a willow, or something, hung- so fantastically and invitingly over a stream — was it 1 — or a roek 1 — no matter — but the stillness and the repose, after a weary journey, 'tis likely, in a languid moment of his Lordship's hot, restless life, so took his fancy that he could imagine no place so pro^jer, in the event of his death, to lay his bones iu. This was all very natural and excusable as a sentiment, and shows his character in a very pleasing light. But when from a passing sentiment it came to be an act ; and when, by a positive testa- mentary disposal, his remains were actually carried all that way from England ; who was there, some desperate sentimentalists excepted, that did not ask the question, Why could not his Lortlship have found a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree as green and pendent, with a stream as emblematic to his purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset, or in Devon? Conceive the sentiment boarded up, freighted, entered at the Custom House (startling the tide-waiters with the novelty), hoisted into a ship. Con- ceive it pawed about and handled between the vw\e jests of tarpaulin ruffians — a thing of its delicate texture — the salt bilge wetting it till it became as vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some superstition about sentiments) of being tossed over in a fresh gale to some propitiatory shark (spirit of Saint Gothard, save us from a quietus so foreign to the deviser's purpose !) but it has happily e\-aded a fisliy consummation. Trace it then to its lucky landing — at Lyons shall we say 1 — I have not the majJ before me — jostled upon four men's shoidders — baiting at this town — stojiping to refresh at t'other village — waiting a passport here, a license there ; the sanction of the magistracy in this district, the con- currence of the ecclesiastics in that canton ; till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk sentiment into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless affectation. How few sentiments, my dear F., I am afraid we can set down, in the sailor's i)hrase, as quite seaworthy. L 146 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which though con- temptible in bulk, are the twinkliug coipuscula which should irradiate a right friendly epistle — your puns and small jests are, I apprehend, extremely circumscribed in their sphere of action. They are so far from a capacity of being packed up and sent beyond sea, they wdll scarce endure to be transported by hand from this room to the next. Their vigour is as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment for their brief existence is the intellectual atmo- sphere of the bystanders : or this last is the fine slime of Nilus — the melior lutus — whose maternal recijnency is as necessary as the sol pater to their equivocal generation. A pun hath a hearty kind of present ear-kissing smack with it ; you can no more transmit it in its pristine flavom- than you can send a kiss. — Have you not tried in some instances to palm off a yesterday's pun upon a gentleman, and has it answered ? Not but it was new to his hearing, but it did not seem to come new from you. It did not hitch in. It was like picking up at a village ale-house a two days'-old newsijaper. You have not seen it before, but you resent the stale thing as an affront. This sort of merchandize above all rec^uires a quick return. A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must be co-instantaneous. The one is the brisk lightning, the other the fierce thunder. A moment's interval, and the link is snapped. A pun is reflected from a friend's face as from a mirror. Who would consult his sweet visnomy, if the polished surfiice were two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve months, my dear F.) in giving back its copy ? I cannot image to myself whereabout you are. When I try to fix it, Peter Wilkins's island comes across me. Sometimes you seem to be in the Hades of Thieves. I see Diogenes prying among you with his perpetual fruit- less lantern. What must you be -wdlling by this time to give for the sight of an honest man ! You must almost have forgotten how ive look. And tell mc what your Sydneyites do 1 are they tli**v*ng all day long 1, Merci- DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. 147 ful Heaven ! what property can stand against such a de- prcdatiou ! The kangaroos — your Aborigines — do they keep their primitive simplicity im- Europe -tainted, witli those little short fore jiuds, looking like a lesson framed by nature to the pick-pocket ! Marry, for diving into fobs they arc rather lamely provided a priori ; but if the hue and cry were once up, they woidd show as feir a pair of hind-shifters as the expertest loco-motor in the colony. We hear the most improbable tales at this distance. Pray is it true that the young Spartans among you are born with six fingers, which spoils their scanning ? — It must look very odd ; but use reconciles. For their scansion, it is less to be regretted ; for if they take it into their heads to be poets, it is odds but they tm-n out, the greater part of them, vile plagiarists. Is there much difference to see, too, between the son of a tli**f and the grandson*? or where does the taint stop % Do you bleach in three or in fom- generations % I have many questions to put, but ten Delphic voyages can be made in a shorter time than it will take to satisfy my scruples. Do you grow your own hemp? — What is your staple trade, — exclusive of the national profession, I mean % Yoiu- locksmiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists. I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarly as when we used to exchange good-morrows out of oiu' old con- tiguous ^^indows, in pump -famed Hare Court in the Temple. Why did you ever leave that quiet corner % — Why did I ? — with its complement of four poor elms, from whose smoke-dyed barks, the theme of jesting niralists, I picked my first ladybirds ! My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us ; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of our English letters before they can reach you. But while I talk I think you hear me, — thoughts dallying with vain sur- mise — Aye me ! while tliee tlie seas and sounding shores Hold far away. 148 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Come back, before. I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall hardly know me. Come, before Bridget walks on crutches. Girls whom you left children have become sage matrons while you are tarrying there. The blooming Miss W — r (you remember Sally W — r) called upon us yesterday, an aged crone. Folks whom you knew di(i off every year. Formerly, I thought that death was wearing out, — I stood ramparted about with so many healthy friends. The departm-e of J. W., two springs back, corrected my delusion. Since then the old divorcer has been busy. If you do not make haste to return, there will be little left to greet you, of me, or mine. THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. I LIKE to meet a sweep — understand me — not a grown sweeper — old chimney-sweepers are by no means attract- ive — -but one of those tender novices, blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effiiced from the cheek — such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the 'peei>peei> of a yoimg sparrow ; or liker to the matin lark should I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom anticipating the sunrise % I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks — poor blots — innocent blacknesses — I reverence these young Africans of our own growth — these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption ; and from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys), in the nipping air of a December morning, l^reach a lesson of patience to mankind. When a child, what a mysterious pleasm'e it was to witness their operation ! to see a chit no bigger than one's- THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEErEES. 149 self, enter, one knew not by what process, into what seemed the fauces Averni — to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades ! to shuchler with the idea that "now, surely he must he lost for ever!" — to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered clay-light — and then (0 fulness of delight !) running out of doors, to come just in time to see the sable phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished weapon of his art victorious like some flag waved over a conquered citadel ! I seem to remember having been told, that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle, certainly ; not much unlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the " Apparition of a child crowned, \di\\ a tree in his hand, rises." Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to give him a penny, — it is better to give him two-pence. If it be starving weather, and to the proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed heels (no unusual accompaniment) be super- added, the demand on thy humanity will sm-ely rise to a tester. There is a composition, the ground-work of which I have understood to be the sweet wood 'ydept sassafras. This wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy beyond the China luxiiry. I know not how thy palate may relish it ; for myself, with every defer- ence to the judicious Mr. Read, who hath time out of mind kept open a shop (the only one he avers in London) for the vending of this " wholesome and pleasant bever- age," on the south side of Fleet Street, as thou approach- est Bridge Street — the only Salopian house — I have never yet adventm-ed to dij) my own particular lip in a basin of his commended ingredients — a cautious premoni- tion to the olfactories constantly whispering to me, that my stomach must infallibly, with all due com-tesy, decline 150 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. it. Yet I have seen palates, otherwise uot iminstructed ill dietetical elegancies, sup it up with avidity. I know not by what particidar conformation of the organ it happens, but I have always found that this com- position is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney-sweeper — ^whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged practitioners ; or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled too much of bitter wood in the lot of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the earth her sassafras for a sweet lenitive— but so it is, that no possible taste or odour to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a delicate excitement comparable to this mixtiu-e. Being penniless, they will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible, seemingly no less jjleased than those domestic animals — eats — when they piuT over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is something more in these sympathies than philo- sophy can inculcate. Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not without reason, that his is the only Salopian house ; yet be it known to thee, reader — if thou art one who keepest what are called good hours, thou art haply ignorant of the fact — he hath a race of industrious imitators, who from stalls, and under open sky, dispense the same savoury mess to liuml^ler customers, at that dead time of the dawn, when (as extremes meet) the rake, reeling home from his mid- night cups, and the hard-handed artizan leaving his bed to resume the premature labours of the day, jostle, not unfrequently to the manifest disconcerting of the former, for the honours of the pavement. It is the time when, in summer, between the expired and the not yet relu- mined kitchen-fires, the kennels of our foir metropolis give forth their least satisfactory odours. The rake, who wisheth to dissipate his o'ernight vapours in more grate- ful coffee, ciu'ses the ungeuial fume, as he passeth ; but THE PRAISE OF CIIIMNEY-SWEEPEUS. 151 the artizan stops to taste, and blesses the frayrant breakfast. This is saloop — the precocious herb-woniau's darliiig — the delight of the early gardener, who transports his smoking cabbages by break of day from Hammersmith to Covent Garden's fametl piazzas — the delight, and oh ! I fear, too often the envy, of the unpennied sweep. Him shoiddst thou haply encounter, with his dim visage pen- dent over the grateful steam, regale him with a sumptuous basin (it will cost thee but three-halfpennies) and a slice of delicate bread and butter (an added halfjienny) — so may thy culinary fire,s, eased of tlie o'ercharged secretions from thy worse-placed hospitalities, curl up a lighter volume to the welkin — so may the descending soot never taint thy costly well-ingredienced soups — nor the odious ciy, quick-reaching from street to street, of the fired chimney, invite the rattling engines from ten adjacent parishes, to disturb for a casual scintidation thy peace and pocket ! I am by natiu'e extremely susceptible of street affronts ; the jeers and taimts of the popidace ; the low-bred triumph they disj^lay over the casual trip, or splashed stocking, of a gentleman. Yet can I endure the jocu- larity of a young sweep with something more than forgiveness. — In the last winter but one, pacing along Cheapside with my accustomed precipitation when I walk westward, a treacherous slide brought me upon my back in an instant. I scrambled up with pain and shame enough — yet outwardly tiying to face it down, as if nothing had happened — when the roguish grin of one of these young wits encountered me. There he stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, till the tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked themselves out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a previous weeping, and soot -inflamed, yet twinkhng through all with such a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth ■ but Hogarth has got him already (how could he miss him 1) 152 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. in the March to Fiiichley, grinning at the pieman — there he stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was to last for ever — with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth — for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it — that I could have been content, if the honour of a gentle- man might eudui'e it, to have remained his butt and his mockery till midnight. I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine set of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must pardon me) is a casket presumably hold- ing such jewels ; but, methinks, they should take leave to " air " them as frugally as possible. The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their teeth, show me bones. Yet must I confess, that from the mouth of a true sweep a display (even to ostentation) of those white and shiny ossifications, strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It is, as when A sable clond Turns forth her silver lining on the night. It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct ; a badge of better days ; a hint of nobility : — and, doubtless, imder the obscuring darkness and double night of their forlorn disguisement, oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle conditions, derived from lost ancestry, and a lapsed ])edigree. The premature apprenticements of these tender victims give but too much encom-agement, I fear, to clandestine and almost infantile abductions ; the seeds of civility and true courtesy, so often discernible in these young grafts (not otherwise to be accounted for) plainly hint at some forced adoptions ; many noble Rachels mourning for their children, even in our days, countenance the fact ; the tales of feiry spiriting may shadow a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the young Montagu be but a solitary instance of good fortune out of many irreparable and hopeless defiUations. In one of the state-beds at Ai'undel Castle, a few years THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 153 since — under a ducal canopy — (that seat of the Howards is an object of curiosity to visitors, chiefly for its beds, in which the late duke was especially a connoisseur)— encircled with curtains of delicatest crimson, Avith starry coronets inwoven — folded lietween a pair of sheets whiter and softer than the lap where Venus lulled Ascanius — was discovered by chance, after all methods of search had failed, at noon-day, fast asleep, a lost chimney-sweeper. The little creature, having somehow confounded his pass- age among the intricacies of those lordly chimneys, by some unknown aperture had alighted upon this magni- ficent chamber ; and, tired with his tedious explorations, was luiable to resist the delicious iuvitement to repose, which he there saw exhibited ; so creeping between the sheets very quietly, laid his black head ui)on the jiillow, and slept like a young Howard. Such is the account given to the visitors at the Castle. — But I cannot help seeming to perceive a confir- mation of what I had just hinted at in this story. A high instinct was at work in the case, or I am mistaken. Is it probable that a poor child of that description, with whatever weariness he might be visited, woiUd have ventured, under such a penalty as he would be taught to expect, to imcover the sheets of a Duke's bed, and deliberately to lay himself down between them, when the rug, or the carpet, presented an obvious couch, still far above his pretensions — is this probable, I would ask, if the great power of nature, which I contend for, had not been manifested within him, prompting to the adventure ? Doubtless this young nobleman (for siich my mind mis- gives me that he must be) was allured by some memory, not amounting to full consciousness, of his condition in infancy, when he was used to be lapped by his mother, or his nurse, in just such sheets as he there foimd, into which he was now but creeping back as into his proper incunahula, and resting-place. — By no other theory than by this sentiment of a pre-existent state (as I may call it), can I explain a deed so venturous, and, indeed, upon 154 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. auy other system, so iudecorous, in this tender, but imseasonable, sleeper. My pleasant friend Jem White was so impressed with a belief of metamorphoses like this frequently taking- place, that in some sort to reverse the Avrongs of fortune in these poor changelings, he instituted an annual feast of cliimney-sweepers, at which it was his pleasm-e to officiate as host and waiter. It was a solemn supper held in Smithfield, upon the yearly return of the fair of St. Bartholomew. Cards were issued a week before to the master-sweeps in and about the mctroijolis, confining the invitation to their younger fry. Now and then an elderly strijiling would get in among lis, and be good- naturedly winked at ; but our main body were infantry. One unfortunate wight, indeed, who, relying npon his dusky suit, had intruded himself into our party, biit by tokens was providentially discovered in time to be no chimney-sweeper, (all is not soot which looks so,) was c|uoited out of the presence with nni versa! indignation, as not having on the wedding garment ; but in general the greatest harmony prevailed. The place chosen was a convenient spot among the pens, at the north side of the fair, not so f;xr distant as to be impervious to the agree- al)le hubbul) of that vanity, but remote enough not to be obvious to the interruption of every gaping spectator in it. The guests assembled about seven. In those little temporary parlours three tables were spread with napery, not so fine as substantial, and at every board a comely hostess presided with her pan of hissing sausages. Th(; nostrils of the young rogues dilated at the savour. James White, as head waiter, had charge of the first table ; and myself, with our trusty companion Bigod, ordinarily ministered to the other two. There was clambering and jostling, you may be sure, who should get at the first table, fin- Rochester in his maddest days coidd not have done the humours of the scene with more spirit than my friend. After some general expression of thanks for the honour the company had done him, his THE TRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 155 iuaugural ceremony was to clas}) the greasy waist of old dame Ursula (the ftittest of the three), that stood frying and fretting, half-blessing, half-cursing "the gentleman," and imprint ui)ou lier chaste lijis a tender salute, whereat the universal host would set up a shout that tore the concave, while lumdreds of grinning teeth startled the night with their brightness. it was a pleasure to see the sable yoimkors lick in the unctuous meat, with his more unctuous sayings — how he would fit the tit-bits to the puny mouths, reserving the lengthier links for the seniors — how he would intercept a morsel even in the jaws of some young desperado, declaring it "must to the pan again to be browned, for it was not fit for a gentle- man's eating" — how he would recommend this slice of white bread, or that piece of kissing-crust, to a tender juvenile, advising them all to have a care of cracking their teeth, which were their best patrimony, — how genteelly he would deal about the small ale, as if it were wine, naming the brewer, and protesting, if it were not good, he shoidd lose their custom ; with a special recom- mendation to wipe the lip before drinking. Then we had our toasts — "the King,"^ — "the Cloth," — which, whether they understood or not, was equally diverting and flatter- ing ; and for a crowning sentiment, which never failed, "May the Brush supersede the Laurel ! " All these, and fifty other fancies, which were rather felt than com- prehended by his guests, would he utter, standing upon tables, and i^refacing every sentiment with a "Gentlemen, give me leave to propose so and so," which was a pro- digious comfort to those yoimg orphans ; every now and then stuffing into his mouth (for it did not do to be squeamish on these occasions) indiscriminate pieces of those reeking sausages, which pleased them mightily, and was the savouriest part, you may believe, of the enter- tainment. Golden kills and lasses must, As cliimuey-sweeiJers, come to dust — James White is extinct, and with him these suppers 15G THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. have long ceased. He carried away with him half the fun of the world when he died — of my world at least. His old clien,ts look for him among the pens ; and, miss- ing liim, reproach the altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and the glory of Smithfield departed for ever. A COMPLAmT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS, IN THE METROPOLIS. The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation — your only modern Alcides' club to rid the time of its abuses — is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags — staves, dogs, and crutches — the whole mendicant fraternity, with all their baggage, are fast posting out of the pmiieus of this eleventh persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the corners of streets and turnings of alleys, the parting Genius of Beggary is " with sighing sent." I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this impertinent crusado, or helium ad exterminationem, pro- claimed against a species. Much good might be sucked from these Beggars. They were the oldest and the honoural)lest form of pauperism. Their appeals were to our common nature ; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humom'S or caprice of any fellow-creature, or set of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian. Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungradged in the assessment. There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation ; as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go in livery. The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses ; A COMPLAINT OF THE DFX'AY OF BECKiAKS. 157 and when Dionysius from king turned schoolmaster, do we feel anything towards him but contempt 1 Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying a ferula for a sceptre, which would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the same compassionate admiration, with which we regard his Belisarius begging for an oholus ? Woidd the moral have been more graceful, more pathetic % The Blind Beggar in the legend — the father of pretty Bessy — whose story doggrel rhymes and ale-house signs cannot so degrade or attenuate but that some sparks of a lustrous sjiirit will shine through the disguisements — this noble Earl of Cornwall (as indeed he w^as) and memorable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stript of all, and seated on the flowering green of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter by his side, illumining his rags and his beggary — would the child and parent have cut a better figure doing the honours of a counter, or expiating their fallen condition upon the three-foot eminence of some sempstering shop-board 1 In tale or history your Beggar is ever the just antipode to your King. The poets and romancical waiters (as dear Margaret Newcastle would call them), when they would most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, never stop till they have brought down their hero in good earnest to rags and the wallet. The depth of the descent illustrates the height he falls from. There is no medium which can be presented to the imagination without ofience. There is no breaking the fall. Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his garments, till he answer "mere nature;" and Cresseid, ftxllen from a jwince's love, must extend her pale arms, pale with other whiteness than of iDcauty, supplicating lazar arms with bell and clap-dish. The Lucian wits knew this very w^ell ; and, with a con- verse policy, when they would express scorn of greatness without the pity, they sIkiw us an Alexander in the shades cobbling shoes, or a Semiramis getting up foul linen. How would it sound in sons:, tliat a a;reat monarch had 158 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. declined his uflectious iiijoii the daughter of a baker ! yet do we feel the imagination at all violated when we read the ''true ballad," where King Cophetua woos the beggar maid 1 Pauperism, paiiju'r, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity alloyed with contempt. No one properly con- temns a Beggar. Poverty is a comparative thing, and each degree of it is mocked by its "neighbour grice." Its poor rents and comings-in are soon summed up and told. Its pretences to property are almost ludicrous. Its pitiful attempts to save excite a smile. Every scornfid companion can weigh his trifle -bigger purse against it. Poor man rei^roaches poor man in the streets with impolitic mention of his condition, his own being a shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both. No rascally comparative insidts a Beggar, or thinks of weighing piu'ses with him. He is not in the scale of comparison. He is not itnder the measure of property. He confessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twittetli him with ostentation above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or upbraideth him ^vith mock humility. None jostle with him for the wall, or pick quarrels for precedency. No wealthy neigldwur seeketh to eject him from his tenement. No man sues liim. No man goes to law with liim. If I were not the independent gentleman that I am, rather tlian I would be a retainer to the great, a led captain, or a poor rela- tion, I would choose, out of the delicacy and true great- ness of my mind, to be a Beggar. Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the Beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenm'e, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public. He is never out of the fashion, or limpcth awkwardly behind it. He is not required to put on court mourning. He weareth all colours, fearing none. His costimie hath imdei'gone less change than tlie Quaker's. He is the only man in tlie universe who is not obliged to study aj^pearanccs. The ups and downs of the A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. 159 world concern him no longer. He alone continueth in one stay. The price of stock or land aifecteth him not. The fluctuations of agricultural or commercial prosperity touch him not, or at worst but change his customers. He is not expected to become bail or surety for any one. No man troubleth him with questioning his religion or politics. He is tlie only free man in the universe. Tlie Mendicants of this great city were so many of her sights, her lions. I can no more spare them than I could the Cries of Loudon. No corner of a street is comi)lete without them. They are as indispensable as the Ballad Singer ; and in their picturesque attire as ornamental as the signs of old London. They were the standing morals, emblems, mementoes, dial-mottoes, the spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry — Look Upon tliat poor aud Lrokcn bankrupt there. Above all, those old blind Tobits that used to line the wall of Lincoln's-inn Garden, before modern fastidiousness had expelled them, casting up their ruined orbs to catch a ray of pity, and (if possible) of light, with their foithful Dog Guide at tlieir feet, — whither are they lied ? or into what corners, blind as themselves, have they been driven, out of the wholesome air and sun -warmth 1 immersed between four walls, in what withering poor-house do they endiu-e the penalty of double darkness, where the chink of the dropt halfpenny no more consoles their forlorn bereavement, far from the sound of the cheerful and hope-stirring tread of the passenger 1 Where hang their useless staves 1 and who will farm their dogs 1 — Have the overseers of St. L — caused them to be shot 1 or were they tied up in sacks and dropt into the Thames, at the suggestion of B — the mild rector of • ? Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne, — most classical, and, at the same time, most English of the Latinists 1 — who has treated of this himian and 160 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. quadrupedal alliance, this dog- and man friendship, in the sweetest of his iioenis, the Epitaphium in Ganem, or, Doffs Epitaph. Reader, peruse it ; and say, if customary sights, which could call up such gentle poetry as this, were of a nature to do more harm or good to the moral sense of the passengers through the daily thoroughfares of a vast and busy metropolis. Pauperis liic Iri reqiiiesco Lyciscus, herilis, Dum vixi, tutela vigil columeiique seuecta3, Dux cfeco fidiis : nee, me diicente, solebat, Praetenso hinc atque hiuc baculo, per iuiqua locorum lucertaiii explorare viam ; sed fila secutus, Qii;e dubios regereiit passus, vestigia tuta Fixit iuortenso gi-essu ; gelidumque sedile In undo nactns saxo, qna prretereuntium Unda frequens confluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras Lanientis, uoctemque oculis ploravit obortam. Ploravit nee frustra ; obolnni dedit alter et alter, Quels corda et uientem indiderat natura beuignam. Ad latus interea jacui sopitus lierile, Vel mediis vigil in somnis ; ad herilia jussa Auresque atque animura arrectus, sen frustula amice Porrexit sociasque dapes, sen longa diet Tfedia per^jessus, reditnm sub nocte parabat. Hi mores, hoec vita fuit, dum fata sinebant, Dum neque languebam morbis, nee iuerte senecta Quffi tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite cseciim Orbavit domiuiiin ; prisci sed gratia facti Ne tota intereat, longos deleta per annos, Exiguum bunc Irus tnmnlum de cespite fecit, Etsi inox^is, non ingratfe, munuscula dextrre ; Carmine signavitqne brevi, dominunique canemque, Quod memoret, fiduraqne Caneni dominunique Benignum. Poor Irus' faitliful wolf-dog here I lie, That wont to tend my old blind master's steps, His guide and guard ; nor, while my service lasted, Had he occasion for that staff, with which He now goes picking out his path in fear Over the highways and crossings ; but woidd plant. Safe in the conduct of my friendly string, A firm foot forward still, till he had reach'd His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide Of passers-by in thickest confluence flow'd : A COMrLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. IGl To whom with loml ami passionate laments From morn to eve his dark estate he wailM. Nor wail'd to all in vain : some here and there, The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave. I meantime at his feet obsequious slept; Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear Prick'd up at his least motion ; to receive At his kind hand my customary crumbs, And common jiortiou in his feast of scraps ; Or when night warn'd ns homeward, tired and spent With our long day and tedious beggary. These were my manners, this my way of life Till age and slow disease me overtook, And sever'd from my sightless master' .s side. But lest the grace of so good deeds should die, Through tract of years in mixte oblivion lost. This slender tomb of tiirf hath Irus reared, Cliea^^ monument of no ungrudging hand. And with short verse inscribed it, to attest, In long and lasting union to attest. The virtues of the Beggar and his Dog. These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past a well-known figure, or part- of the figm-e, of a man, who used to glide his comely upper half over the pave- ments of London, wheeling along with most ingenious celerity upon a machine of wood ; a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and to children. He was of a robust make, with a florid sailor-like complexion, and his head was bare t(j the storm and sunshine. He was a natural curiosity, a speculation to the scientific, a prodigy to the simple. Tlie infant M'ould stare at the miglity man brought down to his own level. The common cripple woidd despise his own pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness, and hearty heart, of this half- limbed giant. Few but must have noticed him ; for the accident which brought him low took place during the riots of 1780, and he has been a groundling so long. He seemed earth-born, an Antaeus, and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neigh- boured. He was a grand fragment ; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature, which should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into M 162 THE ESSAYS OF ELTA. liis Upper parts, and lie "vvas half a Hercules. I heard a tremendous voice thunderiug and growling, as before an earthquake, and casting down my eyes, it Avas this man- drake reviling a steed that had started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature to liave rent the offending quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a centaur, from which the liorse- half had been cloven in some dire Lapithan controversy. He moved on, as if he could have made shift Avith yet half of the body-portion which was left him. The os siihlime was not wanting ; and he threw out yet a jolly counte- nance upon the heavens. Forty -and-two years had he driven this out-of-door trade, and now that his hair is grizzled in the service, but his good spirits no way impaired, because he is not content to exchange his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he is expiating his contu- macy in one of those houses (ironically christened) of Correction. Was a daily spectacle like this to be deemed a nui- sance, which called for legal interference to remove 1 or not rather a salutary and a touching object to the passers- l)y in a great city 1 Among lier shows, her museums, and sujiplies for ever-gaping curiosity (and what else but an accumulation of sights — endless sights — is a great city ; or for what else is it desirable 1) was there not room for one Liisiis (not Naturce, indeed, but) Accidentium ? AVliat if in forty-and-two-years' going about, the man had scraped together enough to give a portion to his child (as the rumour ran) of a few hundreds — whom had he injured ? — -whom had he imposed iqjon 1 The contrilnitors had enjoyed their sif/ht for their pennies. What if after being exposed all day to the heats, the rains, and the frosts of heaven — shuffling his ungainly trunk along in an elaborate and painful motion — he was enabled to retire at night to enjoy himself at a club of his fellow cripples over a dish of liot meat and vegetables, as the charge was gravely brought against him by a clergyman deposing before a House of Commons' Committee — was this, or was his A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. 163 triily loatenial consideration, which (if a ftict) deserved a statue rather than a whii»ping-post, and is inconsistent, at least, ■\vitli the exaggeration of nocturnal orgies which he has liecn slanck^'ed with — a reason that he should be de- prived of his chosen, liannless, nay, edifying way of life, and 1)0 committed in hoary age for a sturdy vagabond 1 — • There was a Yorick once, whom it would not liave shamed to have sate down at the cripples' feast, and to have thrown in his benediction, ay, and his mite too, for a companionable symbol. " Age, thou hast lost thy breed." — Half of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by begging are (I verily believe) misers' calumnies. One was much talked of in the public papers some time since, and the usual charitable inferences deduced. A clerk in the Bank was surprised with the announcement of a five- huudred-pound legacy left him by a person whose name he was a stranger to. It seems that in his daily morning walks from Peckham (or some village thereabouts) where he lived, to his office, it had been his practice for the last twenty years to drop his halfpenny didy into the hat of some blind Bartimeus, that sate begging alms by tlie Avay- side in the Borough. The good old beggar recognised his daily benefactor by the voice only ; and, when he died, left all the amassings of his alms (that had been half a century perhaps in the accumulating) to his old Bank friend. Was this a story to pm-se up people's hearts, and pennies, against giving an alms to the blind ^— or not rather a beautiful moral of well-directed charity on the one part, and noble gratitude upon the other 1 I sometimes wish I had been that Bank clerk. I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creature, blinking and looking up with his no eyes in the sun — ■ Is it possible I could have steeled my purse against him 1 Perhaps I had no small change. Eeader, do not be frightened at the hard words impo- sition, imposture — c/ive, and ask no questions. Oast thy 1G4 THE ESSAYS OF ET.TA. bread upon the waters. Some have unawares (like this Bank clerk) entertained angels. Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted dis- tress. Act a cliarity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visilily such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small children,'' in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their counterfeit looks and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, claw- ing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The maniiscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovei'ed in the manner following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks A DISSERTATION UPON llOAST TK!. 1G5 csonpo into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, S2)rcad the conflagration over every part of their pttor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all o\'er the East, from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he coidd easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the labour of an hoiu* or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufterers, an odour assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What could it proceed from 1 — not from the burnt cottage — he had smelt that smell before — indeed, this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, Aveed, or lioAver. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby ftxshion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and for the fii'st time in his life (in the world's life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted — rracliingf Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understanding, that it was the jiig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious ; and surrendering himself up to the new- born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire 166 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. entered amid the .smoking- rafters, armed witli retributory cudgel, and finding liow affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail-stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure, which he experienced in his lower regions, had rendered him quite callous to any in- conveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fiiirly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensil^le of his situation, something like the following dialogue ensued. "You graceless whelp, what have you got there de- vouring 1 Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses with yom' dog's tricks, and be hanged to you ! but you must be eating fire, and I know not what — what have you got there, I say 1 " " O father, the pig, the pig ! do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats." The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burnt pig. Bo-bo, whose scent Avas wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, " Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, fiither, only taste — Lord !" — with such-like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke. Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abom- inable thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crack- ling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavour, which, make what soiu* mouths he would for a pretence, jjroved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious), both father and son fairly set down to the mess, and never left off till they had despatched all that re- mained of the litter. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST Rlf!. 1G7 Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neigh boiu's Avould certainly have stoned them for a couple of aljoniinable wretches, who could think of im- proving upon the good meat which God had sent them. Nevertlieless, strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti's« cottage was burnt down now more freipiently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the night- time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze ; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkal)le, instead of chastising his sou, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial at Pekiu, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the ob- noxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the cidprits stood accused, might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they all handled it ; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his tather had done before them, and nature promi)ting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given, — to the siu'prise of the whole court, towns- folk, strangers, reporters, and all jn-es^nt — without leav- ing the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty. The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision : and when the court was dismissed, went privily and bought iip all the pigs that coidd be had for love or money. In a few days his lordship's town-house was observed to lie on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fires in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enor- mously dear all over the district. The insurance-offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to 168 TlIK ESSAYS OF EL I A. tlie W()i-](1. Thus tlii.s custom of firing houses coutimu'd, till iu jii'ocess of time, says my mamiscrii)t, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (hurnt, as they called it) withoiit the necessity of con- suming a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most iiscful, and seemingly the most obvious, arts make their way among mankind ■ Without i)lacing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be agreed that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favour of any culinary object, that jwetext and excuse might be found in roast pig. Of all the delicacies iu the whole vinndus edihilu, I Avill maintain it to be the most delicate — ^^rmc^^js ohsoniorum. I sjieak not of your grown porkers — things between pig and pork — those hobbledehoys — but a young and tender suckling — under a moon old — guiltless as yet of the sty — -with no original speck of the amor immunditia', the hereditary fiiiling of the first parent, yet manifest — his voice as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble and a grumble — the mild forerunner or 2)neludium of a grunt. He inust he roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled — but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument ! There is no flavour comparable, 1 will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, cracMing, as it is well called — the vcny teeth are invited to their share of the ])leasure at this banquet iu over- coming the coy, brittle resistance — with the adhesive oleaginous — call it not fiit ! Init an indefinable sweet- ness growing up to it — the tender blossoming of fat — fat A DISSKRTATION UPON ROAST I'K;. 169 cro])i)cd in the bud — taken iu the shoot — in the iirst innocence — the cream and quintessence of the chihl -pig's yet inire food — the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna — or, rather, iixt and lean (if it must be so) so 1)lcnded and running into each other, that both together inake but one aml)rosian result or common substance. Behold him wliile lie is " doing " — it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round tlie string ! Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age ! he hath wept out his jn-etty eyes — radiant jellies — shooting stars. — See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth ! — wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and iudocility which too often accompany matm'er swinehood 1 Ten to one lie would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal — - wallowing iu all manner of filthy conversation — from these sins he is happily snatched away — Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with timely care — his memory is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon — no coalheaver l)olteth him in reeking sausages — he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure — and for such a tomb might be content to die. He is the best of sapors. Pine-ai)i)le is great. She is indeed almost too transcendent — a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a tender -conscienced person would do well to pause — too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach lier — like lovers' kisses, she biteth — slie is a pleasure borderiug on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish — but she stoppeth at the palate — she meddleth not with the appetite — and the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for a mutton-chop. Pig — let me speak his praise — is no less provocative 170 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. of the ap})etite than he is satisfactory to the criticahiess of the censorious pahite. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices. Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is — good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neigh- bours' fixre. I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. " Pre- sents," I often say, " endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those "tame villatic fowl "), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One woidd not, like Lear, "give eveiything." I make my stand upon pig. ]\Ietliinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what) a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate.^ — It argues an insen- sibility. I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, fresli fnmi the oven. In my way to school (it was over London Bridge) a grey- headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt, at this time of day, that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, school-boy like, I made him A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST riG. 171 a present of — the whole cake! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction ; but, before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I biu'st into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, t(i go and give her good gift away to a stranger that I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I — I myself, and not another — would eat her nice cake — and what should I say to her the next time I saw her — hoAV naughty I was to part with her pretty present ! — and the odour of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the l)leasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how dis- appointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last — and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-];)lace hypocrisy of good- ness ; and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey im- l)ostor. Ovu' ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other olisolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a jihilosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, liow we censure the Avisdom of tlie practice. It might impart a gusto. — I rouember an hypothesis, argued upon l)y the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with nuich learning and pleasantry on both sides, " Whctlier, sui')posing that the flavoiir of a pig who obtained his death by whipping [per Jiagellationem extremam) super- added a. iileasure upon the palate of a man more intense 172 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. than any pn.ssiblo suft'eiing' wc can conceive in tlie animal, i.s man justified in \\m\g that metliod of jjutting the animal to death V I forget the decision. His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But l)auish, dear ]\Irs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff theni out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic ; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are — but consider, he is a \^'eakliug — a flower. A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. As a single man, I liave silent a good deal of my time in noting down the infirmities of Married People, to console myself for those superior pleasures, which they tell me I liave lost by remaining as I am. I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their wives ever made any great impression upon me, or had much tendency to strengthen me in those anti-social resolutions which I took up long ago upon more substantial con- siderations. What oftenest offends me at the houses of married persons where I visit, is an error of quite a difi'erent descriptioij^ jr — it is th"t tliey aye t()o^J ovirip;. Not too loving neither : that does notcxplaui my meaning. Besides, why should that ofieiid me ? The very act of separating themselves from the rest of the world, to have the fuller enjoyment of each other's society, implies that they prefer one another to all the world. But what I complain of is, that they carry this i)re- ference so undisguisedly, they jx'rk it uj) in the faces of us single people so shamelessly, you cannot be in their A BACIIELOU'S COMPLAINT OF MAURI Kl) I'EoT'LK. 17:5 company a moineut without being uuido to feel, by some indirect hint or oi^en avowal, that yo%i are not the object of this preference. Now there are some things which give no offence, while implied or taken for granted merely; Imt expressed, there is much offence in them.' If a man w(>re to accost the fii-st homely-featured or plain dressed young woman of his acquaintance, and tell her bluntly, that she was not handsome or rich enough for him, and he could not marry her, he would deserve to be kicked for his ill-manners ; yet no less is implied in the fact, that having access and opportunity of putting the question to her, he has never yet thought fit to do it. The young woman understands this as clearly as if it were put into words ; but no reasonable young woman would think of making this the ground of a quarrel. Just as little right have a married couple to tell me by speeches, and looks that are scarce less plain than speeches, that I am IK it tlic li;ip]»y mmi, — tlie 1?idy'a.^fi ioice. It is enough that 1 kudw I am not : I do not want tliis per- petual renunding. The display of superior knowledge or riches may l)e made sufficiently mortifying, but these admit of a pallia- tive. The knowledge which is brought out to insidt me, may accidentally improve me ; and in the rich man's houses and pictures, — his parks and gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least. But the display of married hajipiness has none of these palliatives : it is throughout pure, unrecompensed, unqualified insult. Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least invidious sort. It is the cunning of most possessors of any exclusive privilege to keep their ad- vantage as much out of sight as possil)le, that their less favoured neighbours, seeing little of the l>enefit, may the less be disposed to question the right. But these married monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of their patent into our faces. Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire com- placency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances 174 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. of a iiew-married couple, — in that of the hidy particu- hxrly : it tells you, that her lot is disposed of in this world : tliat you can have no hopes of her. It is true, I have none : nor wishes either, perhaps : but this is one of those truths which ought, as I said before, to l)e taken for granted, not expressed. The excessive airs which those people give themselves, founded on the ignorance of us unmarried people, would be more offensive if they were less irrational. We will allow them to understand the mysteries belonging to their own craft better than we, who have not had the happiness to be made free of the company : but their arrogance is not content within these limits. If a single person pre- sume to offer his opinion in their presence, though upon the most indifferent subject, he is immediately silenced as an incompetent person. Nay, a young married lady of my acquaintance, who, the best of the jest was, had not changed her condition above a fortnight before, in a question on which I had the misfortime to differ from her, respecting the properest mode of breeding oysters for the London market, had the assm-ance to ask with a sneer, how such an old Bachelor as I could pretend to know anything about such matters ! But what I have spoken of hitherto is nothing to the airs which these creatm-es give themselves when they come, as they generally do, to have children. When I consider how little of a rarity children are, — that every street and blind alley swarms with them, — that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance, — that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains, — how often they tmni out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. — I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them. If they were young phoenixes, indeed, that were born but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when they are so common A BACHELORS COMIT.ATXT OF IMAltltli:]) I'KOPrj:. 175 I do not advert to the insolent merit wliieh they assume with their husliands on these occasions. Let them look to that. But Avhy ive, who are not theii' natural-born subjei-ts, should be expected to bring oiu- spices, myrrh, and incense, — our tribute and homage of admiration, — I do not see. " Like as the arrows in the hand of tlie giant, even so are the young children;" so says the excellent office in our Prayer-book a])i)ointed for the churching of women. "Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them." So say I ; but tlicn don't let him discharge his quiver upon us that are weaponless ; — let thenr be arrows, Init not to gall and stick us. I have generally observed that tliese arrows are double-headed : they have two forks, to be siu-e to hit wath one or the other. As for instance, where you come into a house which is full of children, if you happen to take no notice of them (you are thinking of something else, perhaps, and turn a deaf ear to their innocent caresses), you are set down as untractable, morose, a hater of children. On the other hand, if you find them more than usually engaging, — if you are taken with their pretty manners, and set about in earnest to romp and play with them, — some pretext or other is sure to be found for sending them out of the room ; they are too noisy or boisterous, or Mr. does not like children. With one or other of these forks the arrow is sure to hit you. I could forgive their jealousy, and dispense with toying with their brats, if it gives them any jjain ; but I think it unreasonable to be called upon to love them, where I see no occasion, — to love a whole ftimily, perhaps eight, nine, or ten, indiscriniiuately, — to love all the i)retty dears, because children are so engaging ! I know there is a proverb, "Love me, love m y dog : " that is not always so very practicable, particularlyTrTlTe dog be set ui)on you to tease you or snap at you in sport. But a dog, or a lesser thing — any inanimate substance, as a keepsake, a watch or a ring, a tree, or the place where 176 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. we last parted when my friend went away upcn a long absence, I can make .shift to love, because I love him, and anything that reminds me of him ; provided it be in its nature indifferent, and apt to receive whatever hue i'ancy can give it. But children have a real character, and an essential being of themselves : they are amiable or unamiable j^er se ; I must love or hate them as I see cause for either in their qualities. A child's natm'e is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being, and to be loved or hated accordingly ; they stand with me upon their own stock, as much as men and women do. Oh ! but you will say, sm-e it is an attractive age, — there is something in the tender years of infancy that of itself charms us 1 That is the very reason why I am more nice about them. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in natiu-e, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them ; but the i^rettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory ; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest. — I was always rather squeamish in my women and children. But this is not the worst : one must be admitted into their familiarity at least, before they can complain of inattention. It implies visits, and some kind of inter- com"se. But if the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage — if you did not come in on the wife's side — if you did not sneak into the house in her train, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on, — look about you — your temtre is precarious — before a twelvemonth shall roll over yoirr head, you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have scarce a married friend of my acquaint- ance, upon wliose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship •lid nut ••(iiiiiiK'iiii' (//■/,/• III: /" ri'ni^j^f- lii^ marrianc. With .some liuiit;itiijijs, lliryr;ni riiilurc that ; but that A BACHELOll'S COJIPT.AINT OF MARRIED rEOrLK. 1 7 7 the good man should liave dared to enter into a solemn league of friendsliip in which they were not consulted, though it happened before they knew him, — before they that are now man and wife ever met,^ — this is intolerable to them. Every long friendship, every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with their currency, as a sovereign prince calls in the good old money that w'as coined in some reign before he was born or thouglit of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in the Avorld. You may guess what luck generally befalls such a rusty jjiece of metal as I am in these 7iew mintings. Iniuunerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm you oiit of their husband's confidence. Laugh- ing at all you say with a kind of wonder, as if you were a queer kind of fellow that said good things, hut an vddity, is one of the ways ; — they have a particular kind of stare for the purpose ; — till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some ex- crescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a general vein of observation (not quite vidgar) wdiich he perceived in you, begins to susjiect whether you are not altogether a humorist, — a fellow well enough to have consorted with in his bachelor days, but not Cjuite so jn-oper to be introduced to ladies. This may be called the staring way ; and is that wdiich has oftenest been \)\\i in practice against me. Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony ; that is, wdiere they find you an object of especial regard with their husband, wdio is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attachment founded on esteem which he has conceived towards you, by never qualified exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, till the good man, who luiderstands well enough that it is all done in compliment to him, growls weary of the debt of gratitude which is due to so nuich candour, and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking down a peg or two in his N 178 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. euthusiasm, sinks at length to the kindly level of moderate esteem — that " decent affection and complacent kindness " towards you, "where she herself can join in sympathy with him without much stretch and violence to her sincerity. Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so desirable a inu-jjoso are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband fond of you. If an esteem for some- thing excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any ima- ginary discovery of a want of poignancy in yoiu: conversa- tion, she will cry, " I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. , as a great wit?" If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed chann in your con- versation that he first grew to like you, and was content for this to overlook some trifling irregularities in yom* moral deportment, upon the first notice' of any of these she as readily exclaims, " This, my dear, is your good Mr. 1 " One good lady whom I took the liberty of expostidating with for not showing me c^uite so much respect as I thought due to her husband's old friend, had the candom- to confess to me that she had often heard Mr. speak of me before marriage, and that she had concedi£]J^,ft.^reat^xlQsiLe„tQ.^be_..acquainted with me, biit that the sight of me had very miich disapiJointecTTier expectations ; for, from her huaban d's representation s of me, she had formed a notion that she was to see a fine, tall, ofticei'-like looking man (I use her very words), the very reverse of wdiich j^roved to be the truth. This was candid ; and I had the civility not to ask her in return, how she came to pitch upon a standard of personal accom- l)lishments for her liusband's friends which differed so much from his own ; for my friend's dimensions as near as possible approximate to mine ; he standing five feet five in his shoes, in which I have the advantage of him by about half an inch ; and. he no more than myself ex- hibiting any indications of a martial character in his air or countenance. A bachelor's complaint of married I'EOrLE. 179 These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered in the absurd attempt to visit at their houses. To enumerate them all would be a vain endeavour ; I shall therefore just ghiuce at the very common impro- priety of whicli niiirried ladies are guilty, — of treating us as if w^c were their husliands, and vice versa. I mean, wdien they use us with familiarity, and their husbands with ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me the other night t\\'o or three hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because Mr. did not come home, till the oysters w^ere all spoiled, rather than she would be guilty of the impoliteness of touching one in his absence. This was reversing the point of good manners : for ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing oiirselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow- creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband's importunities to go to supper, she wotdd have acted according to the strict rides of propriety. I know no ceremony that ladies are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond the point of a modest behaviom* and decorum : therefore I must pro- test against the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of Morellas, which I was appljang to with great good-will, to her husband at the other end of the table, and recommended a plate of less extraordinary gooseberries to my unwedded palate in their stead. Neither can I excuse the wanton affront of' But I am weary of stringing u]) all my married acquaintance by Roman denominations. Let them amend and change their manners, or I promise to record the full-length English of their names, to the terror of all such desperate offenders in future. 180 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. The casual sight of au old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day — I know not by what chance it was pre- served so long — tempts me to call to mind a few of the Players, wlio make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast of parts in the Twelfth-Night, at the old Dnuy- lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago. There is something very touching in these old remembrances. They make us think liow we once used to read a Play Bill — not, as now peradventure, singling out a favourite performer, and cast- ing a negligent eye over the rest ; but spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of the scene ; when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian ; when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore — names of small account — had an importance, beyond what we can be con- tent to attribute now to the time's best actors. — " Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore." — What a full Shakspeariau sound it carries ! how fresh to memory arise the image and the manner of the gentle actor ! Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia; Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well; and Viola, in this play. Her voice had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady, melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts — in which lier memory now chiefly lives— in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giving an account how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino, It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following line, to make up the music — yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather raid, not mthout its grace and beauty — but, ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 181 wlieu she had declared her sister's history to be a " Wank," and that she "never told her love," there was a pause, as if the story had ended — and then the image of the " worm in the bud " came up as a new suggestion — and the heightened image of " Patience " still followed after that as by some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought springing up after thought, I would almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine lines — Write loyal cantons of contemned love — Halloo your name to the reverberate hills — there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which was to follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion ; or it was nature's own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law. Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the pride of her beauty, made an admirable Olivia. She was par- ticularly excellent in her unbending scenes in conversation with the Clown. I have seen some Olivias — and those very sensible actresses too — who in these interlocutions have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to vie conceits with him in do\Miright emulation. But she used him for her sport, like what he was, to triile a leisure sentence or two with, and then to be dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still. She touched the imperious fantastic humour of the character with nicety. Her fine spacious person filled the scene. The part of Malvolio has, in my judgment, been so often misunderstood, and the general merits of the actor, who then played it, so unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix upon these jwints. Of all the actors who flourished in my time— a melan- choly phrase if taken aright, reader — Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the present- ment of a great idea to the fixncy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm — the rarest faculty among players. 182 THE ESSAYS OF ELTA. None that I remember possessed even a portion of that fine madness Avhicli he threw out in Hotspur's fomous rant about glory, or tlie transports of the Venetian in- cendiary at the vision of the fired city. His voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect, of the trumijet. His gait was uncouth and stiff, but no way embarrassed by affectation ; and the thorough-bred gentle- man was uppermost in every movement. He seized the moment of passion with greatest tnith ; like a faithfid clock, never striking before the time ; never anticipating or leading you to anticipate. He was totally destitute of trick and artifice. He seemed come ui)on the stage to do the poet's message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the sentiment do its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to mountebank it ; and betrayed none of that cleverness whi(;h is the bane of serious acting. For this reason, his lago was the only endurable one which I remember to have seen. No spectator, from his action, coidd divine more of his artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy alone put you in ])ossession of the mystery. There were no by-intimations to make the audience fancy their own discernment so much greater than that of the Moor — who commonly stands like a great helpless mark, set up for mine Ancient, and a quantity of barren spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The lago of Bensley did not go to work so grossly. There was a trium- phant tone about the character, natural to a general con- sciousness of power ; but none of tliat petty vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any little success- ful stroke of its knavery — as is common with your small villains, and green probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow before its time. It was not a man setting his wits at a child, and winking all tlie while at other children, who are niiglitily pleased at being let into the secret ; but a consununate villain entrapping a noble nature into toils against which no discernment was avail- ON SOME OF TIIF. OLD ACTORS. 183 able, where tlie manner was as fathomless as the purpose seemed dark, and without motive. The part of Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed by Bensley with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some re- cent castings of tliat charac^ter) the very tradition nmst l)e worn out from the stage. No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving it to ]\Ir. Baddely, or I\Ir. Parsons ; when Bensley was occasionally absent from the theatre, John Kemblc thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvolio is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident. He is cold, austere, repelling ; but dignified, consistent, and, for what appears, rather of an over-stretched morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan ; and he might have worn his gold chain with honom' in one of oiu* old roundhead families, in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax. But his morality and his manners are misplaced in Illyria. He is opposed to the proper levities of the piece, and foils in the unequal contest. Still his pride, or his gravity (call it which you will), is inherent, and native to the man, not mock or affected, which latter only are the fit objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the best unlovely, but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His bearing is lofty, a little above his station, but probably not much above his deserts. We see no reason why he should not have been brave, honourable, accomplished. His careless com- mittal of the ring to the ground (which he was com- missioned to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth and feeling. His dialect on all occasions is that of a gentleman and a man of ediication. We must not con- found him with the eternal old, low steward of comedy. He is master of the household to a great princess ; a dignity proliably conferred upon him for other respects than age or length of service. Olivia, at the first indica- tion of his supposed madness, declares that she "would not have him miscarry for half of her dowr3^" Does this look as if the character was meant to appear little or in- significant 1 Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face — 184 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. of what? — of being "sick of self-love," — but with a gentleness and considerateness, which coidd not have been, if she had not thought that this j^articular infii-niity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to the knight and his sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited ; and when we take into consideration the unprotected condition of his mistress, and the strict regard with which her state of real or dissembled mourning would draw the eyes of the world upon her house-aftairs, Malvolio might feel the honour of the fomily in some sort in his keeping ; as it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers, or kins- men, to look to it — -for Sir Toby had dropped all such nice respects at the buttery-hatch. That Malvolio was meant to be represented as possessing estimable qualities, the expression of the Duke, in his anxiety to have him reconciled, almost infers : " Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace." Even in his abused state of chains and dark- ness, a sort of greatness seems never to desert him. He argues highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas, and philosophizes gallantly upon his straw. ^ There must have been some shadow of worth about the man ; he must have been something more than a mere vapour — a thing of straw, or Jack in office — before Fabian and Maria could liave ventured sending him upon a courting -errand to Olivia. There was some consonancy (as he would say) in the undertaking, or the jest would have been too bold even for that house of misrule. Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth. There was something in it beyond the cox- ■■ Cloum. What is tlie opinion of Pvtliagoras concerning wild fowl ? Mai. That the sonl of our grandani might liaply inhabit a bird. Clown. What thinkest thoii of his opinion ? Mai. I think nobly of the sonl, and no way approve of his opinion. ON SOME OF THE OED ACTORS. 185 comb. It was big and swelling, liut you could not be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see it taken down, but you felt that it was upon an elevation. He was magnilicent from the outset ; but when the decent sobrieties of the character began to give way, and the poison of self-love, in his conceit of the Countess's affec- tion, gradually to work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood before you. How he went smiling to himself ! with what inetfalile carelessness would he twirl his gold chain ! what a dream it was ! you were infected with the illusion, and did not wish that it shoidd be removed ! you had no room for laughter ! if an unseasonable reflection of morality obtruded itself, it was a deep sense of the pitiable infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him open to such frenzies — but, in tnith, you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it lasted — you felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with the eyes open. Who would not wish to live but for a day in the conceit of such a lady's love as Olivia 1 Why, the Duke would have given his principality but for a quarter of a minute, slee2iing or waking, to have been so deluded. The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate Hyperion. ! shake not the castles of his pride — endiu^e yet for a season, bright moments of confidence — ^" stand still, ye watches of the element," that Malvolio may be still in fixncy foir Olivia's lord ! — but fixte and retribution say no — I hear the mischievous titter of Maria — the witty taunts of Sir Toby — the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight — the counterfeit Sir Topas is lui- masked — and " thus the whirligig of time," as the true clown hath it, " brings in his revenges." I confess that I never saw the catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic interest. There was good foolery too. Few now remember Dodd. What an Aguecheek the stage lost in him ! Love- grove, who came nearest to the old actors, revived the character some few seasons ago, and made it sufficiently 186 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. grotesque ; Imt Dock! was it, as it came out of nature's hands. It might be said to remain in puris natnralibus. In expressing slowness of apprehension, this actor sur- passed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful process, till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a twilight conception— its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his intellect, as some have had the power to retard their pulsation. The balloon takes less time in filling than it took to cover the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with expression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a corner of his eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A jiart of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder. I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five-and-twenty years ago, that walking in the gardens of Gray's Inn — they were then far finer than they are now — the accursed Verulam Buildings had not encroached upon all the east side of them, cutting out delicate green crankles, and shouldering away one or two of the stately alcoves of the terrace — the siu'vivor stands gajnug and relationless as if it remembered its brother — they are still the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court, my l)elove(l Temi^le not forgotten — have the gravest character ; their aspect being altogether reverend and law -breathing — Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks taking my afternoon solace on a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely sad personage came towards me, whom, from his grave air and deportment, I judged to be one of the old Benchers of the Inn. He had a serious, thoiightful forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of mortality. As I have an instinctive awe of old Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of sub- indicative token of respect which one is apt to demon- strate toM^ards a venerable stranger, and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than any positive ON SOME OF THE OEl) ACTORS. 187 motion of the body to that effect — a species of huuiihty and Avill-worship which I observe, nine times out of ten, rather puzzles than i)leases the person it is offered to — when the face turning full upon me strangely identified itself with that of Dodd. Upon close insi)ection I was not mistaken. But could this sad thoughtful countenance be the same vacant face of folly which I had hailed so often under circumstances of gaiety ; which I liad never seen Avitliout a smile, or recognised but as the usher of mirth ; that looked out so formally flat in Foppington, so frothily jtert in Tattle, so iinpotently busy in Backbite ; so blankly divested of all meaning, or resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand agreeable imper- tinences 1 Was this the face — fidl of thought and care- fulness — that had so often divested itself at will of every trace of either to give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two or three hours at least of its furrows ! Was this the face — manly, sober, intelligent — which I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry with ! The remembrance of the freedoms which I had taken with it came upon me with a reproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I thoiight it looked upon me with a sense of injury. There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actors — joxvc pleasant felk)ws particularly — subjected to and suffering the common lot ; — their for- tunes, their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, their actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly connect them wdth more awful responsi- bilities. The death of this fine actor took place shortly after this meeting. He had quitted the stage some mouths ; and, as I learned afterwards, had been in the habit of resorting daily to these gardens, almost to the day of his decease. In these serious walks, probably, he was divesting himself of many scenic and some real, vanities — weaning himself from the frivolities of the lesser and the greater theatre — doing gentle penance for a life of no very reprehensible fooleries — taking off by degrees the buffoon mask which he might feel he had worn too 188 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. long — and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part. Dying, he " put on the weeds of Dominic." i If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily forget the pleasant creature, who iu those days enacted the part of the Clown to Dodd's Sir Andrew. — Richard, or rather Dicky Suett — for so in his life-time he delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the appella- tion — lietli buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender years were dedicated. There are who do yet remember him at that period — his pipe clear and harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was " cherub Dicky." What cliijped his wings, or made it expedient that he shoidd exchange the holy for the profone state ; whether he had lost his good voice (his best recommendation to that olfice), like Sir John, " with hallooing and singing of anthems;" or whether he was adjudged to lack some- thing, even in those early years, of the gravity indisiiens- able to an occupation which professeth to " commerce with the skies," — I could never rightly learn ; but we find him, after the proljation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition and become one of us. I think he was not altogether of that timber out of which cathedral seats and sounding-boards are hewed. But if a glad heart — kind, and therefore glad — be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much ^ Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice col- lection of old English literature. I shoidd judge him to have been a man of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu which no length of study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening iu Aguecheek, and recognising Dodd the next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a "Save you, Sir Andreiv." Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave of the hand, put him off with an "Away, Fool." ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 189 blameless satisfaction to himself and to the puhlie, be accepted for a suri)liee — his white stole, and albe. The fii-st fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he com- menced, as I have been told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself imitable. He was the Robin Goodfellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all things with a welcome perplexity, him- self no whit troubled for the matter. He was known, like Pu(^k, by his note — Ha ! Ha ! Ha ! — sometimes deepening to Ho ! Ho ! Ho I with an irresistible accession, derived, perhaps, remotely from his ecclesiastical educa- tion, foreign to his prototype of — La ! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling La ! of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by the foithful transcript of his friend Mathews's mimicry. The "force of natm-e could no fiuiher go." He drolled upon the stock of these two syllables richer than the ciickoo. Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported himself upon those two spider's strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scrujjle must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down ; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin Good- fellow, " thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet. Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready mid- wife to a without-pain-delivered jest ; in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the centre ; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch. 190 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The ditierence, I take it, was this : — Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral preten- sions. Dicky was more lil-ed for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood — but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He put us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him — not as from Jack, as from an antagonist, — but because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death ; and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him liy Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple ex- clamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph— La! La ! Bohhy ! The elder Palmer (of stage-trading celebrity) commonly played Sir Toby in those days ; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaft* which he did not quite fill out. He was as much too showy as Moody (who sometimes took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an air of swaggering gentility aliout Jack Palmer. He Avas a gentleman with a slight infusion of the footman. His brother Bob (of recenter memory), who was his shadow in everything while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow afterwards — was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter ingredient; that was all. It is amazing how a little of the more or less makes a difference in these things. When you saw Bobby in the "Duke's Servant,^ you said, " What a pity such a ])retty fellow was only a servant !" When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace his promotion to some lady of quality who fancied the liandsome fellow in his topknot, 1 Hi"h Life Below Stairs. ON SO:\[E OF 'I'JIH OLD ACTOItS. 191 and luul bouglit liim a coinnii^sioii. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was iiisui)eral»le. Jack liad two voices, botli plaiusible, liypucritical, and insinuating ; but his secondary or supi)lemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his common one. It was reserved for the spectator ; and the dramatis personce were supiwsed to know nothing at all about it. The lies of Young Wilding, and the sentiments in Josepli Surface, were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the audience. This secret correspondence with the company before the cm"taiu (wliich is the banc and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy eft'ect in some kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve or of Sheridan especially, wlicre the absolute sense of reality (so indis- peu.salile to scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather interfere to diminish your pleasiu-e. The fact is, joxx do not believe in such characters as Surface — the villain of artificial comedy — even while you read or see them. If you did, they would shock and not divert you. When Ben, in Love for Love, retiirns from sea, the fol- lowing exquisite dialogue occiu's at his first meeting with his father : — (Sir Sa/iqison. Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw thee. Ben. E}^, ey, been. Been far enough, an that be all. — Well, father, and how do all at home ? how does brother Dick and brother Val ? Sir Sampson. Dick ! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. I writ you word when you were at Leghorn. Ben. Mess, that's true ; Marry, I had forgot. Dick's dead, as you say — well, and how ? — I have a many questions to ask you. Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted temperament of the clia- racter. But when you read it in the spirit with which such i)layful selections and specious combinations rather than strict metajjhrases of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does, wound 192 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. the moral sense at all. For what is Ben — the pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us — but a piece of satire — a creation of Congreve's fancy — a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character — his contempt of money — his credulity to women — with that necessary estrangement from home which it is just within the verge of credibility to suppose might i^roduce such an hallucina- tion as is here described. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character. But Avhen an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phan- tom — the creature dear to half-belief — which Bannister exhibited — displays before our eyes a downright concretion of a Wappiug sailor — a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar — and nothing else — when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of the head, and a veering undi- rected goodness of purpose — he gives to it a downright daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its actions ; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the charac- ter with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone — we feel the discord of the thing ; the scene is disturbed ; a real man has got in among the dramatis persona', and puts them out. We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his tnie place is not behind the curtain, but in the first or second gallery. ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional license of dialogue 1 I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw ON THE ARTIFICIAL CO.MEDY OF LAST CENTURY. 193 everytliing u}) to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing jDagcant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. "We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine jjlaying his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not redui-il)le in life to the point of strict morality), and take it all for truth. We substitute a real for a dramatic pereon, and judge him accordingly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis persona', his peers. We have been spoiled with — not sen- timental comedy — but a tyi'ant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all- devouring drama of common life ; where the moral point is everything ; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy), we recognise om'selves, om* brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies, — the same as in life, — with an interest in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afibrd om- moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. What is there transacting, by no modification is made to ufiect us in any otlier manner than tlic same events or characters would do in oiu: relatiousliii)s of life. We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither like our ancestors, to escape fi'om the pressm'e of reality, so much as to confirm our experi- ence of it ; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the moiu^nful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue ; or which in fact was iuilifterent to neither, where neither properly was called in c^uestion ; that haj)py breatliing-place from tlie burthen of a perpetual moral questioning — the sanctuary 194 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry — is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the phxce are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of WTong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and siinshine. I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience, — not to live always in the precincts of the law courts, — but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions — to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me — Secret shades Of woody Ida's inmost grove, While yet there was uo fear of Jove. I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better alwaysfor the perusal of oueof Congreve's — nay, whyshoxdd I not add even of Wycherley's — comedies. 1 am the gayer at least for it ; and I could never connect those sjiorts of a witty fancy in any shape with any residt to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of them- selves almost as much as fairy land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation sliall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire ; because in a modern jilay I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of ^xMce is the measm'e of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it ; it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF LAST CENTURY. 195 from which it must needs fall headlong ; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into tlie sphere of one of his Good ]\Ien, or Angels. But in its own world do we feel the creatiu'e is so very bad 1 — The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants and tlic Lady Touchwoods, in their own s))h('re, do not oftend my moral sense ; in fact, they do not a])i)eal to it at all. They seem engaged in their pro{)er element. They break through no laws or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land — what shall I call it ? — of cuckoldry — the Utopia of gallantly, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a specidative scene of things, which has no re- ference Avhatever to the world that is. No good person can be justly oftended as a spectator, because no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays- — the few excejitions only are mistal-es — is alike essentially vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes — some little gene- rosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted — not only anything like a faultless character, but any pre- tensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy as the design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power whicli his Way of tlie World in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing — for you neither hate nor love his personages — and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations ; and his shadows flit before you A\'ithout distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have 196 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we think them none. Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and stnunpets, — tlie business of their brief existence, the undivided pur- suit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognised ; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so trans- lating them. No such efiects are produced, in tlieir world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings —for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated — for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained — for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted, no holy wedlock bauds are snapped asunder — for affection's depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong, — gratitude or its opposite, — claim or duty, — ]3aternity or sonship. Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon or Dapperwit steal away Miss Martha ; or who is the father of Lord Froth's or Sir Paid Pliant's children 1 The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at the battle of the frogs and mice. But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as imperti- nently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful neces- sities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams. Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the School for ON TIIK ARTIFICIAL COJMEDY OF LAST CENTURY. 197 Scandal in its ti'lory. This comedy grew out of Con- greve and Wyclicrley, but gathered sonic alhxys of the sentimental comedy wliich followed theirs. It is im- possible that it slK)uld be now acted, though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Smface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured stejj, the insinuating voice — to express it in a word — the downright acted villany of the l)art, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness, — the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, — which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that char- acter, ^J miist needs conclude the present generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more denser^ I freely confess that he divided the palm with me wiOTliis better brother ; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are passages, — like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor re- lation, — incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other — but over these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any i:)leasure ; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incon- gruous ; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incom- patibilities ; the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant ; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements. 198 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. A jjlayer with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every tiirn which might tend to mirealise, and so to make the character ftxscinating. He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the deathbeds of those geniuses are con- trasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have dis- appeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Chiu'chyard memory — (an exhi- bition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death ; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former, — and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to be desi)ised, — so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of the rod, — taking it in like honey and butter, — with which the latter submits to tlie scythe of the gentle bleeder. Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a i^opular young ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would not covt^t to meet half- way the stroke of such a delicate mower 1 — John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was plnying to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had the first intimation of a senti- ment before it was on his lips. His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. AVhat was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetiy — or the thin thing {Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a l)lethoiy 1 The fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this oiu* age of seriousness. The jjleasaut okl Teazle Kinc/, too, is gone in good time. His manner woiUd scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate — acqnit or condemn— censure or pity— exert our detestable cox- combry of moral judgment upon everything. Joseph ON THE ARTIFICIAL ("OMKDY OF LAST CENTURY. 199 Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain — no comioromise — his first api)earance must shock and give horror — his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene — for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its xdterior legitimate ends, but his brother's pro- fessions of a good heart centre in downright self-satis- faction) must be loved, and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another. Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings while King acted it) were evidently as much i:)layed off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage, — he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury — a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged — - the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villanous seducer Joseph. To realise him more, liis sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright jjimgency of life — must (or should) make you not mirthful but im- comfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbom* or old friend. The delicious scenes wdiich give the play its name and zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you heard the repiitation of a dear female friend attacked in your real presence. Crab tree and Sir Benjamin — those poor snakes that live but in the sunshine of your mirth — must be ripened by this hot-bed process of real- ization into asps or amphisbsenas ; and Mrs. Candour— O ! frightful ! — become a hooded serpent. ! who that remembers Parsons and Dodd — the wasp and butterfly of the School for Scandal — in those two characters ; and charming natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in this latter part — would forego the true scenic delight — the escape from life — the oblivion of consequences — the holiday "200 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. barring out of tlic pedant Kcflection — those Satiu'iialia of two or three brief hoims, well won from the world — to sit instead at one of our modern plays — to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals — dulled rather, and bhmtcd, as a faculty Avithout repose must be — and his moral vanity jiampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectator's risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author nothing 1 No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this manager's comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington in Lady Teazle ; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired when I fii'st saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then the fixshion to ciy down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith ; but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a tendency. But, as far as I coidd judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good humour. He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he de- livered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could lie altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue — the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley — because none understood it — half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love ON TIIK ACTING OF MUNDKN. 201 for Love, was, to }iiy rct'ollcction, faultless, lie llagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be jiarticularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The rehixing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him — the j)layful court-bred sjiirit in which he condescended to the jJayers in Hamlet — the sportive relief wliich he threw into the darker shades of Richard — disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, his torpors — but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy — politic savings, and fetches of the breath — husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist — rather, I think than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less pain- ful than the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigilance, — the "lidless dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy. ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. Not many nights ago I had come home from seeing this extraordinary performer in Cockletop ; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of it, by conjuring up the most opposite associa- tions. I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life ; private misery, public calamity. All would not do : There the niitic sate blocking our state his <|ueer visnomy — his bewildering costume — all the strange things which he had raked together — his serpen- tine rod swagging about in his pocket — Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics — O'Keefe's wild farce, and his wilder commentary — till the passion of laughter, like 202 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. grief ill excess, U'lieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance it had driven away. But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more per- plexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me, like the faces which, Avhether you will or no, come when you have been taking 0}num — all the strange combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the day he came commis- sioned to dry Tip the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke ! A season or two since, there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety, the latter would not fall far short of the former. There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one it is !) of Liston ; Imt Munden has none that you can properly jjin down, and call his. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unaccount- able warfare Avitli your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of featm-es, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion ; not so much a comedian, as a company. If his name could be multiplied like his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faces : applied to any other person, the j^hrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human coun- tenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river-horse : or come forth a j^ewitt, or la])wing, some feathered metamorphosis. I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry — in old Dornton — difi'use a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man ; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint ON ['UF. ACTtNC OF IMUNDEN. 203 ai)i)ro;iclie.s to this .sort of exccllciK'c in other })hiycrs. JJut ill the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and unai-companied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began, and nuist end, with himself. Can any man wondn; like him 1 can any man see r/hosts, like him? or ji ling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped every- where. The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought as it is the feeder of love, of silence, and ad- miration. So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay — I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion' — 'half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle w\aters lay unexplored for me ; and not till late in life, ciu^iosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, ex- tensive prosi:)ects — and those at no great distance from the house — I was told of such — what were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden 1 So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison, and have been hemmed in by a yet secm'er cincture of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with the garden-loving jioet — Biud me, ye woodbines, in your twines ; Curl me about, ye gadding vines ; And oh so close your circles lace, That I may never leave this place ; But, lest your fetters prove too weak. Ere I your silken bondage break, 208 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Do you, brambles, chain me too, And, courteous briars, uail me through.^ I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug fii-e-sides— the low -built roof — parlours ten feet by ten — frugal boaixls, and all the homeliness of home — these were the condition of my birth — the wholesome soil which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond, and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting accidents of a great fortune. To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors ; and the coatless antiquary in his un- emblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray's or De Cliiford's pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea ? Is it tren- chant to their swords ■? can it be hacked off as a spm- can 1 ( )r torn away like a tarnished garter 1 What, else, were the families of the great to us 1 what pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or tlieir capitulatory brass monuments '? What to us the uninterrupted ciu'rent of their bloods, if om- own did not answer within us to a cognate and corresponding ele- vation 1 Or, wherefore, else, tattered and diminished 'Scut- cheon that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, Bla.ke.smoor ! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters — thy emblematic sup- porters, with their prophetic "Resurgam" — till, every dreg of peasantry 2)urging oft", I received into myself Very Gentility 1 Thou wert first in my morning eyes ; and of nights hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee. ' [Marvell, on Ajipletou House, to the Lord Fairfax.] BLAKESMOOR IN H SlIIltK. 209 This is tho only true gentry by adoption ; the veritalilci change of Mood, and not as eni})irics have tabled, by transfusion. Who it was V)y dying that had earned the s})lendid troijhy, I kuow not, I inquired not ; l)ut its fading rags, and coloiu's cobweb-stained, told that its subject was of two centuries back. And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas, — feeding flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln — did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trajipings of this once proud ^Egon ? repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might i^ossibly have heaped iu his life-time upon my poor pastoral progenitor. If it were presumption so to si^eculate, the present owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle ; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fixncy, or to soothe my vanity. I was the trae descendant of those old AV s, and not the present flxmily of that name, who had fled the old waste places. Lline was that gallery of good old fixmily portraits, which as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one — ^aud then another — would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to recognise the new relationship ; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity. The Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb — that hung next the great bay window — with the bright yellow H shire hair, and eye of watchet hue — so like my Alice ! — I am i:)ersuaded she was a true Elia — Mildred Elia, I take it. Mine, too, Blakesmooe, was thy noble JMarble Hall, ■\nth its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars — stately busts in marble — ranged round ; of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of r 210 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder ; but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality. Mine, too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or self-forgetful maiden — so common since, that bats have roosted in it. Mine, too, — whose else 1 — thy costly fruit-garden, witli its sun-baked southern wall ; the ampler pleasm-e-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, besjiake their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering ; the verdant quarters backwarder still ; and, stretching still lieyoud, in old for- mality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pigeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not ; but chUd of Athens or old Kome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery. Was it for this, that I Idssed my childish hands too fervently in your idol -worship, walks and windings of Blakesmoor ! for this, or what sin of mine, has the l)lough passed over your pleasant places 1 I sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extingviished habitations there may be a hope — a germ to be revivified. POOR RELATIONS. A Poor Relation^is the most irrelevant thing in natiu"e, — a piece of impertinent correspondency, — an odious ap- proximation, — a haunting conscience, — a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon- tide of our ])rosperity, — an vm welcome remembrancer, — a perpetually recurring mortification, — a drain on your purse, — a more intoler- POOR KELATION.S. 211 al)lc dun upon your pride, — a drawback upon siiccess, — a rebuke to your rising, — a stain in your blood, — a blot on your 'scutcheon, — a rent in yoiu* garment, — a death's head at your banquet, — Agathoclcs' pot, — a Mordecai in your gate, — a Lazarus at your door, — a lion in yom- path, — a frog in your chand)er, — a fly in your ointment, — a mote in yoiu- eye, — a triunipli to your enemy, — an apology to your friends, — the one thing not needfid, — the hail in harvest, — the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet. He is known by his knock. Yom^ heart telleth you " That is Mr. ." A rap, between familiarity and respect ; that demands, and at the same time seems to desjmir of, entertainment. He entereth smiling and — embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and — draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time— when the table is full. He oft'ereth to go away, seeing you have company — but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visitor's two children are accommodated at a side-table. He never cometh upon open days, when your wife says, with some complacency, " My dear, perhaps Mr. will drop in to-day." He remembereth birth-days — and professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the turbot being small — yet suftereth himself to be im- portuned into a slice, against his first resolution. He sticketh by the port — yet will be prevailed upon to empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil enough, to him. The guests think " they have seen him before." Every one speculateth upon his condition ; and the most part take him to be a — tide-waiter. He calleth you by your Chris- tian name, to imply that his other is the same with your own. He is too familiar Ijy half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity, he might pass for a casual dependant ; with more boldness, he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend ; yet taketh on him more state than 212 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. befits fi client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringcth up no rent — yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanoiu", that your guests take him for one. He is asked to make one at the whist table ; rcfuseth on the score of poverty, and — resents l^eing left out. When the company break up, he proffereth to go for a coach — and lets the servant go. He recollects your grandfather ; and will thrust in some mean and quite un- important anecdote — of the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as " he is blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to institute what he calleth — favourable comparisons. With a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will inquire the price of your furni- ture : and insidts you with a special commendation of yom- window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is- the more elegant shape ; but, after all, there was some- thing more comfortable about the old tea-kettle — which you must remember. He dare say you must find a great convenience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to yoiu' lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet ; and did not know, till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the ftimily. His memory is unseasonable ; his com- pliments perverse ; his talk a trouble ; his stay pertina- cious ; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a corner as precipitately as possible, and feel fixirly rid of two nuisances. There is a worse evil imder the sun, and that is — a female Poor Eelation. You may do something -with the other ; you may pass him oft' tolerably well ; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. " He is an old humor- ist," you may say, " and aflects to go threadbare. His circumstances are better than folks would take them to be. You are fond of having a Character at yovu" table, and truly he is one." But in the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses be- low herself from caprice. The truth must out without shuffling. " (She is plainly related to the L 's ; or POOR RFXATIONS. 213 wliat docs she at their house V She is, in till })robal)ility, your wife's cousin. Nine times out of ten, at least, this is the case." — Her garb is something between a gentle- woman and a beggar, yet the former evidently jiredomi- nates. She is most provokingly ]unnl)le, and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may I'cquire to be r(>- presscd sometinres — aliquando svfffaminandits crat — but there is no raising her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped — after the gentlemen. ]Mr. • requests the honour of taking wine with her ; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former — because he does. She calls the servant Sir ; and insists on not troiibling him to hold her plate. The housekeeper patronises her. The children's governess takes upon her to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for a harpsichord. Eichard Amlet, Esi^., in the i)lay, is a notable instance of the disadvantages to which this chimerical notion of ajfinily constituting a claim to acquciintance, may subject the spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt him and a lady with a great estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him " her son Dick." But she has wherewithal in the end to recom- pense his indignities, and float him again upon the bril- liant surface, under which it had been her seeming business and pleasure all along to sink him. All men, besides, are not of Dick's temperament. I knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W ■ was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much pride ; but its quality was in- offensive ; it was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a distance ; it only sought to ward off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried as for as it could go, with- out infringing upon that respect, which he woidd have every one else equally maintain for himself He A\^ould 214 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. liave you to think alike with him on this topic. ]\Iauy a qiiarrel have I had with him, when we were rather older boys, and our tallncss made us more obnoxious to ol^serva- tion in the blue clothes, because I would not thread the alleys and Ijlind ways of the town with him to elude notice, when we have been out together on a holiday in the streets of this sneering and prying metrojiolis. W went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness of a scholar's life, meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction, wrought in him a passion- ate devotion to the place, with a profound aversion from the society. The servitor's gown (worse than his school array) climg to him with Nessian venom. He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must have walked erect, and in which Hooker, in his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no discommendable vanity. In the depth of college shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from observation. He found shelter among books, which insult not ; and studies, that ask no questions of a youth's finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom cared for looking out beyond his domains. The healing influence of studious pm'suits was upon him to soothe and to abstract. He was almost a healthy man, when the waywardness of his fate broke out against him with a second and worse malignity. The father of AV had hitherto exercised the humltle pro- fession of house-painter, at N , near Oxford. A sup- posed interest Avith some of the heads of colleges had now induced him to take up his abode in that city, with the hojje of being employed upon some jiublic works which were talked of. From that moment I read in the counte- nance of the yoimg man the determination which at length tore him from academical pursuits for ever. To a person imacquainted with our universities, the distance between the gownsmen and the townsmen, as they are called — the trading part of tlie latter especially — is carried to an ex- cess that would appear harsh and incredible. The tem- perament of W 's father was diametrically the reverse POOR RELATIONS. 215 of his own. Old W was a little, busy, cringiii<^ tradesman, who, with his son upon his arm, would stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand, to anything that wore the scmldance of a gowu — insensible to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose chamber- fellow, or eipial in standing, perhaps, he was thus obse- quiously anil gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things could not last. W must change the air of Oxford, or be suffocated. He chose the former ; and let the sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as high as they can bear, censure the dereliction ; he can- not estimate the struggle. I stood with W , the last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from the High Street to the back of * * * * college, where W kept his rooms. He seemed thoughtful and more reconciled. I ventured to rally him — finding him in a better mood — upon a representation of the Artist Evangelist, which the old man, whose affixirs were beginning to floiuish, had caused to be set up in a splendid^ sort of frame over his really handsome shop, either as a token of prosi^erity or badge of gratitude to his saint. W looked up at the Luke, and, like Satan, "knew his mounted sign — and fled." A letter on his father's table, the next morn- ing, announced that he had accepted a commission in a regiment about to embark for Portugal. He was among the first who perished before the walls of St. Sebastian. I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently i)ainful ; but this theme of poor relationshi}) is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic associations, that it is difficult to keep the account dis- tinct without blending. The earliest impressions which I received on this matter are certainly not attended with anything painful, or very humiliating, in the recalling. At my father's table (no very splendid one) was to be found, every Saturday, the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely 216 THE KSSAYS OF ELIA. appearance. His dei)ortmeut was of the essence of gravity ; his words few or none ; and I was not to make a noise in his presence. I had little inclination to have done so — for my cue was to admire in silence. A jjar- ticidar elboAV-chair was ajjjjropriated to him, which was in no case to be violated. A pecidiar sort of sweet pudding, which appeared on no other occasion, distinguished the days of his coming. I used to think him a i)rodigiously rich man. All I could make out of him was, that he and my fother had been schoolfellows, a world ago, at Lincoln, and that he came from the Mint. The Mint I knew to be a jilace where all the money was coined — and I thought he was the owner of all that money. Awful ideas of the Tower twined themselves about his presence. He seemed above human infirmities and passions. A sort of melancholy grandeur invested him. From some inexplicable doom I fancied him obliged to go about in an eternal suit of mourning ; a captive — a stately being let out of the Tower on Satiuxlays. Often have I wondered at the temerity of my fatlier, who, in spite of an habitual general respect which we all in common manifested towards him, would venture now and then to stand 11}) against liim in some argument touching their youthful days. The houses of the ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers know) l)etween the dwellers on the hill and in the valley. This marked distinction formed an obvious division between the boys Avho lived above (however brought together in a common school) and the boys whose paternal residence was on the plain ; a sufficient cause of hostility in the code of these young Grotiuses. My fiithcr had been a leading IMoun- taineer ; and would still maintain the general superiority in skill and hardihood of the Above Boys (his own faction) over the Belovj Boys (so were they called), of which [larty his contemporary had been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes on this topic — the only one vipon which the old gentleman was ever brought out — and bad blood bred ; even sometimes almost to the rooi; ui'.LATroNS. 217 reconimencomoiit (so I expected) of tictiuil hostilities. But my father, who scorned to insist ujion advantages, generally contrived to turn the conversation upon some adroit by -commendation of the old Minster ; in th(> general ])reference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, the dweller on the liill, and the plain-born, could meet on a conciliating level, and lay down their less important difterences. Once only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and I remember with anguish the thought that came over me : " Perhai^s he will never come here again." He had been pressed to take another plate of the viand, which I have already mentioned as the indispensable concomitant of his visits. He had refused with a resistance amoimting to rigom*, when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but who had something of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, that she would sometimes press civility out of season — uttered the following memorable application- — -"Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day." The old gentleman said nothing at the time — but he took occasion in the course of the evening, when some argu- ment had intervened l)etwecn them, to utter with an emphasis which chillecl the company, and which chills me now as I write it — "Woman, you are sujierannuated ! " John Billet did not survive long, after the digesting of this affront ; but he survived long enough to assure me that peace was actually restored ! and if I remember aright, another pudding was discreetly substituted in the place of that which had occasioned the offence. He died at the Mint (anno 1781) where he had long held, what he accounted, a comfortable indejiendence ; and with five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a penny, which were found in his escritoir after his decease, left the world, blessing God that he had enough to bury him, and that he had never been obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was — a Poor Relation. 218 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. To mind tlie iusiile of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's hrain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own. — Lord Fop2Jington, in " The liekqjse." An iugeuious ac(|uaiutaiice of my own was so mucli struck with this briglit sally of his Lordshiii, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his orighiality. At the hazard of losing some credit on tliis head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsider- able i:)ortiou of my time to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading ; I cannot sit and think. Books tliiuk for me. I have no repiignances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel f^r me, nor Jonatluin AVihl too low. I can read anything which I call a b(jul: Tliere are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such. In this catalogue of hoolcs ichich are no hools — hihlia a-hihlia — I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back. Scientific Treatises, Almanacs, Statutes at Large : the works of Hume, Gibljon, Robertson, Bcattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally, all those volumes wdiich "no gentleman's library should be without : " the Histories of Flavins Josei)hus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosoi)liy. With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding. I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things DETACHED TIIOUdlTTS ON BOOKS AND IlEADINO. 219 in hooks clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of trae shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well-bouud semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted play -book, then, opening what " seem its leaves," to come bolt ui)on a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele or a Farquhar, and find — Adam Smith. To view a well-arranged assortment of block- headed Encyclopnsdias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of russia, or morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably re -clothe my shivering folios, would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself again in the world. I never see these imiwstors, but I long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils. To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of a volume. Magnificence comes after. Tliis, when it can be afforded, is not to lie lavished upon all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would not dress a set of magazines, for instance, in full suit. The dishabille, or lialf-l)inding (mth russia backs ever) is our costume. A Shakspeare or a Milton (unless the first editions), it were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The possession of them confers no distinction. The exterior of them (the things themselves being so common), strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of property in the owner. Thomson's Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond russia) if we would not forget kind feelings in fixstidiousness, of an old " Circulating Library " Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield ! How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight !^ — of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or hard-working mantua-maker) after her long day's needle-toil, nmning far into midnight, when she has 220 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. snatched an hour, ill sijared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents ! Who would have them a whit less soiled *? ^Yllat better condition could we desire to see them in 1 In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and all that class of perpetually self- reproductive volumes — Great Natm-e's Stereotypes — we see them individually perish with less regret, because we know the copies of them to be " eterne." But where a book is at once both good and rare — where the individual is almost the species, and when that perishes. We know not where is that Promethean torcli That can its light i-elumine, — such a liook, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his Duchess — no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently dm-able, to honour and keep safe siu-h a jewel. Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever to be reprinted, but old editions of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his l^rose works. Fuller — of whom we have, reprints, yet the books themselves, though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we know liave not endenizened them- selves (nor possibly ever will) in the national heart, so as to become stock books — it is good to possess these in durable and costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of Shakspeare. [You cannot make a jx't book of an author whom everybody reads.] I rather i)refer the com- mon editions of Eowe and Tonson, without notes, and with jilatcK, which, l)eing so execrably bad, serve as maps or modest remembrancers, to the text ; and, without pi'e- tending to any supposable enuilatiou with it, are so much better than the Shakspeare gallery engravings, which did. I have a community of feeling with my countiymeu about his Plays, and I like those editions of him best A\hicli DETACHED THOUGHTS ON T!OOKS AND READINO. 221 have been oftenest tunihlcd about and handled. — On the contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions are painful to look at. I have uo symiiathy with them. If they were as much read as the current editions of the other poet, I should prefer them in that shape to the older one. I do not know a more heartless si^ht than the reprint of the Anatomy of INIelancholy. M^liat need was there of un- eartliing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censm'e 1 what hapless stationer coidd dream of Burton ever becoming popular ? — The wretched Malone could not do worse, when he bribed the sexton of Strat- ford chm-ch to let him Avhitewash the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, which stood there, in rude but lively fashion depicted, to the very colom- of the cheek, the eye, the eye- brow, hair, the very dress he used to wear — the only authentic testimony we had, however imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat of white paint. By , if I had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire, I would have clapped both commentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets. I think I see them at their work — these sai^ient trouble-tombs. Shall I be thought ftiutastical if I confess that the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear — to mine, at least— than that of Milton or of Shakspeare 1 It may be that the latter are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the men- tion, are, Kit IMarlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthorn- den, and Cowley. ]\Iuch depends upon ii'he)i and ir/icn' you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who woidd think of taking ujj the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons ? 222 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and pvxrged ears. Winter evenings — the world shut out — with less of ceremony the gentle Shakspeare enters. At such a sea- son the Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale — These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud — to yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one — and it degenerates into an audience. Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness. A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices it is the custom (to save so much indi- vidual time) for one of the clerks — who is the best scholar — to commence upon the Tiines or the Chronicle and recite its entire contents aloud, j^^'o ^ono ]mblico. With every advantage of lungs and elocnition, the effect is singularly vapid. In barljers' shops and public-houses a fellow will get up and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as some discovery. Another follows with his selection. So the entire journal transpires at length by piecemeal. Seldom- readers are slow readers, and, without this expedient, no one in the company would probably ever travel through the contents of a whole paper. Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down -nathout a feeling of disappointment. AVliat an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, kee})s the paper ! I am sick of hearing the waiter l)awling out incessantly, "The Chronicle is in hand. Sir." Coming into an inn at night — having ordered your supper — what can be more delightful than to find lying in the window -seat, left there time out of mind by the DKTACHED THOUGHTS ON liOOKS AND KEADINO. 223 carelessness of some fui-incr gncst — two or three iminbers of the okl Town and Country ]\Iagazine, with its amusing tete-a-tcte pictures — " The Royal Lover and Lady G ;" "The Melting Platonic and the old Beau," — and such- like antiquated scaudaH Would you exchange it — at that time, and in that place — for a better book % Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much for the weightier kinds of reading — the Paradise Lost, or Comus, lie could have read to him — but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a maga- zine, or a light pamphlet. I shoidd not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading Candide. I do not remember a more whimsical smprise than having been once detected — by a familiar damsel — re- clined at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera) reading — Pamela. There was nothing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure ; but as she seated lierself down by me, and seemed deter- mined to read in company, I could have Avished it had been — any other book. We read on very sociably for a few jjages ; and, not finding the author much to her taste, she got up, and — went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the lilush (for there was one between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret. I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian min- ister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow Hill (as yet Skinner's Street ^cas not), between the hoiu-s of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner. I owm this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keep- ing clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, woiUd have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points. 224 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A, There is a elass of street readers, whom I can never coutem2)late ^\^thout affection — the poor gentry, wlio, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls — the owner, with his hard eye, casting envions looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he shall inter- pose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they " snatch a fearful joy." Martin B , in this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant to purchase the work. ]\I. declares, that under no circumstance in his life did he ever i^eruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took in those Tuieasy snatches. A qiiaint poetess of our day has moral- ised upon this subject in two very touching but homely stanzas : I saw a l)oy with eager eye Oiieu a book upon a stall, Aud read, as he'd devour it all ; Which, when the stall-man did esjty, Soon to the boy I heard him call, " You Sir, you never buy a book, Therefore in one yotx shall not look." The boy pass'd slowly on, aud with a sigh He wish'd he never had been taught to read. Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need Of sufferings the poor liave manj', Wliich never can the rich annoy. I soon perceived another boy, \Vlio look'd as if he had not any Food, for that day at least — enjoy The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder, Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat : No wonder if he wished he ne'er had learn'd to eat. STAGE ILLUSION. 225 STAGE ILLUSION. A PLAY is said to be well or ill acted, in proportion to the scenical illusion produced. Whether such illusion can in any case be perfect, is not the cpiestion. The nearest approach to it, we are told, is when the actor appears wholly unconscious of the presence of spectators. In tragedy — in all which is to affect the feelings — this undi- vided attention to his stage business seems indispensable. Yet it is, in fact, dispensed with every day by our cleverest tragedians ; and while these references to an audience, in the shape of rant or sentiment, are not too frequent or jialpable, a sufficient quantity of illusion for the purposes of dramatic interest may be said to be j^roduced in spite of them. But, tragedy apart, it may be inquired whether, in certain characters in comedy, especially those which are a little extravagant, or which involve some notion repug- nant to the moral sense, it is not a proof of the highest skill in the comedian when, without absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a tacit understanding with them ; and makes them, miconsciously to themselves, a party in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the mode of doing this ; but we speak only of the great artists in the profession. The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. To see a coward done to the life upon a stage woidd produce anything but mirth. Yet we most of us remember Jack Bannister's cowards. Could anything be more agreeable, more pleasant? We loved the rogues. How was this effected but by the exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us, the spectators, even in the extremity of the shaking fit, that he was not half such a coward as we took him for 1 We saw all the common symjjtoms of the malady upon him ; the quivering Q 226 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. lip, the cowering knees, the teeth chattering ; and could have sworn " tliat man was frightened." But we forgot all the while — or kept it almost a secret to oui'selves — that he never ouce lost his self-possession ; that he let out, by a thousand droll looks and gestures — meant at ?^s-, and not at all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the scene, that his confidence in his own resources had never once deserted him. Was this a genuine pictiu'e of a coward ; or not rather a likeness, which the clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead of an original ; while we secretly connived at the delusion for the purpose of greater pleasure, than a more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to be concomitants of cowardice in real life, could have given us 1 Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endur- able on the stage, but because the skilful actor, by a sort of subreference, rather than direct ajipeal to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its odiousness, by seeming to engage rmr compassion for the inseciu'e tenure by which he holds his money-bags and parchments ? By this subtle vent half of the hatefulness of the character — the self- closeness with which in real life it coils itself up from the sympathies of men — evaporates. The miser becomes sympathetic; i.e., is no genuine miser. Here again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very disagreeable reality. Spleen, irritability — the pitiable infirmities of old men, which produce only pain to behold in the realities, coun- terfeited upon a stage, divert not altogether for the comic appendages to them, but in part from an inner conviction that they are being acted before us ; that a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself They please by being done luider the life, or beside it ; not to the life. When Gattie acts an old man, is he angry indeed ? or only a i)leasant counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to recognise, without pressing upon us the uneasy sense of a reality I STAGE ILLUSION. 227 Comedians, iiaradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural. It was tlie case with a late actor. Nothing could be more earnest or true than the manner of Mr. Emery ; this told excellently in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic cast. But w^hen he carried the same rigid ex- clusiveuess of attention to the stage business, and wilful blindness and oblivion of everything before the ciu'tain into his comedy, it produced a harsh and dissonant eftect. He was out of keeping with the rest of the dramatis persome. There was as little link between him and them, as betA^ixt himself and the audience. He was a third estate — dry, repidsive, and unsocial to all. Individually considered, his execution Avas masterly. But comedy is not this unbending thing ; for this reason, that the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to serious scenes. The degrees of credibility demanded to the two things may be illustrated by the different sort' of truth which we expect when a man tells us a mournful or a merry story. If we suspect the former of falsehood in any one tittle, we reject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a suspected imposition. But the teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth. 'Tis the same with dra- matic illusion. AVe confess we love in comedy to see an audience natm'alised behind the scenes — taken into the interest of the drama, welcomed as bystanders, however. There is something ungracious in a comic actor holding himself aloof from all participation or concern wdth those who are come to be diverted by him. Macbeth must see the dagger, and no ear but his own be told of it ; but an old fool in farce may think he sees something, and by con- scious words and looks express it, as plainly as he can speak, to pit, box, and gallery. When an impertinent in tragedy, an Osric, for instance, breaks in upon the serious passions of the scene, we approve of the contempt wdth wdiich he is treated. But when the pleasant impertinent of comedy, in a piece purely meant to give delight, and raise mirth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the 228 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. studious mun witli taking up liis leisure, or making his house his lioiuo, the same sort of coutemi^t expressed (however natural) would destroy the balance of delight in the spectators. To make the intrusion comic, the actor who plays the annoyed man must a little desert nature ; he must, in short, be thinking of the audience, and express only so much dissatisfaction and peevishness as is con- sistent with the pleasure of comedy. In other words, his perplexity must seem half put on. If he repel the in- truder with the sober set face of a man in earnest, and more especially if he deliver his expostulations in a tone which in the world must necessarily provoke a duel, his real -life manner •will destroy the whimsical and piu'ely dramatic existence of the other character (which to render it comic demands an antagonist comicality on the part of the character opposed to it), and convert what was meant for mirth, rather than belief, into a downright piece of impertinence indeed, which woidd raise no diversion in us, but rather stir pain, to see inflicted in earnest upon any worthy person. A very judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems to have fallen into an error of this sort in his plajaug with Mr. Wrench in the farce of Free and Easy. Many instances would be tedious ; these may suffice to show that comic acting at least does not always demand from the performer that strict abstraction from all reference to an audience which is exacted of it ; but that in some cases a sort of compromise may take i^lace, and all the jjurposes of dramatic delight be attained by a judicious understanding, not too openly announced, be- tween the ladies and gentlemen — on both sides of the curtain. TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 229 TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. JoYOUSEST of oiicc embodied sjiirits, -whither at leugtli hast thou flown 1 to what genial region are we permitted to conjecture that thou hast flitted ? Ai't thou sowing thy wild oats yet (the harvest-time was still to come with thee) ujion casual sands of Avernus ! or art thou enacting Rover (as we would gladlier think) by wandering Elysian streams 1 This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics amongst us, was in truth anything but a prison to thee, as the vain Platonist dreams of this bodi/ to be no better than a county gaol, forsooth, or some house of durance vile, whereof the five senses are the fetters. Thou knewest better than to be in a hurry to cast off these gyves ; and had notice to quit, I fear, before thou wert quite ready to abandon this fleshy tenement. It was thy Pleasure - House, thy Palace of Dainty Devices : thy Louvi'e, or thy White-Hall. What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant now 1 or when may we exjiect thy aerial house-warming 1 Tartarus we know, and we have read of the Blessed Shades ; now cannot I intelligibly fancy thee in either. Is it too much to hazard a conjecture, that (as the school-men admitted a receptacle apart for Patriarchs and unchrisom babes) there may exist — not for perchance from that store-house of all vanities, which Milton saw in visions, — a Limbo somewhere for Players? and that Up thither like aerial vapours fly Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame ? All the irnaccomplished works of Authors' hands, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed, Damn'd upon earth, fleet thither — Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery. — 230 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. There, by the neighbouring moon (liy some not im- properly supposed tliy Regent Phxnet upon earth), mayst th(ju not still be acting thy managerial jiranks, great dis- embodied Lessee ? but Lessee still, and still a manager. In Green Rooms, impei-vious to mortal eye, the muse beholds thee wielding posthumous empire. Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never phunp on earth) circle thee in endlessly, and still their song is Fie on sin- ful Phantasy ! Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe of earth, Robert William Elliston ! for as yet we know not thy new name in heaven. It irks me to think, that, stript of thy regalities, thou shouldst ferry over, a poor forked shade, in crazy Stygian wherry. IMethinks I hear the old boatman, paddling by the weedy wharf, with rancid voice, bawling " Sculls, Sculls !" to which, with waving hand, and majestic action, thou deignest no reply, other than in two ciu't monosyllables, " No : Oars." But the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler ; manager and call-boy ; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking yom- passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently de- parted candle-snuffer. But mercy ! what strippings, what tearing off of histri- onic robes, and private vanities ! what denudations to the bone, before the surly Ferryman will admit you to set a foot within his battered lighter. Crowns, sceptres ; shield, sword, and tnmeheon ; thy own coronation robes (for thou hast brought the whole property-man's wardrobe with thee, enough to sink a navy) ; the judge's ermine ; the coxcomb's wig ; the snuff"- box a la Foppington — all must overboard, he positively swears — and that Ancient Mariner brooks no denial ; for, since the tiresome monodrame of the old Thracian Harper, Charon, it is to be believed, hath shown small taste for theatricals. ELLISTONIANA. 231 Ay, now 'tis done. You arc just boat-weight ; j;;«'a et ]nita anima. But, bless me, how little you h;)ok ! So shall we all look — kings and keysars — stripi^ed for the last voyage. But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu pleasant, and thrice pleasant shade ! with my parting thanks for many a heavy hour of life lightened by thy harmless extrava- ganzas, ])ublic or domestic. Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, leaving to his two brethren the heavy calendars — honest Rhadamanth, always partial to players, weighing their jiarticoloured existence here upon eartli, — making account of the few foibles, that may have shaded thy real life, as we call it (though, substantially, scarcely less a vapour than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards of the Drury), as but of so many echoes, natural re-percussions, and re- sidts to be expected from the assumed extravagancies of thy secondary or mock life, nightly upon a stage — after a lenient castigation with rods lighter than of those Medu- sean ringlets, but just enough to " whip the offending Adam out of thee," shall courteously dismiss thee at the right hand gate — the o. P. side of Hades — that conducts to masques and merry-makings in the Theatre Royal of Proserpine. PLAUDITO, ET VALETO. ELLISTONIANA. My acquaintance with the pleasant creatiu'e, whose loss we all deplore, was but slight. My first introduction to E., which afterwards ripened into an acquaintance a little on this side of intimacy, was over a counter in the Leamington Spa Library, then newly entered upon by a branch of his fiimily. E., whom nothing misbecame — to auspicate, I suppose, the filial 232 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. concern, and f^ct it a-going with a lustre — was serving in lierson two damsels fair, who had come into the shop ostensibly to inquire for some new publication, but in reality to have a sight of the illustrious shopman, hoping some conference. With what an air did he reach down the volume, dispassionately giving his opinion of the worth of the work in question, and launching out into a disser- tation on its comparative merits with those of certain publications of a similar stamp, its rivals ! his enchanted customers feirly hanging on his lips, subdued to their authoritative sentence. So have I seen a gentleman in comedy acting the shopman. So Lovelace sold his gloves in King Street. I admired the histrionic art, by which he contrived to carry clean away every notion of disgrace, from the occupation he had so generously submitted to ; and from that hour I judged him, with no after repent- ance, to be a person with whom it would be a felicity to be more acquainted. To descant upon his merits as a Comedian woidd be suiDcrfluous. With his blended private and professional habits al(jne I have to do ; that harmonious fusion of the manners of the jilayer into those of every-day life, which lirought the stage boards into streets and dining-parlours, and kept up the i)lay when the play was ended. — " I like Wrench," a friend was saying to him one day, "because he is the same natural, easy creatm-e, on the stage, that he is off." " My case exactly," retorted Ellistou — with a charming forgetfulness, that the converse of a pro- position does not always lead to the same conclusion—" I am the same person off the stage that I am on." The inference, at first sight, seems identical ; but examine it a little, and it confesses only, that the one i)erformer was never, and the other always, acting. And in truth this was the charm of Elliston's iwivate deportment. You had spirited performance always going on Ijefore your eyes, with nothing to pay. As where a monarch takes up his casual abode for tlie night, the poorest hovel which he honoiu's by his sleeping in it, ELLISTONIANA. 233 hocomos ?)wo facto for tlint tiiiio a palace ; so wliorovcr EUistoii walkod, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre. He carried al)Out with him his jiit, boxes, and galleries, and set up his portable play-house at corners of streets, and in the market-places. Upon flintiest pavements he trod the boards still ; and if his theme chanced to be passionate, the green baize carpet of tragedy spontan- eously rose beneath his feet. Now this was hearty, and showed a love for his art. So Apelles aliuays painted — in thought. So G. D. always poetises. I hate a luke- warm artist. I have known actors — and some of them of Elliston's own stam]) — who shall have agreeably been amusing you in the i)art of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three hoiu-s of their dramatic existence ; but no sooner does the curtain fall Avith its leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems to seize on all their faculties. They emerge sovu", morose persons, intolerable to their families, servants, etc. Another shall have been expanding your heart with generous deeds and sentiments, till it even lieats "with yearnings of universal sympathy ; you abso- lutely long to go home and do some good action. The ])lny seems tedious, till you can get fairly out of the liouse, and realise yom* laudable intentions. At lengtli the final bell rings, and this cordial rei^resentative of all that is amiable in human breasts stei:)s forth — a miser. EUiston was more of a piece. Did he ^>/'f?y Ranger 1 and did Ranger fill the general bosom of the town with satis- faction 1 why should he not be Ranger, and diffuse the same cordial satisfiiction among his private circles 1 with his temperament, his animal spirits, his good nature, his follies perchance, could he do better than identify liim- self with his impersonation ? Are we to like a pleasant rake, or coxcomb, on the stage, and give oiu'selves airs of aversion for the identical character, presented to us in actual life 1 or what would the performer have gained by divesting himself of the impersonation 1 Could the man Elliston have been essentially different from his part, even if he had avoided to reflect to us studiously, in 234 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. private circles, the airy briskness, the forwardness, the 'scape-goat trickeries of the prototj^je 1 " But there is something not natural in this ever- lasting acting ; we want the real man." Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you cannot, or will not see, imder some adventitious trappings which, nevertheless, sit not at all inconsistently upon him 1 What if it is the natvu'e of some men to be highly artificial? The fault is least reprehensible in plapers. Gibber was his own Foppington, with almost as much wit as Vanbrugh coidd add to it. " My conceit of his person," — it is Ben Jonson speak- ing of Lord Bacon, — "was never increased towards him by his place or honou7-s. But I have, and do reverence him for the greatness, that was only proper to himself; in that he seemed to me ever one of the greatest men, that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that Heaven would give him strength ; for great- ness he could not want." The quality here commended was scarcely less con- spicuous in the subject of these idle reminiscences than in my Lord Verulam. Those who have imagined that an unexpected elevation to the direction of a great London Theatre aftected the consequence of EUiston, or at all changed his nature, knew not the essential greatness of the man whom they disparage. It was my fortune to encounter him near St. Dunstan's Church (which, with its punctual giants, is now no more than dust and a shadow), on the morning of his election to that high office. Grasp- ing my hand with a look of significance, he only uttered, — "Have you heard the newsl"^ — then, with another look following up the blow, he subjoined, "I am the future manager of Drury Lane Theatre." — Breathless as he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation or reply, but mutely stalked away, leaving me to chew upon his new-blown dignities at leisure. In fixct, nothing could be said to it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was in his great style. ELLISTONIANA. 235 But was ho less great (be witness, ye powers of Equanimity, that supported in the ruins of Carthage the consuLir exile, and more reeently transnuited, for a more illustrious exile, the barren constableshij) of Elba into an image of Imperial Franee), when, in melancholy after- years, again, much near the same spot, I met him, when that sceptre had been wrested from his hand, and his dominion was ciu'tailed to the petty managershij), and part proprietorship, of the small Olympic, his Elba ? He still i)layed nightly iipon the boards of Drury, but in parts, alas ! allotted to him, not magnificently distributed by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and mag- nificently sinking the sense of fallen mateynal grandeur in the more liberal resentment of depreciations done to his more lofty intellectual pretensions, " Have you heard " (his customary exordium) — " have you heard," said he, " how they treat me? they put me in comedy." Thought I — but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal inter- ruption — " wdiere could they have put you better?" Then, after a pause — " Where I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio," — and so again he stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses. 0, it was a rich scene, — but Sir A C , the best of story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as well as he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to it, — that I was a witness to, in the tarnished room (that had once been green) of that same little Olympic. There, after his deposition from Imperial Dnu-y, he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was his "highest heaven;" himself "Jove in his chair." There he sat in state, while before him, on complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment — how shall I describe her 1 — one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the tails of choruses — a probationer for the town, in either of its senses — the pertest little drab — a dirty fringe and appendage of the lamp's smoke — who, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a " highly respectable " audience — had precipitately quitted her 236 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. station on tlie hoards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgnst. " And how dare you," said lier manager, — assuming ■ a censorial severity, which would have crushed the confi- dence of a Vestris, and disarmed that beautiful Rebel herself of her professional caprices — I verily believe, he thought her standing before him — "hoAV dare you. Madam, withdraw yourself, without a notice, from your theatrical duties'?" "I was hissed. Sir." "And you have the presumption to decide upon the taste of the town ? " "I don't know that. Sir, but I will never stand to be hissed," was the subjoinder of young Confidence — when gathering up his features into one significant mass of wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation — in a lesson never to have been lost upon a creature less forward than she who stood before him — his words were these : "They have hissed me^'' 'Twas the identical argument cl fortiori, which the son of Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade him to take his destiny with a good grace. " I too am mortal." And it is to be believed that in both cases the rhetoric missed of its application, for want of a projoer understanding with the faculties of the re- si^ective recipients. " Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was coiu'teously conducting me over the 1)enches of his Sm'rey Theatre, the last retreat, and I'ecess, of his every-day waning grandeiu". Those who knew Elliston, will know the manner in which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a preliminary haddock. After a rather plenti- ful partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but of one dish at dinner. " I too never eat but one thing at dinner," — was his reply — then after a pause — " reckoning fish as nothing." The manner was THE OLD SrARGATE HOY. 237 all. It was as if by oue peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the savonry esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This Avas greatness, tempered with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but weh'oming entertainer, Great wert tliou in thy life, Robert William Elliston ! and 7iot lessened in thy death, if rejwrt sjteak truly, which says that thou didst dii'ect that thy mortal remains should repose under no inscrii^tion but one of pure Latinity. Classical was thy bringing up ! and beautiful was the feeling on thy last bed, which, connecting the man with the boy, took thee back to thy latest exercise of imagi- nation, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, under the roofs builded by the munificent and pious Colet. For thee the Pauline Muses weep. In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose, they shall celebrate thy praise. THE OLD MARGATE HOY. I AM fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said so before) at one or other of the Universities. Next to these my choice would fix me at some woody spot, such as the neighboiu"hood of Henley affords in abimdance, on the banks of my beloved Thames. But somehow or other my cousin contrives to wheedle me, once in three or four seasons, to a watering-place. Old attachments cling to her in spite of experience. We have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller at Bright(jn another, dullest at Eastboiu'n a third, and are at this moment doing dreary penance at — Hastings ! — and all because we were happy many years ago for a brief week at Margate. That was om* first sea -side experiment, and many cir- cumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea. 238 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. and we had never been from home so long together in company. Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather-beaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough accom- modations — ill exchanged for the foppery and fresh-water niceness of the modern steam-packet 1 To the winds and waves thou committedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cal- drons. With the gales of heaven thou wentest swim- mingly ; or, Avhen it was their pleasm-e, stoodest still with sailor -like patience. Thy course was natural, not forced, as in a hotbed ; nor didst thou go poisoning the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke — a great sea chimera, chimneying and fm-nacing the deep ; or liker to that fire-god parching up Scamander. Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy reluctant responses (yet to the suppression of any- thing like contempt) to the raw questions, which we of the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of this or that strange naval imj^lement 1 'Specially can I forget thee, thou happy medium, thou shade of refuge between us and them, conciliating inter- preter of their skill to our simplicity, comfortable ambas- sador between sea and land ! — whose sailor-trousers ditl not more convincingly assure thee to be an adojited denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter apron over them, with thy neat-fingered practice in thy culinaiy vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland nurtiu'e heretofore — a master cook of Eastchcap 1 How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain ; here, there, like an- other Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations — not to assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a kindred sense of om' infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that untried motion might haply raise in our crude land -fancies. And when the o'erwashing billows drove us below deck (for it was (av gone in October, and we had stiff" and blowing weather), TlIK OLD MARGATE HOY. 239 liow did thy officious ministerings, still catering for our comfort, with cards, and cordials, and thy more cordial conversation, alleviate the closeness and the confinement of thy else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very inviting, little cabin ! With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow -passenger, Avhose discourse in verity might have beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, and have made mirth and wonder abound as for as the Azores. He was a dark, Spanish-complexioned young man, re- markably handsome, with an officer -like assurance, and an insuppressible volubility of assertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with then, or since. He was none of yom- hesitating, half story-tellers (a most painfid description of mortals) who go on sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as they see you can swallow at a time — the nibbling pickpockets of your patience — but one who committed downright, daylight depredations upon his neighboiu-'s faith. He did not stand shivering upon the bi'ink, but was a hearty, thorough-paced liar, and plunged at once into the depths of your credulity. I partly believe, he made pretty sure of his company. Not many rich, not many wise, or learned, composed at that time the common stowage of a Margate packet. We were, I am afraid, a set of as unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies give it a worse name) as Aldermanbury, or Watling Street, at that time of day could have supplied. There might be an excep- tion or two among us, but I scorn to make any invidious distinctions among such a jolly, companionable ship's comi)any as those were wdaom I sailed with. Something too must be conceded to the Genius Loci. Had the confident fellow told us half the legends on land which he favoui-ed us with on the other element, I flatter my- self the good sense of most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and place disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time 240 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. lias obliterated from my memory much of his wild fabliugs ; and the rest would appear but dull, as written, aud to be read on shore. He had been Aide-de-camp (among other rare accidents and fortimes) to a Persian Prince, and at one blow had stricken off the head of the King of Carimania on horseback. He, of course, married the Prince's daughter. I forget what unlucky turn in the politics of that court, combining with the loss of his consort, was the reason of his quitting Persia ; but, with the rapidity of a magician, he transported himself, along with his hearers, back to England, where we still found him in the confidence of great ladies. There was some story of a princess — Elizabeth, if I remember — having intrusted to his care an extraordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion — but, as I am not certain of the name or circumstance at this distance of time, I must leave it to the Royal daughters of England to settle the honour among themselves in private. I cannot call to mind half his jileasant wonders ; but I perfectly remember that, in the com-se of his travels, he had seen a phoenix ; and he obligingly undeceived us of the \iilgar error, that there is but one of that species at a time, assuring us that they were not uncommon in some jjarts of Upper Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming fancies had trans- ported us beyond the " ignorant i^resent." But when (still hardying more aud more in his triumphs over our simplicity) he went on to affirm that he had actually sailed, through the legs of the Colossus at Rhodes, it really became necessary to make a stand. And here I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of om- party, a youth, that had hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, who, from his recent reading, made bold to assm^e the gentleman, that there nuist be some mistake, as " tlie Colossus in question had been destroyed long since ; " to whose opinion, delivered with all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to concede thus much, that "the figure was indeed a little damaged." TlIK OLD MAlUiATE UuY. 211 This was the only opposition he met with, and it did not Jit all seem to stagger him, for he proceeded with his fables, Avliich the same youth appeared to swallow with still more complacency than ever, — confirmed, as it were, by the extreme candour of that concession. With these prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, which one of our own company (having been the voyage before) inunediately recognizing, and pointing out to lis, was considered by us as no ordinary seaman. All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a dirterent character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, and very patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile ; and, if he caught now and then some snatches of these wild legends, it was by accident, and they seemed not to concern him. The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one being with us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring ; and when some of us pulled out our jmvate stores — our cold meat and our salads — he pro- duced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit he had laid in ; provision for the one or two days and nights, to which these vessels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer acquaint- ance with him, wdiich he seemed neither to court nor decline, we learned that he was going to Margate, with the hoi)e of being admitted into the Infirmary there for sea-bathing. His disease w^as a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over him. He expressed great hopes of a ciire ; and when we asked him whether he had any friends where he was going, he replied, "he had no friends." These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first sight of the sea, co-operating with youth, and a sense of holidays, and out-of-door adventure, to me that had been pent up in populous cities for many months before, — have left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon. Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some R 242 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. unwelcome comparisous) if I eiideavom* to account for the dissatlsfartion, wliicli I have heard so many persons confess to have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion), at the sight of the sea for the first time ? I think the reason usually given — referring to the incapa- city of actual objects for satisfying oiu- preconceptions of them — scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the same person see a lion, an elephant, a mountain for the first time in his life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do not fill up that space which the idea of them seemed to take up in his mind. But they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar impression : enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon familiarity. But the sea remains a disappointment. Is it not, that in the latter we had expected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of imagination, unavoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain compassable by the eye, but all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist OF THE earth 1 I do not say we tell ourselves so much, but the craving of the mind is to be satisfied with no- thing less. I will suppose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. He comes to it for the first time — all that he has been reading of it all his life, and that the most enthusiastic part of life, — all he has gathered from narratives of wandering seamen, — what he has gained from true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously from romance and poetry, — crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation. — He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down luito it ; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes ; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation ; of Biscay swells, and the mariner For many a day, and many a dreadful night, Incessant labouring round tlie stormy Cape ; THE OLD MAIUJATE HOY. 243 of fatal I'ocks, and the "still -vexed Bermootlios ;" of j^reat whirlpools, and the water-sijoiit ; of sunken shii"»s, and siimless treasures swallowed up in the unrcstoriuiij depths ; of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible on earth — Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal, Compared with the creatures iu the sea's entral ; of. naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and shells; of coral beds, and of enchanted isles; of mermaids' grots — I do not assert that iu sober earnest he expects to be shown all these wonders at once, but he is imder the tjTanny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him with con- fused hints and shadows of all these ; and when the actual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather, too, most likely) from our unromantic coasts — a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him — what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment / Or if he has come to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening 1 and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him, nothing comparable to the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily withoiit dread or amaze- ment 1 — Who, in similar circumstances, has not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir, Is tliis the mighty ocean ? is this cdl i I love town or country ; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritions rocks ; which the amateur calls "verdure to the edge of the sea." I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water- brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland numnurs. I cannot stand all day on the naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea, shifting like the coloiu's of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the windows 244 THE ESSAYS OF EEIA. of this island-prison. I would fain retii'e into the interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it. It binds me in Avith chains, as of iron. My tlioughts are abroad. I shonld not so feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a i)lace of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock- brokers, Ami)hitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive .shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair, honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something — with a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something. I could abide to dwell with Meshech ; to assort with fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many of this latter occupation here. Their fixces become the jilace. I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs nothing but the revenue — an abstraction I never greatly cared about. I could go out with them in their mackerel boats, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfaction. I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day i^ace along the beach, in endless progress and recur- rence, to watch their illicit countrymen — townsfolk or brethren, perchance — whistling to the sheathing and un- sheathing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who, under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfixre in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their detestation of nui hoUands, and zeal for Old England. But it is the visitants from town, that come here to sai/ that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond-23erch or a dace might be supjDosed to liave, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here as for them. What can they want here 1 If they had a true relish of the ocean, why have they brought all this land luggage with them ? or why pitch their civilized tents in the desert ? What mean these scanty book- THE OLD IMAUOATK IKJY, 245 rooms — marine libraries as tliey entitle tlieni — if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book " to read strange matter iu'"? what are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain b(^ tliout!;lit to do, to listen to the music of the waves 1 All is false and hollow 2:)reteusiou. They come because it is the fashion, and to spoil the nature of the place. They are, mostly, as I have said, stock-brokers ; but I have watched the better sort of them — now and then, an honest citizen (of the old stamp), in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to see it in their countenance. A day or two they go wandering on the shingles, picking up cockle-shells, and thinking them great things ; but, in a poor week, imagination slackens : they begin to discover that cockles produce no pearls, and then — then ! — if I coidd interpret for the pretty crea- tures (I know they have not the courage to confess it themselves), how gladly would they exchange their sea- side rambles for a Sunday walk on the green sward of their accustomed Twickenham meadows ! I woidd ask one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think they truly love the sea, Avith its wild usages, what woidd their feelings be if some of the unsophisticated aborigines t)f this place, encouraged by their courteous questionings here, shoidd venture, on the foith of such assuj'ed sympathy between them, to return the visit, and come up to see — London. I must imagine them with their fishing-tackle on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a sensation woidd it cause in Loth- bury ! What vehement laughter would it not excite among Tlie daughters of Che.apside, aiid wives of Lombard-street ! I am sure that no town-bred or iidand-born subjects can feel their true and natiiral nourishment at these sea- places. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids ns stay at home. The salt foam 246 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. seems to nourish a s])l('('u. I am not half so good-natured as Ijy the milder waters of my natural river. I woiild exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow for ever about tlie banks of Thamesis. THE CONVALESCENT. A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, has re- duced me to an incapacity of reflecting ujjon any topic foreign to itself. Exjject no healthy conclusions from me this month, reader ; I can ofter you only sick men's dreams. And truly the whole state of sickness is such ; for what else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw daylight cm'tains about him ; and, shut- ting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the works which are going on under it 1 To become insen- sible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse ? If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there ; what caprices he acts without con- trol ! how king-like he sways his jiillow — tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thum2)ing, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes sides oftener than a politician. Now he lies fidl length, then half length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed ; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum. How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself ! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme self- ishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty. 'Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothiu'^ to think THK CONVALESCENT. 247 of but how to get well. What passes out of doors, or within tliem, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not. A litth^ while ago he was greatly coucerned in the event of a lawsuit, whirh was to be the making or the marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen trudg- ing about ujjon this man's errand to fifty quarters of the town at ouce, jogging this \vitness, refreshing that solici- tor. The cause AA^as to come on yesterday. He is abso- lutely as indifferent to the decision as if it were a question to be tried at I'ekin. Peradventure from some whisper- ing, going on about the house, not intended for his hearing, h(^ picks up enough to make him understand that things went cross-grained in the court yesterday, and his friend is ruined. But the word "friend," and the word "ruin," distm-b him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of anything but hoAv to get better. What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing consideration ! He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is wrapped in the callous hide of suffering ; he keeps his sympathy, like some cmious vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only. He lies pitting himself, honing and moaning to him- self ; he yearneth over himself ; his bowels are even melted within him, to think what he suffers ; he is not ashamed to weep over himself He is for ever plotting how to do some good to him- self ; studying little stratagems and artificial alleviations. He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable fiction, into as many distinct individuals as he hath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates — as of a thing apart from him — upon his poor aching head, and that dull i)ain Avliich, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to be removed without opening the very skull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated fingers. He conqiassiouates himself 248 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. all over ; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and tender heart. He is his own symi)athizer ; and instinctively feels that none can so well j^erform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old mirse pleases him, that announces his l)roths and his cordials. He likes it because it is so un- moved, and because he can pour forth his feverish ejacu- lations before it as unreservedly as to his bed-post. To the world's business he is dead. He understands not what the callings and occupations of mortals are ; only he has a glimmering conceit of some such thing, when the doctor makes his daily call ; and even in the lines on that busy face he reads uo multiplicity of patients, but solely conceives of himself as the sick man. To what other un- easy couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefiUly, for fear of rustling — is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same hour to-morrow. Household rumours touch him not. Some faint niiu'- mur, indicative of life going on within the hoiise, soothes liim, while he knows not distinctly what it is. He is not to know anything, not to think of anything. Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burthen to him : he can just endure the pressiu^e of conjectm-e. He opens his eye ftxintly at the dull stroke of the muffled knocker, ;uid closes it again without asking "Who was it 1" He is flattered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him, but he cares not to know the name of the in- quirer. In the general stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his sovereignty. To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Com- pare the silent tread and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is served — with the careless de- Till': CONVALESCENT. 249 meauour, the unceirinoniuus goings in and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same attend- ants, when he is getting a little better — and you will con- fess, that from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the elbow-chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity, anu)uuting to a deposition. How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine statm'e ! Where is now the space, which he occuj^ied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye 1 The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was his presence-chamber, where he lay and acted his desi)otic fancies — how is it reduced to a common bedi"oom ! The trimness of the very bed has something petty and un- meaning about it. It is made every day. How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a service not to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when the patient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and decencies which his shaken frame deprecated ; then to be lifted into it again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder it out of shai:)e again, while every fresh furrow was an historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy tiu-ning, some seeking for a little ease ; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled coverlid. Hushed are those mysterious sighs — those groans — so much more awful, Avhile we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved ; and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage. Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of great- ness survives in the still lingering visitations of the medi- cal attendant. But how is he, too, changed with every- thing else 1 Can this be he — this man of news — of chat — of anecdote — of everything but physic — can this be he, who so lately came between the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn eml>assy from Nature, erecting 250 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. herself into a high mediating party 1 — Pshaw ! 'tis some old woman. Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous — the spell that hushed the household — the desert-like still- ness, felt throughout its inmost chambers — the mute attendance — the inquiry by looks — the still softer deli- cacies of self-attention — the sole and single eye of dis- temper alonely fixed upon itself — w^orld-thoughts excluded — the man a world unto himself — his own theatre — Wiat a sj^eck is lie dwiudled into ! In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough from the terra-firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting — an article. In Articulo Mortis, thought I ; but it is something hard — and the quibble, wretched as it Avas, relieved me. The summons, imseasonable as it appeared, seemed to link me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I had lost sight of; a gentle call to activity, however trivial ; a wholesome weaning from that prepos- terous dream of self-absorption — the jnifiy state of sick- ness — in which I confess to have lain so long, insensible to the magazines and monarchies of the world alike ; to its laws, and to its literature. The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding ; the acres, which in imagination I had spread over — for the sick man swells in the sole contemplation of his single sufteriugs, till he becomes a Tityus to him- self— are wasting to a sjjan ; and for the giant of self- importance, which I was so lately, you have me once again in my natural pretensions — the lean and meagre figure of your insignificant Essayist. SANITY OF TRUE IJENIUS. 251 SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. So f;ir from the position holding;- true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is im- possible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of wdt, by wdiieh the poetic talent is here chiefly to he understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the dispropor- tionate straining or excess of any one of them. " So strong a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend, " dill Nature to liiia frame, As all tilings but liis judgment overcame ; His judgment like the heavenly moon did show, Tempering that mighty sea below." The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spmious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not pos- sessed by his subject, but has dominion over it. In the gi'oves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay ; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of cliaos " and old night." Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a " human mind untuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that, — never letting the reins of reason wdiolly go, while most he seems to do so, — he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good 252 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward Fhivius recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her consistency. He is beautifidly loyal to that sovereign directress, even when he appears most to betray and desert her. His ideal tribes submit to policy ; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they wonder at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to European vestm-e. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their own natm-e (oiu'S with a dift'erence), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced ; that if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they lose themselves and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless ; their visions nightmares. They do not create, which implies shaping and consistency. Their imagina- tions are not active — for to be active is to call something into act and form — but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or something super-added to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all, and that these mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the treatment of subjects oiit of nature, or transcending it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonized : but even in the describing of real and every-day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature — show more of that inconse- quence, which has a natural alliance with frenzy, — than a great genius in his "maddest fits," as Wither some- where calls them. AYe a|)peal to any one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels, — as they existed some twenty or thirty years back, — those scanty intel- lectual viands of the whole female reading pultlic, till a happier genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutritions SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 253 pliiiiitonis, — whether he has not found liis brain more " bc- tossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no char- acters, of some third-rate love-intrigue — where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond Street — a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him than he has felt wandering over all the fairy-grounds of Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing lint names and places is familiar ; the persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one ; an endless stream of activities without pur[)ose, of purposes destitute of motive : — we meet pliantoms in our known walks ; fantasques only christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction ; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their "whereabout." But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home, and upon ac- quainted ground. The one turns life into a dream ; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every- day occurrences. By what subtle art of tracing the mental processes it is effected, we are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all the treasures of the world ; and has a daughter, Ambition, before whom aU the world kneels for favours — with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream — that we should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of trea- siu'es, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in liell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy, — is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in the wildest seeming-aberrations. 254 THE ESSAYS OF ETJA. It is not enough to ,say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's conceptions in sleep ; it is, in some sort — but what a copy ! Let the most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool examination shall appear so reasonless and so ludinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded ; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions in this episode are eveiy whit as violent as in the most extrava- gant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them. CAPTAIN JACKSON. Among the deaths in our oliituary for this month, I ol> serve with concern "At his cottage on the Bath Road, Captain Jackson." The name and attribution are com- mou enough ; Init a feeling like reproacli persuades me tliat this could have been no other in fact than my dear old friend, who some five-and-twenty years ago rented a tenement, which he was pleased to dignify with the appellation here used, about a mile from Westbourn Green. Alack, how good men, and the good turns they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled but by the surprise of some such sad memento as that which now lies before us ! He whom I mean was a retired half-pay oflieer, witli a wife and two grown-up daughters, Avhom he maintained with the port and notions of gentlewomen upon that slender professional allowance. Comely girls they were, too. And was I in danger of forgetting this man 1 — his cheerful suppers — the noble tone of hospitality, when first you set your foot in the cottage — the anxious ministeriugs CArTAIN JACKSON. 255 about 3'on, whore littlo or nothing (God knows) was to be ministered. — Althea's horn in a poor phxtter — the power of sclf-cnchantment, by which, in his magnificent wishes to entertain you, he multiplied his means to bounties. You saw -with, your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag — cold savings from the foregone meal — remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door con- tented. But in the coi)ious will — the revelling imagina- tion of your host — the " mind, the mind, Master Shallow," whole beeves wei'e spread before you — hecatombs — no end appeared to the profusion. It w^as the widow's erase — ^the loaves and fishes; carving could not lessen, nor helping diminish it — the stamina were left — the elemental bones still flourished, divested of its accidents. "Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the open- handed creature exclaim; "while we have, let ns not want," "here is plenty left ;" " want for nothing " — with many more such hos})itable sayings, the spurs of appetite, and old concomitants of smoking boards and feast -op- pressed chargers. Then sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his wife's plate, or the daughters', he would convey the remanent rind into his own, with a merry quirk of " the nearer the bone," etc., and declaring that he universally preferred the outside. For we had oiu- table distinctions, you are to know, and some of us in a manner sate above the salt. None but his guest or guests dreamed of tasting flesh liixiu-ies at night, the fragments were ver^ hosjntihus sacra. But of one thing or another there was always enough, and leavings : only he would sometimes finish the remainder crust, to show that he wished no savings. Wine we had none ; nor, excejit on very rare occa- sions, spirits ; but the sensation of wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I remember — " British beverage," he would say! "Push about, my boys;" "Drink to your sweethearts, girls." At every meagre dranght a toast must ensue, or a song. All the forms of good liquor were 256 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence ; tipsy upon words ; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian encouragements. We had our songs — "Why, Soldiers, why,"^ — and the " British Grenadiers " — in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both the daughters sang. Their pro- ficiency was a nightly theme— the masters he had given them — the " no-expense " which he spared to accomplish them in a science "so necessary to young women." But then — they could not sing " without the instrument." Sacred, and, by me, never-to-be-violated, secrets of Poverty ! Shoidd I disclose your honest aims at gran- deur, your makeshift eftbrts of magnificence 1 Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant ; thrummed by a thousand ancestral thumbs ; dear, cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa ! Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin accompauier of her thinner warble ! A veil be si^read over the dear delighted face of the well -deluded father, who now haply listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings of that slender image of a voice. We were not without our literary talk either. It did not extend far, but as far as it went it was good. It was bottomed well ; had good grounds to go upon. In the cottage was a room, which tradition authenticated to have been the same in which Glover, in his occasional retire- ments, had penned the greater part of his Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly qiioted, though none of the present inmates, that I could discover, appeared ever to have met with the poem in question. But that was no matter. Glover had written there, and the anecdote was pressed into the account of the family importance. It diff"use(l a learned air through the apartment, the little CAPTAIN JACKSON. 257 side casement of which (the poet's study window), open- ing upon a superb view as far as the pretty spire of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, not a rood nor square yard whereof our host coukl call his own, yet gave occasion to an immoderate expansion of — vanity shall I call if? — in his bosom, as he showed them in a glowing summer evening. It was all his, he took it all in, and connnunicated ri(;h portions of it to his guests. It was a part of his largess, his hospitality ; it was going over his grounds ; he was lord for the time of showing them, and you tlie implicit lookers-up to his magnificence. He was a juggler, who threw mists before yom' eyes — you had no time to detect his fallacies. He would say, " Hand me the silver sugar-tongs ;" and before you could discover it was a single spoon, and that p/rt^cc^, he would disturb and captivate your imagination by a misnomer of " the m"n " for a tea-kettle ; or by calling a homely bench a sofix. Rich men direct you to their furniture, poor ones divert you from it ; he neither did one nor the other, but by simply assimiing that everything was handsome about him, you were positively at a demur what you did, or did not see, at the cottage. With nothing to live on, he seemed to live on everything. He had a stock of wealth in his mind ; not that which is projierly termed Content, for in truth he was not to be contained at all, but overflowed all bounds by the force of a magnificent self-delusion. pjuthusiasm is catching; and even his wife, a sober native of North Britain, who generally saw things more as they were, was not proof against the continual collision of his credulity. Her daughters were rational and dis- creet young women ; in the main, perhaps, not insensible to their true circumstances. I have seen them assume a thoughtful air at times. But such was the jH-epouderat- ing opideuce of his fancy, that I am persuaded not for any half hoiu* together did they ever look their own prospects fixirly in the face. There was no resisting the vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination 258 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. coujured up haiulsome settlements before their eyes, •which kept them up in the eye of the world too, and seem at last to have realized themselves ; for they both have married since, I am told, more than respectably. It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some subjects, or I should wish to convey some notion of the manner in which the pleasant creatiu'e described the cir- cumstances of his own wedding-day. I ftiintly remember something of a chaise-and-four, in which he made his entry into Glasgow on that morning to fetch the bride home, or carry her thither, I forget which. It so com- pletely made out the stanza of the old ballad — When we came down through Glasgow town, We were a comely sight to see ; My love was clad in black velvet, And I myself iu cramasie. I suppose it was the only occasion upon which his own actual splendour at all corresponded with the world's notions on that subject. In homely cart, or travelling caravan, by whatever humble vehicle they chanced to be transported in less prosperous days, the ride through Glas- gow came back upon his fiincy, not as a humiliating con- trast, but as a fair occasion for reverting to that one day's state. It seemed an " equipage etern " from which no power of fate or fortune, once mounted, had i)ower there- after to dislodge him. There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances. To bully and swagger away the sense of them before strangers, may not be always dis- commendable. Tibbs, and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our admiration than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to play the Bobadil at home ; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all the while chin-d(!ep in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosopliy, and a mastery over fortune, which was reseiTed for my old friend Captain Jackson. THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 259 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. Sera tanieu respexit Libertas. Virgil. A f'lerk I was iii London gaj'. — O'Keefe. If peradveutiire, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life — thy shining youth — in the irk- some confinement of an office ; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite ; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood ; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance. It is now six-and-thirty years since I took my seat at the desk in Mincmg Lane. Melancholy was the transi- tion at fourteen from the abundant playtime, and the frecpiently- intervening vacations of school days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours' a-day attendance at the counting-house. But time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content — doggedly con- tented, as wild animals in cages. It is tnie I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, admirable as the institution of them is for pmposes of worship, are for that very reason the very Avorst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers — the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictiu'es, all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which make a weekday saunter through the 260 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. less busy jDarts of the metropolis so delightful — are shut out. No book-stalls delidously to idle over — no busy faces to recreate the idle man who contemplates them ever passing by — the very face of business a charm by contrast to his temporary relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances — or half-happy at best — of emancipated 'prentices and little tradesfolks, with here and there a servant-maid that has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the cajjacity of enjoying a free hoiu" ; and livelily expressing the hoUowness of a day's pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields on that day look anything but comfortable. But besides Sundays, I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence ; and the jwospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round, did the glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me, or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pm'suit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them 1 Where was the quiet, where the promised rest 1 Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another snatch woidd come. Still the prosj^ect of its coming threw something of an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, I coidd scarcely have sustained my thraldom. Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted with a sense (perhajjs a mere caprice) of incapacity for business. This, during my latter years, had increased to such a degree, that it was visible in all the lines of my coiuitenance. My health and my good si)irits flagged. I had ])erpetually a dread of some crisis, to which I shoidd be found imequal. Besides THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 261 my daylight servitude, I served over again all night in my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years of age, and no prospect of emancipatiun presented itself I had grown to my desk, as it were ; and the wood liad entered into my soul. My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me upon the troul>le legible in my countenance ; but I did not know that it had raised the suspicions of any of my employers, when, on the fifth of last month, a day ever to be remembered by me, L , the junior partner in the finn, calling me on one side, directly taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly inquired the cause of them. So taxed, I honestly made confession of my infirmity, and added that I was afraid I should eventually be obliged to resign his service. He spoke some words of course to hearten me, and there the matter rested. A whole week I remained labouring under the impression that I had acted impnidently in my disclosure ; that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, and had been anticipating my own dismissal. A week passed in this manner — the most anxious one, I verily believe, in my whole life — when on the evening of the 12th of April, just as I was about quitting my desk to go home (it might be about eight o'clock), I received an awful sum- mons to attend the presence of the whole assembled firm in the formidable back parlour. I thought now my time is surely come, I have done for myself, I am going to be told that they have no longer occasion for me. L , I coxdd see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was a little relief to me, — when to my utter astonishment B ; the eldest partner, began a formal harangue to me on the length of my services, my very meritorious conduct during the whole of the time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find out that '? I protest I never had the confidence to think as much). He went on to descant on the expediency of retiring at a certain time of life, (how my heart panted !) and asking me a few questions as 262 THE ESSAYS OF ELTA. to the amount of my own iiroperty, of which I have a little, ended ^vith a proposal, to which his three partners nodded a grave assent, that I should accept from the house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amf)unt of two-thirds of my accustomed salary — a mag- nificent otter ! I do not know what I answered between surjOTse and gratitude, but it was uiulerstood that I ac- cepted their proposal, and I was t(jld that I was fi'ee from that hour to leave their service. I stanunered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home — for ever. This noble benefit — gratitude forbids me to conceal their names— I owe to the kindness of the most munificent firm in the world — the house of Boldero, MerrjTveather, Bosanquet, and Lacy. Esto 2^srpetua ! For the first day or two I felt stunned — overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity ; I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the con- dition of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I coidd scarce trust myself -with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity — for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have all his Time to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue ; I coidd see no end of my possessions ; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And here let me caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without weigh- ing their own resources, to forego tlujir customary employ- nient all at once, for there may be danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my resources are sufficient ; and now that those first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my con- dition. I am in no hiu'iy. Having all holidays, I am as though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon mo, I THE SUPERANNILVTED MAN. 263 could walk it away ; l)ut I do not walk all day long, as I used to do in those old transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If Time were trouble- some, I could read it away ; but I do not read in that violent measure, with which, having no Time my own but candlelight Time, I used to weaiy out my head and eyesight in bygone winters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now) just when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after j^leasure : I let it come to me. I am like the man tliat's born, ami has his years come to him, In some green desert. "Years!" you will say; "what is this superannuated simpleton calculating upon 1 He has already told us he is past fifty." I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them tlie hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own — that which he has all to him- self; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other peoj^le's Time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me threefold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty. 'Tis a fair ride-of-tliree sum. Among the strange fantasies which beset me at the conunencement of my freedom, and of which all traces are not yet gone, one was, that a vast tract of time had intervened since I quitted the Counting House. I could not conceive of it as an aftair of yesterday. The partners, and the clerks with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely associated — being suddenly removed from them — they seemed as dead to me. There is a fine passage, which may serve to illustrate this fancy, in a Tragedy by Sir Bobert Howard, speaking of a friend's death : — 264 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. 'Tw.is liiit just now lie went away ; I have not since had time to shed a tear ; And yet the distance does tlie same appear As if he had been a thousand years from nie. Time takes no measure in Eternity. To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have lieen fain to go among them once or twice since; to visit my old desk- fellows — my co-brethren of the quill ^ — that I had left below in the state militant. Not all the kindness with which they received me could quite restore to me that pleasant fiimiliarity, which I had heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked some of our old jokes, but methought they went off but faintly. My old desk ; the })eg where I hung my hat, were ai)pro[)riated to another. I knew it must be, but I could not take it kindly. D 1 take me, if I did not feel some remorse — beast, if I had not — at quitting my old compeers, the foithful partners of my toils for six-and-thirty years, that soothed for me with their jokes and conundrums the ruggedness of my professional road. Had it been so rugged then, after all 1 or was I a coward simply ? Well, it is too late to repent ; and I also know that these suggestions are a common ftillacy of the mind on such occasions. But my heart smote me. I had violently broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least not courteous. I shall be some time before I get (piite reconciled to the separation. Farewell, old cronies, yet not for long, for again and again I will come among ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell, Ch , dry, sarcastic, and friendly ! Do , mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly ! PI , officious to do, and to volunteer, good services ! — and thou, thou dreary pile, fit mansion for a Gresham or a Whittington of old, stately house of Merchants; Avith thy laljjTinthine passages, and light -excluding, pent-up offices, where candles for one-half the year supplied the place of the sun's light ; unhealthy contributor to my weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell ! In thee remain, arid not in the obscure collection of some wander- THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 265 iiig hookseller, my " works ! " There let them rest, as I do from my Labours, jiled on thy massy shelves, more MSS. in foUo than ever Aquinas left, and full as useful ! My mantle I bequeath among ye. A fortnight has passed since the date of my first com- munication. At that period I was approacliing to tran- quillity, but had not reached it. I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was comparative only. Something of the first flutter was left ; an unsettling sense of novelty ; the dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline suddenly by some re- volution retm-ned upon the world. I am now as if I had never been other than my own master. It is natural for me to go where I please, to do what I please. I find myself at 1 1 o'clock in the day in Bond Street, and it seems to me that I have been sauntering there at that very hour for years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a bookstall. Methinks I have been thirty years a collector. There is nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine picture in the morning. "Was it ever otherAvise 1 What is become of Fish Street Hill ? Where is Fenchurch Street ? Stones of old Mincing Lane, which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six-and-thirty years, to the footsteps of what toil-worn clerk are yom* everlasting flints now vocaH I indent the gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is 'Chnnge time, and I am strangely among the Elgin marbles. It was no hyfierbole when I ventured to com- pare the change in my condition to passing into another world. Time stands still in a manner to me. I have lost all distinction of season. I do not know the day of the week or of the month. Each day iised to be indi- vidually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days ; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations. The genius of each day was upon me 2GG THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appetite, spirits, etc. The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sate as a load upon my poor Sabliath recreations. What charm has washed that Ethiop white 1 What is gone of Black Monday ? All days are the same. Sunday itself — that unfortunate failure of a holiday, as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitive- ness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it — is melted down into a week-day. I can spare to go to church now, without grudging the huge cantle which it used to seem to cut out of the holi- day. I have time for everything. I can visit a sick friend. I can interrupt the man of much occupation when he is busiest. I can insult over him with an invi- tation to take a day's pleasure with me to Windsor this fine May -morning. It is Lucretian })leasvu'e to behold the poor di'udges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring ; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round — and what is it all for? A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him NoTHiNG-TO-DO ; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed cotton-mills 1 Take me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down As low as to the fiends. I am no longer ***** *, clerk to the Firm of, etc. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambidating at no fixed pace, nor with any settled pm-pose. I walk about • not to and from. They tell me, a certain ami digniiate air, that has been buried so long with my other good parts, has begim to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. When I take up a newspapei', it is to read THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 267 the state of the opera. Opus operatmn est. I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task-work, and have the rest of the day to myself. THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. It is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are models of the genteel style in writing. We should prefer saying — of the lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing can be more unlike, than the inflated finical rhapsodies of Shaftesbury and the plain natural chit-chat of Temple. The man of rank is dis- cernible in both writers ; but in the one it is only insinu- ated gracefully, in the other it stands out oftensively. The peer seems to have written with his coronet on, and his Earl's mantle l)efore him ; the commoner in his elbow-chair and undress. — What can be more pleasant than the way in which the retired statesman peeps out in his essays, penned by the latter in his delightful retreat at Shene "i They scent of Nimeguen and the Hague. Scarce an authority is quoted under an ambas- sador. Don Francisco de Melo, a " Portugal Envoy in England," tells him it was frequent in his country for men, spent with age and other decays, so as they could not hope for above a year or two of life, to ship them- selves away in a Brazil fleet, and after their arrival there to go on a great length, sometimes of twenty or thirty years, or more, by the force of that vigour they recovered with that remove. " Whether such an effect (Temple beautifully adds) might grow from the air, or the fruits of that climate, or by approaching nearer the sun, which is the fountain of light and heat, when their natural heat was so far decayed; or whether the piecing out of an old man's life were worth the pains ; I cannot tell : perhajis the play is not worth the candle." Monsieur 268 THE ESSAYS OK ELIA. Ponipoiic, " Froiicli Ambassador in his (Sir William's) time at the Hague," certifies him, that in his life he had never heard of any man in France that arrived at a hundred years of age ; a limitation of life ■which the old gentleman imputes to the excellence of their climate, giving them such a liveliness of temper and humour, as disjMi.ses them to more pleasures of all kinds than in other countries ; and moralizes upon the matter very sensibly. The " late Robert Earl of Leicester " furnislies him with a story of a Countess of Desmond, married out of Eng- land in Edward the Fourth's time, and who lived for in King James's reign. The " same noble person " gives him an account, how such a year, in the same reign, there Aveut about the country a set of morrice-dancers, com- posed of ten men who danced, a Maid Marian, and a tabor and pipe ; and how these twelve, one with another, made up twelve hundred years. " It was not so much (says Temple) that so many in one small county (Hert- fordsliire) should live to that age, as that they should be in vigour and in humour to travel and to dance." Mon- sieur Zuliehem, one of his " colleagues at the Hague," informs him of a cm-e for the gout ; which is confirmed by another " Envoy," Monsieur Scrinchamps, in that town, who had tried it. — Old Prince Maurice of Nassau recommends to him the use of hammocks in that com- plaint ; having been allured to sleep, while suftering under it himself, by the " constant motion or swinging of those airy beds." Count Egmont, and the Rhinegrave Avho " was killed last summer before ]\Iaestricht," impart to him their experiences. But the rank of the writer is never more innocently disclosed, than where he takes for granted the compli- ments paid by foreigners to liis fruit-tre(\s. For the taste and perfection of what we esteem the best, he can truly say, that the French, who have eaten his peaches and grapes at Shene in no very ill year, have generally con- cluded that the last are as good as any they have eaten in France on this side Fontainebleau ; and the first as THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 269 good as any they have eat in Gascony. Italians have agreed his white figs to be as good as any of that sort in Italy, which is the earlier kind of white fig there; for in the latter kind and the blue, we cannot come near the warm climates, no more than in the Frontignac or Muscat grape. His orange-trees, too, are as large as any he saw when he was young in France, except those of Fontaine- bleau; or what he had seen since in the Low Coimtries, except some very old ones of the Prince of Orange's. Of grapes he had the honour of bringing over four sorts into England, which he enumerates, and supposes that they are all by this time pretty common among some gardeners in his neighbom'hood, as well as several persons of quality; for he ever thought all things of this kind "the commoner they are made the better." The garden pedantry with which he asserts -that 'tis to little purpose to plant any of the best fruits, as peaches or grapes, hardly, he douljts, beyond Northamptonshire at the farthest northwards; and praises the "Bishop of Munster at Cosevelt," for attempting nothing beyond cherries in that cold climate ; is equally pleasant and in character. " I may perhaps" (he thus ends his sweet Garden Essay with a passage worthy of Cowley) " be allowed to know something of this trade, since I have so long allowed myself to be good for nothing else, which few men will do, or enjoy their gardens, without often looking abroad to see how other matters play, what motions in the state, and what invitations they may hope for into other scenes. For my own part, as the coimtry life, and this part of it more particularly, were the inclination of my youth itself, so they are the pleasures of my age ; and I can truly say that, among many great employments that have fallen to my share, I have never asked or sought for any of them, but have often endeavoiu*ed to escape from them, into the ease and freedom of a private scene, where a man may go his own way and his own j^ace in the common ])aths and circles of life. The measiire of choos- ino- well is whether a man likes wliat he has chosen. 270 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. which, I thank God, has befallen me; aud though among the follies of my life, building and planting have not been the least, and have cost me more than I have the confi- dence to own ; yet they have been fidly recompensed by tlie sweetness and satisfaction of this retreat, where, since my resolution taken of never entering again into any public employments, I have passed five years without ever once going to town, though I am almost in sight of it, and have a hoiise there always ready to receive me. Nor has this been any sort of aftectation, as some have thought it, but a mere want of desire or humour to make so small a remove ; for when I am in this corner I can truly say with Horace, Me quoties reficit, etc. ' Me, when the cold Digentian stream revives, Wliat does my frieud believe I thiuk or ask ? Let me yet less possess, so I may live, Wliate'er of life remains, unto myself. May I have books enough ; and one year's store, Not to dei^end upon each doubtful hour : Tliis is enough of mighty Jove to pray, Who, as he pleases, gives and takes away.' " The writings of Temple are, in general, after this easy copy. On one occasion, indeed, his wit, which was mostly subordinate to natm'c and tenderness, has seduced him into a string of felicitous antitheses ; which, it is obvious to remark, have been a model to Addison and succeeding essayists. " Who would not be covetous, and with reason," he says, "if health could be purchased witli gold 1 who not ambitious, if it were at the command of power, or restored by honour '? but, alas ! a white statt' will not help gouty feet to w^alk better than a common cane ; nor a blue ribband bind up a wound so well as a fillet. The glitter of gold, or of diamonds, will but hurt sore eyes instead of cming them ; and an aching head will be no more eased by wearing a crown than a common nightcap." In a far better style, and more accordant with his o\vn humour of plainness, are the concluding sentences of his " Discourse upon Poetry." Temple THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 271 took a part in the controversy about the ancient and the modern learning ; and, with that partiality so natiu'al and so graceful in an old man, whose state engagements had left him little leisure to look into modern produc- tions, wliile liis retirement gave him occasion to look back upon the classic studies of his youth — decided in favour of the latter. " Certain it is," he says, " that, whether the fierceness of the Gothic humom\s, or noise of their perpetual wars, frighted it away, or that the unequal mixture of the modern languages would not bear it — the great heights and excellency both of poetry and music fell with the Roman learning and empire, and have never since recovered the admiration and applauses that before attended them. Yet, such as they are amongst us, they must be confessed to be the softest and the sweetest, the most general and most innocent amusements of common time and life. They still find room in the com-ts of princes, and the cottages of shepherds. They serve to revive and animate the dead calm of poor and idle lives, and to allay or divert the violent passions and perturba- tions of the greatest and the busiest men. And both these ettects are of equal use to human life ; for the mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales ; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or affections. I know very well that many who pretend to be wise by tlie forms of being grave, are apt to despise both poetry and music, as toys and trifles too light for the use or entertainment of serious men. But whoever find themselves wholly insensible to their charms, would, I think, do well to keep their own counsel, for fear of reproaching their own temper, and l^ringing the goodness of their natures, if not of their imderstaudings, into question. While this world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and request of these two entertainments will do so too ; and happy those that content themselves with these, or any other so easy and so innocent, and do not 272 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. trouble the world or other men, because they cannot be quiet themselves, though nobody hiu-ts them." " When all is done (he concludes), lumian life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with, and humoured a little, to keep it qiiiet, till it falls aslee}>, and then the care is over." BARBARA S- On the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 4, I for- get which it was, just as the clock had struck one, Barbara S , with her accustomed punctuality, ascended the long rambling staircase, with awkward interposed landing- places, which led to the office, or rather a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat sat the then treasurer of (what few of our readers may remember) the old Bath Theatre. All over the island it was the custom, and remains so I believe to this day, for the players to receive their weekly stipend on the Saturday. It was not much that Barbara had to claim. The little maid had just entered her eleventh year ; but her important station at the theatre, as it seemed to her, with the benefits which she felt to accrue from her pious application of her small earnings, had given an air of womanhood to her steps and to her behaviour. You would have taken her to have been at least five years older. Till latterly she had merely been employed in choiiises, or where children were wanted to fill up the scene. Biit the manager, observing a diligence and adroitness in her above her age, had for some few months jmst iutnisted to her the performance of whole parts. You may guess the self-consequence of the promoted Barbara. She had al- ready drawn tears in young Arthur ; had rallied Richard with infantine petulance in the Duke of York ; and in her BARBARA S . 273 turn had rebuked that petulance when she was Prince of Wales. She would have done the elder child in Morton's pathetic afterpiece to the life ; but as yet the " Children in the Wood" was not. Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, I have seen some of these small parts, each making two or three pages at most, copied out in the rudest hand of the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little more carefully and foirly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of the establishment. But such as they were, blotted and scrawled, as for a child's use, she kei:)t them all ; and in the zenith of her after reputation it was a delightfid sight to behold them bound up in costliest morocco, each single — each small part making a book — with fine clasps, gilt- splashed, etc. She had conscientiously kept them as they had been delivered to her ; not a blot had been effaced oi- tampered with. They were precious to her for their affecting remembrancings. They were her priuci])ia, lier rudiments ; the elementary atoms ; the little steps by which she pressed forward to perfection. " What," she woidd say, " coidd India-rubber, or a jjumice-stone, have done for these darlings'?" I am in no hiurry to begin my story — indeed, I have little or none to tell — so I will just mention an observa- tion of hers connected with that interesting time. Not long before she died I had been discoursing with her on the quantity of real present emotion which a great tragic performer experiences diu-ing acting. I ventured to think, that though in the first instance such players must have possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by frequent repetition those feel- ings must become deadened in great measure, and the performer trust to the memory of past emotion, rather than express a present one. She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a truly great tragedian the operation, by which such effects were produced upon an audience, could ever degrade itself into what was purely mechanical. With much delicacy, avoiding to instance in her self-ex- T 274 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. periciicc, she told mo, tliat so long ago as when she used to phiy the part of tlie Little Son to Mrs. Porter's Isabella (I think it was), wlicn that impressive actress has been bending over her in some licart-rending colloquy, she has felt real hot tears come trickling from her, which (to use her powerful expression) have perfectly scalded her back. I am not quite so sure that it was IMrs. Porter ; but it was some great actress of that day. The name is in- different ; but the fact of the scalding tears I most dis- tinctly remember. I was always fond of the society of players, and am not siu-e that an impediment in my speech (which cer- tainly kept me out of the pulpit), even more than certain personal disqualifications, which are often got over in that profession, did not prevent me at one time of life from adopting it. I have had the honour (I must ever call it) once to have been admitted to the tea-table of Miss Kelly. I have played at serious whist with Mr. Liston. I have chatted with ever good-luunoiu-ed Mrs. Charles Kemble. I have conversed as friend to friend with her accomplished husband. I have been indidged with a classical confer- ence with Macready ; and with a sight of the Player- picture galleiy, at Mr. Mathews's, when the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love of the old actors (whom he loves so much), went over it with me, supplying to his capital collection, what alone the artist could not give them — voice ; and their living motion. Old tones, half- faded, of Dodd, and Parsons, and Baddeley, have lived again for me at his bidding. Only Ed'win he coidd not restore to me. I have supped with ; but I am growing a coxcomb. As I was about to say — at the desk of the then trea- surer of the old Bath Theatre — not Diamond's — presented herself the little Barbara S . The parents of Barbara had been in reputable circum- stances. The father had practised, I believe, as an apothecaiy in the town. But his practice, from causes which I feel my own infirmity too sensibly that way to BARBARA S . 275 arraign — or perhaps from that pure infelicity which accom- panies some peopk^ in their walk through life, and which it is impossible to lay at the door of imprudence — was now reduced to nothing. They were, in foct, in the very teeth of starvation, when the manager, who knew and respected them in better days, took the little Barbara into his company. At the period I commenced with, her slender earnings were the sole support of the family, including two younger sisters. I must throw a veil over some mortifying cir- cumstances. Enough to say, that her Saturday's pittance was the only chance of a Sunday's (generally their only) meal of meat. One thing I will only mention, that in some child's part, where in her theatrical character she was to sup oft" a roast fowl (0 joy to Barbara !) some comic actor, who was for the night caterer for this dainty — in the mis- guided humour of his part, threw over the dish such a quantity of salt (0 grief and pain of heart to Barbara !) that when he crammed a portion of it into her mouth, she was obliged sputteringly to reject it ; and what with shame of her ill-acted part, and pain of real appetite at missing such a dainty, her little heart sobbed almost to breaking, till a flood of tears, which the well-fed spec- tators were totally unable to comprehend, mercifully relieved her. This was the little starved, meritorious maid, who stood before old Ravenscroft, the treasurer, for her Satur- day's payment. Ravenscroft was a man, I have heard many old thea- trical people besides herself say, of all men least calculated for a treasurer. He had no head for accounts, paid away at random, kept scarce any books, and summing up at the week's end, if he found himself a pound or so deficient, blest himself that it was no worse. Now Barbara's weekly stipend was a bare half-guinea. - — By mistake he popped into her hand — a whole one. Barbara tripped away. 276 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. She was entirely unconscious at first of the mistake : God knows, Ravenscroft would never have discovered it. But when she had got down to the first of those un- couth landing-places, she became sensible of an unusual weight of metal pressing in her little hand. Now mark the dilemma. She was by nature a good child. From her parents and those about her, she had imbibed no contrary influ- ence. But then they had taught her nothing. Poor men's smoky cabins are not always porticoes of moral philosophy. This little maid had no instinct to evil, but then she might be said to have no fixed principle. She had heard honesty commended, but never dreamed of its application to herself She thought of it as something which concerned grown-up people, men and women. She had never known temptation, or thought of preparing resistance against it. Her first impulse was to go back to the old treasm-er, and explain to him his lilunder. He was already so con- fused with age, besides a natural want of punctuality, that she would have had some difficulty in making him understand it. She saw that in an instant. And then it was such a bit of money ! and then the image of a larger allowance of butcher's meat on their table the next day came across her, till her little eyes glistened, and her mouth moistened. But then Mr. Ravenscroft had always been so good-natured, had stood her friend behind the scenes, and even recommended her promotion to some of her little parts. But again the old man was reputed to be worth a world of money. He was supposed to have fifty poiinds a-year clear of the theatre. And then came staring upon her the figures of her little stockingless and shoeless sisters. And when she looked at her own neat white cotton stockings, which her situation at the theatre had made it indispensable for her motlier to provide for her, with hard straining and pinching from the family stock, and thought how glad she should be to cover their poor feet with the same — and how then they could ac- BARBARA S . 277 comi^any her to reliearsals, which they had hitherto been prechided from doing, by reason of their unfashionable attire, — in these thoughts she reached the second landing- place — the second, I meau, from the top — for there was still another left to traverse. Now virtue support Barbara ! And that never-failing friend did step in — for at that moment a strength not her own, I have heard her say, was revealed to her — a reason above reasoning — and with- out her own agency, as it seemed (for she never felt her feet to move), she found herself transjiorted back to the individual desk she had just quitted, and her hand in the old hand of Ravenscroft, who in silence took back the refunded treasure, and who had been sitting (good man) insensible to the lapse of minutes, which to her were anxious ages, and from that moment a deep jjeace fell upon her heart, and she knew the quality of honesty. A year or two's unrepining application to her profes- sion brightened up the feet and the prospects of her little sisters, set the Avhole flxmily upon their legs again, and released her from the difficulty of discussing moral dogmas upon a landing-place. I have heard her say that it was a surprise, not much short of mortification to her, to see the coolness with which the old man pocketed the difference, which had caused her such mortal throes. This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, from the mouth of the late Mrs. Crawford,^ then sixty-seven years of age (she died soon after) ; and to her struggles upon this childish occasion I have sometimes ventured to think her indebted for that power of rending the heart in the rei)resentation of conflicting emotions, for which in after years she was considered as little inferior (if at all so in the part of Lady Randolph) even to Mrs, Siddons. ^ The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she changed, by successive marriages, for those of Dancer, Barry, and Crawford. She was Mrs. Crawford, a third time a widow, when I knew her. 278 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. IN A LETTER TO R S , ESQ. TiiouGH iu some points of doctrine, and jDerhaps of dis- cipline, I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that cluu'ch which you have so worthily hutorijied, yet may the ill time never come to me, when with a chilled heart or a portion of irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time -hallowed Edifices. Judge, then, of my mortification when, after attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with the tombs and anti(piities there, I found myself excluded ; turned out, like a dog, or some profane person, into the common street, with feelings not very congenial to the place, or to the solenm service which I had been listening to. It was a jar after that music. You had yoiu- education at Westminster ; and doubtless among those dim aisles and cloisters, you must have gathered much of that devotional feeling in those young years, on which your piu'est mind feeds still — and may it feed ! The antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and grace- fully Ijlending ever with the religious, may have been sown iu you among those wrecks of splendid mortality. You owe it to the place of your education ; you owe it to your learned fondness for the architecture of your an- cestors ; you owe it to the venerableness of your ecclesi- astical establishment, which is daily lessened and called in question through these practices — to speak aloud your sense of them ; never to desist raising yoiu* voice against them, till they be totally done away with and abolished ; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed against the decent, though low-in-pm'se, enthusiast, oi- blameless devotee, who must commit an injury against THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 279 his family economy, if he would be indulged with a bare admission within its walls. You owe it to the decencies which you wish to see maintained in its impressive services, that our cathedral be no longer an object of inspection to the poor at those times only, in wliich they must rol) from their attendance on the worshij) every minute which they can bestow upon the fabric. In vain the public prints have taken up this subject, — in vain such poor, nameless writers as myself express their indignation. A word from you, sir, — a hint in your Journal — would be sufficient to fling open the doors of the Beautiful Temple again, as we can remember them when we were boys. At that time of life, what woidd the imaginative faculty (such as it is) iu both of us, have suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection had been obstructed by the demand of so much silver ! — If we had scraped it up to gain an occasional admission (as we certainly should have done), would the sight of those old tombs have been as impressive to us (while we have been weighing anxiously prudence against sentiment) as when the gates stood open as those of the adjacent park ; when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a shorter or longer time, as that lasted? Is the being shown over a place the same as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it 1 In no part of our beloved Abbey now can a person find entrance (out of service-time) under the sum of two shillings. The rich and the great will smile at the anti-climax, presumed to lie in these two short words. But you can tell them, sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity for en- larged feeling, how much taste and geniiis, may coexist, especially in youth, with a purse incompetent to this de- mand. A respected friend of ours, during his late visit to the metropolis, presented himself for admission to St. Paul's. At the same time a decently-clothed man, with as decent a wife and child, were bargaining for the same indulgence. The price was only two-pence each person. The poor Init decent man hesitated, desirous to go in ; but there were three of them, and he turned away reluctantly. 280 TTIE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Perhaps he wished to have seen the tomb of Nelson. Perhaps the Interior of the Cathedral was his object. But in tlie state of his finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the Aristocracy of the country (no man can do it more impressively) ; instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces of money, these minims to their sight, may be to their humbler brethren. Shame these Sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the pretext, that an indiscri- minate admission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember your boy-days. Did you ever see, or hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free to all 1 Do the rabble come there, or trouble their heads about such speculations ? It is all that you can do to drive them into your churches ; they do not voluntarily offer them- selves. They have, alas ! no passion for antiquities ; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would be no longer the rabble. For forty years that I have known the Fabric, the only well -attested charge of violation adduced has been — a ridicidous dismeml;)erment committed upon the efiigy of that amiable spy, Major Andrd. And is it for this— the wanton mischief of some school-boy, fired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic Freedom — or the remote possibility of such a mischief occurring again, so easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within the walls, if the vergers are incompetent to the duty — is it upon such wretched pretences that the people of England are made to pay a new Peter's Pence, so long abrogated ; or must content themselves with contemplating the ragged Exterior of their Cathedral 1 The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate relic ? — AMICUS EEDIVIVUS. 281 AMICUS REDIVIVUS. Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas ? I DO not know when I have experienced a stranger sen- sation than on seeing my old friend, G. D., who had been paying me a morning visit, a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right-hand path by which he had entered — with staff in hand, and at noonday, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear. A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling enough ; but in the liroad, open daylight, to witness such an unreserved motion towards self-destruction in a valued friend, took from me all jiower of speculation. How I found my feet I know not. Consciousness was cj^uite gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery apparition of a good white head emerging ; nigh which a staff (the hand unseen that wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies. In a moment (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders, and I — freighted with a load more precious than his who bore Ancliises. And here I cannot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry passers-by, who, albeit arriving a little too late to i)articipate in the honours of the rescue, in ijhilan- throijic shoals came thronging to communicate their advice as to the recovery ; prescribing variously the application, or non-api)lication, of salt, etc., to the person of the patient. Life, meantime, was ebbing fast away, amidst the stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest, by a bright thought, pro- posed sending for the Doctor. Trite as the coimsel was, and impossiljle, as one should think, to be missed on, — 282 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. shall I confess 1 — in this emergency it was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great i^revious exertions — and mine had not been inconsiderable — are commonly followed by a debility of purpose. This was a moment of irresolution. MoNOCULUS — for so, in default of catching his true name, I choose to designate the medical gentleman who now appeared — is a grave, middle-aged person, who, without having studied at the college, or truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental processes npon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, woidd seem extinct and lost for ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of common surfeit suftbcation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too wilful application of the plant cannabis outwardly. But though he declineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation tendeth, for the most part, to water-practice ; for tlie convenience of Avhich, he hath judiciously fixed his quarters near the grand repository of the stream mentioned, where day and night, from his little watch- tower, at the Middleton's Head, he listeneth to detect the wrecks of drowned mortality — partly, as he saith, to be ujjon the spot — and partly, because the liquids which he nseth to prescribe to himself and his patients, on these distressing occasions, are ordinarily more conveniently to be found at these common hostelries than in the shops and ])hials of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is reported he can dis- tinguish a jjlunge, at half a furlong distance ; and can tell if it be casual or deliberate. He weareth a medal, suspended over a suit, originally of a sad brown, but which, by time and frequency of nightly divings, has been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His remedy — after a sutfieient application of warm blankets, friction, etc., is a simple tumbler, or more, of the purest Cognac, with water, made as hot as AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 283 the couvalesceut can bear it. Where he findeth, as in tlie case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he con- descendeth to be the taster ; and showetli, by his own example, the innocuous natiu-e of the ijrescription. No- thing can be more kind or encouraging than this pro- cedm'e. It addeth confidence to the jmtient, to see his medical adviser go hand in hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his own draught, what peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him in the l)otion 1 In fine, Monoculus is a humane, sensible man, Avho, for a slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is content to wear it out in the endeavour to save the lives of others — his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty I coidd press a crown upon him, for the price of restoring the existence of such an invaluable creature to society as G. I). It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after notice, of all the providential deliverances he had ex- perienced in the coiu'se of his long and innocent life. Sitting up on my couch — my couch Avhich, naked and void of furnitiire hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered, shall be honoured with costly valance, at some price, and henceforth be a state-bed at Colebrook, —he discoursed of marvellous escapes — by carelessness of nurses — by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling element, in infancy — by orchard pranks, and snapi)ing twigs, in schoolboy frolics — by descent of tiles at Trump- ington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke — by studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance — by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. — Anon, he would bm"st out into little fi'ag- ments of chanting — of songs long ago — ends of deliver- ance hymns, not remembered before since childhood, but coming up now, when his heart was made tender as a child's — for the tremor cordis, in the retrospect of a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, 284 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. acting upon au iunoceut heart, will produce a self-tender- ness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice ; and Shakspeare, in the latter crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers. Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton — what a spark you were like to have extinguished for ever ! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now near two centiuies, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment wash- ing away. Mockery of a river — liquid artifice — wretched conduit ! henceforth rank with canals and sluggish aque- ducts. Was it for this that, smit in boyhood with the explorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters si^arkling through green Hert- fordshire, and cultiu'ed Enfield parks 1 — Ye have no swans — no Naiads — no river God — or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him iu, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your waters 1 Had he been drowned in Cam, there would have been some consonancy in it ; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture ? — or, having no nmne, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the Stream Dyerian 1 And could siicli spacious virtue find a grave Beneath tlie inipostlnimed bubble of a wave? I protest, George, you shall not venture out again — no, not by daylight — without a sufiicieut pair of spectacles • — in yom- musing moods especially. Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripiis with Aristotle, if we can help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years, after yoiu" many tracts in favour of sprinkling only ! I have nothing but water in my head o'nights since this frightful accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 285 in liis dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and crying oiit to his good brother Hopeful (that is, to me), " I sink in deep waters ; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me. Selali." Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save. Next follow — a mournful procession — suicidal faces, saved against their will from drowning ; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant grate- fulness, with ropy weeds pendent from locks of watchet hue — constrained Lazari — Pluto's half-subj ects — stolen fees from the grave — bilking Charon of his fare. At their head Ai-ion — or is it G. D. ? — in his singing gar- ments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which Machaou (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharfs Avhere Ophelia twice acts her muddy death. And, doulitless, there is some notice in that invisible world when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When a soid knocks once, twice, at Death's door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be considerable ; and the grim Feature, by modern science so often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tantalus. A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysiau shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts — poet, or historian — of Grecian or of Roman lore — to crown with unfeding chaplets the half-finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected — him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter — him the sweet lyiist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upon earth, ^ with newest airs prepared to greet ; and patron of the gentle Christ's boy, — who should have been his patron through life — the mild Askew, with longing aspirations leaned foremost from his ^ Graium tantum vidit. 286 TlIK KSSAYS OV ELIA. venerable ^EsciUapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetic- ally fed and watered. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. Sydney's Sonnets — I speak of the best of them — arc among the very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his compositions of a similar structure. They are in truth what Milton, cen- suring the Arcadia, says of that work (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application), " vain and amatorious " enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be "full of worth and wit." They savour of the Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman. But Milton was a Coiu'tier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a Courtier when he composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him ; and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the revolution, there is no reason why he shoidd not have acted the same part in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did not want for plain- ness or boldness of spirit. His letter on the French match may testify he could sj^eak his mind freely to Princes. The times did not call him to the scaftbld. The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton were the comjDositions of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were WTitten in the veiy heyday of his blood. They are stuck full of amorous fancies — far-fetched conceits, befitting his occu- pation ; for True Love thinks no labour to send out SOME SONNETS OP SIR IMIILIP SYDNEY. 287 Thoughts upon the vast auil more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich pearis, outhmdish wealth, gums, jewels, spiceiy, to sacrifice in self- depreciating simili- tudes, as shadows of tnie amiabilities in the Beloved. We must be Lovers — or at least the cooling touch of time, the rirnLin 'pra'cordia frigtis, must not have so damped our faculties, as to take away our recollection that we Avere once so — before we can didy appreciate the glorious vanities and graceful hyijcrboles of the passion. The images which lie before our feet (though by some accounted the only natural) are least natiu-al for the high Sydueaii love to express its fimcies by. They may serve for the loves of Tibullus, or the dear Author of the Schoolmistress ; for passions that creep and whine in Elegies and Pastoral Ballads. I am sure Milton never loved at this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses {ad Lconoram I mean) have rather erred on the farther side ; and that the poet came not much short of a religious indecorum, when he could thus apostrophize a singing-girl : — Angelus nnicuiqiie sims (sic credite gentes) Obtigit ffitherels ales ab ordinibus. Quid minim, Leonora, tibi si gloria major, Nam tua ijrsesentem vox sonat ipsa Deuiii ? Axit Dens, aut vacui certe mens tertia coeli Per tna secreto guttnra serpit agens ; Serpit agens, facilisqne docet mortalia corda Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono. Quod si cuncta quidem Dkus est, per cunctaque fdsus. In te una loquitub, c.eteha mutus habet. This is loving in a strange fashion ; and it requires some candoiu: of construction (besides the slight darken- ing of a dead language) to cast a veil over the ugly appearance of something very like blasphemy in the last two verses. I think the Lover would have been stag- gered if he had gone about to express the same thought in English. I am sure Sydney has no flights like this. His extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he 288 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. takes leave to adopt the i^ale Diau into a fellowship with his mortal passions. With liow sad steps, Moon, thou clinib'st the skies How silently ; and with how wan a face ! Wliat ! may it be, that even in heavenly place That busy Archer his sharp arrow tries ? Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes Can judge of love, thon feel'st a lover's case ; I read it in thy looks ; thy languisht grace To me, that f(>el the like, thy state descries. Then, even of fellowship, Moon, tell me, Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit ? Are beauties there as proud as here they be ? Do they above love to be loved, and yet Those lovers scorn, whom that love doth possess ? Do they call virtue there — %ingratefidness ! The last line of this poem is a little obscured by- transposition. He means, Do they call ungratefulness there a virtue ? Come, Sleep, Sleep, the certain knot of jDcace, The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe. The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release. The indifferent judge between the high and low ; With shield of jiroof shield me from out the jjrease^ Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw ; make in me those civil wars to cease : 1 will good tribute pay if thou do so. Take thou of me sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; A rosy garland, and a Aveary head. And if these things, as being thine by right. Move not thy heavy grace, thou .shalt in me, Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see. in. The curious wits, seeing dull peusiveness Bewray itself in my long-settled eyes, 1 Press. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 289 Whence those same fumes of mehauclioly rise, With idle pains, and missing aim, do guess. Some, that know how my spring I did address. Deem that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies. Others, because the Prince my service tries, Think, tliat I think state errors to redress ; But harder judges judge, ambition's rage. Scourge of itself, still climbing slippery place, Holds my young brain captiv'd in golden cage. fools, or over-wise ! alas, the race Of all my thoughts hath neither stoj^ nor start, But only Stella's eyes, and Stella's heart. Because I oft in dark abstracted guise Seem most alone in greatest company. With dearth of words, or answers quite awry. To them that wonld make speech of speech arise ; They deem, and of their doom the rumour flies, Tliat poison foul of bubbling Pride doth lie So in my swelling breast, that only I Fawn on myself, and others do despise ; Yet Pride, I think, doth not my soul possess, Which looks too oft in his unflattering glass ; But one worse fault — ■Anihition — I confess, That makes me oft ray best friends overpass, Unseen, unheard — while Thought to highest place Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace. Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance, Guided so well that I obtained the ^jrize. Both by the judgment of the English eyes. And of some sent from that svxet enemy, — France ; Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance ; Townsfolk my strength ; a daintier judge ajiplies His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise Some lucky wits impute it Imt to chance ; Others, because of both sides I do take My blood from them, who did excel in this. Think Nature me a man of arms did make. How far they shot awry ! the true cause is, Stella look'd on, and from her heavenly face Sent fortli the beams which made so fair my race. U 290 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. lu martial sports I had my cunning tried, And yet to hreak more staves did me address, While with the people's shouts (I must confess) Youth, luck, and praise, even fill'd my veins with pride- When Cupid having me (his slave) descried Tn Mars' livery, prancing in the press, ' \Vliat now. Sir Fool ! " said he ; " I would no less : Look here, I say." I look'd, and Stella spied, Wlio hard by made a window send forth light. My heart then quaked, then dazzled were mine eyes ; One hand forgot to rule, th' other to fight ; Nor trumpet's sound I heard, nor friendly cries. My foe came on, and beat the air for me — Till that her blush made me my shame to see. No more, my dear, no more these counsels try : give ray passions leave to run their race ; Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace ; Let folk o'ercharged with brain against me cry Let clouds bedim my face, break in mine eye ; Let me no steps, but of lost labour, trace ; Let all the earth with scorn recount my case — But do not will me from my love to fly. 1 do not envy Aristotle's wit. Nor do asjsire to Cesar's bleeding fame ; Nor aught do care, though some above me sit ; Nor hope, nor wish, another course to frame, But that which once may win thy cruel heart : Thou art my wit, and thou my virtue art. Love still a boy, and oft a wanton, is, School'd only by his mother's tender eye ; What wonder, then, if he his lesson miss. When for so soft a rod dear play he try ? And yet my Star, l)ecanse a sugar'd kiss In sport I suck'd, wliile she asleep did lie. Doth lour, nay chide, nay threat, for only this. Sweet, it was saucy Love, not humble L But no 'scuse serves ; she makes her wrath appear In Beauty's throne — see now who dares come near SOME SONNETS OF SIR J'lilLlI' SYDNEY. 291 Those scarlet judges, tlireat'iiiug bloody pain ? lieav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face Anger invests with such a lovely gi-ace, That anger's self I needs must kiss again. I never drank of Aganipjie well. Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit, And Muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell ; Poor lay-man I, for sacred rites mifit. Some do I hear of Poet's fury tell, But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it ; And this I swear by blackest brook of hell, I am no pick-purse of another's wit. How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please ? Guess me the cause— what is it thus ? — fye, no ! Or so ? — much less. How then ? sure thus It is, My lips are sweet, inspir'd with Stella's kiss. Of all the kings that ever here did reign, Edward, named Fourth, as first in piaise I name. Not for his fair outside, nor Avell-lined brain — Although less gifts imp feathers oft on Fame. Nor that he coidd, young-wise, wise-valiant, frame His sire's revenge, join'd with a kingdom's gain ; And, gain'd by Mars could yet mad Mars so tame, That Balance weigh'd wliat Sword did late obtain Nor that he made the Floure-de-luce so 'fraid, Though strongly hedged of bloody Lions' paws, That witty Lewis to him a tribute paid. Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause — But only, for this worthy knight durst prove To lose his crown rather than fail his love. happy Thames, that didst my Stella bear, 1 saw thyself, with many a smiling line Upon thy cheerful face, Joy's livery wear, While those fair planets on thy streams did shine. 292 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. The boat foi- joy could not to dance forbear, While wanton winds, \vith beauty so divine Eavish'd, stay'd not, till in her golden hair They did themselves (0 sweetest prison) twine. And fain those ^ol's youth there would their stay Have made ; but, forced by nature still to fly, First did with puffing kiss those locks display. She, so dishevell'd, blush'd ; from window I With sight thereof cried out, fair disgrace. Let Honour's self to thee grant highest place ! Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be ; And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet, Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet, More soft than to a chamber melody ; Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet. My Muse and I must you of duty gi-eet With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. Be you still fair, houour'd by public heed. By no encroachment wrong'd, nor time forgot ; Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed. And that you know, I envy you no lot Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss, Hundreds of j'ears you Stella's feet may kiss. Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the last sonnet, are my favourites. But the general beauty of them all is, that they are so perfectly characteristical. The spirit of "learning and of chivalry," — of which union, Spenser has entitled Sydney to have been the "president," — shines through tliem. I confess I can see nothing of the "jejune " or " frigid " iu them ; much, less of the " stiff " and " cumbrous " — which I have some- times heard objected to the Arcadia. The verse runs off swiftly and gallantly. It might have been tmied to the trumpet ; or tempered (as himself expresses it) to " trampling horses' feet." They abound in felicitous phrases — liea\'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face — 8th Sonnet. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 293 • Sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; A rosy garland, and a weary head. 2cl Sonnet. ■ That sweet enemy, — France— 5fh Sonnet. But they are not rich in words only, in vague and unlocalised feelings — the failing too much of some poetry of the i^resent day — they are full, material, and ciiTum- stantiated. Time and place appropriates every one of them. It is not a fever of passion wasting itself upon a thin diet of dainty words, but a transcendent passion per- vading and illuminating action, jxirsuits, studies, feats of arms, the opinions of contemporaries, and his judgment of them. An historical thread runs through them, which almost affixes a date to tliem ; marks the xvhen and where they were written. I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the merit of these poems, because I have been hurt by the wanton- ness (I wish I could treat it by a gentler name) witli which W. H. takes every occasion of insulting the memory of Sir Philip Sydney. But the decisions of the Author of Table Talk, etc. (most profound and subtle where they are, as for the most part, just), are more safely to be relied upon, on subjects and authors he has a partiality for, than on such as he has conceived an accidental prejudice against. Milton wrote sonnets, and was a king-hater ; and it was congenial perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a patriot. But I was imwilling to lose a fine idea from my mind. The noble images, imssions, sentiments, and poetical deli- cacies of character, scattered all over the Arcadia (spite of some stittness and encuml)erment), justify to me the character which his contemporaries have left us of the writer. I cannot think with the Critic, that Sir Philip Sydney was that opprobrious thing which a foolish noble- man in his insolent hostility chose to term him. I call to mind the epitai^h made on him, to guide me to juster thoughts of him ; and I repose upon the beautiful lines 294 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA, in the " Friend's Passion for his Astrojihel," printed with the Elegies of Spenser and others. You Icnew — who knew not Astvopliel ? (Tluil I slionlil live to say I knew, And have not in possession still !) — Things Icnown permit me to renew — Of him you know his merit such, I cannot say — you hear — too mucli. Within these woods of Arcady He chief deliglit and pleasure took ; And on the mountain Partheny, Upon the crystal liquid brook, The Muses met him every day. That taught him sing, to write, and say. When he descended down the mount, His personage seemed most divine : A thousand graces one might count Upon his lovely cheerful eyne. To hear him speak, and sweetly smile, You were in Paradise the while. A sweet attractive kind of grace ; A full assurance given by looks ; Continual comfort in a face, The liueamejits of Gos2)el books — I trow that count'nance cannot lye. Whose thoughts are legible in the eye. Above all others this is he. Which erst approved in his song. That love and honour might agree, And that pure love will do no wrong. Sweet saints, it is no sin or blame To love a man of virtuous name. Did never love so sweetly breathe In any mortal breast before ; Did never Muse inspire beneath A Poet's brain with finer store ! He wrote of Love with high conceit, And Beauty rear'd above her height. Or h;t any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AOO. 295 into rage) in the Poem, — the last in the collection accom- panying the above, — which from internal testimony I believe to be Lord Brooke's— beginning with " Silence augmenteth grief," and then seriously ask himself, whether the subject of such absorbing and confounding regrets coidd have been that thing which Lord Oxford termed him. NEWSPAPERS THIRTY -FIVE YEARS AGO. Dan Stuart once told us, that he did not remember that he ever deliberately walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his life. He might occasionally have escorted a jiarty of ladies across the way that were going in, but he never went in of his own head. Yet the office of the Morning Post newspaper stood then just where it does now — we are carrying you back, reader, some thirty years or more — with -its gilt-globe- topt front feeing that emporium of our artists' grand Annual Exposure. We sometimes Avish that we had observed the same abstinence with Daniel. A word or two of D. S. He ever appeared to us oue of the finest-tempered of Editors. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, was equally pleasant, with a dash, no slight one either, of the courtier. S. was frank, plain, and English all over. We have worked for both these gentlemen. It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges ; to trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river, With holy reverence to approach the rocks, Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song. Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's ex- ploratory ramblings after the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember on one fine summer holyday (a "whole day's leave" we called it at Christ's hospital) 296 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. sallying foi-tli at rise of sxin, not very well provisioned either for sucli an undertaking, to trace the current of the New River — Middletouian stream ! — to its scaturient source, as we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell. Gallantly did we commence our solitary quest — for it was essential to the dignity of a Discovery, that no eye of schoolboy, save our own, should beam on the detection. By flowery spots, and verdant lanes skirting Hornsey, Hope trained us on in many a baffling tiu-n ; endless, hopeless meanders, as it seemed ; or as if the jealous waters had dodged us, reluctant to have the humble spot of their nativity revealed ; till spent, and nigh famished, before set of the same sim, we sate down somewhere by Bowes Farm near Tottenham, -wdth a tithe of our proposed labours only yet accomplished ; sorely con^^nced in spirit, that that Brucian enterprise was as yet too arduous for our young shoulders. Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is the tracing of some mighty waters up to their shallow fontlet, than it is to a pleased and candid reader to go back to the inexperienced essays, the fii'st callow flights in authorship, of some established name in litera- ture ; from the Gnat whicli preluded to the ^neid, to tlie Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on. In those days, every Morning Paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an author, wdio was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke — and it was thought pretty high too — was Dan Stuart's settled remuneration in these cases. The chat of the day — scandal, but, above all, dress — furnished the material. The length of no paragraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant. A foshion oi flesh, or rather ^>/>J.--coloured hose for the ladies, luckily coming up at the juncture when we were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to S.'s Paper, established our reputation in that line. We were pronounced a "capital hand." the conceits which we NEWSPAPERS THIRTV-FIVE YEARS AGO. 297 varied u})on red in all its pri.smatic difterences ! from the trite and obvious flower of Cytlierea, to the flaming costume of the lady that has her sitting \\\)0\\ " many waters." Then there was the collateral topic of ankles. What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of touching that nice brink, and yet never tumbling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something " not quite proper;" while, like a skilful posture -master, balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites, he keeps the line, from which a hair's -breadth deviation is destruction ; hovering in the confines of light and darkness, or where "both seem either;" a hazy uncertain delicacy; Auto- lycus-like in the Play, still putting off his expectant auditory with "Whoop, do me no harm, good man!" But above all, that conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff" to remember, where, allu- sively to the flight of Astrtea — ultimia Coelestmn tejTas reliquit — we pronounced— in reference to the stockings still — that Modesty, taking hee final leave of MORTALS, HER LAST BlUSH WAS VISIBLE IN HER ASCENT TO THE Heavens by the tract of the glowing in- step. This might be called the crowning conceit : and was esteemed tolerable Avriting in those days. But the fixshion of jokes, with all other things, passes away; as did the transient mode which had so favoured us. The ankles of our fjxir friends in a few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female Avhims followed, but none, methought, so pregnant, so iuA'itatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings. Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns daily consecutively for a fortnight, would surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a long twelve- montli, as we were constrained to do, was a little harder exaction. " Man goetli forth to his work until the evening" — from a reasonable hour in the morning, we presume it was meant. Now, as our main occupation 298 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. took us up from eight till five every day in the city ; and as oiu- evening hours, at that time of life, had generally to do with anything rather than business, it follows, that the only time we could spare for this manufactory of jokes — our supplementary livelihood, that supplied us in every want beyond mere bread and cheese — was exactly that part of the day which (as we have heard of No Man's Laud) may be fitly denominated No Man's Time ; that is, no time in which a man ought to be u]), and awake, in. To speak more plainly, it is that time of an hour, or an hour and a half's duration, in which a man, whose occasions call him up so preposterously, has to wait for his breakfast. those head-aches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past five in summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, we were compelled to rise, having been perhaps not above four hours in bed — (for we were no go-to-beds with the lamb, though we anticipated the lark ofttimes in her rising — we like a parting cup at midnight, as all young men did before these effeminate times, and to have oiu" friends about us^ — we were not constellated under Aquarius that watery sign, and therefore incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless — we were none of your Basilian watersponges, nor had taken our degrees at Mount Ague — we were right toping Capulets, jolly com- panions, we and they) — but to have to get up, as we said before, curtailed of half our fixir sleep, fasting, with only a dim vista of refreshing bohea in the distance — to be necessitated to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old hag of a domestic, who seemed to take a dialiolical pleasure in her announcement that it was " time to rise ;" and whose chappy knuckles we have often yearned to amputate, and string them up at our chamber door, to be a terror to all such unseasonable rest-breakers in future " Facil " and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the "descending" of the over-nigiit, balmy the first sinking NEWSPArEUS THIKTY-FIVE YEAltS A(iO. 299 of tlie heavy head upon the pillow ; but to get up, as he goes on to say, — revocare grailus, siiperasque evadere ad aitras — and to get up, moreover, to make jokes with malice pre- pended — there was the "labour," there the "work." No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny which this necessity exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing ! Wc make twice the niimber every day in our lives as a matter of coiu'se, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they come into ovu* head. But when the head has to go out to them — when the mountain must go to Mahomet — Reader, try it for once, only for a short twelvemonth. It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings came up ; but mostly, instead of it, some rugged untract- able subject ; some topic impossible to be contorted into the risible ; some feature, upon which no smile coiUd play ; some flint, from which no process of ingenuity could procm-e a scintillation. There they lay ; there your appointed tale of brick-making was set before you, Avhicli you miist finish, with or without straw, as it hapjjened. The craving dragon — the Public — like him in Bel's Temple — must be fed, it expected its daily rations ; and Daniel, and om'selves, to do us justice, did the best we could on this side bursting him. AVhile we were wringing out coy sprightlinesses for the Post, and writhing under the toil of what is called "easy writing," Bob Allen, our quondam schoolfellow, was tapping his impracticable Ijrains in a like service for the Oracle. Not that Robert troubled himself much about wit. If his paragraplis had a sprightly air about them, it was sufficient. He carried this nonchalance so far at last, that a matter of intelligence, and that no very important one, was not seldom palmed upon his em- ployers for a good jest ; for example sake — " Walhing 300 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. yesterday morning (yisiKiHy down Snoiv Hill, who should we meet but Mr. Deputy Humjyhreys ! xve rejoice to add, that the vmrthy Deputy appeared to enjoy a good state of health. We do not remember ever to have seen him look better." This gentleman so surprisingly met npou Snow Hill, from some peculiarities in gait or gesture, was a constant butt for mirth to the small i3aragrai)h-mougers of the day ; and our friend thought that he might have his fling at him with the rest. We met A. in Holborn shortly after this extraordinary rencounter, which he told with tears of satisfaction in his eyes, and chuckling at the anticii)ated effects of its announcement next day in the pai)er. We did not quite comprehend where the wit of it lay at the time ; nor was it easy to be detected, wlien the thing came out advantaged by ty[)e and letterpress. He had better have met anything that morning than a Common Council Man. His services were shortly after dispensed with, on the plea that his paragraphs of late had been deficient in point. The one in question, it must be owned, had an air, in the opening especially, proper to awaken curiosity ; and the sentiment, or moral, wears the aspect of humanity and good neighbourly feeling. But somehow the conclusion was not judged altogether to answer to the magnificent promise of the premises. We traced oiu* friend's pen afterwards in the True Briton, the Star, the Traveller, — from all which he was successively dismissed, the Proprietors having " no further occasion for his services." Nothing was easier than to detect him. When wit failed, or topics ran low, there constantly appeared the following — '^ It is not genercdly known that the three Blue Balls at the Pawnbrokers' shops are the ancient arms of Lomhardy. The Lombards were the first money-brokers in Europe." Bob has done more to set the public right on this imi)ortant point of blazoniy, tlian the whole College of Heralds. The appointment of a regular wit has long ceased to be a part of the economy of a Morning Pai)er. Editors NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 301 fiud their own jokes, or do as well without them. Parson Este, and Topham, j^rought up the set custom of " witty paragraphs " first in the World. Boaden was a reigning paragraphist in his day, and succeeded poor Allen in the Oracle. But, as we said, the fashion of jokes passes away ; and it would be difficult to discover in the bio- grapher of Mrs. Siddous, any traces of that vivacity and fancy which charmed the whole town at the commence- ment of the present century. Even the prelusive deli- cacies of the present writer — the ciu"t "Astra3an allu- sion " — would be thought pedantic and out of date, in these days. From the office of the Morning Post (for we may as well exhaust our Newspaper Reminiscences at once) by change of property in the paper, we were transferred, mortifying exchange ! to the office of the Album News- paper, late Rackstrow's Museum, in Fleet street. What a transition — from a handsome apartment, from rosewood desks and silver inkstands, to an office — no office, but a den rather, but just redeemed from the occupation of dead monsters, of which it seemed redolent— from the centre of loyalty and fashion, to a focus of vulgarity and sedi- tion ! Here in murky closet, inadequate from its square contents to the receipt of the two bodies .of Editor and humble paragraph-maker, together at one time, sat in the discharge of his new editorial functions (the " Bigod " of Elia) the redoubted John Fenwick. F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left not many in the pockets of his friends whom he might com- mand, had purchased (on tick, doubtless) the whole and sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with all the rights and titles (such as they were worth) of the Albion from one Lovell ; of whom we know nothing, save that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of Wales. With this hopeless concern^for it had been sinking ever since its commencement, and could now reckon upon not more than a hundred subscribers — F. resolutely determined upon pulling down the Government in the first instance. 302 TTIE ESSAYS OF EIJA. aud making both our fortunes by way of corollary. For seven weeks and more did this infatuated democrat go about borrowing seven-shilling pieces, and lesser coin, to meet the daily demands of the Stamp Office, which allowed no credit to publications of that side in politics. An out- cast from politer bread, we attached oiu- small talents to the forlorn fortunes of our friend. Our occupation now was to write ti'eason. Recollections of feelings— which were all that now re- mained from our first boyish heats kindled by the French Revolution, when, if we were misled, we erred in the com- pany of some who are accounted very good men now — rather than any tendency at this time to Republican doctrines — assisted us in assuming a style of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very under tone to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to insinuate, rather than recommend, possible abdica- tions. Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribimals, were covered with flowers of so cunning a perijihrasis — as Mr. Bayes says, never naming the thing directly — that the keen eye of an Attorney -General was insufficient to detect the lurking snake among them. There were times, indeed, when we sighed for our more gentleman-like occupation under Stuart. But with change of masters it is ever change of service. Already one paragraph, and another, as we learned afterwards from a gentleman at the Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, with a view of its being submitted at least to the attention of the proper Law Officers — when an unlucky, or rather lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J s M h, who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits of his apostasy, as F. pronounced it (it is hardly worth parti- cularizing), happening to off"end the nice sense of Lord (or, as he then delighted to be called Citizen) Stanhope, deprived F. at once of the last hopes of a guinea from the last patron that had stiick by us ; and breaking up our establishment, left us to the safe, but somewhat mortifying, neglect of the Crown Lawyers. It was about ON THE PRODUCTION.S OF MODERN ART. 303 this time, or a little earlier, that Dan Stuart made that curious confession to us, that he had " never deliberately walked into an Exhibition at Somerset House in his life." BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter within the last fifty years, or since the humour of ex- hibiting began, that has treated a story imaginatively ? By this we mean, upon whom his subject has so acted, that it has seemed to direct him — not to be arranged by him ? Any upon whom its leading or collateral points have impressed themselves so tyrannically, that he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he shoidd falsify a revelation 1 Any that has imparted to his compositions, not merely so much truth as is enough to convey a story with clearness, but that individualizing property, which shoidd keep the subject so treated distinct in feature from every other subject, however similar, and to common apprehensions almost identical; so that we might say, this and this part could have found an appropriate place in no other picture in the world but this? Is there anything in niodern art — we will not demand that it should be equal — but in any way analogous to what Titian has eft'ected, in that wonderful bringing together of two times in the " Aiiadne," in the National Gallery*? Precipitous, with his reeling satyr rout about him, repeopling and re-illum- ing suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fiuy beyond the grape, Bacclius, born in fire, fire-like flings himself at the Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the story, an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido, in his harmonious version of it, saw no fiirther. But from the depths o^ 304 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and laid it contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god, — as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconceruing pageant — her soul uudistracted from Theseus — Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at day- break to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian. Here are two points miraculously co- uniting; j&erce society, with the feeling of solitude still absolute ; noon- day revelations, with the accidents of the dull gray dawn unqueuched and lingering ; the 2^'>'^sent Bacchus, with the 2Kist Ariadne : two stories, with double Time ; separate, and harmonizing. Had the artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God ; still more, had she expressed a rapture at his advent, where would have been the stoiy of the mighty desolation of the heart previous 1 merged in the insipid accident of a flattering offer met wdth a welcome acceptance. The broken heart for Theseus Avas not likely to be pieced up by a God. We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by Raphael in the Vatican, It is the Presentation of the new-born Eve to Adam by the Almighty. A fairer mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of men since born. But these are matters sub- ordinate to the conception of the situation, displayed in this extraordinary production. A tolerable modern artist would have been satisfied with tempering certain raptures of connubial anticipation, with a suitable acknowledgment to the Giver of the blessing, in the countenance of the first bridegroom : something like the divided attention of the child (Adam was here a child-man) between the given toy, and the mother who had just blest it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the fii'st -sight view, the sujjei-ficial. An aitist of a higher grade, considering the ON THE rRODUGTIONS OF MODERN ART. 305 awful presence they were in, would have taken care to subtract something from the expression of the more human passion, and to heighten the more spiritual one. This woidd be as much as an exhibition-goer, from the oi^ening of Somerset House to last year's show, has been encouraged to look for. It is obvious to hint at a lower expression yet, in a pictm-e that, for respects of drawing and colour- ing, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible within these art-fostering walls, in which the raptures should be as ninety -nine, the gratitude as one, or perhaps zero ! By neither the one passion nor the other has Rai)hael expounded the situation of Adam. Singly upon his brow sits the absorbing sense of wonder at the created miracle. The vioment is seized by the intuitive artist, perhaps not self-conscious of his art, in which neither of the conflict- ing emotions — a moment how abstracted ! — have had time to sjjring up, or to battle for indecorous mastery. — We have seen a landscape of a justly-admired neoteric, in which he aimed at delineating a fiction, one of the most severely beautifid in antiquity — the gardens of the Hesperides. To do Mr. justice, he had painted a laudable orchard, with fitting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of which a Polypheme, by Poussin, is somehow a fac-simile for the situation), looking over into the world shut out backwards, so that none but a " still-climbing Hercules " could hope to catch a peep at the admired Ternary of Recluses. No conventual porter could keep his keys better than this custos with the " lidless eyes." He not only sees that none do intrude into that privacy, but, as clear as daylight, that none but Hercules aut Diaholus by any manner of means can. So far all is well. We have absolute solitude here or nowhere. Ab extra, the damsels are snug enough. But here the artist's com'age seems to have failed him. He began to pity his pretty charge, and, to comfort the irksomeness, has peoi^led their solitude with a bevy of fair attendants, maids of honour, or ladies of the bed-chamber, according to the approved eticj[uette at a court of the nineteenth X 30G THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. ceutiuy ; giving to the whole scene .the air of a fete- chani2)etre, if wc will l)ut excuse the alisence of the gentlemen. This is Avell, and Watteaiiish. But what is become of the solitary mystery — the Daughters three, That sing around the golden tree ? This is not the w%ay in which Poussin would have treated this subject. The paintings, or rather the stupendous architectm'al designs, of a modern artist, have been m'ged as objections to the theory of our motto. They are of a character, we confess, to stagger it. His towered structures are of the highest order of the material sublime. Whether they were dreams, or transcripts of some elder Avorkmanship — Assyrian ruins old — restored by this mighty artist, they satisfy om- most stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled. On that side, tlie imagination of the artist halts, and appears defective. Let us examine the point of the story in the " Belshazzar's Feast." We will intro- duce it by an apposite anecdote. The com-t historians of the day record, that at the first dinner given by the late King (then Prince Regent) at the Pavilion, the following characteristic frolic was played off. The guests were select and admiring ; the banquet profuse and admirable ; the lights lustrous and oriental ; the eye was perfectly dazzled with the display of plate, among which the great gold salt-cellar, brought from the regalia in the Tower for this especial purpose, itself a tower ! stood conspicuous for its magnitude. And now the Rev. * * *, the then admired coiut Chaplain, was proceeding with the grace, when, at a signal given, the lights were suddenly overcast, and a huge transparency was discovered, in which glittered in gold letters — " Brighton — Earthquakk — Swallow-tjp-Alive ! " Imagine the confusion of the guests ; the Georges and ON THE rRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 307 garters, jewels, bracelets, moulted upon the occasion ! The fans dropped, and picked up the next morning by the sly court-pages ! Mrs. Fitz-what's-her-name fainting, and the Countess of * * * holding the smelling-bottle, till tlie good-humoured Prince caused harmony to be re- stored, by calling in fresh candles, and declaring that the whole was nothing but a pantomime hoax, got up by the ingenious Mr. Farley, of Covent Garden, from hints which his Royal Highness himself had furnished ! Then ima- gine the infinite applause that followed, the mutual rall\angs, the declarations that " they were not much frightened," of the assembled galaxy. The point of time in the picture exactly answers to the appearance of the transparency in the anecdote. The huddle, the flutter, the bustle, the escape, the alarm, and the mock alarm ; the prettinesses heightened by conster- nation ; the courtier's fear which was flattery ; and the lady's Avhich was affectation ; all that we may conceive to have taken place in a mob of Brighton corn-tiers, sympathizing with the well-acted surprise of their sove- reign ; all this, and no more, is exhibited by the well- dressed lords and ladies in the Hall of Belus. Just this sort of consternation we have seen among a flock of dis- quieted wild geese at the report only of a gun having gone off' ! But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety for the preservation of their persons — such as we have witnessed at a theatre, when a slight alarm of fire has been given — an adequate exponent of a supernatirral terror'? the way in which the finger of God, writing judgments, would have been met by the withered con- science'? There is a human fear, and a divine fear. The one is disturbed, restless, and bent upon escape ; the other is bowed down, effortless, passive. When the spirit appeared before Eliphaz in the visions of the night, and the hair of his flesh stood up, was it in the thoughts of the Temanite to ring the bell of his chamber, or to call up the servants 1 But let us see in the text what 308 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. there is to justify all this huddle of \T.ilgar consterna- tion. From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzar had made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. The golden and silver vessels are gorgeously enumerated, with the princes, the king's concubines, and his wives. Then follows — " In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the l)laster of the wall of the king's palace ; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the l-inr/s countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosened, and his knees smote one against another." This is the plain text. By no hint can it be other- wise inferred, but that the appearance was solely confined to the fancy of Belshazzar, that his single brain wa,s troubled. Not a word is spoken of its being seen by any else there present, not even by the queen herself, who merely undertakes for the interpretation of the pheno- menon, as related to her, doubtless, by her husband. The lords are simjjly said to be astonished ; i.e. at the trouble and the change of countenance in their sovereign. Even the prophet does not appear to have seen the scroll, which the king saw. He recalls it only, as Joseph did the Dream to the King of Egy^rt. " Then was the part of the hand sent from him [the Lord], and this writing was written." He speaks of the iihautasm as past. Then what becomes of this needless multijilication of the miracle 1 this message to a royal conscience, singly expressed — for it was said, " Thy kingdom is divided," — simultaneously impressed u^^on the fancies of a thousand courtiers, who Avere implied in it neither directly nor grammatically 1 But, admitting the artist's own version of the story, and that the sight was seen also by the thousand courtiers — let it have been visible to all Babylon — as the knees of Belshazzar were shaken, and his comitenance ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 309 troubled, even so would the knees of every man in Babylon, and their countenances, as of an individual man, have been troubled ; bowed, bent down, so would they have remained, stupor-fixed, with no thought of struggling with that inevitable judgment. Not all that is optically possible to be seen, is to be shown in every pictiu'e. The eye delightedly dwells upon the brilliant individualities in a " Marriage at Cana," by Veronese, or Titian, to the very textiu-e and colour of the wedding garments, the ring glittering upon the bride's finger, the metal and fixshion of the wine- pots ; for at such seasons there is leisure and luxiuy to be curious. But in a " day of judgment," or in a " day of lesser horrors, yet divine," as at the impious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the actual eye of an agent or imtient in the immediate scene would see, only in masses and indistinction. Not only the female attire and jewelry exposed to the critical eye of the fashion, as minutely as the dresses in a Lady's Magazine, in the criticised picture — but perhaps the ciuiosities of anatomical science, and studied diversities of posture, in the falling angels and sinners of Michael Angelo, — have no business in their great subjects. There was no leisure for them. By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got at their true conclusions ; by not showing the actual appearances, that is, all that was to be seen at any given moment by an indifferent eye, but only what the eye might be supposed to see in the doing or suffering of some portentous action. Suppose the moment of the swallo-ft-ing up of Pompeii. There they were to be seen — houses, columns, architectural proportions, differences of public and private buildings, men and women at their standing occupations, the diversified thousand postm-es, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion tridy, but physically they were visible. But what eye saw them at that eclips- ing moment, which reduces confusion to a kind of unity, and when the senses are uptm'ned from their proprieties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only 1 A thousand 310 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. years have passed, and we are at leisiire to contemplate the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at his oven, and to turn over with antirpiarian coolness the pots and pans of Pompeii. " Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon." Who, in reading this magnifi- cent Hebraism, in his conception, sees aught but the heroic son of Nun, with the outstretched arm, and the greater and lesser light obsequious'? Dovibtless there were to be seen hill and dale, and cliariots and horsemen, on open plain, or winding by seci'et defiles, and all the circumstances and stratagems of war. But whose eyes would have been conscious of this array at the interposi- tion of the synchronic miracle 1 Yet in the picture of this subject by the artist of the " Belshazzar's Feast " — no ignolble work, either — the marshalling and landscape of the war is everything, the miracle sinks into an anec- dote of the day ; and the eye may " dart through rank and file traverse " for some miinites, before it shall dis- cover, among his armed followers, u'hich is Joshua / Not modern art alone, but ancient, where only it is to be foimd if anywhere, can be detected erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. The world has nothing to show of the preternatm'al in painting, transcending the figure of Lazarus bm-sting his grave-clothes, in the great picture at Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two beings. A ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly-apiDrehend- ing gratitude at second life bestowed. It cannot forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a body. It has to tell of the world of spirits. — Was it from a feeling, that the crowd of half- impassioned bystanders, and tlie still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a dis- tance, who have not heard, or Init fliintly have been told of the passing miracle, admirable as they are in design and hue — for it is a glorified work — do not respond adequately to the action — that the single figure of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the ON TFTE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 311 greater half of the interest 1 Now that there were not iiulitierent imssers-by within aetual scoi^e of the eyes of tliose present at the miracle, to whom the sonnd of it had but fivintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to deny ; but would they see them 1 or can the mind in the conception of it admit of such uuconcerning objects; can it think of them at all 1 or what associating league to the imagination can there be between the seers and the seers not, of a presential miracle 1 Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we will ask whether, in the present low state of expectation, the i)atron woidd not, or ought not be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide -stretched oaks? Dis-seat those woods, and i^lace the same figure among fountains, and falls of pellucid water, and you have a — Naiad ! Not so in a rough j^rint we have seen after Julio Romano, we think — for it is long since — there, by no process, with mere change of scene, could the figure have reciprocated characters. Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautifid in convolution and distortion, linked to her con- natural tree, co-twisting with its limlis her own, till botli seemed either — these, animated branches ; those, disani- mated members — yet the animal and vegetable lives sufficiently kept distinct — his Dryad lay — an approxima- tion of two natiu-es, which to conceive, it must be seen ; analogous to, not the same with, the delicacies of Ovidian transformations. To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial compre- hension, the most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness and fniitfulness. The large eye of genius saw in the meanness of present objects their capabilities of treatment from their relations to some grand Past or Future. How has Raphael — we must still linger about the Vatican — treated the hiuuble craft of the ship -builder, in his " Building of the Ark"? It is in that scriptural series, to which we have referred, and which, judging from some fine rough old graphic sketches of them which we possess. 312 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. seem to be of a higher and more poetic grade than even tlie Cartoons. The dim of sight are the timid and the shrinking. There is a cowardice in modern art. As the Frenchman, of whom Coleridge's friend made the pro- phetic guess at Rome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of Michael Augelo collected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat and a Cornuto ; so from this subject, of mere mechanic promise, it would instinctively turn away, as from one incapable of investiture with any grandeur. The dock-yards at Woolwich woidd object derogatory associations. The depot at Chatham would be the mote and the beam in its intellectual eye. But not to the nautical preparations in the ship -yards of Civita Vecchia did Eaphael look for instnictions, when he imagined the building of the Vessel that was to be conservatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. In the intensity of the action he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation. There is the Patriarch, in calm forethought, and with holy prescience, giving directions. And there are his agents — the solitary but sufficient Three — hewing, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of a Deniiurgus ; imder some in- stinctive rather than technical guidance ! giant -muscled ; every one a Hercules ; or liker to those Vulcanian Three, that in sounding caverns under Mongibello wrought in fire — Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyracmou. So work the workmen that should repair a world ! Artists again err in the confounding of jioetic with inctorial subjects. In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as nothing. Othello's colour — the infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaff — do they haunt us perpetually in the reading 1 or are they obtruded upon oiu- conceptions one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration at the respective moral or intellectual attributes of the char- acter ? But in a i3icture Othello is ahvays a Blackamoor ; and the other only Plump Jack. Deeply corporealized, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of ex- ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 313 ternality, must 1ic tlio iniiul, to wliicli, in its better moments, the image of the high-souk^l, liigli-intelligenced Quixote — the errant Star of Knightliood, made more tender by eclipse — has never presented itself divested from the unhallowed accompaniment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Eosinante. That man has read his book by halves ; he has laiighed, mistaking his author's purport, which was — tears. The artist that pictures Quixote (and it is in this degrading point that he is every season held up at our Exliibitions) in the shallow hope of exciting mirth, would have joined the rabble at the heels of his starved steed. We wish not to see that counterfeited, which we would not have wished to see in the reality. Conscious of the heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, on hearing that his withered person was i)assing, would have stepped over his threshold to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, and the " strange bed-fellows which miseiy brings a man acquainted with"? Shade of Cervantes ! who in thy Second Part could put into the mouth of thy Quixote those high aspirations of a super-cliivalrous gallantry, where he replies to one of the shepherdesses, apprehensive that he would spoil their pretty net-works, and inviting him to be a guest with them, in accents like these: "Truly, fairest Lady, Actseon was not more astonished when he saw Diana bathing herself at the fountain, than I have been in beholding your beauty : I commend the manner of your pastime, and thank you for yom* kind offers ; and, if I may serve you, so I may be sure you will be obeyed, you may com- mand me : for my profession is this. To show myself thankful, and a doer of good to all sorts of people, especially of the rank that your person shows you to be ; and if those nets, as they take up but a little piece of ground, should take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass through, rather than break them : and (he adds) that you may give credit to this my exaggeration, beh(ild at least he that promiseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath 314 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. come to your hearing." Illustrious Romancer ! were the " fine frenzies," which jDossessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this Second Part, to be ex- posed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving -men ? to be monstered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men 1 Was that pitiable infirmity, which in thy First Part misleads him, always from vnthin, into half- ludicrous, but more than half-compassionable and admir- able errors, not infliction enough from heaven, that men by studied artifices must devise and practise upon the luimour, to inflame where they should soothe it 1 Why, Goneril would have blushed to practise upon the abdi- cated king at this rate, and the she -wolf Regan not have endured to play the pranks upon his fled wits, which thou first made thy Quixote suffer in Duchesses' halls, and at the hands of that unworthy nobleman.^ In the First Adventures, even, it needed all the art of the most consummate artist in the Book way that the world hath yet seen, to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic attributes of the character without relaxing ; so as absolutely that they shall suffer no alloy from the debasing fellowship of the clown. If it ever obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh ; or not, rather, to indulge a contrary emotion 1 — Cervantes, stung, perchance, by the relish with which Ms Reading Public had received the fooleries of the man, more to their palates than the generosities of the master, in the sequel let his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the balance, and sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his contemporaries. We know that in the present day the Knight has fewer admirers than the Squire. Anticipat- ing, what did actually happen to him — as afterwards it did to his scarce inferior follower, the Author of " Guz- man de Alfarache " — that some less knowing hand would prevent him by a spurious Second Part ; and judging that it would be easier for his competitor to outbid him ^ Yet from this Secoml Part, our cried-iip pictures are mostly selected ; the waiting-women witli beards, etc. THE WEDDING, 315 in the comicalities, than in the romance, of liis work, he abandoned his Knight, and has fairly set up the Squire for his Hero. For what else has he unsealed the eyes of Sancho'? and instead of that twilight state of semi- insanity- tlic madness at second-hand — the contagion, caught from a stronger mind infected — that war between native cunning, and liereditary deference, with which he has hitherto accompanied his master — two for a pair almost-^does he substitute a downright Knave, with open eyes, for his own ends only following a confessed Madman ; and offering at one time to lay, if not actually laying, hands upon him ! From the moment that Sancho loses his reverence, Don Quixote is become — a treatable lunatic. Our artists handle him accordingly. THE WEDDING. I DO not know when I have been better pleased than at being invited last week to be present at the wedding of a friend's daughter. I like to make one at these cere- monies, which to us old people give back our youth in a manner, and restore our gayest season, in the remem- brance of om* own success, or the regrets, scarcely less tender, of our own youthful disappointments, in this point of a settlement. On these occasions I am siu-e to be in good humour for a week or two after, and enjoy a reflected honeymoon. Being without a family, I am flattered with these temporary adoptions into a friend's fixmily ; I feel a sort of cousinhood, or uncleshij), for the season ; I am inducted into degrees of affinity ; and, in the participated socialities of the little commimity, I lay down for a brief whUe my solitary bachelorship. I carry this humour so far, that I take it unkindly to be left out, even when a fimeral is going on in the house of a dear friend. But to my subject. The union itself had been long settled, but its cele- 316 THE ESSAYS OF EIJA. bnition had been hitherto deferred, to an ahnost unreai5on- able state of siisiiense in the lovers, by some invincible prejudices which the bride's father had unhappily con- tracted upon the subject of the too early marriages of females. He has been lecturing any time these five years — for to that length the com'tship had been pro- tracted — upon the propriety of putting off the solemnity, till the lady should have completed her five-and-tweutieth year. We all began to be afraid that a suit, which as yet had abated of none of its ardours, might at last be lingered on, till passion had time to cool, and love go out in the experiment. But a little wheedling on the part of his wife, who was by no means a party to these over- strained notions, joined to some serious exjiostulations on that of his friends, who, from the growing infirmities of the old gentleman, could not promise om-selves many years' enjoyment of his company, and were anxious to bring matters to a conclusion during his lifetime, at length prevailed ; and on Monday last the daughter of my old friend, Admiral ■ , having attained the ivomanly age of nineteen, Avas conducted to the church by her pleasant cousin J , who told some few years older. Before the youthful part of my female readers express their indignation at the abominable loss of time occa- sioned to the lovers by the preposterous notions of my old friend, they will do well to consider the reluctance which a fond parent naturally feels at parting with his child. To this imwillingness, I believe, in most cases may be traced the difference of opinion on this point between child and parent, whatever pretences of interest or prudence may be held out to cover it. The hard- heartedness of fathers is a fine theme for romance waiters, a sure and moving topic ; but is there not something untender, to say no more of it, in the hurry which a beloved child is sometimes in to tear herself from the paternal stock, and commit herself to strange graftings 1 The case is heightened where the lady, as in the present instance, happens to be an only cliild. I do not under- THE WEDDING. 317 stand these matters experimentally, but I can make a shrewd guess at the wounded pride of a parent upon these occasions. It is no new observation, I believe, that a lover in most cases has no rival so much to be feared as the father. Certainly there is a jealousy in imparallel subjects, which is little less heartrending than the passion which we more strictly cliristen by that name. Mothers' scruples are more easily got over ; for this reason, I sui:)pose, that the protection transferred to a husband is less a derogation and a loss to their authority than to the paternal. Mothers, besides, have a trembling foresight, which paints the inconveniences (impossible to be con- ceived in the same degree by the other parent) of a life of forlorn celibacy, which the refusal of a tolerable match may entail upon their child. Mothers' instinct is a surer guide here than the cold reasonings of a f;xther on such a topic. To this instinct may be imputed, and by it alone may be excused, the unbeseeming artifices, by which some wives push on the matrimonial projects of their daughters, which the husband, however approving, shall entertain with comparative indifference. A little shame- lessness on this head is pardonable. With this explana- tion, forwardness becomes a grace, and maternal impor- timity receives the name of a virtue. — But the parson stays, while I preposterously assume his office; I am preaching, while the bride is on the threshold. Nor let any of my female readers suppose that the sage reflections which have just escaped me have the obliquest tendency of application to the young lady, who, it will be seen, is about to venture upon a change in her condition, at a mature and competent age, and not without the fullest approbation of all parties. I only deprecate very hasty marriages. It had been fixed that the ceremony should be gone through at an early hour, to give time for a little dejeiine afterwards, to which a select party of friends had been invited. We were in chiu'ch a little before the clock struck eis;ht. 318 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. Nothing could be more jiulieious or graceful than the dress of the bride -maids — the three charming Miss Foresters — on this morning. To give the bride an opportunity of shining singly, they had come habited all in green. I am ill at describing female apparel ; but while she stood at the altar in vestments white and can- did as her thoughts, a sacrificial whiteness, they assisted in robes such as might become Diana's nymphs— Foresters indeed— as such who had not yet come to the resolution of putting off cold virginity. These young maids, not being so blest as to have a mother living, I am told, keep single for their father's sake, and live altogether so happy vni\\ their remaining parent, that the hearts of their lovers are ever broken with the prospect (so inauspicious to their hopes) of such uninterrupted and provoking home-comfort. Gallant girls ! each a victim worthy of Iphigenia ! I do not know what business I have to be present in solemn places. I cannot divest me of an imseasonable disposition to levity upon the most awful occasions. T was never cut out for a public functionary. Ceremony and I have long shaken hands ; but I could not resist the importunities of the young lady's father, whose gout unhappily confined him at home, to act as parent on this occasion, and give away the bride. Something ludicrous occurred to me at this most serious of all moments — a sense of my unfitness to have the disposal, even in imagination, of the sweet young creature beside me. I fear I was betrayed to some lightness, for the awful eye of the parson — and the rector's eye of St. Mildred's in the Poultry is no trifle of a rebuke — was upon me in an instant, som-ing my incipient jest to the tristful severities of a funeral. This was tlie only misbehaviour which I can plead to upon this solemn occasion, unless what was objected to me after the ceremony, by one of the handsome Miss T s, be accounted a solecism. She was pleased to say that she had never seen a gentleman before me give away a bride, in black. Now black has been my ordinary TJIE WEDDING. 319 ap2)arcl so loug — indeed, I take it to be the projjer costume of an author — the stage sanctions it^ — that to have ai^peared in some lighter colour would have raised more mirth at my exi)cnse than tlie anomaly had created censure. But I could perceive tliat the bride's mother, and some elderly ladies present (God bless tliem !) would have been well content, if I had come in any other colour than that. But I got over the omen liy a lucky apologue, wliich I remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian author, of all tlie birds being invited to the linnet's wedding, at which, when all the rest came in their gayest feathers, the raven alone apologised for his cloak because " he had no other." This tolerably reconciled the elders. But with the young people all was merriment, and shaking of hands, and congratulations, and kissing away the bride's tears, and kissing from her in return, till a young lady, who assiuned some experience in these matters, having worn tlie nuptial bands some foiu' or five weeks longer than her friend, rescued her, arcldy observing, with half an eye upon the bridegroom, tliat at this rate she would have " none left." My friend the Admiral was in fine wig and buckle on this- occasion— a striking contrast to his usual neglect of personal appearance. He did not once shove up his bor- rowed locks (his custom ever at his morning stiidies) to betray the few gray stragglers of his own beneath them. He wore an aspect of thoughtful satisfaction. I trembled for the hour, which at length approached, when after a protracted breakfast of three hours — if stores of cold fowls, tongues, hams, botargoes, dried fruits, wanes, cordials, etc., can deserve so meagre an appellation — the coach was annomiced, which was come to cany off the bride and bridegroom for a season, as custom has sensibly or- dained, into the country ; npon which design, wishing them a felicitous journey, let us retimi to the assembled guests. As wlieu a well-graced actor leaves the stage, The eyes of nieu Are idly bent on him that enters next, 320 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. SO idly (lid we hcnd our eyes ui^on one another, when the chief performers in the morning's pageant had vanished. None told his tale. None sijjped her glass. The poor Admiral made an effort — it was not much. I had antici- pated so far. Even the infinity of full satisfaction, that had betrayed itself through the prim looks and quiet deportment of his lady, began to wane into something of misgiving. No one knew whether to take their leave or stay. We seemed assembled upon a silly occasion. In this crisis, betwixt tarrying and departure, I must do justice to a foolish talent of mine, which had otherwise like to have brought me into disgrace in the fore-part of the day ; I mean a power, in any emergency, of thinking and giving vent to all manner of strange nonsense. In this awkward dilemma I found it sovereign. I rattled off some of my most excellent absurdities. All were willing to be relieved, at any expense of reason, from the pressure of the intolerable vacuum which had succeeded to the morning bustle. By this means I was fortunate in keeping together the better part of the company to a late hour ; and a rubber of whist (the Admiral's favourite game) with some rare strokes of chance as well as skill, which came opportimely on his side — lengthened out till midnight — dismissed the old gentleman at last to his bed with comparatively easy spirits. I have been at my old friend's various times since. I do not know a visiting place where every guest is so per- fectly at his ease ; nowhere, where harmony is so strangely the result of confusion. Everybody is at cross purposes, yet the eftect is so much better than xuiiformity. Con- tradictory orders ; servants pulling one way ; master and mistress driving some other, yet both diverse; visitors huddled up in corners ; chairs unsymmetrized ; candles disposed by chance ; meals at odd hoiu-s, tea and supper at once, or the latter preceding the former ; the host and the guest conferring, yet each upon a different topic, each understanding himself, neither trying to understand or hear the other ; draughts and politics, chess and pohtical V 'v -^ -\j^ V:x^>^ UPON THE NEW YEAR's COMING OF AGE. 321 economy, cards and conversation on nautical matters, going on at once, without the hope, or indeed the wisli, of distinguishing them, make it altogetlier the most per- fect cnncordia discors you sliall meet with. Yet some- how tlie old house is not quite what it should be. The Admiral still enjoys his pipe, but he has no Miss Emily to fill it for him. The instrmuent stands where it stood, but she is gone, whose delicate touch could sometimes for a short minute appease the warring elements. He has learnt, as Marvel expresses it, to " make his destiny his choice." He bears bravely up, but he does not come out with his flashes of wild wit so thick as formerly. His sea-songs seldomer escape him. His wife, too, looks as if she wanted some younger body to scold and set to rights. We all miss a junior presence. It is wonderful how one young maiden freshens up, and keej)s green, the paternal roof Old and young seem to have an interest in hei", so long as she is not absolutely disposed of. The youthfulness of the house is flown. Emily is married. REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. The Old Year being dead, and the Neio Year coming of age, which he does, by Calendar Law, as soon as the breath is out of the old gentleman's body, nothing would serve the yoimg spark but he must give a dinner upon the occasion, to which all the Days in the year were in- vited. The Festivals, whom he deputed as his stewards, were mightily taken with the notion. They had been engaged time out of mind, they said, in providing mirth and good cheer for mortals below ; and it was time they should have a taste of their own bounty. It was stifily debated among them whether the Fasts should be ad- Y 322 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. mitted. Some said the appearance of such lean, starved guests, "with theu* mortified faces, would pervert the ends of the meeting. But the objection was overruled by Chrintmas Bay, who had a design upon A^h Wednesda?/ (as you shall hear), and a, mighty desire to see how the old Domine would behave himself in his cups. Only the Vigils were requested to come with their lanterns, to light the gentlefolks home at night. All the Days came to their day. Covers were pro- vided for three hundred and sixty -five guests at the l^rincipal table ; with an occasional knife and fork at the side-board for the Tiventy-Ninth of February. I should have told you that cards of invitation had been issued. The carriers were the Hours; twelve little, merry, whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire to see, that went all round, and found out the persons invited well enough, with the exception of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such Jloveables, ^^■ho had lately shifted their quarters. Well, they all met at last — foul Days, fine Days, all sorts of Days, and a rare din they made of it. There was nothing l)ut, Hail ! fellow Day, well met — brother Day — sister Day — only Lady Day kej^t a little on the aloof, and seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for she came in a tiffany suit, white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake, all royal, glittering, and Epiphanous. The rest came, some in green, some in white — but old Lent and his family were not yet out of mourning. Rainy Days came in, drij^ping ; and sunshiny Days helped them to change their stockings. Wedding Day was there in his mar- riage finery, a little the worse for wear. Pay Day came late, as he always does ; and Doomsday sent word — he might be expected. April Fool (as my young lord's jester) took upon him- self to marshal the guests, and wild work he made with it. It would have posed old Erra Pater to have fovmd out any given Day in the year to erect a scheme upon — UPON THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. 323 good J)i(i/s, l)a(l D((?/>i, were so sliuftled together, to the coufouiuling (jf all sober horoscojjy. He had stuck the Tivent //-First of June next to the Tirentij-Second of December, and the former looked like a Maypole siding a inari"ow-bone. Ash Wednesday got wedged in (as was concerted) betwixt Christmas and Lord Mayor's Days. Lord ! how he laid about him ! Nothing but barons of beef and turkeys woiUd go down with him — to the great greasing and detriment of his new sack- cloth bib and tucker. And still Christinas Day was at his elbow, plying him with the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and hiccupp'd, and protested there was no faith in dried ling, but commended it to the devil for a soiu", windy, acrimonious, censorious, hy-po-crit-crit-critical mess, and no dish for a gentleman. Then he dipt his fist into the middle of the great custard that stood before his left-hand neighbour, and daubed his hungry beard all over with it, .till you would have taken him for the Last Day in De- cember, it so hung in icicles. At another part of the table, Shrove Tuesday was helping the Second of September to some cock broth, — which courtesy the latter returned with the delicate thigh of a hen pheasant — so that there was no love lost for that matter. The Ijast of Lent was spvmging upon Shrove-tide's pancakes ; which Ajml Fool perceiving, told him that he did well, for pancakes were proper to a good fry- day. In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of January, who, it seems, being a sour, puritanic cha- racter, that thought nobody's meat good or sanctified enough for him, had smuggled into the room a calf's head, which he had had cooked at home for that purpose, think- ing to feast thereon incontinently ; but as it lay in the dish, March Manyweathers, who is a very fine lady, and subject to the meagrims, screamed out there was a " human head in the platter," and raved about Herodias' daughter to that degree, that the obn(jxious viand was obliged to be removed ; nor did she recover her stomach till she had 324 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. gulped down a Restorative, confected of Oah Ai:>}-)le, which the merry Twenty -Ninth of May always carries about with him for that purpose. The King's health ^ being called for after this, a notable dispute arose between the Twelfth of Atignst (a zealous old Whig gentlewoman) and the Tiventy-Third of April (a new-fangled lady of the Tory stamp), as to which of them should have the honour to propose it. August grew hot upon the matter, aifirming time out of mind the prescriptive right to have lain with her, till her rival had basely supplanted her; whom she represented as little better than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, while she (the legitimate Birthday) had scarcely a rag, etc. April Fool, l^eing made mediator, confirmed the right, in the strongest form of words, to the appellant, but de- cided for peace' sake, that the exercise of it should remain with the present possessor. At the same time, he slyly rounded the first lady in the ear, that an action might* lie against the Crown for hi-geny. It beginning to grow a little duskish, Candlemas lustily bawled out for lights, which was opposed by all the Days, who protested against burning daylight. Then Mr water was handed romid in silver ewers, and the same lady was observed to take an unusual time in Washing herself. May Bay, -with that sweetness which is peculiar to her, in a neat speech jiroposing the health of the founder, crowned her goblet (and by her example the rest of the company) with garlands. This being done, the lordly JVetv Year, from the upper end of the table, in a cordial but somewhat lofty tone, returned thanks. He felt i^roud on an occasion of meeting so many of his worthy father's late tenants, promised to improve their farms, and at the same time to abate (if anything was found unreasonable) in their rents. At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days invol- untarily looked at each other, and smiled ; Ajiril Fool ^ Kius George IV. UPON THE NEW YEAR's COMING OF AGE. 32f) whistled to au old tune of "New Brooms;" and a surly old rebel at the fiirther end of the table (who was dis- covered to be no other than the Fifth of November) muttered out, distinctly enoi;gh to be heard by the whole company, words to this effect^ — that " when the old one is gone, he is a fool tliat looks for a better." Which ruden(>ss of his, the guests resenting, unanimously voted his expulsion ; and the malcontent Avas thrust out neck and heels into tlie cellar, as the propercst place for such a boutefeu and firebrand as he had shown himself to be. Order being restored — the young lord (who, to say truth, had been a little ruflied, and put beside his oratory) iu as few and yet as obliging words as possible, assured them of entire welcome ; and, with a graceful turn, sing- ling out poor Twenty-Ninth of February, that had sate all this while nnnuchancc at the side-board, begged to couple his health witli that of the good company before him — which he drank accordingly; observing that he had not seen his honest face any time these four years — with a number of endearing expressions besides. At the same time removing the solitary Day from the forlorn seat which had been assigned him, he stationed him at his own board, somewhere between the Greek Calends and Latter Lammas. Ash Wednesday being now called iipou for a song, with his eyes fast stuck in his head, and as well as the Canary he had swallowed would give him leave, struck up a Carol, which Christmas Day had taught him for the nonce ; and was followed by the latter, who gave " Mise- rere " in fine style, hitting oft" the miunping notes and lengthened drawl of Old Moi'tification with infinite humour. April Fool swore they had exchanged condi- tions ; but Good Friday was observed to look extremely grave ; and Sunday held her fan before her face that she might not be seen to smile. Shrove-tide, Lord Mayor^s Day, and April Fool, next joined in a glee — Wliicli is the properest day to drink ? 326 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. ill which ail tlie Days cliiiuing in, made a merry burden. They next fell to qiiibl)les and conundrums. The question being projiosed, who had the greatest number of followers — the Quarter Days said, there could be no question as to that ; for they had all the creditors in the world dogging their heels. But April Fool gave it in favour of the Forty Days before Easter ; because the debtors in all cases outuumliered the creditors, and they kept Lent all the year. All this while Valentine's Day kept courting pretty May, who sate next him, slipping amorous billets-doux under the table, till the Dog Days (who are naturally of a warm constitution) began to be jealous, and to bark and rage exceedingly. Ajiril Fool, who likes a bit of sport above measure, and had some pretensions to the lady be- sides, as being but a cousin once removed, — clapped and halloo'd them on ; and as fast as their indignation cooled, those mad wags, the Ember Days, were at it with their bellows, to blow it into a flame ; and all was in a ferment, till old ]\[adam Septuagesima (who boasts herself the Mother of the Days) wisely diverted the conversation with a tedious tale of the lovers which she could reckon when she was young, and of one Master Rogation Day in particular, who was for ever putting the question to her; but she kejit him at a distance, as the chronicle would tell — by which I apprehend she meant the Al- manack. Then she rambled on to the Days that were gone, the good old Days, and so to the Days before the Flood — ^ which plainly showed her old head to be little better than crazed and doited. Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks and greatcoats, and took their leave. Lord Mayor's Day went oft' in a Mist, as usual ; Shortest Day in a deep black Fog, that wrapt the little gentleman all round like a hedge-hog. Two Vigils — so watchmen are called in heaven — saw Christmas Day safe home — they had been used to the business before. Anotlier Vigil — a stout, (»IJ) CHINA. 327 sturdy putiole, called the Eve of St. Christopher — seeing Ash Wednesdiiy in a condition little better than he should be — e'en whipt him over his shoulders, pick-a-back fashion, and Old Mortification went floating home singing — On the bat's back I do fly, and a number of old snatches besides, between drunk and sober; but very few Aves or Penitentiaries (you may believe me) were among them. Longest Day set off westward in beautiful crimson and gold — the rest, some in one fashion, some in another ; but Valentine and pretty May took their dejjarture together in one of the prettiest silvery twilights a Lover's Day could wish to set in. OLD CHINA. I HAVE an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see any great house, I inquire for the china- closet, and next for the picture-gallery. I cannot defend the order of i^reference, but by saying that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was taken to ; but I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my im- agination. I had no repugnance then — why shoidd I now have 1 — to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that, under the notion of men and women, float about, uncir- cumscribed by any element, in that world before perspec- tive — a china tea-cup. I like to see my old friends — whom distance cannot diminish — figiuing up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still — for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the 328 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. decorous artist, to prevent alisiirditj^, liad made to spring up beneath their sandals. I love tlie men with women's faces, and the women, if possible, Avith still more womanish expressions. Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver — two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect ! And here the same lady, or another — for likeness is identity on tea-cups — is stepping into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a daiiity mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead — a furlong off" on the other side of the same strange stream ! Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of their world — see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays. Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and coextensive — so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay. I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson (which we are old-fashioned enough to drink un- mixed still of au afternoon), some of these speciosa mir- acida upon a set of extraordinaiy old \A\\q china (a recent purchase) which we were now for the first time using ; and could not help remarking, how favoimible circum- stances had been to us of late years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort — when a passing sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of my companion. I am quick at detecting these sum- mer clouds in Bridget. " I wish the good old times would come again," she said, " when we were not qiiite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; but there was a middle state" — so she was pleased to ramble on, — " in which I am sure we were a great d(!al hapjner. A purchase is but a pur- chase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and, ! how much ado I had to get you to consent in those times !) — we were used to have a OLD CHINA. 329 debate two or tliree days before, and to weigh the^or and against, and think Avliat we might spare it oi;t of, and wliat saving we could hit ui)on, that shouhl be an equi- valent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it. " Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare — and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden 1 Do you remem- ber how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a deter- mination till it was near ten o'clock of the Satmxlay night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late— and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures — and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome — and when you presented it to me — and when we were exploring the perfectness of it {collating, you called it) — and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till day- break — was there no pleasure in being a poor man 1 or can those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since w^e have become rich and finical — give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit — your old cor- beau — for four or five weeks longer than yoii should have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen — or sixteen shillings was HI — a great affixir we thought it then — which you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can affoixl to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now. " When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo, which we christened the ' Lady Blanch ; ' 330 THE ESSAYS OF EIJA. when j'ou looked at the i)urcliaso, and tliouglit of the money — -and thought of the money, and looked again at the pictm'c — was there no pleasure in being a poor man 1 Now, you ha^ve nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you ? " Tlien, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter's bar, and AValtham, when we had a holy day — holydays and all other fun arc gone now we are rich — and the little hand -basket in which I used to deposit our day's fare of savoury cold lamb and salad — and how you would prj about at noon -tide for some decent house, where we might go in and produce our store — only paying for the ale that you must call for — and speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a tablecloth — and wish for such another honest hostess as Izaak Walton has de- scribed many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he went a -fishing — and sometimes they would prove obliging enough, and sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us — but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food savourily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall 1 Now — when we go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom, moreover, we ride part of the way, and go into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense — which, after all, never has half the relish of those chance country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a precarious welcome. " You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you remember where it was we used to sit, when we saw the battle of Hexham, and the Sur- render of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood — when we squeezed out om* shil- lings apiece to sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery — where you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me — and more strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me — and the pleasure was the better for a little shame — and when the curtain OLD CHINA. 331 drew uj), Avliat oared w(! for our place in the house, or what mattered it wlierc we were sitting, whoa our thoughts were Avith Rosahnd iu Arden, or with Viohi at the Court of Illyria 1 You used to say that the Gallery was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially — that the relish of such exhibitions must be in proportion to the iufrequency of going — that tlie company we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on, on the stage — because a word lost Avould have been a chasm, which it was impossible for tliem to fill up. With such reflections we consoled our jjride then — and I appeal to you whether, as a woman, I met generally with less attention and accommodation than I have done since in more expensive situations in the house 1 The getting iu, indeed, and the crowding up those inconvenient stair- cases, was bad enough — but there was still a law of civility to woman recognized to quite as great an extent as we ever found in the other jDassages — and how a little difficulty overcome heightened the sniig seat and the play, afterwards ! Now we can only pay our money and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in the galleries now. I am siu-e we saw, and heai'd too, well enough then — but sight, and all, I think, is gone with our poverty. " There was i^leasure in eating strawberries, before they became quite common — in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear — to have them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now ? If we were to treat ourselves now — that is, to have dainties a little above our means, it woiild be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat — when two people, living together as we have done, now and then indidge themselves in a cheap luxury, which both like ; while each apologizes, and is willing to take both halves of the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making much of themselves, in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to 332 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. make inucli of otliers. But uow — what I mean by the word — we never do make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons us we were, just aliove poverty. " I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet, — and much ado we used to have every Thirty-first Night of December to account for our exceedings — many a long face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out how we had spent so much — or that we had not spent so much — or that it was impossible we should spend so much next year — and still we found our slender capital decreasing — but then, — betwixt ways, and projects, and compromises of one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing without that for the future — and the hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you were never poor till now), we pocketed up om* loss, and in conclusion, with ' lusty brimmers ' (as you used to quote it out of hearty cJieerful Mr. Cotton, as you called him), we used to welcome in the ' coming guest.' Now we have no reckoning at all at the end of the old year — no flattering i:)romises about the new year doing better for us." Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, howc\'er, smiling at the phantom of wealth wdiich her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor hundred pounds a year. "It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. I am afi'aid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That we had much to struggle with, as we grew up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened and knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain of. The resisting i)owcr — those natui'al THE CHILD ANGEL; A DREAM. 333 dilatious of the youthful spuit, which circumstances cannot straiten — with us are long since passed away. Conii)etencc to age is sujjplcmcntary youth, a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We nuist ride where we formerly walked : live better and lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — than we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could those days return — could you and I once more walk our thirty miles a day — could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and you and I be young to see them — could the good old one -shilling gallery days re- turn — they are dreams, my cousin, now — but coidd you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofe — be once more struggling up those inconvenient staircases, pushed about and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest rabltle of poor gallery scramblers — could I once more Jiear those anxious shrieks of yours — and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, which always followed when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the whole clieerfid theatre down beneath us — I know not the fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to biuy more wealth in than Croesus had, or the great Jew R is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed -tester, over the head of that pretty insipid half Madonna-ish chit of a lady in that very blue summer- house." THE CHILD ANGEL ; A DREAM. I CHANCED upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a dream the other night, that you shall hear of. I had been reading the " Loves of the Angels," and went to bed A\'ith my head full of speculations, suggested by 334 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. that extraordinary legend. It had given birth to innu- merable conjectures ; and, I remember the last waking thought, which I gave expression to on my pillow, was a sort of wonder, "what could come of it." I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could scarcely make out — but to some celestial region. It was not tlie real heavens neither — not the downright Bible heaven — -but a kind of fairyland heaven, about which a jwor human fancy may have leave to sj^ort and air itself, I will hope, without presumption. Methought — what wild things dreams are! — I was present — at what would you imagine ? — at an angel's gossiping. Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, or whether it came purely of its own head, neither you nor I know — but there lay, sure enough, wrapt in its little cloudy swaddling-bands — a Child Angel. Sun-threads — filmy beams — ran through the celestial napery of what seemed its princely cradle. All the winged orders hovered round, watching when the new born should open its yet closed eyes ; which, when it did, first one, and then the other — -with a solicitude and apprehension, yet not such as, stained with fear, dim the exjianding eyelids of mortal infants, but as if to explore its path in those its unhereditary palaces — what an inex- tinguishable titter that time spared not celestial visages ! Nor wanted there to my seeming — 0, the inexplicable simpleness of dreams ! — bowls of that cheering nectar, — which mortals caudle call below. Nor were wanting faces of female miuistrants, — stricken in years, as it might seem, — so dexterous were those heavenly attendants to counterfeit kindly similitudes of earth, to greet with terrestrial child -rites the young present, whicli earth had made to heaven. Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full sym- phony, as those by which the spheres are tutored ; but, as loudest instruments on earth speak oftentimes, mufiled ; THE CHILD ANGEL ; A DREAM. 385 BO to accommodato their smnid tlio better to the weak ears of the iinp(nfeet-l)orii. And, with the noise of tliese sultdued soundings, tlie Angelet sprang fortli, fluttering its rudiments of jjinions — but forthwith flagged and was recovered into the arms of tliosc full-winged angels. And a wonder it was to see how, as years went round in heaven — a year in dreams is as a day — continually its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but wanting the perfect angelic nutriment, anon was shorn of its aspiring, and fell fluttering — still caught by angel hands, for ever to put forth shoots, and to fall fluttering, because its birth was not of the unmixed vigour of heaven. And a name Avas given to the Babe Angel, and it was to be called Ge-Urania, because its ])roduction was of earth and heaven. And it could not taste of death, by reason of its adop- tion into immortal palaces ; but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human imbecility ; and it went with a lame gait ; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness. Then pity first sprang up in angelic bosoms ; and yearnings (like the human) touched them at the sight of the immortal lame one. And with pain did then first those Intuitive Essences, with pain and strife to their natures (not grief), put back their bright intelligences, and reduce their ethereal minds, schooling tliem to degrees and slower processes, so to adapt their lessons to the gradual illumination (as must needs be) of the half- earth -born ; and what intuitive notices they could not repel (by reason that their nature is, to know all things at once) the half-heavenly novice, by the better part of its nature, aspired to receive into its understanding ; so that Humility and Aspiration went on even-paced in the instruction of the glorious Amphibium. But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross to breathe the air of that super-subtile region, its portion was, and is, to be a child for ever. And because the human part of it might not press into 336 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. the heart and inwards of the paUxce of its adoiDtion, those fuU-natured angels tended it by turns in the pm-lieus of the i)ahice, where were shady groves and rivvUets, like this green earth from which it came ; so Love, with Voluutaiy Humility, waited upon the entertainment of the new-ado])tod. And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams Time is nothing), and still it koi)t, and is to keep, perpetual child- hood, and is the Tutelar Genius of Childhood upon earth, and still goes lame and lovely. By the banks of the river Pison is seen, lone sitting by the grave of the terrestrial Adah, whom the angel Nadir loved, a Child ; but not the same which I saw in heaven. A mournfid hue overcasts its lineaments ; never- theless, a correspondency is between the child by the grave, and that celestial orphan, whom I saw above ; and the dimness of the grief ujjon the heavenly, is a shadow or emblem of that which stains the beauty of the terrestrial. And this correspondency is not to be understood but by di'eams. And in the archives of heaven I had grace to read, how that once the angel Nadir, being exiled from his place for mortal passion, upspringing on the wings of parental love (such power had parental love for a moment to suspend the else-irrevocable law) appeared for a brief instant in his station, and, depositing a wondrous Birth, straightway disappeared, and the palaces knew him no more. And this charge was the self-same Babe, who goeth lame and lovely— but Adah sleepeth by the river Pison. CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water- CONFKSSIONS OF A DJa'NKAi;]). 'A'^7 (Iriiikiiii;' cvitics. Jiiit witli the patient liiinselt', tlie man that is to l)e enreil, unfortunately their sound has sehloin prevailed. Yet the evil is acknowledged, tlie remedy simple. Abstain. No force can oblige a man to raise the glass to his head against his wilh 'Tis as easy as not to steal, not to tell lies. Alas ! the hand to i)ilfer, and the tongue to bear false witness, have no constitutional tendency. These are actions indirtcrent to tliem. At the first instance of the reformed will, they can be brought oft" without a nnunnur. The itching finger is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar can with the same natiu'al delight give forth useful truths with which it has been accustomed to scatter their pernicious contraries. But when a man has commenced sot pause, thou stimly moralist, thou person of stout nerves and a strong head, whose liver is happily imtouched, and ere thy gorge riseth at the 7im)ie which I had written, first learn what the thin<^ is ; how much of compassion, how much of human allowance, thou mayest virtuously mingle Avith thy disapprobation. Trample not on the ruins of a man. Exact not, under so terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation from a state of death almost as real as that from which Lazarus rose not liut by a miracle. Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a mountain but going through fire ? what if the whole system must undergo a change violent as that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects 1 what if a process comparable to flaying alive be to be gone through 1 is the weakness that sinks under such struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity which clings to other vices, which have induced no constitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole victim, body and soul 1 1 have known one in that state, when he has tried to abstain but for one evening, — though the poisonous potion z 338 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. had \otvj; ccasod to hriiig back its first ciicliantments, though he was siu'C it would rather deepen his gloom than brighten it, — in the violence of the struggle, and tlie necessity he liad felt of getting rid of the present sensation at any rate, I have known him to scream out, to cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife within him. Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself 1 I have no pnling apology to make to mankind. I see them all in one way or another deviating from the piu^e reason. It is to my own nature alone I am accountable for the woe that I have brought upon it. I believe that there are constitutions, robust heads and iron insides, whom scarce any excesses can hurt ; whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at all events whom wine, taken in ever so plentiful a measure, can do no worse injury to than just to muddle their facul- ties, perhaps never very pellucid. On them this discourse is wasted. They would but laugh at a weak brother, who, trying his strength with them, and coming off foiled from the contest, would fain persuade them that such agonistic exercises are dangerous. It is to a very different description of persons I s])eak. It is to the weak — the nervous ; to those who feel the want of some artificial aid to raise their spirits in society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around them without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the convivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves for term of life. Twelve years ago I had completed my six-and-twentieth year. I had lived from the period of leaving school to that time pretty much in solitude. My companions were chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of my own book-loving and sober stamp. I rose early, went to bed betimes, and the faculties which God had given me, I have reason to think, did not rust in me unused. About that time I fell in with some companions of a CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 339 (lifferout order. They were men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a -nights, disputants, dnniken ; yet seemed to have something noble about them. We dealt about the wit, or what passes for it after midnight, jovially. Of the quality called fimcy I certaiidy possessed a larger share than my companions. Encouraged liy their applause, I set up for a professed joker ! I, who of all men am least fitted for such an occupation, having, in addition to the greatest difficulty whicli I experience at all times of find- ing words to express my meaning, a natm-al nervous im- IDcdiment in my speech ! Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit. When you find a tickling relish upon yoiu* tongue disposing you to that sort of conversation, especially if you find a preternatural flow of ideas setting in upon you at the sight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid giving way to it as you would fly yoiu" greatest destruction. If you cannot crush the power of fancy, or that within you which you mistake for such, divert it, give it some other play. Write an essay, pen a character or description, — but not as I do now, with tears trickling down your cheeks. To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes ; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools ; to be esteemed dull when you cannot be witty, to be ap- plauded for witty when you know that you have been dull ; to be called upon for the extemporaneous exercise of that faculty which no premeditation can give ; to be spurred on to efi'orts which end in contempt ; to be set on to provoke mirth which procures the procurer hatred ; to give pleasure and be paid with squinting malice ; to swallow draughts of life-destroying wine which are to be distilled into airy breath to tickle vain auditors ; to mortgage miserable morrows for nights of madness ; to waste whole seas of time upon those who pay it back in little inconsiderable drops of grudging applause, — are the wages of buff'oonery and death. Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all con- 340 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. nectioiis which have no solidev fasteuhig than this liquid cemeut, more kind to nie tlian my own taste or penetra- tion, at leno'th opened my eyes to the supposed qualities of my first friends. No trace of them is left but in the vices which tliey introduced, and the liabits they infixed. In them my friends survive still, and exercise ample re- tribution for any supposed infidelity that I may have been guilty of towards them. My next more immediate companions were and are l)ersons of such intrinsic and felt worth, that though accidentally their acquaintance has proved pernicious to me, I do not know that if the thing were to do over again, I should have the corn-age to eschew the mischief at the price of forfeiting the benefit. I came to them reeking from the steams of my late over-heated notions of companionship ; and the slightest fuel which they imconsciously aftorded, was sufficient to feed my own fires into a pro])ensity. They were no drinkers ; but, one from professional habits, and another from a custom derived from his father, smoked tobacco. The devil could not have devised a more subtle trap to re-take a backsliding penitent. The transition, from gulping down draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous blasts of dry smoke, was so like cheating him. But he is too hard for us when we hope to commute. He beats us at barter ; and when we think to set oS a new flxiling against an old infirmity, 'tis odds but he puts the trick upon us of two for one. That (comparatively) white devil of tobacco brought with him in the end seven worse than himself. It were impertinent to carry the reader through all the processes by which, from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took my degrees through thin wines, through stronger wine and water, through small pimch, to those juggling compositions, which, under the name of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of brandy or other poison under less and less water continually, until they come next to none, and so to none at all. But it is hateful to disclose the secrets of my Tartarus. CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 341 I should repel my readei-s, fi-ijin u mere incapacity of believing me, were I to tell tlicm what tobacco has been to me, tlie drudging service wluch I have i)aid, tlie slavery which I have vowed to it. How, when I have resolved to c^uit it, a feeling as of ingratitude has started up ; how it has ]nit on personal claims and made the demands of a friend upon me. How the reading of it casually in a book, as where Adams takes his wliiti" in the chimney- corner of some inn in Joseph Andrews, or Piscator in the Complete Angler breaks his fixst upon a morning jjipe in that delicate room Piscatoribus Sacrum, has in a moment broken down the resistance of weeks. How a pipe was ever in my midnight path before me, till the vision forced me to realise it, — how then its ascending vapoiu"s curled, its fragrance lulled, and the thousand delicious miuister- ings conversant about it, employing every fiiculty, ex- tracted the sense of pain. How from illuminating it came to darken, from a quick solace it turned to a nega- tive relief, thence to a restlessness and dissatisfaction, thence to a positive misery. How, even now, when the whole secret stands confessed in all its dreadful truth before me, I feel myself linked to it beyond the power of revocation. Bone of my bone Persons not accustomed to examine the motives of their actions, to reckon up the countless nails that rivet the chains of habit, or perhajjs being boimd by none so obdurate as those I have confessed to, may recoil from this as from an overcharged picture. But what short of su(;h a bondage is it, which in spite of protesting friends, a weeping wife, and a reprobating world, chains down many a poor fellow, of no original indisposition to good- ness, to his pipe and his pot 1 I have seen a print after Correggio, in which three female figures are ministering to a man who sits fast bound at the root of a tree. Sensuality is soothing him. Evil Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Repugnance at the same instant of time is applying a snake to his side. In his face is feeble delight, the recollection of past rather 342 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. than perception of present pleasures, lauguid enjoyment of evil with utter imbecility to good, a Sybaritic eftemi- uacy, a submission to bondage, the springs of the will gone down like a broken clock, the sin and the suffering CO -instantaneous, or the latter forerunning the former, remorse preceding action — all this represented in one point of time. — When I saw this, I admired the wonder- ful skill of the painter. But when I went away, I wept, because I thought of my own condition. Of that there is no hope that it should ever change. The waters have gone over me. But out of the black depths, could I be heard, I would cry out to all those who have but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to whom the flavour of his first wine is delicious as the opening scenes of life or the entering upon some newly-discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be made to understand what a dreary thing it is when a man shall feel himself going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive will, — to see his destruction and have no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all the way ema- nating from himself ; to perceive all goodness emptied out of him, and yet not to be able to forget a time when it was otherwise ; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his own self-ruins : — coidd he see my fevered eye, feverish with last night's drinking, and feverishly looking for this night's repetition of the folly ; could he feel the body of the death out of which I cry hourly with feebler and feebler outcry to be delivered, — it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the pride of its mantling temj^tation ; to make him clasp his teeth, and not imdo 'em To suffer wet damnation to run thro' 'em. Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety be that fine thing you would have us to understand, if the comforts of a cool brain are to be preferred to that state of heated excitement which you describe and deplore, CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 343 what hinders in your instance tliat you (1(j not return to those liabits from whicli you would iiuUice others never to swerve 1 if the blessing be worth i)reserving, is it not Avorth recovering 1 Recovering f — if a wish could transport me back to those days of youth, when a draught from the next clear spring could slake any heats wliich summer suns and youthfid exercise had jiower to stir up in the blood, how gladly would I return to thee, pure element, the drink of children and of child-like holy hermit ! In my dreams I can sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purling over my burning tongue. But my waking stomach rejects it. That which refreshes innocence only makes me sick and faint. But is there no middle way betwixt total abstinence and the excess which kills you 1 — For your sake, reader, and that you may never attain to my experience, with jiain I must utter the dreadful truth, that there is none, none that I can find. In my stage of habit (I speak not of habits less confirmed — for some of them I believe the advice to be most prudential), in the stage which I have reached, to stop short of that measure which is sufficient to draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic sleep of the dnmkard, is to have taken none at all. The pain of the self-denial is all one. And what that is, I had rather the reader should believe on my credit, than know from his own trial. He will come to know it, whenever he shall arrive in that state in which, paradoxical as it may appear, reason shall only visit him through iyitoxica- tion ; for it is a fearful truth, that the intellectual facul- ties by repeated acts of intemperance may be driven from their orderly sphere of action, their clear daylight minis- terics, until they shall be brought at last to depend, for the faint manifestation of their departing energies, upon the returning periods of the flital madness to which they owe their devastation. The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals. Evil is so flir his good.^ ^ Wheu i^oor M painted his last picture, witli a pencil in 344 THE E!^8AYS OF ELIA. Behold me tlieii, in the robust ijeriod of life, reduced to imbecility and decay. Hear me count my gains, and the profits which I have derived from the midnight cup. Twelve years ago, I was possessed of a healthy frame of miud and body. I was never strong, but I think my constitution (for a weak one) was as happily exempt from the tendency to any malady as it was possible to be. I scarce knew what it was to ail anything. Now, except when I am losi::j myself in a sea of drink, I am never free from those uneasy sensations in head and stomach, which are so much worse to bear than any definite jiains or aches. At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the morning, summer and winter. I awoke refreshed, and seldom without some merry thoughts in my head, or some piece of a song to welcome the new-born day. Now, the first feeling which besets me, after stretching out the hom's of recumbence to their last possible extent, is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before me, with a secret wish that I coxdd have lain on still, or never awaked. Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, the trouble, and obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the day-time I stumble upon dark mountains. Business, which, though never very particularly adapted to my nature, yet as something of necessity to be gone through, and therefore best undertaken with cheerfulness, I used to enter upon with some degree of alacrity, now wearies, aff'rights, perplexes me. I fancy all sorts of dis- couragements, and am ready to give up an occupation Avhich gives me bread, from a harassing conceit of inca- pacity. The slightest commission given me by a friend, or any small duty Avhich I have to perform for myself, as one trembling liaml, ami a glass of brandy and water in the other, his fingers owed the comiiarative steadiness with which they were enabled to go through their task in an irajierfect manner, to a temporary firmness derived from a repetition of practices, the geuei'al eliect of which had shaken both them and him so terribly. CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 345 giving orders to a tradesinan, etc., haunts mc as a labour impossible to be got through. So uiuch the sjirings of action are liroken. The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse Avith mankind. I dare not promise that a friend's hon- our, or liis cause, woidd be safe in my keejjing, if I were put to the expense of any uianly resolution in defending it. So much the springs of moral action are deadened within me. My favourite occupations iu times past now cease to entertain. I can do nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time kills me. This poor abstract of my condition was penned at long intervals, with scarcely an attempt at connexion of thought, which is now difficidt to me. Tlie noble passages which formerly delighted me in history or poetic fiction now only draw a few tears, allied to dotage. My broken and dispirited nature seems to sink before anything great and admirable. I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or none. It is inexpressible how much this infirmity adds to a sense of shame, and a general feeling of deterioration. These are some of the instances, concerning which I can say with tnith, that it was not always so with me. Shall I lift u-p the veil of my weakness any further ? — or is this disclosure sufficient 1 I am a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to consult by these Confessions. I know not whether I shall be laughed at, or heard seriously. Such as they are, I commend them to the reader's attention, if he find his own case any way touched. I have told him what I am come to. Let him stop in time. 346 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. POPULAR FALLACIES. I. — THAT A BITLLY IS ALWAYS A COWAKD. This axiom contains a principle of compensation, wliicii disposes us to admit the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to dictionaries and definitions. We should more willingly fall in with this popidar language, if we did not find brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valoiir ill the same vocabulary. The comic writers, with their poetical justice, have contributed not a little to mislead us upon this point. To see a hectoring fellow exposed and beaten upon the stage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some people's share of animal spirits is notoriously low and defective. It has not strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no part of valoiu'. The truest courage with them is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. But confront one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his confidence in the theory quickly vanishes. Pre- tensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest, inofiensive deportment does not necessarily imply valour ; neither does the absence of it justify us in deny- ing that quality. Hickman wanted modesty — we do not mean him of Clarissa — but who ever doubted his courage*? Even the poets- — -upon whom this equitable distribution of qualities should be most binding — have thought it agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the " Agouistes," is indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies singly before him — and does it. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight into this kind of character than either of his predecessors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a sort roPULAi; FALLACIES. 347 of dimidiate pre-einiueiine : -" Bully Dawson kicked by half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was true distributive justice. II. — THAT ILL-GOTTEN OAIN NEVER TROSPEKS. The weakest part of mankind have this saying commonest in their mouth. It is the trite consolation administered to the easy dupe, when he has been tricked out of his money or estate, that the acquisition of it will do the owner no good. But the rogues of this world — the prudeuter part of them at least, — know better ; and if the observation had been as true as it is old, would not have foiled by this time to have discovered it. They have pretty sharp distinctions of the fluctuating and the permanent. " Lightly come, lightly go," is a jDroverb which they can very well aftbrd to leave, when they leave little else, to the losers. They do not always find manors, got by rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away as the poets will have it ; or that all gold glides, like thaw- ing snow, from the thief's hand that grasps it. Church land, alienated to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this slippery cjuality. But some portions of it somehow always stuck so ftist, that the denunciators have been Mn to postpone the prophecy of refundment to a late posterity. III. — THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST. The severest exaction siu'ely ever invented upon the self- denial of poor human nature ! This is to exjiect a gentle- man to give a treat without partaking of it ; to sit esurient at his own table, and commend the flavour of his venison upon the absurd strength of his never touch- ing it himself. On the contrary, we love to see a wag taste his own joke to his party ; to watch a quirk or a merry conceit flickering upon tlie lips some seconds before 348 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. the tongue is delivered of it. If it be good, fresh, and racy — begotten of the occasion ; if he that utters it never thought it before, he is uatiu-ally the first to be tickled with it, and any suppression of such comj^lacence we hold to be churlish and insulting. What does it seem to imply but that your company is weak or foolish to be moved by an image or a fancy, that shall stir you not at all, or but faintly? This is exactly the hmnour of the fine gentleman in Maudeville, who, while he dazzles his guests with the display of some costly toy, atiects himself to " see nothing considerable in it." IV. THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BKEEDING. — THAT IT IS EASY TO rERCEIVE HE IS NO GENTLEMAN. A SPEECH from the jworest sort of people, which always indicates that the party vituperated is a gentleman. The very fiict which they deny, is that which galls and exas- perates them to use this language. The forbearance with which it is usually received is a proof what interpretation the bystander sets upon it. Of a kin to this, and still less politic, are the phrases with which, in their street rhetoric, they ply one another more grossly; — He is a "poor, creature. — He has not a rag to cover etc.; though this last, we confess, is more frequently applied by females to females. They do not perceive that the satire glances upon themselves. A poor man, of all things in the world, should not upbraid an antagonist with poverty. Are there no other topics — as, to tell him his father was hanged — his sister, etc. without exposing a secret which should be kept snug between them ; and doing an affront to the order to which they have the honour equally to belong ? All this while they do not see how the wealthier man stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both. POPULAR FALLACIES. 349 V. THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RTCJf. A SMOOTH text to tlie latter; and, preached from the juilpit, is sure of a docile audience from the pews lined with satin. It is twice sitting upon velvet to a foolish squire to be told that he — and not ^yfrverse nature, as the homilies would make us imagine, is the true cause of all the ii'regularities in his parish. This is striking at the root of free-will indeed, and denying the originality of sin in any sense. But men are not such implicit sheep as this comes to. If the abstinence from evil on the part of the upper classes is to derive itself from no higher prin- ciple than the aj^prehension of setting ill jjatterns to the lower, Ave beg leave to discharge them from all squeamish- ness on that score : they may even take their fill of pleasures, where they can find them. The Genius of Poverty, hampered and straitened as it is, is not so barren of invention but it can trade upon the staple of its own vice, without drawing upon their capital. The poor are not quite such semle imitators as they take them for. Some of them are very clever artists in their way. Here and there, we find an original. Who taught the poor to steal — to pilfer % They did not go to the great for school- masters in these faculties, surely. It is well if in some vices they allow us to be — no cojiyists. In no other sense is it true that the poor copy them, than as servants may be said to tl(f'tonising sings : — Every spirit as it is more piire, And liatli in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer l)ody doth procure To halnt in, and it more fairly dight With cheerful gi-ace and amiable sight. For of tlie soul the body form doth take : For soul is form, and doth the body make. But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. Conrady. These poets, we find, arc no safe guides in philosophy ; for here, in his very next stanza but one, is a saving clause, which throws us all out again, and leaves us as much to seek as ever : — Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind Dwells in deformed tabernacle cb-owu'd, Either by chance, against the course of kind, Or through unaptuess in the substance found, Which it assumed of some stubborn ground, That will not yield unto her form's direction, But is performed with some foul imperfection. From which it would follow, that Spenser had seen some- body like ]\Irs. Conrady. The spirit of this good lady — her previous anima — must have stumbled upon one of these untoward taber- nacles which he speaks of. A more rebellious com- modity of clay for a ground, as the poet calls it, no gentle mind — and sure hers is one of the gentlest — ever had to deal with. Pondering upon her inexplicable visage — inexplicable, we mean, but by this modification of the theory — we POPULAR FALLACIES. 357 have come to a conclusion that, if one mnst be phiin, it is better to be plain all over, than amidst a tolerable residue of features to hang out one that shall be excep- tionable. No one can say of Mrs. Conrady's covuitenance that it would he better if she had but a nose. It is im- possible to i)ull her to pieces in this manner. We have seen the most malicious beauties of her own sex baffled in the attempt at a selection. The tout-ensemhle defies particularizing. It is too complete — too consistent, as we may say — to admit of these invidious reservations. It is not as if some AjDclles had j^icked out here a lip — and there a chin — out of the collected ugliness of Greece, to frame a model by. It is a symmetrical whole. We challenge the minutest connoissem- to cavil at any part or parcel of the countenance in question ; to say that this, or that, is improperly placed. We are convinced that true ugliness, no less than is affirmed of true beauty, is the residt of harmony. Like that, too, it reigns without a competitor. No one ever saw Mrs. Conrady without pronouncing her to be the plainest woman that he ever met with in the com'se of his life. The first time that you are indulged with a sight of her face, is an era in yoiir existence ever after. You are glad to have seen it — like Stonehenge. No one can pretend to forget it. No One ever apologised to her for meeting her in the street on such a day and not knowing her : the pretext would be too bare. Nobody can mistake her for another. No- body can say of her, " I think I have seen that face some- where, but I cannot call to mind where." You must remember that in such a iinrlour it first struck you — like a bust. You wondered where the owner of the house had picked it up. You wondered more when it began to move its lips — so mildly too ! No one ever thought of asking her to sit for her pictvire. Lockets are for remem- brance ; and it would be clearly superfluous to hang an image at your heart, which, once seen, can never be out of it. It is not a mean face either ; its entire originality precludes that. Neither is it of that order of plain faces 358 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. which imi")rove upon acquaintauce. Some very good but ordinary poo})le, by an unwearied perseverance in good offices, put a cheat upon oiu' eyes ; juggle our senses out of their natiu'al iniiiressions ; and set us upon discovering good indications in a countenance, which at first sight promised nothing less. "We detect gentleness, which had escaped us, Im-king about an under lip. But when Mrs. Courady has done you a service, her face remains the same ; when she has done you a thousand, and you know that she is ready to double the number, still it is that individual fiice. Neither can you say of it, that it would be a good face if it were not marked by the small-pox — a compliment which is always more admissive than excusa- tory — for either Mrs. Conrady never had the small-pox ; or, as we say, took it kindly. No, it stands upon its own nieiits fairly. There it is. It is her mark, her token ; that which she is known by. XI. — THAT AVE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH : Nor a lady's age in the parish register. We hope we have more delicacy than to do either; but some faces spare us the trouble of these dental incpiiries. And what if the beast, which my friend would force upon my ac- ceptance, prove, upon the face of it, a sorry Rosinante, a lean, ill-favoiu"ed jade, whom no gentleman could think of setting up in his stables 1 Must I, rather than not be obliged to my friend, make her a companion to Eclipse or Lightfoot 1 A horse-giver, no more than a horse-seller, has a right to palm liis spavined article upon us for good ware. An equivalent is expcicted in either case ; and, with my own good-will, I could no more be cheated out of my thanks tliau out of my money. Some peojtle have a knack of ])uttiiig u])on you gil'ts of no real Aalue, to engage you to substantial gratitnde. We thank them for nothing. Om' friend Mitis carries this humour of never refusing a present to the very point of absmxlity — if it POPULAR FALLACIES. 359 were possible to couple the ridiculous with so much uiis- taken delicacy and real good-nature. Not an apartment in his fine house (and he has a true taste in household decorations), but is stuffed up with some preposterous print or mirror — the worst adapted to his panels that may be — the presents of his friends that know his weak- ness ; while his noble Vandykes are displaced to make room for a set of daubs, the work of some wretched artist of his acquaintance, who, having had them returned upon his hands for bad likenesses, finds his accomit in bestow- ing them here gratis. The good creature has not the heart to mortify the painter at the expense of an honest refusal. It is pleasant (if it did not vex one at the same time) to see him sitting in his dining parlour, surrounded with obscure aunts and cousins to God knows whom, while the true Lady ]\Iarys and Lady Bettys of his own honourable flimily, in favour to these adopted frights, are consigned to the staircase and the lumber-room. In like manner, his goodly shelves are one by one stripped of his favomite old authors, to give place to a collection of pre- sentation copies — the flour and bran of modern poetry. A presentation copy, reader — if haply you are yet innocent of such favoiu"s — is a copy of a liook which does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it j for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship ; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does sell, in return. We can speak to experience, having by us a tolerable assortment of these gift-horses. Not to ride a metaphor to death — we are willing to acknowledge that in some gifts there is sense. A duplicate out of a friend's library (where he has more than one copy of a rare author) is intelligible. There are favom's, short of the pecimiary — a thing not fit to be hinted at among gentlemen — whi(;h confer as much grace upon the acceptor as the offerer ; the kind, we confess, which is most to our palate, is of those little conciliatory missives, which for their vehicle generally choose a hamper — little odd presents of game, fruit, per- 360 THE ESSAYS OF ELTA. haps wine — though it is essential to the delicacy of the latter, that it be home-made. We love to have our friend in tlie comitry sitting tlius at our table by proxy; to apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles may be between us) by a turkey, whose goodly aspect reflects to us his "plump corpusculum ; " to taste him in grouse or woodcock ; to feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar to the latter ; to concorporatc him in a slice of Canterbmy brawn. This is indeed to have him within ourselves ; to know him intimately : such participation is methinks unitive, as the old theologians phrase it. For these con- siderations we should be sorry if certain restrictive regula- tions, which are thought to bear hard upon the peasantry of this country, were entirely done away with. A hare, as the law now stands, makes many friends. Cains con- ciliates Titius (knowing his goxil) with a leash of partridges. Titius (suspecting his partiality for them) passes them to Lucius ; W'ho, in his tm-n, preferring his friend's relish to his own, makes them over to ]\Iarcius ; till in their ever- widening progress, and round of unconscious circum- migration, they distribute the seeds of harmony over half a parish. We are well-disposed to this kind of sensible remembrances ; and are the less apt to be taken by those little airy tokens — impalpable to the palate — which, under the names of rings, lockets, keepsakes, amuse some peoj^le's fimcy mightily. AVe coxild never aw\ay with these indi- gestible trifles. They are the very kickshaws and foppery of friendship. XII. — THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY. Homes there are, we are sure, that are no homes ; the home of the very poor man, and another which we shall speak to presently. Crowded jilaces of cheai) entertain- ment, and the benches of alehouses, if they could speak, might bear mournful testimony to tlic first. To tliem the very poor man resorts for an image of the home which POPULAR FALLACIES. 3G1 he caimot find ut home. For a starved grate, and a scanty firing, that is not enough to keejD alive the natural heat in the fingers of so many shivering children with their mother, he finds in the depths of winter always a blazing hearth, and a hob to warm his pittance of beer by. Instead of the clamours of a wife, made gaunt by famishing, he meets with a cheerful attendance beyond the merits of the trifle which he can afibrd to spend. He has companions wdiich his home denies him, for the very poor man has no visitors. He can look into the goings on of the world, and speak a little to politics. At home there are no politics stirring, but the domestic. All interests, real or imaginary, all topics that should expand the mind of man, and connect him to a sympathy with general existence, are crushed in the absorbing considera- tion of food to be obtained for the family. Beyond the price of bread, news is senseless and impertinent. At home there is no larder. Here there is at least a show of plenty ; and while he cooks his lean scrap of butcher's meat before the common bars, or munches his humbler cold \'iands, his relishing bread and cheese with an onion, in a corner, where no one reflects upon his poverty, he has a sight of the substantial joint providing for the landlord and his fomily. He takes an interest in the dressing of it ; and while he assists in removing the trivet from the fire, he feels that there is such a thing as beef and cabbage, which he was beginning to forget at home. All this while he deserts his wife and children. But what wife, and what children ! Prosperous men, who object to this desertion, image to themselves some clean contented family like that which they go home to. But look at the countenance of the poor wives who follow and persecute their good-man to the door of the public-house, which he is about to enter, when something like shame would restrain him, if stronger misery did not induce him to pass the threshold. That face, ground by want, in which every cheerful, every conversable lineament has been long eff'aced by misery, — is that a face to stay at 362 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. lionie with ? is it more a woman, or a wild cat 1 alas ! it is the face of the wife of his youth, that once smiled upon him. It can smile no longer. What comforts can it share ? what burthens can it lighten 1 Oh, 'tis a fine thing to talk of the humble meal shared together ! But what if there be no bread in the cupboard 1 The innocent prattle of his children takes out the sting of a man's poverty. But the children of the very poor do not prattle. It is none of the least frightful features in that condition, that there is no childishness in its dwellings. Poor peoiDle, said a sensible old nurse to us once, do not bring up their children ; they drag them up. The little careless darling of the wealthier nursery, in their hovel is transformed betimes into a prematiu-e re- flecting person. No one has time to dandle it, no one thinks it worth while to coax it, to soothe it, to toss it up and down, to humour it. There is none to kiss away its tears. If it cries, it can only be beaten. It has been prettily said, that "a babe is fed with milk and praise." But the aliment of this poor babe was thin,, unnourishing ; the return to its little baby tricks, and efforts to engage attention, bitter ceaseless objurgation. It never had a toy, or knew Avhat a coral meant. It grew up without the lullaby of nurses, it was a stranger to the patient fondle, the hushing caress, the attracting novelty, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper off-hand contrivance to divert the child ; tlie jn-attled nonsense (best sense to it), the wise impertinences, the wholesome lies, the apt stoiy interposed, that puts a stop to present sufferings, and awakens the passions of young wonder. It was never svmg to — no one ever told to it a tale of the nursery. It was dragged up, to live or to die as it happened. It had no young dreams. It broke at once into the iron realities of life. A child exists not for the very poor as any ob- ject of dallian(!e ; it is only anotlier mouth to be fed, a pair of little hands to be betimes inured to labour. It is the rival, till it can be tlie co-ojxn'ator, for food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his diversion, his solace : POPULAR FALLACIES. 3G3 it never makes liiin young again, with recalling his young times. The children of the very poor have no young times. It makes the very heart to bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid beings which we have been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery books, of summer holidays (fitting that age) ; of the promised sight, or play ; of praised suflSciency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman,— before it was a child. It has learned to go to market ; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs ; it is knowing, acute, sharpened ; it never prattles. Had we not reason to say that the home of the very poor is no home % There is yet another home, which we are constrained to deny to be one. It has a larder, which the home of the i^oor man wants ; its fireside conveniences, of which the poor dream not. But with all this, it is no home. It is — the house of a man that is infested with many visitors. May we be branded for the veriest churl, if we deny our heart to the many noble-hearted friends that at times exchange their dwelling for our poor roof ! It is not of guests that we complain, but of endless, purpose- less visitants ; droppers-in, as they are called. We some- times wonder from what sky they fall. It is the veiy error of the position of our lodging ; its horoscopy was ill calculated, being just situate in a medium — a plagity suburban mid-space— fitted to catch idlers from town or country. We are older than we were, and age is easily put out of its way. We have fewer sands in our glass to reckon upon, and we cannot brook to see them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences. At our time of life, to be alone sometimes is as needful as sleep. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. The growing infirmities of age manifest themselves in nothing more strongly than in 3G4 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. an inveterate dislike of iiiteiTui)tion. The thing which we are doing, we wisli to be permitted to do. We have neither much knowledge nor devices ; but there are fewer in the place to which we hasten. We are not willingly- put out of our way, even at a game of nine-pins. While youth was, avc had vast reversions in time future ; we are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged to econo- mise in that article. AVe bleed away our moments now as hardly as our ducats. We cannot bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten and fretted into by moths. We are willing to barter our good time ■with a friend, who gives us in exchange his own. Herein is the distinction be- tween the genuine guest and the visitant. This latter takes your good time, and gives you his bad in exchange. The guest is domestic to you as your good cat, or house- hold bird ; the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at yoiu window and out again, leaving nothing but a sense of dis- tm'bance, and victuals spoiled. The inferior functions of life begin to move heavily. We cannot concoct our food with intermptions. Om- chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. With difliculty we can eat before a guest ; and never understood what the relish of public feasting meant. Meats have no sapor, nor digestion fair play, in a crowd. The unexpected coming in of a visitant stojjs the machine. There is a punctual generation who time their calls to the precise commencement of your dining- hour — not to eat — but to see you eat. Our knife and fork drop instinctively, and we feel that we have swallowed ovu" latest morsel. Others again show their genius, as we have said, in knocking the moment you have just sat down to a book. They have a peculiar compassionate sneer, with which they " hope that they do not interrupt your studies." Tliough they flutter oft" the next moment, to carry their inijx'rtinences to the nearest student tliat they can call tlieir friend, the tone of the book is spoiled ; we shut the leaves, and with Dante's lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the eflect of intrusion were simply coextensive with its presence, but it mars all the POPULAR FALLACIES. 3G5 good hours afterwards. These scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. " It is a prosti- tution of the bravery of friendship," says worthy Bishop Taylor, " to spend it upon impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their fomilies, but can never ease my loads." This is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, and morning calls. They too have homes, which are — no homes. XIII. — THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME AND LOVE MY DOG. " Good sir, or madam — as it may be — we most willingly embrace the offer of your friendship. We have long known yom- excellent qualities. We have wished to have you nearer to us ; to hold you within the very innermost fold of our heart. We can have no reserve towards a person of your open and noble nature. The frankness of your humour sixits us exactly. We have been long look- ing for such a friend. Quick — let us disbiu'theu our troubles into each other's bosom — let us make our single joys shine by reduplication.— But yap, yap, yap I what is this confounded cur 1 he has fastened his tooth, which is none of the bluntest, just in the fleshy part of my leg." "It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. Here, Test— Test— Test !" " But he has bitten me." " Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better acquainted with him. I have had him three years. He never bites me." Yap, yap, yap ! — " He is at it again." " Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like to be kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with aU the respect due to myself." " But do you always take him out with you, when you go a friendship-hunting V " Invariably. 'Tis the sweetest, prettiest, best-condi- tioned animal. I call him my te&t — the touchstone by which to try a friend. No one can properly be said to love me, who does not love him." 3GG THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. " Excuse us, dear sir — or madam, aforesaid — if upon further consideration Ave are oliliged to decline the otherwise invaluable otter of your friendship. We do not like dogs." " ]\Iighty well, sir, — you know the conditions — you may have worse offers. Come along, Test." The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but tliat, in the intercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason of these canine appendages. They do not always come iu the shape of dogs ; they sometimes wear the more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near acquaintances, my friend's friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. We could never yet form a friendship — not to speak of more delicate correspondence — however much to our taste, without the intervention of some third anomaly, some impertinent clog affixed to the relation — the miderstood dog in the proverb. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture ; like a school-boy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it. What a delightfid companion is * * * *, if he did not always bring his tall cousin with him ! He seems to grow with him ; like some of those douljle births which we remember to have read of with such wonder and de- light in the old "Athenian Oracle," where S^vift com- menced author by writing Pindaric Odes (what a begin- ning for him !) upon Sir William Temple. There is the picture of the brother, with the little brother peeping out at his shoulder ; a species of fraternity, which we have no name of kin close enough to comprehend. When * * * * comes, poking in his head and shoulder into your room, as if to feel his entry, you think, surely you have now got him to yourself — what a three hours' chat we shall have ! — but ever in the haunch of him, and before his diffident body is well disclosed in youi- apartment, appears the haimting shadow of the cousin, overpeering his modest kinsman, and sure to overlay the expected good talk with his insufferable procerity of stature, and uncorresponding dwarfishness of observation. Misfortunes seldom come POPULAR FALLACIES, 367 alone. 'Tis hard when a blessing comes accompanied. Cannot we like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess with her eternal brother ; or know Sulpicia, without knowing all the round of her card-playing relations^ — must my friend's brethren of necessity be mine also? must we be hand and glove with Dick Selby the parson, or Jack Selby the calico-printer, because W. S., who is neither, but a ripe wit and a critic, has the misfortune to claim a common parentage with tliem ? Let him lay down his brothers ; and 'tis odds but we will cast him in a j^air of ours (we have a superflux) to balance the concession. Let F. H. lay down his garndous micle ; and Honoring dismiss his vapid wife, and superfluous establishment of six boys : things between boy and manhood — too ripe for play, too raw for conversation — that come in, impudently staring his father's old friend out of countenance ; and will neither aid nor let alone, the conference ; that we may once more meet upon equal terms, as we were Avont to do in the disengaged state of bachelorhood. It is well if your friend, or mistress, be content with these canicular probations. Few young ladies but in this sense keep a dog. But while Rutilia hounds at you her tiger aunt ; or Ruspiua expects you to cherish and fondle her viper sister, whom she has preposterously taken into her bosom, to try stinging conclusions upon your con- stancy ; they must not complain if the house be rather thin of suitors. Scylla must have bi'oken off many ex- cellent matches in her time, if she insisted upon all that loved her loving her dogs also. An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, of Delia Cruscan memory. In tender youth he loved and courted a modest appanage to the Opera — in truth, a dancer — who had won him by the artless contrast between her manners and situation. She seemed to him a native violet, that had been transplanted by some nide accident into that exotic and artificial hotbed. Nor, in truth, was she less genuine and sincere than she appeared to him. He wooed and won this flower. Only for appearance sake, .3r)8 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. anil for duo honour to the bride's relations, slie craved that she might have the atteudani^e of her friends and kindred at the approaching solemnity. The request was too amiable not to be conceded ; and in this solicitude for conciliating the good-will of mere relations, he found a IM'esage of her superior attentions to himself, when the golden shaft should have " killed the flock of all aftectious else." The morning came : and at the Star and Garter, Richmond — the place appointed for the breakfasting — accompanied with one English friend, he impatiently awaited what reinforcements the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had made. They came in six coaches — the whole corps du Ballet — French, Italian, men and women. Monsieur de B., the famous pironeiter of the day, led his fair spouse, but craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The Prima Donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second Bufta were there ; and Signor Sc — , and Signora Ch — , and Madame V — , with a countless cavalcade besides of chorusers, figurantes ! at the sight of whom Merry afterwards declared, that " then for the first time it struck him seriously, that he was about to marry — a dancer." But there was no help for it. Besides, it was her day; these were, in fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage, though whimsical, was all very natural. But when the bride — handing out of the last coach a still more extraordinary figure than the rest — presented to him as her father — the gentleman that was to give her moay — no less a person than Signor Delpini himself — with a sort of pride, as much as to say, See what I have brought to do us honour ! — the thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite overcame him ; and slipping away under some pretence from the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry took horse from the back yard to the nearest sea-coast, from which, shipping him- self to America, he shortly after consoled himself with a more congenial match in the person of Miss Brunton ; relieved from his intended clown father, and a bevy of painted buftas for bridemaids. POPULAR FALLACIES, 369 XIV. THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK. At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night -gear, and prejDares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalist enough to determine. But for a mere human gentleman — that has no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed to such pre- posterous exercises — we take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of course, diu'ing this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hoiu- at whirh he can begin to think of abandon- ing his pillow. To think of it, we say ; for to do it in earnest requires another half hour's good consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gawds, abroad in the world, in summer-time especially, some hoiu-s before what we have assigned ; which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getting up. But having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. We are no longer amlntious of being the sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances ; which have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up mth the sun (as 'tis called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listless- ness and headaches ; Natm'e herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller. We deny not that there is something sprightly and \igorous, at the outset especially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world ; to conquer Death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us ; and we pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the unnatiu-al inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, 2 B 370 THE ESSAYS OF ELTA. are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sIccid by wholesale ; we choose to linger a-hed and digest oiu" dreams. It is the veiy time to recombine the wandering images, which night in a confused mass presented ; to snatch them from forgetful- ness ; to shape, and mould them. Some people have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision ; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies ; to drag into day- light a strugghug and half- vanishing nightmare; to handle and examine the terrors, or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these spiritual communications, to let them go so lightly. We are not so stupid, or so careless as that Imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we shoidd need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as much significance as oiir waking concerns ; or rather to import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by j^ears to the shadowj' woi"ld, whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the world's business ; we have done with it ; we have discharged our- self of it. Why shoidd we get up ? we have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have nothing here to expect, but in a short time a sick-bed, and a dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in the world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions. Om' spirits showed gray before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are composed. W^e have asked no more of life than what the mimic images in play-houses present us with. Even those tjqies have waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We arc superan- nuated. In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to POPULAR FALLACIES. 371 have friends at court. The extracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little of the usages of that colony ; to learn the language and the foces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world ; and think we know already how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes which, while we clung to flesh and blood, aff'righted us, have become familiar. We feel attenuated into their meagre essences, and have given the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal being. We once thought life to be something ; but it has unaccountably fallen from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get uj) ? XV. — THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB. We could never quite understand the philosophy of this arrangement, or the wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for instruction to these woolly bedfellows. A sheej}, when it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he can. Man found out long sixes — Hail, candle-light ! without disparagement to sun or moon, the kindliest luminary of the three — if we may not rather style thee their radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon ! — We love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by candle-light. They are everybody's sun and moon. This is our peculiar and household planet. Wanting it, what savage unsocial nights must oiir ancestors have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses ! They must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees could have passed, when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbour's 372 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. cheek to be sure that he understood it 1 Tliis accounts for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unhmteru'd nights. Jokes came in witli caudles. We wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup? what a melange of chance carving they must have made of it ? — here one had got a leg of a goat when he wanted a horse's shoulder — there another had dipped his scooped palm in a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's milk. There is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these civilized times, has never experienced this, when at some economic table he has commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the flavour till the lights came 1 The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the dark 1 or distinguish Sherris from pure Malaga 1 Take aw^ay the candle from the smoking man ; by the glimmering of the left ashes, he knows that he is still smoking, but he knows it only by an inference ; till the restored light, coming in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses the full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs ! how he bm-nishes ! — there is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours ; but it was labour thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquettes, that wnll have you all to their self and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight tajier, the writer digests his meditations. By tlie same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. They are abstracted works — Things tliat were hnrn, when none hut the still night, And his dnmlj candle, saw his pinching throes. ]\Iarry, daylight — daylight might fui-nish the images, the POPULAR FALLACIES. 373 crude material ; but tor the fine sliaj^iugs, the true turn- ing and filing (as mine author hath it), they must 1)6 con- tent to hold their insjwration of the candle. Tlie mild internal light, that reveals them, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Night and silence call out the starry fixncies. Milton's Morning Hymn in Para- dise, we would hold a good wager, was penned at mid- night ; and Taylor's rich description of a sunrise smells decidedly of the taper. Even ourself, in these our humbler lucubrations tune our best-measured cadences (Prose has her cadences) not unfrequeutly to the charm of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors;" or the wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier specu- lation than we have yet attempted, courts om* endeavours. We would indite something about the Solar System. — Bdty, Iring the candles. XVI. THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE. We grant that it is, and a very serious one — to a man's friends, and to all that have to do with him ; biit whether the condition of the man himself is so much to be de- plored, may admit of a cpiestion. We can speak a little to it, being ourself but lately recovered — 'we whisper it in confidence, reader — out of a long and desperate fit of the sullens. Was the cure a blessing 1 The conviction which wrought it, came too clearly to leave a scruple of the fanciful injuries — for they were mere fancies — which had provoked the humour. But the humour itself was too self-pleasing while it lasted— we know how bare we lay om'self in the confession — to be abandoned all at once with the grounds of it. We still brood over wrongs which we know to have been imaginary ; and for our old ac- quaintance N , whom we find to have been a truer friend than we took him for, we sid3stitute some phantom — a Caius or a Titius — as like him as we dare to form it, to wreak our yet unsatisfied resentments on. It is morti- fying to fall at once from the pinnacle of neglect ; to forego 374 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. theitleaof liaving been ill-used and contumaciously treated by an old friend. Tlic first thing to aggrandize a man in his own conceit, is to conceive of himself as neglected. There let him fix if he can. To undeceive him is to de- prive him of the most tickling morsel witliin the range of self-complacency. No flattery can come near it. Haj^py is he who suspects his friend of an injustice ; but supremely blest, who thinks all his friends in a conspiracy to depress and undervalue him. There is a pleasure (we sing not to the profane) far beyond the reach of all that the world counts joy — a deep, enduring satisfaction in the depths, where the superficial seek it not, of discontent. Were Ave to recite one half of this mystery — which we were let into by our late, dissatisfaction, all the world woidd be in love with disrespect ; we shoidd wear a slight for a bracelet, and neglects and contumacies would be the only matter for courtship. Unlike to that mysterious book in the Apocalypse, the study of this mystery is unpalatable only in the commencement. The first sting of a suspicion is grievous ; but wait — out of that wound, which to flesh and blood seemed so difiicidt, there is balm and honey to be extracted. Your friend passed you on such or such a day, — having in his company one that you conceived worse than ambiguously disposed towards you, — passed you in the street without notice. To be sure, he is something short-sighted ; and it was in yoiu* jx)wer to have accosted him. But fiicts and sane inferences are trifles to a true adept in the science of clissatisfiiction. He must have seen you ; and S , who was with him, must have been the cause of the contempt. It galls you, and well it may. But have patience. Go home, and make the worst of it, and you are a made man from this time. Shut yoiu'self up, and — rejecting, as an enemy to your peace, eveiy whispering suggestion that but insinuates there may be a mistake — reflect seriously upon the many lesser instances whicli you had begim to perceive, in proof of your friend's disaflection towards you. None of them singly was much to the purpose, but the aggregate weight is positive ; and POPULAR FALLACIES. 375 you have this last affront to clench them. Thus far the process is anything but agreeable. But now to your relief comes the (comparative foculty. You conjure up all the kind feelings you have had for your friend ; what you have been to him, and what you would have been to him, if he woidd have suffered you ; how you defended him in this or that place ; and his good name — his literary reputation, and so forth, was always dearer to you than your own ! Your heart, spite of itself, yearns towards him. You could weep tears of blood but for a restraining pride. How say you ? do you not yet begin to apprehend a com- fort ? — some allay of sweetness in the bitter waters 1 Stop not here, nor penmiously cheat yourself of yom' reversions. You are on vantage ground. Enlarge your specidations, and take in the rest of your friends, as a spark kindles more sparks. Was there one among them who has not to you proved hollow, folse, slippery as water ? Begin to think that the relation itself is inconsistent ^Yith. mortality. That the very idea of friendshij), with its component parts, as honour, fidelity, steadiness, exists but in your single bosom. Image yoxu'self to yourself as the only possible friend in a world incapalile of that commimion. Now the gloom thickens. The little star of self-love twinkles, that is to encourage you through deeper glooms than this. You are not yet at the half point of your elevation. You are not yet, believe me, half sidky enough. Adverting to the world in general (as these circles in the mind will spread to infinity), reflect with what strange injustice jow have been treated in quarters where (setting gratitude and the expectation of friendly returns aside as chimeras) you pretended no claim beyond justice, the naked due of all men. Think the veiy idea of right and fit fled from the earth, or your breast the solitary receptacle of it till you have swelled yourself into at least one hemisphere ; the other being the vast Arabia Stony of your friends and the world aforesaid. To grow bigger every moment in your own conceit, and the world to lessen ; to deify yourself at the expense of your species ; to judge the world — this is 37G THE ESSAYS OF ETJA. the acme and sujireme point of your mystery — these the true Pleasures of Sulkiness. We profess no more of this grand secret than what ourself experimented on one rainy afternoon in the last week, sulking in our study. We had jirocccded to the penultimate point, at Avliich the true adept seldom stops, where the consideration of benefit forgot is about to merge in the meditation of general injustice — when a knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the very friend whose not seeing of us in the morning (for we will now confess the case our own), an accidental oversight, had given rise to so much agreeable generalization ! To mortify us still more, and take down the whole flattering snperstructiu'e whicli pride had piled upon neglect, he had broiight in his hand the identical S , in whose favom' we had suspected him of the con- tumacy. Asseverations were needless, where the frank manner of them both was convictive of the injurious uatvu-e of the susijicion. We fancied that they perceived oirr embiurassment ; but were too proud, or something else, to confess to tlie secret of it. We had been but too lately in the condition of the noble patient in Argos : — Qui se credebat miros aiidire tragoedos, 111 vacuo Ifetus sessor plausorque theatro — and could have exclaimed with equal reason against the friendly hands that cm-ed us — Pol, me occidistis, amici, Noil sei'vastis, ait ; cui sic extorta voluptas, Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimiis error. NOTES. RECOLLECTIONS OF THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE.— P. 1. (London Miujazine, August 1820.) Charles Lamb left Clirist's Hospital in the year 1789, at the age of fourteen, and at some date within the next two years he obtained a situation in the South -Sea House. His father's employer, Samuel Salt, the Bencher of the Inner Temple, was a Deputy-Governor of the South-Sea House at the time, and it was doubtless by the influence of this kind friend that the appointment was obtained. Charles's elder brother, John, was already a clerk in the oSice. In the Royal Calendar for 1792 John Lamb's name ajipears as holding the position of Deputy- Accountant. Other of the names mentioned by Lamb in this Essay are also found in the official records of the day — John Tipp, on whose promotion to the office of Accountant (as ' ' John Tipp, Esq."), John Lamb succeeded to the post just mentioned ; W. Evans, Deputy-Cashier in 1791 ; Thomas Tame, Deputy- Cashier in 1793; and Richard Plumer, Deputy - Secretary in 1800. Lamb's fondness for gratuitous mystification is thus curiously illustrated in the insinuation towards the close of the Essay that the names he has recorded are fictitious, after all. Lamb's old colleague, Elia, whose name he borrowed, has not (as far as I am aware) been yet ti-aced in the annals of the office. But he probably held, lilce Lamb himself, a very subordinate position. A full account of the famous South-Sea Bubble will be found in Lord Stanhope's History, and also in Chambers's Book of Days. For an account of the constitution of the Company at the end of the last century, Hughson's Walks through London (1805) may be consulted. He says—" Notwithstanding the terms of the charter by which we are to look upon this Company as merchants, it is observable that they never carried on any con- siderable trade, and now they have no trade. They only receive interest for their capital which is in the hands of the Govern- 378 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. meiit, and £8000 out of the Treasury towards the expense attending the management of their allairs, ■\vhicli is done by a Governor, Sub -Governor, Dej)uty-Goveinor, and t\vent_y-one Directors annually chosen on the 6th of February by a majority of votes." Pennant (who is referred to in this Essay, and wrote in 1790) says — "In tliis (Threadneedle) Street also stands the South-Sea House, the place in which the Company did business, when it had any to transact." Henry Man, the Wit, etc. — The two "forgotten vohrmes" — '■'Miscellaneous TForks in Verse and Prose of the late Henry Man, London, 1802" — are now before me. They contain a variety of light and amusing jiapers in verse and prose. The humour of them, however, is naturally still more out of date now than in Lamb's day. One of tlie epigrams found there may be said to have become classical, — that upon the two Earls (Spencer and Sandmch) who invented respectively "half a coat" and "half a dinner." Henry Man was Deputy-Secretary in 1793. Rattle-headed Plumer. — Lamb had a special interest in the family bearing this name, because his grandmother, Mary Field, was for more than half a centiuy housekeeper at the Dower House of the family, Blakesware in Hertfordshire. The pre- sent Mr. Phmier, of Allerton, Totness, a grandson of Richard Phimer of the South-Sea House, by no means acquiesces in the tradition here recorded as to his grandfather's origin. He believes that though the links are missing, Richard Plumer was descended in regular line from the Baronet, Sir Walter Plumer, who died at the end of the seventeenth century. Lamb's memory has failed him here in one respect. The ' ' P)achelor Uncle," Walter Phuner, uncle of William Plumer of Blakesware, was most certainly not a bachelor (see the Pedigree of the family in Cussans' Hertfordshire). Lamb is further inaccurate as to the connection of this Walter Plumer with the aftair of the franks. A reference to Johnson's Life of Cave ^\i\\ show that it was Cave, and not Phimer, who was summoned before the House of Commons. Walter Plumer, member for Aldborough and Aj>pleby, had given a frank to the Duchess of Jlarlborough, which had been challenged by Cave, who held the post of Clerk of the Franks in the House of Commons. For this. Cave was cited before the House, as a Breach of Privilege. In the passage on John Tipp, Lamb, speaking of his fine suite of rooms in Threadneedle Street, adds — "I know not who is the occupier of them now." When the Essay first appeared in the London Maijazine, the note in brackets was appended. Thus we learn that John Lamb was still, in 1820, occupying rooms in the old building. NOTES. 379 Mild, cliild-ince, imstoral M . — "]\raynard, haiig'd him- self" (Lainl)'s " Key"). Mr. T. Maynard was cliief clerk of the Old Aiinnitios and Three per Cents from*1788 to 1793. His name does not appear in the almanacs of the day after this date. OXFORD IN THE VACATION.— P. 10. (London Magazine, October 1S20.) Lamb was foud of spending his annual holiday in one or other of the great university towns, more often perhaps in Cambridge. It was on one such visit, it will be remembered, that Charles and IMary first made the acquaintance of little Emma Isola. On its first appearance in the London, the paper was dated "August 5, 1820. From my rooms facing the Bod- leian." A sonnet writen a year before at Cambridge, tells of the charm that University associations had for one who had been debarred through infirmity of health and poverty from a university education : — " I was not trained in Academic bowers. And to those learned streams I nothing owe Which copious from those twin fair founts do flow ; Mine have been anything but studious hours. Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers, Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lajj ; My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap, And I walk gowned ; feel luiusual powers. Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring sj^eech, Old Ramus' gliost is busy at my brain ; And my skull teems with notions infinite. Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach Truths which transcend the seai'ching schoolmen's vein, And half had staggered that stout Stagirite !" " Andreiv and John, men famous in old times," quoted, quite at random, from Paradise Regained, ii. 7. G. D. — George Dyer (1755-1841), educated at Christ's Hos- pital and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A compiler and editor and general worker for the booksellers, short-sighted, absent-minded, and simple, for whom Lamb had a life -long affection. He compiled, among other books, a History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge, and contributed the original matter (preface excepted) to Valpy's edition of the Classics. The account of him given by Crabb Robinson in his Diary well illustrates Lamb's frecjuent references to this singular character. " He was one of the best creatures, morally, that ever breathed. He was the son of a watchman in Wapping, 380 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. and was put to a charity .school by some pious Dissenting ladies. He afterwards went to Christ's Hospital, and from there was sent to Cambridge. ' He was a scholar, but to the end of his days (and he lived to be eiglity-five) M'as a bookseller's drudge. He led a life of literary labour in poverty. He made indexes, corrected the press, and occasionally gave lessons in Latin and Greek. When an inulergraduate at Cambridge he became a hearer of Robert Robinson, and consequently a Unitarian. This closed the churcli against him, and he never had a fellowship. . , . He ^^Tote one good book — The Life of Robert Rohinson, which I have hoard Wordsworth mention as one of the best works of biography in the language. . . . Dyer had the kindest heart and simplest manners imaginable. It was literally the case with liim that he would give away his last guinea. . . . Not many years before his death he married his laundress, by the advice of his friends — a very worthy \voman. He said to me once, 'Mrs. Dyer is a woman of excellent natural sense, but she is not literate.' That is, she could neither read nor WTite. Dyer was blind for a few years before his death. I used occasionally to go on a Sunday morning to read to him. . . . After he came to London, Dyer lived always in some very humble chambers in Clifford's Inn, Fleet Street." Give me Agur's Wish. — See the Book of Proverbs xxx. 10. Our friend M. 's in Bedford Square. — M. was Basil Montagu, Q.C., and editor of Bacon. Mrs. M. was of course Irviug's "noble lad}%" so familiar to us from Carlyle's iicwiMijsccnccs. "Pretty A. S." was Mrs. Montagu's daughter, Anne Skepper, afterwards the wife of Mr. Procter (Barry Cornwall). In his Memoir of Lamb, Mr. Procter significantly remarks that he could vouch jiersonally for the truth of this anecdote of Dyer's absent-miruledness. Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder rcjmsc of MSS. — In tlie London Magazine was appended the following note : — ' ' There is something to me repugnant at any time in written hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty — as springing up with all its parts absolute — till, in an evil hour, I was shown the original cojty of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the library of Trinity, kept like some treasure, to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them after the latter Cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore ! interlined, corrected ! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure ! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good ! as if inspiration were made U}) uf parts, and these fluctuating, successive, in- NOTRS. 381 different ! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture till it is fairly olf the easel : no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea." CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. —P. 17. (London, Magazine, November 18:20.) The first collected edition of Lamb's Prose and Yerse appeared in the year 1818, published by C. and J. Oilier. Among other papers it contained one entitled RccoUcdions of Christ's Hosjntal. The Essay was a reprint ft-oni the Gentleman's Magazine for June 1813, where it originally owed its appearance to an alleged abuse of the presentation system in force at the Blue Coat School. This earlier article on Christ's Hospital had been WTitten in a serious and genuine vein of enthusiasm for the value and dignity of the old Foundation. Lamb now seems to have remembered that there were other aspects of schoolboy life under its shelter that might be profitably dealt witli. The "poor friendless boy," in whose character he now writes, was his old schoolfellow Coleridge, and the general truth of the sketch is showii by Coleridge's own reference to his schooldays in the early chapters of his BiograpMa Literaria. "In my filcndless wanderings on our leave-clays (for I was an orphan, and had scarce any connections in London) highly was 1 delighted if any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with me." Lamb's love of mystification shows itself in this Essay in many forms. " Sweet Calne in Wiltshire " is a quite gi'atuitous sirbstitution for Ottery St. JIary in Devonshire, the home after which young Coleridge did actually yearn. Coleridge did, how- ever, reside for a time at Calne in later life. Moreover, as will be seen, the disguise of identity with Coleridge is dropped altogether towards the close of the Essay. The general account of the school here given it is interesting to compare with that given by Leigh Hunt in his autobiography. L. 's governor {so we called the patj'on ivho presented us to tlie foundation) lived in a maimer under his jiatemal roof. — It was under Samuel Salt's roof that John Lamb and his family lived, and as the presentation to Christ's was obtained from a friend of Salt's, Lamb considers it fair to speak of the old Bencher as the actual benefactor. There ivas one IT . — Hodges (Lamb's "Key "). " To feed our mind with idle portraiture," a line apparently 382 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. extemporised by Laiiil) an a translation of the passage in Virgil to which he refers, " animum 2nctiird 2}ciscit inani." " 'Tioas said lie ate strange Jlesh," As usual, a new quotation formed out of Lamh's general recollection of an old one. He had in his mind, no doubt, a passage in Antony and Cleopatra (Act I. Sc. 4) : — " It is reported thou didst eat strauge flesh Which some did die to look on. " Mr. Ilatlmway, the then Steward. — Perry was steward in Lamb's day (see the former Essay on Christ's Hospital). Leigh Hunt says of his successor : — "The name of the steward, a thin stiff man of invincible formality of demeanour, admirably fitted to render encroachment impossible, was Hathaway. We of the grammar school used to call him ' the Yeoman ' on account of Shakspeare having married the daughter of a man of that name, designated as 'a substantial yeoman.'" The Ecv. James Boyer became upper master of Christ's in 1777. For the better side of Boyer's qualifications as a teacher, see Coleridge's Biographia Litcraria, the passage beginning, "At school I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe master." Else- where Coleridge entirely confirms Lamb's and Leigh Hunt's accounts of Boj^er's violent temper, and severe discipline. Laiidj never reached the position of Grecian, but it is the tradition in Christ's Hospital that he was under Boyer's instruction some time before leaving school. The Rev. Matthciv Field. — Some charming additional ti-aits in this character, entirely confirming Lamb's account, will be found in Leigh Hunt's autobiogi-aphy. ' ' A man of a more handsome incompetence for his situation perhaps did not exist. He came late of a morning ; went away soon in the afternoon ; and used to walk up and down, languidly bearing his cane, as if it were a lily, and hearing our eternal Domimises and As in 'praescntis with an air of ineiiable endurance. Often he did not hear at all. It was a joke mth us when any of our friends came to the door, and we asked his permission to go to them, to address liim with some preposterous question wide of the mark ; to which he used to assent. We would say, for instance, ' Are you not a great fool, sir?' or 'Isn't your daughter a pretty girl ? ' to which he would rei)ly, ' Yes, child. ' When he con- descended to hit us with the cane, he made a face as if he were taking physic. " The Author of ike Country Spectator. — For an amusing ac- NOTES. 383 count of the origin of this peviodioal, sec Mozley's Reminiscences of Oriel College, voL ii. addenda. Dr. T c— Dr. Trollope, who succeeded Boj'er as head- master. Th .—Thornton (Lamb's "Key"). Poor S . — " Scott, died in Bedlam" (Lamb's " Key "). Ill-fated M .— "Maunde, dismissal school" (Lamb's " Key""). ' ' Finding some of Edward's Race Unhappy, pass tJieir annals by. " Adapted from Matt. Prior's Carmen Scecularc for 1700 (stanza viii. ) — ■ " Janus, mighty deity, Be kliy;l, and as thy searching eye Does our modern story trace. Finding some of Stuart's race Unhappy, pass their annals by." C V. Lc G. — Charles Valentine Le Grice and a younger brother of the name of Samuel were Grecians and prominent members of the school in Lamb's day. They were from Corn- wall. Charles became a clergyman and held a living in his native county. Samuel went into the annj'^, and died in the West Indies. It was he who was staying in London in the autumn of 1796, and showed himself a true friend to the Lambs at the season of the mother's death. Lamb WTites to Coleridge, " Sam Le Grice, who was then in town, was with me the three or four first days, and was as a brother to me ; gave up every hour of his time to the very hurting of his health and spirits in constant attendance, and humoirring my poor father ; talked with him, read to him, played at cribbage with him." He was a "mad wag," according to Leigh Hunt, who tells some plea- sant anecdotes of him, but must have been a good-hearted fellow. "Le Grice the elder was a wag," adds Hunt, "like his brother, but more staid. He went into the church as he ought to do, and married a rich widow. He published a translation, abridged, of the celebrated pastoral of Longus ; and report at school made him the author of a little anonymous tract on the Art Of Poking the Fire. " " Which tivo I behold," cic— This is Fuller's account of the wit-combats between Ben Jonson and Shakspeare. The Junior Le G. and F. — The latter of these was named Favell, also a Grecian in the school. These two, according to 384 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Leigli Hunt, ■when at the universitj- ■wrote to the Duke of York to ask for commissions in the army. " The Duke good-naturedly sent them." Favcdl \vas killed in the Peninsula. His epitaph will be found on a tablet in Great St. Andrew's Church, Cam- bridge : — "Samuel, a Captain in the 61st Regiment, having been engaged in the expedition to Egypt, afterwards served in the principal actions in the Peninsula, and fell whilst heading liis men to the charge in the Battle of Salamanca, July 21, 1812." AVe shall meet with him again, under a different initial, in the essay on Poor Relations. THE TWO RACES OF MEN.— P. 31. (London Maga:inc, December 1S20.) Jialjjk Bigod. — John Fcnwiek, editor of the Albion. See later essay on Ncwsiiapers Thirty-five Years Ago. ' ' To slacken virtue and abate her edge Than prompt her to do aught may merit 2)raise." Paradise Regained, ii. 455. Co/nbcrbatch, more properly Combcrbacl; the name adopted by Coleridge when he enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons, in Dec. 1793. He gave his name to the authorities as Silas Titus Coniberback, with initials corresponding to his own, perhaps in order that the maiks on his clothes might not raise suspicion. "Being at a loss when suddenly asked my name," he writes, " I answered Coniberback ; and, verily, my habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." Jf'ayivard, Spiteful /r.— Kenney, the dramatist, who married a Frenchwoman and lived for some years at Versailles. Lamb visited him there in 1822. " Umoorlhy land, to harbour such a sivcctncss." I have not been able as yet to trace this quotation to its source. S. T. C. — Of course, Coleridge again. It is a good illus- tration of Lamb's fondness for puzzling that having to instance his friend, he indicates him three times in the same essay by a different alias. Coleridge's constant practice of enriching his o^wn and other's books with these marginalia is well known. NEW YEAR'S EVE.— P. 37. (London Mngmine, January 1821.) It was probably this paper, together with that on Witches and other Night Fears, which so shocked the moral sense of South(>y, and led to his lamenting publicly, in the pages of the Quarterly, the "absence of a sounder religious feeling" in the Essays of Elia. The melancholy scepticism of its strain would NOTES. 385 appear to have struck others at the time. A graceful aiul tenderly-remoustrative copy of verses, suggested by it, appeared in the London ifagazine for August 1821, signed " Olen.^' Lamb noticed them in a letter to his publisher Mr. Taylor, of July 30. ' ' You will do me injustice if you do not convey to the writer of the beautiful lines, which I here return you, my sense of the extreme kindness which dictates them. Poor Elia (call him Ellia) does not pretend to so very clear revelations of a future state of being as ' Olen ' seems gifted with. He stumbles about dark mountains at best ; but he knows at least how to be thankful for tliis life, and is too thankful, indeed, for certain relationships lent him here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift." Lamb thinks that the verses may have lieen l)y James Mont- gomery, who was on the staff of the London, Ijut I have not found them reprinted in any collected edition of JMoutgomery's poems. ' ' / saw the shirts of the departing Year. " From the first strophe of Coleridge's " Ode to the departing Year," as originally printed in the Ihistol edition of his poems in 1796. He afterwards altered the line to '• I saw the train of the departing Year." " Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest." From Pope's translation of the Odyssey. (Book xv. line 84.) Alice W n. — According to Lamb's "Key," for Winterton. In any case the fictitious name by which Lamb chose to indicate the object of his boyish attachment, whose form and features he loved to dwell on in his early sonnets, Rosamund Gray, and afterwards in his essays. We shall meet her again later on. " Siveet assurance of a look." — From Lamb's favourite Elegy on Philip Sidney, by Matthew Roydon. From what have I not fallen, if the child I remcmhcr locus indeed myself. — The best commentary on this passage is that supplied by Lamb's beautiful sonnet, written as far liack as 1795:— ' ' We were two pretty babes ; the youngest she, The youngest, and the loveliest far (I weeu) And Innocence her name : the time has been We two did love each other's company ; Time was, we two had wept to have been apart. But when, by show of seeming good beguiled, I left the garb and manners of a child, And my first love for man's society, 2 c 386 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Defiling with the worhl nij' virgin heart — My loved companion (lro])t a tear, and tied. And hid in deepest shades her awful head. Beloved ! who shall tell rae, where thou art ? In what delicious Eden to be found? That I may seek thee, the wide world around." ]\IRS. BATTLE'S OriNIONS ON WHIST.— P. 41 (Lomlon Marjn:ine, February 1821.) There is probably no evidence existing as to the original of I\Irs. liattle. Several of Lamb's commentators have endeavoured to prove her identity with Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother, so long resident with the I'lumer family ; the sole fact common to them being that Lamb represents ]\Irs. Battle (in the essay on Blakesmoor) as having died at Blakesware, where also Mrs. Field ended her days. But any one who will read, after the present essay. Lamb's indisj^utably genuine and serious verses on Mrs. Field's death ( The Grandamc) will feel that to have transformed her into this "gentlewoman born" with the fine " last century couutenauce, " would have been little short of a mauvaisc i^lai- santerie, of which Lamb was not likely to have been guilty. Mr. Bowles. — "William Lisle Bowles brought out his edition of Pope in 1807. Bridget Ella. — The name by which Lamb always indicates his sister in this series of essays. A CHAPTER ON EARS.— P. 52. {London Magazine, March 1821.) Lamb's indifference to mu.sic is one of the best-knowm features of his personality. Compare the admirably humorous verses, " Free Thoughts on several Eminent Composers," beginning — " Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart, Just as the whim bites ; for my part I do not care a farthing candle For either of them, or for Handel, — Cannot a man live free and easy Without admiring Pergolesi ? Or through the world with comfort go That never heard of Dr. Blow ?" Mil friend A.' s. — Doubtless Lamb's friend, William Ayrton, tlie well-known musical critic of that day (1777-1858). NOTES. 387 Party in a parlour, etc. — From a stanza in the original draft of Wordsworth's Peter Bell. Tho stanza was omitted in all editions of the poem after tho first (1819). Mij good Catholic friend Nov •. — Vincent ISTovello, the well-kno\\^l organist and composer, father of Mde. Clara Novello and Mrs. Cowden Clarke (1781-1861). rapt above earth, And possess joys not promised at my birth. — " As T thus sat, these and other sights had so fully possessed ray soul with content that I thought, as the poet has happily expressed it, — I was for that time lifted above earth ; And possessed joys not promised at my birtli." —Walton's Compilcte Angler, Part I. chap. 4. ALL FOOL'S DAY.— P. 58. (London Magazine, April 1821.) The crazy old church clock. And the beicildercd chimes. — Wordsworth, " The Fountain : a Conversation. " Ha ! honest R. — According to Lamb's " Key," one Ramsay, who kept the "Loudon Library" in Ludgate Street. Granville S. — Granville Sharp, the abolitionist, died in 1813. King Pandion, he is dead ; All thy friends are lapt in lead. — From the verses on a Nightingale, beginning — "As it fell upon a day," formerly ascribed to Shakspeare, but now known to be written by Richard Barnfield. A QUAKERS' MEETING.— P. 62. (Lo)ulon Magaslne, April 1821.) " Boreas and Cesias and Argestes loud." — ]\Iilton, Paradise Lost, x. 699. sands, ignoble things, Dro2)tfrom the ruined sides of Icings. — From "Lines on tho Tombs in Westminster Abbey," by Francis Beaumont. 388 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Hoxo reverend is tJic view oftliese hushed hrcnh, Looking tratiquillity ! — A good example of Lamb's habit of constructing a quotation out of his general recollection of a passage. The lines he had in his mind are from Congreve's Mourning Bride, Act II. Scene 1 :— " llow reverend is the face of this tall ]>ile, Whose ancient pillars rear theu" marble heads To bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof, By its owu weight made stedfast and immoveable, Looking tranquillity." The writings of John Woolman. — "A journal of the life, gospel labours, and Christian experiences of that feithful minister of Jesus Christ, John AVoolman, late of Mount Holly, in the Pro- vince of Jersey, North Anuu-ica " (1720-1772). Woolman was an American Quaker of humble origin, an "illiterate tailor," one of the first who had " misgivings about the institution of slavery." Crabb Robinson, to whom Lamb introduced the book, becomes rapturous over it. "His religion is love ; his whole existence and all his passions were love !" " Forty feeding like one." — From Wordsworth's verses, written in March 1801, beginning " The cock is crowing. The stream is flowing." I have noted elsewhere Lamb's strong native sympathj' with the Quaker spirit and Quaker manners and customs, a sympathy so marked that it is difficult to believe it was not inherited, and that on one or other side of his . parentage he had not relations \\'ith the Society of Friends. His i)ieture of the Quakerism of sixty years ago is of almost historical value, so gi'eat are the changes that have since divided the Society against itself. THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER.— P. 67. {London Magasiiw, May 1S21.) My friend M. — Thomas Manning, the mathematician and ex- plorer, whose acquaintance Lamb made early in lil'e at Cambridge. King Basilius. — See Sidney's Arcadia, Book i. (vol. ii. p. 17 of the edition of 1725.) Even a child, that " ])1 ay thing for an hour." — One of Lamb's (piotations from himself. The phrase occurs in a charming poem, of three stanzas, in the Poetry for Children: — NOTES. 389 "A child's a playtliiiig for an lioiir ; Its prttty tricks wo try For tluit or for a longer space ; Then tire and lay it by. " But I knew one that to Itself All seasons could control ; That would have mocked the sense of pain Out of a grieved soul. " Thou straggler into loving arms, Young climber np of knees, When I forget thy thousand ways, Then life and all shall cease." IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES.— P. 76. (London Magazine, August 1S21.) Stdiidinri on earth, not rapt above the sky. — Quoted, not with perfect accuracy, from Paradise Lost, vii. 23. John B uncle. — "The Life of John Buncle, Esq. ; containing various observations and reflections, made in several parts of the world, and many extraordinary relations." By Thomas Amory (1756-66). Amory was a staunch Unitarian, an earnest moralist, a humorist, and eccentric to the verge of insanity — four quali- fications which would appeal irresistibly to Lamb's sympathies. A graceful Jtg lire, after Leonardo da Vinci. — This print, a present to Lamb from Crabb Robinson in 1816, was of Leonardo da Vinci's Viergc aux Hochers. It was a special favourite with Charles and Mary, and is the subject of some verses by Charles. B would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. — Braham, the singer. In a letter to Manning, Lamb describes him as a compound of the "Jew, the gentleman, and the angel." " To sit a guest ivith Daniel at his pulse." — Slightly altered from Paradise Regained, Book ii. line 278. / loas travelling in a stage-coach toith three inale Quakers. — This adventure happened not to Lamb, but to Sir Anthony Carlisle, the surgeon, from whom Lamb had the anecdote. WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS.— P. 85. (London Magazine, October 1S21.) Headless hear, black man, or ape. — From "The Author's Abstract of Jlelancholy, " prefixed to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. 390 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. Dear little T. //.— Tlionitoii Hunt, Leiv^h Hunt's eldest boy. This passage is interesting as liaving provoked Southey's violent attack ou Leigh Hunt and his principles, in the Quarterly Re- view for January 18"23. " • names whose sense wc see not Fray its u-ifh things that he not." — From Spenser's Ejnthfdamiwm, line 343. 1 Jiave formerly travelled among the Westmoreland Fells. — See Lamb's letter to Manning, in 1802, describing his and Mary's visit to Coleridge at Keswick. "We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a gor- geous sunset, which transmuted all the mountains into colours. We thought we had got into Fairyland. . . . Such an impres- sion I never received from objects of sight before, nor do 1 sup- pose that I can ever again." VALENTINE'S DAY.— r. 03. (Leigh Hunt's Indicator, February 1-1, 1S21.) "Brushed with the hiss of rustling tvings." — Paradise Lost, i. 768. "Gives a very ceho to the throne where hope is seated." — Another of Lamb's adaptations of Shakspeare. The original is in Twelfth Night (Act 11. Sc. 4.) A little later on will be noticed a similar free-and-easy use of a passage from AVordsworth. F. B. — Edward Francis Burney (1760-1848), a portrait- painter, and book-illustrator on a large scale. He was a cousin of Mde. D'Arblay, and not a half-brother as stated in Lamb's "Key." His name may be seen "at the bottom of many a well-executed vignette in the way of his profession " in the periodicals of his day. He illustrated for Harrison, the World, Tatler, Guardian, Adventurer, etc., besides the Arabian Nights, and novels of Richardson and Smollett. MY RELATIONS. —P. 96. {London Magazine, June 1821.) Ill these tAvo successive essays, and in that on the Benchers of the Inner Temple, Lamb draws portraits of singular interest to us, of his father, aunt, broth(u-, and sister — all his near re- lations with one exception. The mother's name never occurs NOTES. 391 in letter or ])ublislieil wiitiiij,' after the first bitterness of tlic calaiiiity of iSepteinlxT IZlHi had passed away. This was (hmljt- Jess out of coiisiileratiou for the feelings of his sister. Very noticeable is the frankness with which he descriljcs the less agreeable side of the character of his biother John, who was still living, and apparently on ([iiitt' friendly terms with Charles and i\Iary. / had an aunt. — A sister of John Lamb the elder, who generally lived with the family, and contributed something to the common income. After the death of the mother, a lady of comfortable means, a relative of the family, offered her a home, but the arrangement did not succeed, and the aunt returned to die among her own people. Charles ■WTites, just before her death in February 1797 — "My poor old aunt, who was the kindest creature to me when I was at school, and used to bring me good things ; when I, schoolboy-like, used to be ashamed to see her come, and open her ajiron, and bring out her basin with some nice thing which she had saved for me, — the good old creatiu'e is now dying. She says, poor thing, she is glad she is come home to die with me. I was always her favourite." See also the lines "written on the day of my aunt's funeral" in the little volume of Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, published in 1798. Brother or sister, I never had any to know fhem.— h\ this and the next sentence is a curious blending of fact and fiction. Besides John and Mary, four other children had been born to John and Elizabeth Lamb in the Temple, between the years 1762 and 1775, but had apparently not survived theiu infancy. Two daughters had been christened Elizabeth, one in 1762 and another after her death, in 1768. John and Mary Lamb are now to be described as cousins, under the names of James and Bridget Elia. Charles Lamb actually had relations, in that degree, living in Hertfordshire, in the neighbourhood of AVheat- hampstead. James is an inexplicable cousin. — The mixture of the man of the world, dilettante, and sentimentalist — not an infrequent combination — is here described with graphic power. All that we know of John Lamb, the "broad, burly, jovial," living his bachelor-life in chambers at the old Sea- House, is supported and confirmed by this passage. Touching his extreme sensibility to the physical sufferings of animals, there is a letter of Charles to Crabb Robinson of the year 1810, which is worth noting. ' ' My brother, whom you have met at my rooms (a plump, good-looking man of seven-and-forty), has written a book about humanity, which I transmit to you herewith. Wilson the 392 THE ESSAYS OF KLIA. jmlilLsluT has put it into liis licail that you can get it reviewed for him. I daresay it is not in the scope of your review ; but if you could put it into any likely train, he would rejoice. For, alas ! our boasted humanity partakes of vanity. As it is, he teases me to death with choosing to su2)pose that I could get it into all the Reviews at a moment's notice. I ! ! ! — who have been set up as a mark for them to throw at, and woidd willingly consign them all to Megicra's snaky locks. But here's the book, and don't show it to Mrs. Collier, for I remember she makes excellent eel soup, and the leading points of the book are directed against that very process." Through the green plains of 2)lcasant Ilcrlfordshire. — From an early sounet of Lamb's. MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE.— P. 103. (London Marjazinc, July 1S21.) Bridget Elia. — Mary Lamb. The lives of the brother and sister are so bound together, that the illustrations of their joint life afforded by this essay, and that on Old China, are of singular interest. They show us the brighter and happier intervals of that life, without which indeed it could hardly have been borne for those eight-and -thirty years. In 1805, duiing one of Mary Lamb's periodical attacks of mania, and consequent absences from home, Charles WTites— " I am a fool bereft of her co-operation. I am used to look up to her in the least and biggest perplexities. To say all that I find her would be more than, 1 think, anybody could possil)ly understand. She is older, wiser, and better than I am ; and all my wretched imper- fections I cover to myself by thinking on her goodness." Com- pare also the sonnet written by Charles, in one of his ' ' lucid intervals " when himself in confinement, in 1796, ending with the words — " the mighty debt of love I owe, Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend." TJie oldest thing I remember is MacJcery End, or Mackarcl, End. — The place, now further contracted into " Mackrye End," is about a mile and a half from Wheathampstead, on the Luton Branch of the Great Northern Railway. On leaving the Wheat- hampstead Station, the traveller must follow the road which runs along the valley towards Luton, nearly parallel with the railway for about a mile, to a group of houses near the "Cherry Trees." At this point, he will turn short to the right, and then take the first turning on his left, along the edge of a pretty NOTKS. 393 littlu wood. He will .soon see the venerable old ,I;icoliean mansion, l)ropei'ly called Mackrye J^nd, and close to it a whitish farm- house, which is the one occui)ied by Lamb's relatives, the Glad- mans, at the time of the pilgrimage recorded in this essay. The ])rescnt wi'iter lias visited the spot, also in the ' ' heart of June," and bears th(^ plcasantest testimony to its rural beauty and seclusion. The farmhouse has had an important addition to it since Jjamb's day, but a large portion of the building is evidently still the same as when the " image of welcome" came forth from it to greet the brother and sister. May I, without presumption, call attention to the almost unitpie beauty of this ' ^ But tlioH (hat didst appear so fair Tufond imagination. — Wordsworth's "Yarrow Visited." B. F. — Barron Field, who accompanied Lamb and his sister ou this expedition. See the essay on Distant Correspondents. Compare a letter of Lamb to Manning in May 1819. " How are my cousins, the Gladmans of AVheathampstead, and farmer Bruton ? Jlrs. Bruton is a glorious woman. ' Hail, ]\Iackery End.' This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but got no further." MY FIRST PLAY.— P. 108. {London Magazine, December 1S21.) The only landed fvopcrty I could ever call my own. — Mrs. Procter informs me that a relative of Lamb's did actually be- ([ueath to him a small "landed estate " — probably no more than a single field — producing a pound or two of rent, and that Lamb was fond of referring to the circumstance, and declaring that it had revolutionised his views of Property. The first appearance to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isahella. — One of Lamb's earliest, perhaps his first sonnet, was inspired by this great actress. It was published, with some of Coleridge's, in the columns of the Morning Chronicle in 1794. As when a child, on some long winter's night Aft'righted clinging to its grandam's knees With eager wondering and perturbed delight Listens strange tales of fearful dark decrees Muttered to wretch by necromantic spell ; Or of those hags, who at the witching time Of murky midnight ride the air sublime, And mingle foul embrace with fiends of Hell : Cold Horror drinks its blood ! Anon the tear More gentle starts, to hear the beldame tell 39-i TlIK ESSAYS OF ELI A. Of pretty Ixilies that loveil eacli otliur dear, Murdered by cruel Uncle's mandate fell : Even such the shivering joys thy tones inijiart, Even so thou, Siddons, meltest my sad heart ! irODERN GALLANTRY.— r. 113. (^Lomlon Magazine, November 1822). Joseph Palce, of Bread Street Ilill, merchant. — Some very interesting particulars of tlie life and character of this generous and self-sacrificing persou, in wlioni most unquestionably " mamiers were not idle," will be fouiul in the Athenccum iov the year 1841 (pp. 3CG and 387), contributed by the late Miss Anne Manning. Thomas Edwards, author of Canons of Criti- cism, a very acute commentary upon AVarburtou's emendations of Shakspeare, was his uncle. Edwards was a mediocre poet, but his sonnets are carefully constructed on the Miltonic scheme, which jjerhaps accounts for Lamb's exaggerated epithet. The sonnet may be given here as at least a curiosity : — To Mr. J. Paice. Joseph, the woi'thy sou of worthy sire, Who well repay'st thy jiious parents' care To train thee in the ways of Virtue fair, And early with the Love of Truth inspire, What farther can my closing eyes desire To see, but that by wedlock thou repair The waste of death ; and raise a virtuous lieir To build our House, e'er I in peace retire ? Youth is the time for Love : Then choose a wife, Witli prudence choose ; 'tis Nature's genuine voice ; Aud what she truly dictates must be good ; Neglected once that prime, our remnant life Is soured, or saddened, by an ill-timed choice, Or lonely, dull, and friendless solitude. THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE.— P. 118. (London Magazine, September 1821.) Charles Lamb was born on the 10th of February 1775, in Crown Office Row, Temple, where Samuel Salt, a Bencher of the Inn, owned two sets of chambers. This was Lamb's home for the seven years preceding his admission into Christ's Hos- pital in 1782, and afterwards, in holiday seasons, till he left school in 1789, and later, at least till Salt's death in 1792. A recent editor of Laml)'s works has stated that, with the excep- tion of Salt, almost all the names of Benchers given in this essay NOTES. 395 are "ymrely imaginary." The rt'verse of tliis is tho fact. All tlie names liere colcbratcil arc to bu found in the records of tlic honourable society. There when thcij came, vlierats those hrickij towers, — Spenser's Prothalamion, stanza viii. Of building strong, albeit of Paper highf. — Paper Buildings, facing King's Bench Walk in the Temple. The line is doubtless improvised for the occasion. That fine Elizabethan hall. — The hall of the Middle Temple. The fountain still plays, but "quantum niutatus." Ali ! yet doth beauty like a dial Imnd. — Shakspeare's Sonnet, No. 104. " Carved it out quaintly in the sun." —III. Henry FT., ii. r>. Tlic roguish eye of J — U. — Jekyll, the IMaster in Chancery. The wit, and friend of wits, among the old Benchers — the Sir George Rose of his day. Called to'the Bench 1805 ; died 1837. Thomas Coventry, nephew of William, fifth Earl of Coventry ; of North Cray Place, Bexley, Kent.— Called to the liench in 1766 ; died in 1797. Samuel ,S'«^(;.— Called to the Bench 1782 ; died in 1792. The Bencher in whom Lamb had the most peculiar interest. John Lamb, the father, was in the service of Salt for some iive and forty years — he acting as clerk and confidential servant, and his wife as housekeeper. As we have seen, Mr. Salt occupied two sets of chambers in Crown Office Row, forming a substan- tial house. He had two indoor servants, besides John and Elizabeth Lamb, and kept his carriage. Salt died in 1792. By his will, dated 1786, he gives "To my servant, John Lamb, who has lived with me near forty years, " £500 South Sea stock ; and "to Mrs. Lamb £100 in money, well deserved for her care and attention during my illness." By a codicil, dated Decem- ber 20, 1787, his executors are directed to employ John Lamb to receive the testator's "Exchequer annuities of £210 and £14 during their term, and to jiay him £10 a-year for his trouble so long as he shall receive them," a delicate and ingenious way of retaining John Lamb in his service, as it were, after his own decease. By a later codicil, he gives another liundred pounds to Mrs. Lamb. These benefactions, and not the small pension erroneously stated, on the authority of Talfourd, in my memoir of Lamb, formed the provision made by Salt for his faithful pair of attendants. The appointment of Charles to the clerkship 396 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. ill till' Iiulia House in 1792 must have been the lastof the many kiiul acts of Samuel Salt to tlie family. Where the Lamb famil}- moved to al'ter Salt's death in 17!>2, and how they strug- gled on l)et\vceu that date and tlie fatal year 1796, is one of the unsettled points of Lamb's history. Jlary Lamb's skill with her needle was proliably used as a means of increasing the common income. Crabb Kobinson tells us of an article on needlework contrilnitcd by her some years later to one of the magazines. The iinforiimate Miss Blandji. The heroine of a cause celebre in the year 1752. Her wliole story will be found, aproiyos of the town of Henley, in Mr. Leslie's charming book on the Thames, entitled Our Pdvcr. ]\liss Blandy, the daughter of an attorney at Henley, with good expectations from her father, attracted "the attention of an adventurer, a certain Captain Cranstoun. The father disapproved of the intimacy, and the Captain entrusted Miss Blandy with a certain powder wliich she administered to her father with a fatal result. Her defence was that she believed the powder to be of the nature of a love-philtre, which would have the effect of making her father well-affected towards her lover. The defence was not successful, and Miss Blandy was found guilty of murder, and executed at Oxford in April 1752. Susan P — — . — Susannah Pierson, sister of Salt's brother- Bencher, Peter Pierson, mentioned in this essay, and one of Salt's executors. By his second codicil, Salt bequeaths her, as a mark of regard, £500 ; his silver mkstand ; and the ' ' works of Pope, Swift, Shakspeare, Addison, and Steele ;" also Sherlock's Ser- mons (Sherlock had been Master of the Temple), and any other books she likes to choose out of his library, hoping that, "by reading and reflection," they will "make lier life more com- fortable." How oddly touching this bequest seems to us, in the light thrown on it by Lamb's account of the relation between Salt and his friend's sister ! "What a pleasant glimpse, again, is here afforded of the " spacious closet of good old English reading" into which Charles and Mary were "tumbled," as he told us, at an early age, when they " browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage." I knew this Lovel. — Lamb's father, John Lamb. The sketch of him given in Mr. Procter's memoir of Charles, taken doubt- less from the, portrait here mentioned, confirms the statement of a general resemblance to Garrick. Mrs. Arthur Tween, a daughter of Randal Norris, has in her possession a medallion portrait of Samuel Salt, executed in plaster of Paris by John Lamb. He published a collection of his verses, " Poetical Pieces on several occasions," in a rough pamphlet of quarto size. A NOTES, 397 few lines from the (rather dogf^erel) verses descrihiiig the life of a footman in the last centurj' (doubtless reflectiiif^ his own experiences of the time when he wore " the smart new livery ") may be given as a sample of his efforts in the manner of " Swift and Prior." The footman has just been sent on an errand to inquire after the health of a friend of his mistress who has lost lier monkey : — "Tlien up slie mounts — down I descend, To shake liands witti particular friend ; And tliere I do some brothers luect, Aud we each other kindly gi'eet ; Then cards they bring aud cribbagedjoard, Aud I must play upon tlieir word, Altho' I tell them I am sent To know how tli' night a lady spent. ' Pho ! make excuse, aud have one bout, And say the lady was gone out ; ' Th' advice I take, sit down and say, 'What is the sum for which we i:)lay?' 'I care not much,' another cries, ' But let it be for Wets aud Drys.' " "A remnant most forlorn of what he ivas." — One of Lamb's quotations from himself. It occurs in the lines (February 1797) "written on the day of my aunt's funeral : " — " One parent yet is left, — a wretched thing, A sad survivor of his buried wife, A palsy-snutteu, childish, old, old man, A semblance most forlorn of what he was, A merry cheerful man." John Lamb lingered till April 1799. Peter Fie rson.— Called to the Bench 1800, died 1808. It M'ill be seen that Salt and Pierson, though friends and contemporaries at the Bar, were not so as Benchers. Salt had been some years dead when his friend was called to the Bench. Dailies Barriiigton.— The antiquary, naturalist, and corre- spondent of White of Selborue. Called to the Bench in 1777, died 1800. Thomas Barton. — Called to the Bench 1775, died 1791. John Head.— Called to the Bench 1792, died in 180i. Twopenny. — There never was a Bencher of the Inner Temple of this name. The gentleman here intended, Mr. Richard Twopeny, was a stockbroker, a member of the Kentish family of that name, who, being a bachelor, lived in chambers in the Temple. On his retirement from business he resided at West 398 THE f:ssays of fjja. .Mailing in Kent, ami A'wd in 1800, at the age of eiglit5^-hvo. Mr. Edward Twopoiiy of Woodstock, Sittiugliourne, a great- nephew of tills gentleman, remembers him well, and informs me that he was, as Lamb describes him, remarkabl}' thin. Lamb evidently recalled him as a familiar iigure in the Temple in his own ehihlish days, and supposed him to have been a member of the Bar. Mr. Twopeny held the important position of stockbroker to the P)ank of England. JoJm n7(a/Ty.— Called to the Bench 1801, died in 1812. Richard Jackson. — Called to the Bench 1770, died 1787. This gentleman was M. V. for New Romncy and a member of Lord Shelburne's Government in 1782. Erom his wide reading and extraordinary memory he was known, bej^ond the circle of his brother-Benchers, as "the omniscient." Dr. Johnson (re- versing the usual order of his translations) styles him the "all- knowing." See BosiocU, under date of April 1776 : — "No, Sir ; Mr. Thrale is to go by my advice to Mr. Jackson (the all-knowing), and get from him a plan for seeing the most that can be seen in the time that we have to travel." James Mingay. — Called to the Bench 1785, died 1812. Mr. Mingay was an eminent King's Counsel, and in his day a powerful rival at the Bar, of Thomas Erskine — according to an obituary notice in the Gentleman s MagaziTie of " a ]iersuasive oratory, infinite wit, and most excellent fancy." His retort upon Erskine, about the knee-buckles, goes to confirm this verdict. Baron Mascres. — Cursitor Baron of the Exchequer, a post which he filled for fifty years. Born 1731, died May 1824. He persevered to the end of his days in wearing the costume of the reign in which he was bom. R. N. — Randal Norris, for many years Sub - Treasurer and Librarian of the Liner Temple. At the age of fourteen he was articled to i\Ir. Walls of Paper Buildings, and Irom that time, for more than half a century, resided in the Liner Temple. His wife was a native of Widford, the village adjoining Blakes- ware, in Hertfordshire, and a friend of Mrs. Field, the house- keeper, and there was thus a double tie connecting Randal Norris with Lamb's family. His name appears early in Charles's corre.spondence. At the season of his mother's death, he tells Coleridge that ]\Ir. Norris had been more than a father to him, and Mrs. Norris more than a mother. ]\fr. Norris died in the Temple in January 1827, at the age of seventy-.six, and was l)uried in the Temple churchyard. Talfourd misdates the event by a year. It was then that Charles Lamb wrote to Crabb Robinson — " In him I have a loss the world cannot make up. NOTES. 399 Ho was my frioiul and my fatlior's friend all the life I can remember. I seem to have ma(l(^ foolisli friendships ever since. Those are the friendships wliieh ontlive a .second generation. Old as I am waxing, in his eyes I was still the child he first knew me. To the last he called me Charley. 1 have none to call me Cliarley now." GRACE BEFOllE MEAT,— P. 130. (London Magazine, November 1821.) C . — Coleridge. 0. J'. L. — Charles Valentine le Grice, Lamb's schoolfellow at Christ's Hospital. See the Essay on that Institution. Some one recalled a legend. — Leigh Hnnt tells the story in his account of Christ's Hospital: — "Our dress was of the coarsest and quaintest kind, but was respected out of doors, and is so. It consisted of a blue drugget gown, or body, with ample skirts to it ; a yellow vest underneath in winter time ; small clothes of Russia duck ; worsted yellow stockings ; a leathern girdle ; and a little black worsted cap, usually carried in the hand. I believe it was the ordinary dress of children in humble life during the reign of the Tudors. We used to flatter ourselves that it was taken from the monks ; and there went a monstrous tradition, that at one period it consisted of blue velvet with silver buttons. It was said, also, that during the blissful era of the blue velvet, we had roast mutton for supper ; but that the small clothes not being then in existence, and the mutton suppers too luxurious, the eatables were given up for the inef Fables." The following beautiful passage from the Ilccrcations and Studies hy a Country Clergyman of the Eighteenth Century (John Murray, 1882), shows that others, besides Lamb, had thought the main thought of this essay. The writer is describing, in 1781, the drive from Huddersfield, along the banks of the Calder : — " I never felt anything so fine : I shall remember it and thank God for it as long as I live. I am sorry I did not tliink to .say grace after it. Are we to be grateful for nothing but beef and pudding? to thank God for life, and not fur happiness?" DREAJI CHILDREN ; A REVERIE.— P. 1-37. (London Magazine, January 1822.) The mood in which Lamb was prompted to this singularly affecting confidence was clearly due to a family bereavement, a month or two before the date of the essay. I maj' be allowed 400 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. to repeat words of my own, used elsewhere, on this subject. " Lamb's eklcr brother John was then lately dead. A letter to Wordswortli, of Llarch 1822, mentions his death as even then recent, and speaks of a certain ' deadncss to everything ' which tlie writer dates from that event. The 'broad, burly, jovial ' Jolui Lamb (so Talfourd describes him) had lived his own easy prosperous life up to this time, not altogether avoiding social relations with his brother and sister, but evidently absorbed to tlie last in his own interests and }>leasures. The death of this brother, wholly unsympathetic as he was with Charles, served to bring home to him his loneliness. He was left in the world with but one near relation, and that one too often removed from him for months at a time by the saddest of afflictions. No wonder if he became keenly aware of his solitude. " The emotion discernible in this essay is absolutely genuine ; the bleuding of fact with fiction in the details is curiously arbitrary. Their great - grandmother Field. ■ — Lamb's grandmother, Mary Field, for more than fifty years housekeeper at Blakes- ware, a dower-house of the Hertfordshire family of Plumers, a few miles from Ware. William Plumer, who represented his coiuity for so many years in Parliament, was still living, and Lamb may have disguised the whereabouts of the "great house" out of consideration for him. Why he substituted Norfolk is only matter for conjecture. Perhaps there were actually scenes from the ohl legend of the Children in the Wood carved upon a chimneypieee at Blakesware ; possibly there was some old story in the annals of the Plumer family touching the myste- rious disappearance of two children, for which it pleased Lamb to substitute the story of the familiar ballad. His grandmother, as he has told us in his lines The Grandame, was deeply versed "in anecdote domestic." Which c(fterwards came to decay, aiulwas nearly 2niUcd doivn. — The dismantling of the Blakesware house had therefore begun, it apjiears, before the death of William Plumer. Cussans, in his History of Hertfordshire, says it was pulled do\vn in 1822. Perhaps the complete demolition was not carried out till after JMr. Plumer's death in that year. The "other house" was Gilston, the jirincipal scat of the Plumers, some miles distant. See notes on the essay Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire. And then I told hoiv, when she came to die. — Mrs. Field died in the .summer of 1792, and was buried in the adjoining church- yard of AVidford. Her gravestone, with the name and date of death, August 5, 1792, is still to be seen, and is one of the few tangible memorials of Lamli's family history still existing. By a curious fatality, it narrowly escaped destruction in the great NOTES. 401 gale of October 1881, when a tree was blown down across it, considerably reducing its proportions. John L. — Of course John Lamb, the brother. Whether Charles was ever a " lanio-footed " boy, through some tempor- ary cause, we cannot say. We know that at the time of the mother's death John Lamb was suffering from an injury to his foot, and made it (after liis custom) an excuse for not exerting himself unduly. See tlie letter of Charles to Coleridge written at the time. "My brother, little disposed (I speak not with- out tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties." I courted the fair Alice W — n. — In my memoir of Charles Lamb, I have given the reasons for identifying Alice W— n with the Anna of the early sonnets, and again with the form and features of the village maiden described as Rosamund Gray. The girl who is celeln'ated under these various names won the heart of Charles Lamb while he was yet little more than a boy. He does not care to conceal from us that it was in Hertfordshire, while under his grandmother's roof, that he first met her. The Beauty '• with the yellow Hertfordshire hair — so like my Alice," is how he describes the portrait in the picture gallery at Blakesmoor. Moreover, the "winding wood- walks green " where he roamed with his Anna, can hardly be unconnected with the "walks and windings of Blakesmoor," apostrophised at the close of that beautiful essay. And there is a group of cottages called Blenheim, not more tlian half a mile from the site of Blakesware House, where the original Anna, according to the traditions of the village, resided. "Alice W — n" is one of Lamb's deliberate inventions. In the key to the initials employed by him in his essays, he ex- plains that Alice W — n stood for Alice Winterton, but that the name was "feigned." Anna was, in fact, the nearest clue to the real nanre that Lamb has vouchsafed. Her actual name was, I have the best reason to believe, Ann Simmons. She afterwards married Jlr. Bartram, the pawnbroker of Princes Street, Leicester Sn[uare. The complete history of this episode in Lamb's life will probably never come to light. There are many obvious reasons why any idea of marriage should have been indefinitely abandoned. The poverty in Lamb's home is one such reason ; and one, even more decisive, may have been the discovery of the taint of madness that was inherited, in more or less degi'ee, by all the children. Why Lamb chose the particular alias of Winterton, under which to disguise his early love, will never be known. It was a name not unfamiliar to him, being that of the old steward in Colman's jday of the Iron 2d 402 THE ESSAYS OF 1.:LIA. Chest, a part created by Lamb's favourite comedian Dodd. The play was first acted in 1796, about the time Avhen tlie final separation of the lovers seems to have taken place. In ilhistration of Lamb's fondness for children, I have the pleasure of adding the follo\nng pretty letter to a child, not hitherto jtrinted. It was written to a little girl (one of twin- sisters), the daughter of Kenney the dramatist, after Lamb and his sister's visit to the Kenneys at Versailles in September 1822. The letter has been most kindly placed at my disposal by my friend Mr. W. J. Jeailreson, wliose motlier was the Sophy of the letter. At the close of a short note to Mrs. Kenney, Lamb adds : — " Pray deliver what follows to my dear Anfe, Soiihy : — "My dear Sophy — The few short days of connubial felicity which I passed with you among the pears and apricots of Ver- sailles were some of the hapjiiest of my life, l^ut they are flown ! "And your other half, your dear co-twin — that she-you — that almost equal sharer of my alTections — j'ou and she are my better half, a quarter apiece. She and you are my pretty six- pence, you the head, and she the tail. Sure, Heaven that made you so alike must pardon the error of an inconsiderate moment, should I for love of you, love her too well. Do you think laws wxre made for lovers ? I think not. "Adieu, amiable pair. ' ' Yours, and yours, "C. Lamb. " P.S. — I inclose half a dear kiss apiece for you." DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS.— r. 142. {London Magazine, March 1S22.) n. i^.— Barron Field. Born October 23, 1786. He was educated for the Bar and practised for some years, going the Oxford Oirciiit. In 1816 he married, and went out to New South AVales as Judge of the Supreme Court at Sydney. In 1824 he returned to England, having resigned his judgeship; but two or three yeai's afterwards he was appointed Chief-Justice of Gibraltar. He died at Torquay in 1846. His lirother, Francis John Field, was a fellow-clerk of Charles Lamb's at the India House, wliich was perhaps the origin of the acquaintance. Barron Field edited a voUniie of papers {Gcogrcqihical Memoirs) on New South Wales for Murray, and the appendix contains some short poems, entitled First- Fruits of Australian Poetry. NOTES. 403 Sonic papers of his arc to be fouiul in Lcigli Hunt's ReJJcdor, to wliicli Lamb also contributed. One of Mrs. lioivc's supcrscrqilions. — Mrs. Elizabeth Eowc (1674-1737), an exemplary person, and now forgotten moralist in verse and prose. Among other works she wrote. Friendship in Death — in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living. Tlic following are from the " sni>erscriptions " of these letters: — "To Sylvia from Alexis;" "From Oleander to his Brother, endeavouring to reclaim liim from his extravagances;" "To Emilia from Delia, giving her a description of the invisible regions, and the happy state of the inhabitants of Paradise." The late Lord C— The second Lord Camelford, killed in a duel with Mr. Best in 1804. The day before liis death he gave directions that his body should lie removed "as soon as may be convenient to a country far distant ! to a spot not near the haunts of men, but where the surrounding scenery may smile upon my remains. It is situated on the borders of the lake of St. Lanipierre, in the Canton of Berne, and three trees stand in the particular spot." The centre tree he desired might be taken up, and his body being there deposited immediately replaced. At the foot of this tree, his lordship added, he had formerly passed many solitary hours, contemplating the mutability of human affairs. — Annual Register for 1804. Aye me ! while tliee the seas and sounding shores Hold far atvay. — Lycidas, quoted incorrectly, as usual. J. W. — James White, Lamb's schoolfellow at Christ's Hos- pital. Died in 1820. THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS.— P. 148. (London Magazine, May 18'22.) A sable cloud Turns forth her silver lining on the night. — Milton, Comv,s, line 223. My pleasant friend Jem While. — James White, a schoolfellow of Lamb's at Olirist's Hospital, and the author of a Shakspearian s([uib, suggested by the Ireland Forgeries — " Original Letters, etc., of Sir John Falstalf and his friends, now first made public by a gentleman, a descendant of Dame Quickly, from genuine manuscripts which have been in the possession of the Quickly family near four hundred years." It was published in 1795, 404 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. ami Soiitliey believed that Laiiil> had in some way a hand in it. Tlie Preface in partieuhir bears some traces of his peculiar vein, but Lamb's enthusiastic recommendation of the book to liis friemls seems to show that it was in the main the production of James White. The jcu d''csiwU is not more successful than such parodies usually are. AVhite took to journalism, in sonie form, and was at the time of his death in March 1820 an "agent of Provincial newspapers. " His annual supi)er to the little climb- ing-boys was imitated by many charitable persons in London and other large towns. Our trusty comimnion, Btgod. — Lamb's old friend and editor .Tohn Feuwick, of the Albion. See Essay ou the Tioo Recces of Men. Golden lads and lasses must. — Cymhclinc, Act iv. Sc. 2. Golden lads and girls all must, As cliimney-swee23ers, come to dust. It is curious that in this essay Lamb does not even allude to the gi-ave subject of the cruelties incident to the climbing-boys' occupation — a question which for some years past had attracted the attention of philanthropic persons, in and out of Parliament. A year or two later, however, he made a characteristic offering to the cause. Li 1824 James Montgomery of Sheflield edited a volume of Prose and Verse — The Chimney -Sicccpcfs Friend, and Climhincj-hoy s Album, to which many waiters of the day con- tributed. Lamb, who had been applietl to, sent Blake's poem — The Chimney -SivceiKr. It was headed, ' ' Communicated by Mr. Charles Lamb, from a very rare and curious little work " — doubtless a true description of the Sonqs of Innocence in 1824. It is noteworthy that, before sending it, this incorrigible joker could not refrain from quietly altering Blake's " Little Tom Dacre" into "Little Tom Toddy" ' A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS, IX THE METROPOLIS. — P. 156. (jMndon Magazine, June 18-32.) Each degree of it is mocked by its "neighbour grice." A reference, apparently, to Timon of Athens, iv. 3. ' ' every grisc of fortune Is smoothed by that below." Vnfastidious Vincent Bourne (1697-1747). — The "dear Tinny Bourne " of Cowper, who had been his jmpil at Westminster. NOTES. 405 Cowppr, it will be remenibciTcl, translated many of Bourne's Latin verses. B , the mild Rector of . — In Lamb's "Key" to the Liitials, etc., used in his essays, this is aiiirmed to be a tj^uite imaginary personage. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST TIG.— P. 164. (London Mugaziiie, Sept ember 1S22.) The tradition as to the origin of cooking, which is of course the salient feature of this essay, had been communicated to Lamb, he hero tells us, by his friend M., Thomas Manning, whose acquaintance he had made long ago at Cambridge, and who since those days had spent much of his life in exploring China and Thibet. Lamb says the same thing in one of his private letters, so we may accept it as a literal fact. The question therefore arises whether Manning had found the legend existing in any form in China, or whether Lamb's detail of the Chinese manuscript is wholly fantastic. It is at least certain that the story is a very old one, and appears as early as the third century, in the writings of Porphyry of Tyre. The follow- ing passage, a literal translation from the Treatise De Ahstinentid of tliat pliilosopher, sets forth one form of the legend : — " Asclepiades, in his work on Cyprus and Phrenice, writes as follows : — 'Originally it was not usual for anything having life to be sacrificed to the gods— not that there was any law on the subject, for it was supposed to be forbidden by the law of nature. At a certain period, however (tradition says), when blood was required in atonement for blood, the iirst victim was sacrificed, and was entirely consumed by fire. On one occasion, iu later times, when a sacrifice of this kind was being offered, and the victim in process of being burned, a morsel of its flesh fell to the ground. The priest, who was standing by, imme- diately picked it up, and on remo\'ing his fingers from the burnt flesh, chanced to put them to his mouth, in order to assuage the pain of the burn. As soon as he had tasted the burnt flesh he conceived a strange longing to eat of it, and accordingly began to eat the flesh himself, and gave some to his wife also. Pygmalion, on hearing of it, directed that the man and his wife should be put to deatlr, by being hurled headlong from a rock, and appointed another man to the priest's office. AVhen, more- over, not long after this man was offering the same sacrifice, and in the same way ate of the flesh, he was sentenced to the same punishment. When, however, the thing made further progress, and men continued to offer sacrifice, and in order to gratify their ap]ietite could not refrain from the flesh, but regularly adojited the habit of eating it, all punishment for so doing ceased to be inflicted." 406 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. jMaiining may have Ijccu aware of this passage, ami have tohl the story in his own language to Charles Lamb. It is worth noticing that in 1823, the year following tlie appearance of this essay, Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, })ublislied a translation of certain Treatises of Porphyry, including the Dc Abstincntid. It is possible that JMauning may, on some occasion, have learned the tradition from Taylor. Recent editors of Lamb have asserted, without offering any sufficient evidence, that he owed the idea of this rhapsody on the Pig to an Italian Poem, by Tigrinio P)istonio, published in 1761, at Modena, entitled GH Elocji del Porco (Tigrinio Bistonio was the pseudonym of the Abate Giuseppe Ferrari). ]Mr. Richard Garnett of the British Museum, to whom I am indebted for calling my attention to the passage in Porphyry, has kindly examined for me the Italian poem in question, and assures me that he can find in it no resemblance whatever to Lamb's treat- ment of the same theme. There is no affectation in Lamb's avowal of his fondness for this delicacy. Towards the close of his life, however, Roast Pig declined somewhat in his favour, and was superseded by hare, and other varieties of game. Indeed Lamb was as fond of game as Cowper was of fish ; and as in Cowper's case, his later letters constantly open with acknowledgments of some recent offering of the kind fiom a gooel-natured correspondent. Ure sin could blight or sorroio fade, Death came ivith timely care. — From Coleridge's Epltnjjh on an Infant. It must have been with unusual glee that Lamb here borrowed half of his friend's quatrain. The epitaph had appeared in the very earliest volume to which he was himself a contributor — the little volume of Coleridge's poems, published in 1796, by Joseph Cottle, of Bristol. The lines are there allotted a whole page to them- selves. It was over London Bridge. — The reader will not fail to note the audacious indifference to fact that makes Lamb assert in a parenthesis that his school was on the other side of Loudon Bridge, and that he was afterwards "at St. Omer's." ON THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE.— P. 172. {London Magazine, September 1822.) The essay had previously appeared, in 1811, in Leigh Hunt's Jlejlector. NOTES. 407 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS.— R 180. {London Magazine, February 1822.) This essay was orif,dnally one of three which appeared in the London under the title of The Old Actors. When Lamh col- lected and edited his essays for pul)li('iition in a volume in 1823, he abridged and rearranged them under dillerent headings. Many of LamlVs favourites, here celebrated, had died or left the stage almost before Lamb entered manhood, showing how early his critical faculty liad matured. Bensley, whose performance of Malvolio he has analysed in such a masterly way, retired from his profession in 1796, and Palmer in 1798. Parsons died in 1795, and Dodd in the autumn of 1796, three months after quitting the stage. Suett survived till 1805, and Mrs. Jordan till 1816. ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY.— P. 192. (London Magazine, April 1822.) Originally tlie second part of the essay on The Old Actors. This essay is noteworthy as having provoked a serious remon- strance from Lord Macaulay, in revie^ving Leigh Hunt's edition of the Restoration Dramatists. Lamb's apology for the moral standards of Congreve and Wycherley is simply an exercise of ingenuity, or rather, as Hartley Coleridge pointed out, is an apology for himself — Charles Lamb — who found himself quite able to enjoy the un]iaralleled wit of Congreve without being in any way thrown oft' his moral balance. It is in a letter to Moxou on Leigh Hunt's proposed edition that Hartley Cole- ridge's comment occurs. He writes : ' ' Nothing more or better can be said in defence of these writers than what Lamb has said in his delightful essay on The Old Actors ; which is, after all, rather an apology for the audiences who applauded and himself who delighted in tlieir plays, than for the plays themselves. . . . But Lamb always took things by the better handle." ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN.— P. 201. (London Magazine, October 1822.) Cocklctop. — In O'Keefe's farce oi Modern Antiques ; or, The Merry Mourners. There tJie antic sate Mocking our state. — Adapted from Richard IT. , Act iii. Sc. 2. THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. The Second Series of Elia M'as published in a collected form by- Mr. Moxon in 1833. It was furnished with a Preface, jiurport- ing to be written by "a friend of the late Elia," announcing his death, and commenting freely on his character and habits. This Preface (written, of course, by Lamb himself) is placed in the present edition at the beginning of the volume. Elia is here supposed to have died in the interval between the publica- tion of the First and Second Series. From the opening sentences we should conclude that it was at first intended as a postscript to the First Series, and indeed it originally appeared in the London Magazine for January 1823. But this design, if ever entertained, was not carried out. I have spoken in my Introduction of the estimate here pronounced by Lamb himself on his own writings, as in my memoir of Lamb I had occasion to deal with the same Preface as throwing light on the causes of his unpopularity. In each case he shows a rare degree of self-knowledge. If they stood alone they would entirely account for Carlyle's harsh verdict. "Few professed literati were of his councils," and he would be little disposed to show the serious side of himself, still less the better side of his humour, to such as Carlyle. To the evidence of such friends as Hood, Patmore, and Procter, confirming Lamb's own account, I may here add a piece of fresh testimony from Hazlitt. It occurs in the essay "On Coffee-House Politi- cians," one of the Table- TaJk series : — " I will, however, admit that the said Elia is the worst com- jiany in the world in bad company, if it be granted me that in good company he is nearly the best that can be. He is one of those of whom it may be said. Tell vie your company and Til tell you your manners. He is the creature of sympathy, and makes good whatever opinion you seem to entertain of him. He can- not outgo tlie apprehensions of the circle, and invarial)ly acts up or down to the point of refinement or vulgaritj' at which they pitch him. He appears to take a pleasure in exaggerating the prejudices of strangers against him, a pride in confirming NOTES. 409 thn prepossessions of friends. In whatever seale of intellect lie is placeii, lie is as lively or as stujiid as tlie rest can lie for tlicir lives. If you think him odd and ridiculous, he becomes more and more so every minute, a lafulic, till he is a wonder gazed at by all. Set him against a good wit and a ready apprehension, and he brightens more and more — ' Or like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back Its ligure and its heat.' " BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIEE.— r. 205. {London Magazine, Soyitember 1S24.) Blakcsmoor, as has been already observed, was Blakesware, a dower-house of the Plumers, about live miles from Ware, in Hertfordshire. If there were ever any doubt on the subject, Lamb's own words are decisive. In a letter to Bernard Barton, of August 10, 1827, occurs the following charming passage: — "You have well described your old -fashioned paternal hall. Is it not odd that every one's recollections are of some such place? I had my Blakesware (' Blakesmoor ' in i\\c London). Nothing fills a child's mind like a large old mansion, better if un- or partially-occupied : peopled with the spirits of deceased memliers of the county and justices of the Quorum. AVouId I were buried in the peopled solitudes of one with my feelings a-t seven years old ! Those marble busts of the emperors, they seemed as if they were to stand for ever, as they had stood from the living daj's of Home, in that old marble hall, and I to }iartake of their jiermanency. Eternity was, while I thought not of time. But he thought of me, and the}' are toppled down, and corn covers the spot of the noble old dwelling and its princely gardens. I feel like a grasshopper that, chirjiing about the grounds, escaped the scythe only by my littleness. " In face of this letter, it might seem strange that most of Lamb's editors have unhesitatingly asserted that the original of Lamb's Blakesmoor was Gilston, the other seat of the Plumers, near Harlow, in the same county. The oi'igin of the mistake is to be found in the history of "the Plumer property, after the death of Mr. William Plumer, the member for Iligham Ferrers, in 18'22. Mr. Plumer died without children, and left his estates at Blakesware and Gilston to his widow. The house at Blakesware, which, as we have seen, had been partially dis- mantled in Mr. Plnmer's lifetime, was now pulled to the ground — its jnincipal contents having been already removed to the 410 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. otlicr liouso at (lil.ston. It was after its liiial doiiiolition that Lamb paid tlio visit hero recorded, to look once more on the remains of a place associated with so many happy memories. The widow, Mrs. Plumer, not long after her first hnsbaud's death, married Commander Lewin of the Royal ISTav}', and finally, after his death, married for the tliird time, in 1828, Mr. Ward, author of the once popular novel Tremainc. On marrying Mrs. Plumer Lewin Mr. Ward received the royal permission to take and use the name of Plumer as a prefix to that of Ward. Mr. and ]\Irs. Phimer Ward continued to live at the family residence of the Pluniers at Gilston. Mr. P. G. Patmore — the father of the present Mr. Coventry Patraore — made the acquaintance of Mr. Plumer Ward in 1824, and in a book, entitled My Friends and Acquaintance, pub- lished in 1854, gave an interesting account of Mr. Ward, together witli a full description, supplied by that gentleman himself, of the furniture and general arrangements of Gilston House. Among these appear the Twelve Cresars and the Marble Hall, and other features of tlie old house at Blakesware, familiar to readers of Charles Lamb, which had been in fact removed from the one house to the other. Mr. Patmore, ap- parently ignorant of the existence of any other residence belong- ing to the Plumers, at once assumed that Gilston had been the house celebrated by Lamb, and announced the discovery with some natural exultation. From that time Mr. Patmore 's version of the facts has been generally accepted. Gilston House was pulled down in 1851. The contents, except such as were used for the new house erected at a short distance, were sold by auction. The Twelve Cassars, and many other things, went to Wardour Street. Nothing remains of Blakesware save the " firry wilderness " and the faint undulations in the grassy meadow, where the ample jjleasure garden rose backwards in triple terraces. But the rural tranquillity of the surrounding country is still un- changed, and tliat depth and warmth of colouring in the foliage that gives to the Hertfordshire landscape a character all its own. It is a day well spent to make an excursion from the country town of Ware, and wander over the site of the old place, and among the graves of Widford churchyard. It will be felt then how, with this "cockney of cockneys," the beauty of an English home — a "haunt of ancient peace " — had passed into his life and laecome a part of his genius and himself. / wrts the true descendant of those old W s. — Lamb dis- guises the family of Plumer under this change of initial. He certainly did not mean the Wards — Mr. Ward not having become connected with the family of Plumer till several years later than the date of this essay. NOTES. 4 1 1 So like my Alice ! — See notes on Dream Children in tlie first series of the essays. Compare with this essay Mary Lamb's story of "the Young Jlahonii'dan " in Mrs. Leiecstcrs School. Blakesware is tliere again described, as remembered by Mary Lamb when a child. rOOR RELATIONS. -P. 210. (London Ma(j(tzine, May 1823.) Richard Amlet, Esq., in tlic plaij. — Sec Vaubrugh's comedy, The Confederacy. Poor JF . — The Favell of the essay, Christ's Hospital Five- and-thirty Years Ago. Lamb, in his " Key " to the initials used by him, has written against the initial F. , there employed : "Favell left Cambridge, because he was asham'd of his father, who was a house- painter there." He was a Grecian in the school in Lamb's time, and when at Cambridge A\Tote to the Duke of York for a commission in the army, which was sent him. Lamb here changes both his friend's name and his University. Like Satan, "knew his mounted sign — and fled." — See the concluding lines of Paradise Lost, Book iv., of which this is a more than usually free adaptation. Li the incident referred to, the angel Galjriel and Satan arc on the point of engaging in struggle, Mhen " The Eternal, to prevent such horrid fray. Hung forth in heaven his golden scales." Satan's attention being called to the sight, " — — The fiend looked up, and knew His mounted scale aloft : nor more : but fled Murraurinsf, and with him fled the shades of night." DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. — r. 218. (London Magazine, July 1882.) The wretched Malonc. — This happened in 1793, on occasion of Maloue's visit to Stratford to examine the municipal and other records of that town, for the purposes of his edition of Shakspeare. Martin B . — Martin Charles Burney, the only son of Admiral Burney, and one of Lamb's life-long friends. Lamb dedicated to him the second volume of his collected writings in 412 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. 1818 iu a prefatory sonnet, in which he sa5^s — " lu all my tlireadings of this worldly maze (And I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, euvy, low design, I have not found a whiter soul than thine." Martin Burney was originally an attorney, but left that branch of the profession for the Bar, where, however, he was not successful. Mr. Burney died in London iu 1852. A quaint poetess of our day. — Mary Lamb. The lines will be found in Charles and Mary Lamb's Poetry for Children. STAGE ILLUSION.— r. 225. (London Magazine, August 1825.) TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON.— P. 229. (Englishman's Magazine, August 1S31.) Up thither lite aerial vapours fly. — A parody of the well-known description of the Limbo of V'anity iu the third book of the Paradise Lust. ELLISTONIANA.— P. 231. (Englishman's Magazine, August 1831.) G. D. — George Dyer. Sir A C — — . — Sir Anthony Carlisle, the surgeon. These two papers were prompted by the death of the jiopular comedian in July 1831. THE OLD MARGATE HOY.— P. 237. (London Magazine, July 1823.) Charles and Mary Lamb had actually, as here stated, passed a week's holiday together at Margate, when the former was quite a boy. In his early days of authorship Charles had utilised the experience for a sonnet, one of the first he published — "written at midnight by tlie sea-side after a voyage." It is amusing to note these two diiferent treatments of the same theme : — ■ NOTES. 4 1 3 " O wingerl bark ! liow swift along tlie iiiglit Passed thy proud keel ; nor shall I let go by Lightly of that dread hour the memory, When wet and chilly on tliy deck I stood Unbonueted, and gazed upon the flood." '^ For many a day, and many a dreadful night, Incessant labouring round, the stormy Cape." — Thomson's ulilished the Last Essays of Ella in a collected form. I have dealt witli tho subject at some length in my memoir of Lamb. AMICUS REDIVIVUS.— P. 281. {London Magazine, December 1823.) For an account of C!. J). — George Dyer — soc notes to the essay, Oxford in the Vacation, The incident had actually occurred a few M-eeks only before the date of this essay. ]\Ir. Procter supplements the account here given with some amusing particulars: — "I happened to go to Lamb's house, about au hour after his rescue and restoration to dry land, and met IMiss Lamb in the passage in a state of great alarm ; she was whim- pering, and could only utter, ' Poor Mr. Dyer ! Poor Mr. Dyer !' in tremulous tones. I went upstairs, aghast, and found that the involuntary diver had been jjlaced in bed, and that Miss Lamb had administered brandy and water, as a well-established preventive against cold. Dyer, unaccustomed to anythingstronger than the 'crystal spring,' was sitting upright in the bed per- fectly delirious. His hair had been rulibetl up, and stood out like so many needles of iron-gray. ' I soon found out where I was,' he cried out to me, laughing ; and then he went wander- ing on, his words taking flight into regions where no one could follow." And could such spacious virtue find a grave. — Lamb had headed this essay with an appropriate quotation from ililton's Lycidas. He now cites a less famous poem from the collection of tributary verse in which Lycidas made its lirst appearance — the little volume of Elegies on the death of Edward King, published at Camliridge in 1638. The couplet here quoted is from the contribution to this volume by John Cleveland, the Cavalier. It runs thus in the original : — " But can his spacious vertue liiul a grave Within th' inipostlmmed bubble of a wave." The sweet lyrist of Peter House. — The poet Graj'. Tlie mild AsTceic. — Anthony Askew, M. D. — See Dyer's Poems, 1801, p. 156 (note) : — " Dr. Anthony Askew, formerly a physician in London, once of Emmanuel College, well known in this and foreign countries for his ae(juaintaiice with Greek literature, and his valuable collection of Greek books and ]\ISS. : a particular friend and patron uf the author's early youth." NOTES. 419 SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.— P. 286. (London Magazine, September 1823.) In the year 1820 "William Hazlitt delivered a course of lectures at the Surrey Institution on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. In the sixth lecture of the covu'se he dealt, among other writers, with Sidney, on whose Arcadia he made an elaborate onslaught. "It is to me," he says, "one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power upon record. It puts one in mind of the Court dresses and preposter- ous fashions of the time, which are grown obsolete and disgust- ing. It is not romantic, but scholastic ; not poetry, but casuistry ; not nature, but art, and the worst sort of art, which thinks it can do better than nature. Of the number of fine things that are constantly passing through the author's mind, there is hardly one that he has not contrived to spoil, and to spoil purposely and maliciously, in order to aggrandise our idea of himself" — with much more in the same strain. In the course of his remarks he describes the sonnets inlaid in the Arcadia as "jejune, far-fetched, and frigid," the very words cited by Lamb in his essay ; and it is clear that Hazlitt's lecture was the immediate cause of the present paper. It is a lesson of high value to contrast Lamb's and Hazlitt's estimate of Sidney. Hazlitt possessed acuteness, wide reading, and had command of an excellent style, but he was (through political bias, among other causes, as Lamb suggests) out of sympathy with his subject. Moreover, Lamb was a poet. His few sentences beginning, " But they are not rich in words only," are truer and more satisfying than the whole of Hazlitt's minute analysis. I am afraid some of his addresses {"ad Leonoram" I mean) have rather erred on the other side. — Cowper translated most of Milton's Latin poems in skilful intimation of the Miltonic verse. It is significant that he "drew the line" at this exorbitant piece of flattery, which remains untranslated by him. Lord Oxford. — The "foolish nobleman," just before men- tioned. Sidney was grossly insulted by the young earl in a tennis-court, where they had met for play. According to Fulke Greville, the earl called Sidney " a puppy " — the "oppro- brious thing " alluded to by Lamb. It is worth noting that two centuries later another earl (Horace Walpole) made an equally memorable and insolent attack upon Sidney. See the notice of Fulke Greville in Walpole's Eoyal and Noble Authors. There is a touching incident associating Lamb's last days with those of Sidney. The last letter written by Lamb before the fatal issue of his accident was to Mrs. George Dyer, con- 420 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. cerniiifj the safety of a certain book licloiigiiii; to ilr. Gary of the British ^lusciun, wliieli Lamb liail left by accident at her house. Tlie book was the Thcatrum roctarum of Edward Phillips, I\lilton's nephew. On the recovery of the volume it was found that the page was turned down at the notice of riiilip Sidney. It was on this incident that Cary wrote his charming lines : — " So shoiild it be, my gentle friend ; Thy leaf last closed at Sidney's end. Thou too, like Sidney, would'st have given The water, tliir.sting, and near Heaven ; Nay, were it wine, lill'd to the brini, Thou liadst looked hard — but given, like him." NEWSPAPERS THIPvTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.— P. 295. {Englishman's Magazine, October 1S31.) The title of this essay Avas iirst given to it when it appeared in the Last Essays of Elia in 1833. The date, therefore, to which it refers is the year 1798, or thereabouts. Lamb's con- nection with the newspaper world began even earlier than this. He seems to have owed his first introduction to it to Coleridge, who published some of his own earliest verse in the columns of the Morning Chronicle. Coleridge was contributing sonnets to this paper as early as the year 1794, and among them appeared Lamb's sonnet (perhaps a joint composition with his friend) on Mrs. Siddons. After this period, until Coleridge's return from German}' at the end of 1799, we have no means of tracing Lamb's hand in the news])apers ; but from 1800 to 1803 frequent mention is made in Lamb's correspondence of his employment in the capacity described in this essay. It was his time of greatest poverty and struggle, when the addition of an extra fifty pounds a year to his income was of the greatest importance. Coleridge appears to have introduced Lamb to Daniel Stuart, the editor of the Morning Post. He was writing in the same year for the Albion, the final collapse of which, by the help of Lamb's epigram, is here described. " The Albion is dead," ho writes to Manning on this occasion, "dead as nail in door — my revenues have died M'ith it ; but I am not as a man without hope." He had now got an introduction, through his friend George Dyer, to the Morning C]ironicl<\ under the editorship of Perry. In 1802 he was trying an entirely ne\v line of writing in the Morning Post — turning into verse prose translations of German poems supplied by Coleridge. A specimen of Lamb's work of this kind has been preserved — Thekla's song in Wallcn- stein. "As to the translations," he writes to Coleridge, "let me do two or three hundred lines, and then do you try the NOTES, 421 nostrums upon Stuart in any way j'ou please." ITis connection with tlie newspapers came to an end in 1803. " I liave given up two guineas a week at the Pod," lie writes to Alanning, "and rcgaiued my health and spirits, which were upon the wane. I grew sick, and Stuart unsatisfied. Luslsli satis, tcmpus ahirc est. I must cut closer, that's all." Daniel Stuart— who lived till 1846— published in the Gentlr- onan's Magazine for June 1S38 an account of his dealings with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lamb. It is amusing to hear the other side of the story. He says, "As for good Charles Lamb, I could never make anything of his writings. Coleridge re- peatedly jiressed me to settle him on a salary, but it would not do. Of politics he knew nothing ; and his drollery was vapid when given in short paragraphs for a newspaper." Certainly no style M'as ever less fitted for journalism, iu any department, than Lamb's. Boh JUcn — 07(r quondam scJwoIfcUoio. — He was a Grecian at Christ's Hospital in Lamb's time. See the story of him, and his handsome face, in the essay on the Blue Coat School. John Fcmviclc. — The Ralph Bigod of the essay, The Tv;o Races of Men. An unTucl-y, or rather luclcy, ejrigram from onr 2^en. — The alleged apostasy of Sir James Mackintosh consisted in his having accepted, at the hands of Mr. Addington, the office of Recorder of Bombay in 1804. His Vincliciec Gallica: were imb- lished in 1791. Lamb's epigram was the following : — " Though thou'rt like Judas, an apostate black. In the resemblance one thing dost thou lack ; Wlien he had gotten his ill-purchased pelf, He went away, and wisely hang'd himself : This thou may do at last, yet much I doubt If thou hast any bowels to gush out !" BARRENIS^ESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE FRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART.— P. 303. (The Atlicmcum, January and Feljruary 1S33.) A^yropos of what Lamb writes in this essay on the Titian in the National Gallery, it is not unamusing to find the following sentence in a letter to Wordsworth of May 1833 : — " Thank yon for your cordial reception of Elia. Inter nos, the 'Ariadne' is not a darling with me ; several incongruous things are in it, but in the composition it served me as illustrative." 422 THE ESSAYS OF ETJA. THE WEDDING.— P. 315. (London Magazine, Juue IS'iJ.) Sarah Buriic}-, the daughter of Adiiiiial r.uniey, married her cousin .Toliii Payne in April 1821, and licr father died in Novemher of tlio same year. Hor age was between twenty - seven and twenty -eight. This is the foundation of fact on which tliis idyllic little stoiy is built up. It is at least a curious coincidence that, when Lamb revised the essay for the Last Essays of Elia, he was liimself looking forward to a bereave- ment strictly parallel to that of the old adnural. He and Mary M'ere about to lose, by marriage, one who had been to them as an only child. Emma Isola married Mr. ^Mo.xon in July 1833. Lamb might indeed have said of himself, "He bears bravely up, but he docs not come out with his flashes of wild wit so thick as formerly . . . the youthfulness of the house is flown." Did he perchance remember, as he quoted his favourite Jlarvell, that the poet was bidding good-bye to one who had been his pupil, as Emma Isola had been Lamb's ? In the lines on Appleton House, IMarvell predicts the marriage of Mary Fairfa.K — ■' Wliile her jjlail parents mo.st rejoice, And make their destiny their choice." REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE.— P. 321. (London Magusiae, January 1823.) OLD CHINA.— P. 327. (London MagarJuf, March 1823.) This beautiful essay tells its own story — this time, we may be sure, without romance or exaggeration of any kind. It is a contribution of .singular interest to our understanding of the happier days of Charles and Mary's united life. Danclncj the hays. — The haj's was an old Engli.sh dance, involving some intricate figures. It seems to have been known in England u]) to fifty years ago. The dance is often referred to in the M'riters W'hom Lamb most loved. Herrick, for ex- ample, has — '■ On holy-dayes, when Yirgins meet To dance tlie Iluyes, with nindjle feet." NOTES. 423 THE CHILD ANflEL; A DREAM.— P. 333. (Lo)idoti Magazine, June 1S23.) 'J'honuis Aloore's Loves of the Angels had appeared in the year 18"23. Lamb, as we may well believe, was not in general attracted to this poet, but there were reasons why this parti- cular poem may have been an excei)tion to the rule. It was based upon the translation in the Keptuagint of the second verse in the si.xth chai)ter of Genesis — "Angels of God" instead of " Sons of God." " In addition to the iitncss of the subject for poetry," Moore writes in his preface, "it struck me also as capable of affording an allegorical medium, through which might be shadowed out the fall of the soul from its original purity — the loss of light and happiness which it sutlers in the pursuit of this world's perisliable pleasures — and the punishments, both from conscience and Divine justice, with Avhich impurity, pride, and presumptuous inquiry into the awful secrets of God ai'e sure to l3e visited." This vein of thought had a strange fiiscination for Lamb, as we know from his rellections in New Year's Eve, and his beautiful sonnet on Innocence. The topic, in short, may have attracted him, rather than Moore's fluent verse and boudoir metaphysics. It may be doubted whether he meant his .sequel to the poem to be in any sense an allegory. It is probably fantastic merely. CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD.— P. 336. (London Magazine, August 1822.) In the year 1814 Basil Montagu compiled a volume of mis- cellaneous extracts on the subject of temperance, i;nder the title Soine Enquiries into the Effects of Fennentccl Liq2(07's. By a Water Drinker. The contents were taken from the writings of physicians, divines, poets, essayists and others who had pleaded tlie temperance cause. The volume was arranged in sections, and to that headed Do Fermented Liquors contrihute to Moral Excellence ? Lamb furnished (of course anonymously) his Con- fession of a Drunkcu'd. It was illustrated by an outline engraving of the Correggio drawing so powerfully described in the essay. A second edition of the book apjieared in 1818. In the Quarterly Review for April 1822 appeared an article on Dr. Reid's treatise on Hypocliondriasis and other Nervous Aff'cctions. These Confessions of a Drunkard were there referred to, as "a fearful picture of the consetjuences of intemperance," which the reviewer went on to saj', "we have reason to know is a true tale." I may be allowed to finish the story in words used by me elsewhere. " In order to give the author the oppor- 424 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A. tuiiitj' of coiitradirtiii!;' this statement, the paper mms vopriiiteJ in the Lomlon in the following August, under the signature of Elia. To it were appt luled a few words of remonstrance with the Quarlcrhj reviewer for assuming the literal truthfulness of these confessions, but accompanied with certain significant admissions that showed Lamb had no right to be seriously indignant. 'It is indeed,' he writes, 'a comi)ound extracted out of his long observation of the effects of drinking upon all the world about him ; and this accumulated mass of misery he hath centred (as the custom is with judicious essayists) in a single figure. AVe deny not that a portion of his own experiences may have passed into the picture (as who, that is not a washy fellow, but must at some lime have felt the after-operation of a too generous cup?) ; but then how heightened ! how exaggerated ! how little within the sense of the review, when a part in their slanderous usage must be understood to stand for the whole.' The truth is that Lamb, in writing his tract, had been playing with edge-tools, and could hardly have complained if they turned against himself. It would be those who knew Lamb, or at least tlie circumstances of his life, best, who would lie most likely to accept these confessions as true." There is, in short, a thread of fact running through this paper, though with exaggerations and additions in abundance. The reference to the excessive indulgence in smoking we have too good reason for accepting as genuine. When some one w-atched him persistently emit dense vplumes of smoke during the greater part of an evening, and asked him how he had contrived to do it, he answered, " I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue. " Compare his Ode to Tobacco. and not undo 'cm To suffer wet davination to run thro' 'em. From the Revenger's Tragedy, by Cyril Tourneur. A'iudici is addressing the skull of his dead lady : — ' ' Here's an eye, Able to tempt a great man — to serve God ; A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot how to dissemble. MethinlvS this mouth should make a swearer tremble ; A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo 'em. To sutler wet damnation to run through 'em." rorULAR FALLACIES.— P. 34G. (The New Monthly Magazine, J.anu;iry to September 1S2G.) Lamb writes to Wordsworth in 1833, when the volume was newly out : — " I want you in the Pojnilar Fallacies to like the ' home that is no home,' and ' rising with the lark.' " The former NOTES. 425 of these luiturally iiitcrestcil Lamb deeply, for it eontaiiis a liardly-disgiiised account of his own struggles with the cro\yd of loungers and good-natured friends who intruded^ on liis leisure hours, and hindered his reading and w^riting. There is little to call for a note in these papers. The ]>un of Swift's criticised— with rare acumen— in the Fallacy, "that the worst puns are the best," was on a lady's mantua dragging to the ground a Cremona violin. Swift is said to have (|Uoted Virgil's line— "Mautua vaj miserai niniium viciua Cremonas. " Printed by 'R.. & R. Clark, Edinburgh. By CHARLES LAMB. TIIK COLLECTED WORKS OF CHARLES LAM 13. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by the Rev. Alfred AiNGER, RL A., Canon of Bristol. In Six Vohimes. Globe 8vo. 5s. each. \7"he Eversley Series. I. The Essays of Ema. II. Poems, Plays, and Miscellaneous Essays, III. Mrs. Leicester's School, and other Writings in Prose and Verse. IV. Tales from Shaksi'eake. 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