"•' "'. \Wi m ill III : . i I. II IRARY THE University of California. Mrs. SARAH P. WALSWORTH. Received October, 1894. ^Accessions NoS^j ' Qt-r'l~ Class No. BJREAKFAST IN BED; PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. §. Strits of frtbigtstible giscoarses, BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, AUTHOR OF "TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK," "WILLIAM HOGARTH," "THE SEVEN. SONS OP MAMMON," "THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN DANGEROUS," ETC., ETC., ETC. NEW YORK: JOHN BEADBUEN, (SUCCESSOR TO M. DOOLADY,) 49 WALKER STREET. 1863. syofi-- 7#44i*£ TO HY KIND DOCTOR H. J. J. WHO SET ME ON MY LEGS AND WOULD TAKE NO FEE, 3 33riHcate tjjus 33ook, WRITTEN IN SICKNESS BUT REVISED IN HEALTH. Guilford Street, Russell Squars, September, IS63. CONTENTS ON A REMARKABLE DRAMATIC PERFORMANCE ON A LITTLE BOY GOING TO SCHOOL PAGE 33 50 ON MR. MAVOR'S SPELLING-BOOK ON THE PREVAILING MADNESS ON THINGS GOING, GOING GONE ! . . . . 8 T ON BEING BURNT ALIVE 104 ON THE CONDITION OF MY POOR FEET . . . 130 ON A REMARKABLE DOG 154 ON WHAT PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE FOR BREAKFAST . 184 ON HAVING SEEN A GHOST AT HOXTON, AND THE VERY DEUCE HIMSELF IN PARIS .... 204 ON THE DISCOVERY IN ONE'S WAISTCOAT-POCKET OF SOME BONES OF UNUSUAL CHARACTER . ' . 229 ON A YOUNG LADY IN A BALCONY . . . 254 BREAKFAST IN BED; OR, PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. ON A EEMAEKABLE DEAMATIC PEE- FOEMANCE. f Do you know Hircius and Spungius, servants to Dorothea, in that curious old play by Mass- inger, the Virgin Martyr f I have always looked upon these two fellows as the perfection of scoundrelism. To steal pence off the tray of a blind man's dog is ordinarily esteemed the acme of baseness ; but Hircius and Spungius go far beyond this. They take the saintly Yirgin's wages, but they are bond-servants to Venus— La Venere d£ ruffianly and to Bacchus (Bacchus who is head warden of Vintners' Hall, ale Conner, mayor of all victualling houses ; lanceprezade to red noses and invincible Adalantado over the armada of deep-scarleted, rubified, and carbun- cled faces). How they drink and gorge, and 8 OR, swear and lie, and bear false witness ! When Dorothea sends them out with meat and medi- cines to comfort her almswomen, Hircius and Spungius convey the cates to a receiver of stolen goods, and spend the proceeds in foul riot. "For blood of grapes they sell the widow's food," and " snatch the meat out of the prison- er's mouth " to fatten the naughty. With vile hypocrisy they simulate devotion ; but when the meek Angelo, who is always walking about with upturned eyes and a lighted taper, has gone on his way, Hircius and Spungius thrust their tongues into their cheeks, and reel into the nearest tav- ern, blaspheming. Finally, when Dorothea, their mistress, their benefactress, their Saint, is to be scourged, outraged, tortured, who but Hir- cius and Spungius are there to help the hang- man ? Faugh ! There is but one merry passage in this mournful tragedy, and that is where the twin villains are dragged away by the heels to the gallows. Every man who feels strongly, and works hard, and has made a name, and hates Rogues, is pestered with a Hircius and a Spungius. They begin by fawning upon and slavering him ; and when they discover that he will have none of their lip-service, they become his enemies. With one more ally, they would be counterparts of the three Jews who put their three-hatted heads PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 9 together to "devise deyices against Jeremiah, and make his life a torment to him." Ever since I laid down pencil to take up pen, I have had my Hircins and my Spungius for ever carp- ing, sneering, maligning, reviling. Hircius libels me in the " Cad's Chronicle" because I have declined to lend him three-and-sixpence ; Spun- gius, who is reviewer-in-ordinary to the " Gutter- blood Gazette," essays to filch from me my good name because I would not insert his "New Scan- dal about Queen Elizabeth " in " Temple Ear." Yet I*, honestly confess that the enmity of Hir- cius and Spungius does me good. It is better, O sage, to wriggle on a cushion stuffed full of the thorns of abuse than to rest the head on the hop-pillow of flattery. A mongrel cur barking at your heels is not so agreeable, but he is more useful than a cringing Bos well. Then, again, is there not a pleasure in taking one's traducers by the ear, and cudgelling their bewrayed hides with sounding thwacks ? To hear Hircius howl, to listen to Spungius as he squeals — this is sack and sugar to one who is content to abide by the wholesome doctrine of give and take, and who, in return for a craven blow, can deliver the " auctioneer " well over the face and eyes. " Aha !" I hear Hircius and Spungius cry when they open this sheet, and see " Breakfast in Bed" at the head of the page. "JSTow we 10 have him on the hip. "Now we will gird at him, and snarl, and glose, and ' make his life a tor- ment to him.' " Yes, H. and S., so shall you do till you swell and burst with venom, if you like the sport. " Oho !" Hircius and Spungius con- tinue, " Breakfast in Bed, forsooth ! Here is another sample of literary vanity. His lordship breakfasts in bed, does he, and not at the penny coffee-shop ? What does he condescend to take at his breakfast ? Chocolate frothed in a silver mill ? devilled kidneys, muffins, flowery pekoe, truffled turkey, or Strasburg pie ? Does he read the 'Morning Post?'" (Yes, he does; and a capital paper it is, with columns inexorably closed against Hircian and Spungian contribu- tions.) "Does he subsequently rise, don a bro- caded dressing-gown, and, with a golden pen, on violet-tinted paper, set down the thoughts that have flitted through his mind at breakfast-time ? Or, does his Ineffability (and be hanged to his impudence !) have a rosewood writing-desk inlaid with ivory (Mechi and Bazin, makers) brought to his bedside, and deposited on his pink silk quilted counterpane, while a trembling slave holds the standish ? Or, perhaps, we shall be favored with a description of- the bedchamber on the model — he is an inveterate plagiarist — of Xavier de Maistre's Voyage autour de ma Cham- bre. JSTow for a broker's inventory of the furni- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN" THE SHEETS. 11 ture : chairs, washhand-stand, tiger-skin rug, and adjoining bath-room. Oh, be joyful; let us say grace, my brother, for anon we shall be full of meat. The old, old Galimatias is coming. The old conceit, ignorance, fragments of slangy French, scraps of bad Latin, wiredrawn descrip- tions, interminable digressions, and affected ver- biage. And this wretched imitation of the immortal < Koundabout Papers ' he calls { Break- fast in Bed.' Breakfast in bed, quotha ! Why not Breakfast on a doorstep, Breakfast in the workhouse, Breakfast in gaol ?" Well, all may be on the cards ; for the life of mortal man is full of strange vicissitudes. Mean- while I am content to Breakfast in Bed. Do You, my reader, want a reason for a decidedly indolent and perhaps unhealthy habit? You should have a hundred, were you so minded. I breakfast in bed because I like it ; because I am much given to sitting up all night, with cats, and owls, and friends, and books, and things ; because I am generally very tired when I go to bed, and my poor feet require rest as well as my poor head ; because a cup of tea taken between the sheets tastes more sweetly to me than the family souchong on the ground-floor ; because I am much given to quarrelling with my bread- and-butter at breakfast-time — and, alone, in bed there are but two parties to the quarrel instead B 12 of three or four; because there is a bell close to my hand, which I can pull viciously when I choose ; because one can get through the perusal of six daily papers much better in bed than in an arm-chair ; and finally, because when in bed in the fresh morning, and wide awake, not in the incoherence of drowsiness, one can think, plot, devise, arrange, decide upon the moment- ous Yea, the irrevocable No ; bid farewell to the evil, welcome the good and rise a new man. [Never mind what my sleeping apartment is like. Damask-hung four-poster, ceiled with plate-glass ; feather-bed and down pillow, or iron pallet, with straw paillasse and hard- stuffed bolster — what does it matter ? I ask not Hircius and Spongius to what twopenny-rope their hammocks are hung pending the final sus. per coll. How many pairs of boots are there in the dressing-room ? Do I urticate my back hair with two brushes (ivory-backed) % Have I any Ess. Bouquet, Kondeletia, or Toilet Yinegar on the dressing-table % All these are things of little moment. Suffice it to say that the windows are open from the top, that there is no looking-glass in the room — for this reason, that most men have an invincible propensity for looking at their tongue the first thing in the morning, and when you look at your tongue you can't help looking at your face ; and then comes the cold shudder PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 13 when yon discover that yon are a night older, and that gray hair nnmber nineteen has just put in an appearance. Stay, there is one other cir- cumstance which I may mention in connection with my domestic arrangements. On the wall opposite my bed hangs, neatly framed, an old Dutch Engraving of the martyrdom of some five hundred saints, who suffered in the persecutions of the Roman Emperors from Yalerian to Max- entius. There they are, being fried, grilled, boiled, roasted, barbecued, flayed alive, burnt, steamed, whipped, pinched, hanged, decapitated, baked, drowned, minced, scolloped, hewn in pieces, sawn asunder, impaled, broken on the wheel, and flung to wild beasts. A lively com- position, with a long epigraph in Dutch, begin- ning " Het Martelen der Uoedgetuigen de onder der Vervolging der Roomse Keisers voer de ■ Waarheid des Evangeliums" and so forth ! I like to look at this sanguinolent old print, first, in complacency for being in bed, in Bloomsbury, in the Queen's peace, with the breakfast things coming jangling upstairs on the tray — Ha ! ' another breakage at that unlucky .second-pair landing; next, in gratitude remembering that the five hundred persons here represented were cruelly done to death because they presumed to differ in matters of conscience from the " Roomse Keisers ;" and, thank God ! no King or Kaiser 14 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OK, nowadays dare so much as pinch an English- man's little finger for what he writes or speaks according to his conscience. Cannot one get up a little Philosophy between the Sheets this fine rainy morning ? Here are the Newspapers. Surely some texts must turn up in those extensive, close-printed, loose-medi- tated columns. In the advertisements always there is a mine of philosophy ; but they always detain the " Times " Supplement down-stairs — I presume with a hankering after the Births, Mar- riages, and Deaths, the abandoned Initials who have run away from home, and the Bank an- nouncements of unclaimed stock. There is none standing in my name, I am sure. Here are the telegrams — Eeuter's hottest ? The Tuileries com- pliment Turin. Do they? The Keichsrath ? No; it's the Landtag. Stay, it's the council of the nobility of the government of TambofF, who have been memorializing somebody about some- thing. Indeed ! Montenegro. Where is Mon- tenegro ? There is no use in consulting the map ; for has not a great authority informed us that all maps professing to give a projection of any places out of the British Dominions are simply impos- tures? The Turks have taken Spuz, and are marching on Cettigne. Much good may it do them ! Another dreadful murder. There is always another dreadful murder. Infanticide. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS 15 Ditto. Swindling extraordinary; more garotte robberies ; death through crinoline ; Lord John Maimers on agricultural prizes ; Mr. Henley on laborers' cottages; Mr. Disraeli on himself; " consols opened heavily " — did they % state of trade ; suicide ; destitution ; another awful fire. Well, I do not see that the world has altered its ordinary jog-trot since yesterday, — since 2,190,000 yesterdays, more or less. "We are still laboring, groaning, crashing in M. Yictor Hugo's dark tunnel ; and I for one am choked with the engine's ever-belching smoke, and deafened by the rattle and roar ; and they don't give us lights in the second-class carriages ; and thrusting my head out of the window, at the risk of having it (the head) knocked off, I can see no glimmer of the luminous point which is so visible to M. Hugo's eagle eye — the happy valley; the pro- mised land ; the bright terminus — Canaan. Here are leading articles galore. "It was once wittily remarked by Eochefoucault " — Connu, " The Fabian policy of General McClel- l an? » — I have seen that before. " Those whom the gods are resolved to destroy they first deprive of reason ; and the conduct of the Indian govern- ment with reference to the Gwalior bungalows, the farming of mofnssils to Kansamahs, and the breach of Sudder Adawlut towards the ryots of the Himalayan compounds" — Very clever and ex- 16 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OE, haustive, I have no doubt ; but my acquaintance with Hindostan stops at curried lobster, and In- dian politics are to me among the cosas d& JE&pana. I just glance at the theatrical advertisements above the leaders. My eye lights on the un- varying staple of the bill of fare at the Haymar- ket. Our American Cousin, of course. Tre- mendous and continued success of Mr. Sothern as Lord Dundreary. Why, let me collect my thoughts. "Where was I last night ? whom did I meet ? with whom did I quarrel ? which are sy- nonymous terms. Why, I went to the Theatre Royal Haymarket, and paid for my admission — at least, somebody else paid for me, the free list being suspended, and orders hopelessly unattain- able; and I saw Mr. Sothern in Lord Dun- dreary, and I have seen him twice within as many weeks. I don't often go to the play. It is too good for the likes of me. I envy the people who seem to enjoy the performance, which wearies and stu- pifies me. I am restless and uneasy ; long for the green curtain to descend, and for the festoons of brown holland to envelope the boxes. I never sat out a theatrical performance without wishing, not that the roof might fall in, and the chande- lier tumble into the pit — for those accidents would hurt my brethren below — but that the PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN" THE SHEETS. 17 stage-manager would step forward and inform the audience that the French had landed, or that a blue monkey was standing on his head on the summit of Bow-church steeple, or that Captain Fowke's brick barn at South Kensington had caught fire : anything sensational, in fact, to put a stop to the mummery on the stage and clear the house. I had not, before I went to see Lord Dundreary ^ been inside the Haymarket theatre for years. I remember the last time well ; the pit black with paying play-goers' heads, the boxes radiant with famous men and fair women, and one old man on the stage, white-bearded, straw-bedecked, babbling to his Fool about his daughter's ingratitude. Vidi tantmn. I have seen William Charles Macready in King Lear / and after that wondrous impersonation, the rant and buffoonery of the modern stage disgust a dull man somewhat. Exult not, my Hircius and Spungius ; I am not about to descant on the glorious old days of the drama — on Young and Charles Kemble, whom I have seen — on the Eean, whom I never saw — on "Jack Bannister, sir," who died years before I was born. And let me tell Mr. John Baldwin Buckstone, whom I have known, admired, and respected for very many years — who has been, I am proud to say, from the first, a subscriber to this Magazine, that he is very much mistaken if he thinks I am 18 BREAKFAST IN BED ] OR, about to puff either Mr. Sothern or himself. No, J. B. B., perpend. You may cut off with ruthless excision your subscription to T. B., but you shall listen to the impartial critic now Breakfasting in Bed. You may strike, but you shall hear. Some kind, despotic friends I am happy to possess were good enough, lately, to take me to the Exhibition (where I had never been, of my own motion, since the opening day) and to feed me on macaroni dressed in the Neapolitan fash- ion, with tomatoes, and to give me some grouse, and some selzer and sillery, and other nice things, which cast a sunshine on the shady walks of life, and to tell me that three front seats had been secured a week before at the Haymarket, and tnat I was to go, en sandwich, and see Lord Dundreary. I protested; but in vain. I pleaded my engagements, the printer's devil of T. B., my incapacity to appreciate the drama, my aching head, and those perennial poor feet. All remon- strances I found unavailing; and ten minutes before the termination of a very stupid farce, I found myself in the first agonies of that cramp which is the lot of all who occupy front rows at an English theatre. It is not, I conceive, necessary tljat I should describe the plot and incidents of the piece, en- titled Our American Cousin, and which is called a Comedy. This much, however, I may say, that PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN" THE SHEETS. 19 it is, as regards construction, dialogue and in- trigue, about as much a comedy as I am a Dutch- man. As comedies go, however, I suppose that it is received as something quite in the style of Sheridan or Mrs. Inchbald. There is plenty of " broad fun " in it, which may be said to be ana- logous with " Broad church," i. e., no fun at all Is it funny for the " tag " to the first act to de- pend on a Yankee pulling the string of a shower- bath, and bellowing beneath the cascade ; or for the wind-up of the second to turn on the popping of a champagne-cork and the casting of an effer- vescing jet over Lord Dundreary? These fun- niments remind one of the old " real water " effects of Sadler's Wells. The fun of Mr. Buck- stone appearing in the costume of the Ancient Order of Foresters, dilating on the pleasant odor of the back hair of the young lady he is hugging, and of his mixing sherry-cobblers and brandy- cocktails in an English drawing-room, I cannot discover. But all this must be funny, you see, because the public roar with laughter at every feat of mountebank horse-play ; and whatever is, you know, is right. Although Mr. Buckstone's Asa Trenchard does not in the slightest degree resemble either a Northern or a Southern American, it is unde- niably a very droll performance. But then Mr. Buckstone would be sure to make you laugh 20 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OE, were he playing the part, say of a Mute, or of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, or of Grim Death himself. He makes the most of an unnatural and ungrateful role, manifestly written down by a bad dramatist to suit the morbid vanity of a Bowery audience — or wherever else in Bragga- docioclom the thing was primarily played. In- deed, the whole " comedy " bears evident signs of being written to order, and with the view of " cracking up " the most conceited people in the world. The quasi- American from Vermont is made chivalrous, generous, self-sacrificing, even to lighting his cigar with the document which assures him the possession of large property ; while, of the two most salient English gentlemen represented, one is a " bloated aristocrat " of a Baronet, hopelessly in debt, the other a vapid, brainless nobleman. All the types of English character, save Florence and Mary (who is to have the signal honor of marrying the Yankee), are absurd and repulsive. The butler is a mon- Btrosity of malaspirated H's ; the dairyman who brings the letters is a cringing fawner ; the law- yer (the villain of the piece) is a thief, and his clerk a drunkard. Captain De Boots is a fool and nothing more ; and Mrs. Mountchessington has the manners of a charwoman, and sells her daughters to the highest bidders. This, I sup- pose, is English Society. Is it? I am sure I PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 21 don't know. I don't go into society myself;— and, my dear, I have rung twice for another lump of sugar ; and to-morrow being Sunday we will go to the Foundling Chapel, and be thank- ful for all things. I look upon the Lord Dundreary of Mr. Sothern as a most finished, ingenious, and amaz- ingly well-sustained delineation of a character he has undeniably originated : — that of a well- dressed but grotesque imbecile. It is easy to see directly he comes on the stage the man is a thorough actor. Like Mr. Fechter, he is never idle; his by-play is always exquisite, never obtrusive. Many comedians, when they have done mouthing what is set down for them, sub- side at once into gawky inertia; and because they are no longer near the footlights, think that they have a right to twiddle their thumbs, to yawn, to stand on one leg, to gossip with their compeers, or to gaze vacantly at the wings. They are just like the Marionettes you see at Genoa : one moment full of spasmodic action, and the next flaccid and powerless, with their heads on one side, their backbones apparently drawn out, and propped against the wing. "With Mr. Sothern it is entirely different. You never see too much of him, when in comparative repose ; but you may be always sure that he is doing the right thing in the right place. He 22 BEEAKFAST IN BED ; 0E, dresses in wonderfully good taste. His costumes (with one exception, which I shall notice pre- sently) are true to the character which, other- wise, he so often falsifies. His face is mar- vellously "• made-up;" his management of an eye-glass as dexterous as Perea ISTena's manage- ment of a fan. He cannot unfold a pocket- handkerchief, open a letter, put on a pair of gloves, cross his legs, or pull his moustaches, without showing you that he has made those seemingly petty details the matter of careful and artistic study. Finally, to sum up his good quali- ties, he appears to be an admirable mimic, and imitates very successfully the drawl, the lisp, and the stutter, which he has turned to such famous account. He is the more entitled to praise for his powers of mimicry, as the tones of his natural voice, when heard from time to time, have a harsh and unpleasant twang, suggesting to those who hear him that Asa Trenchard in his hands, or rather in his mouth, would be much more a lifelike performance than is the Yankee of Mr. Buckstone. And the per contra. Is there anything to be said on the other side ? Can anything, without malice or hypercriticism, be set down in depre- ciation of an actor who has taken the town by storm, who for months has crammed the Hay- market to the very ceiling, whose photograph is PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 23 in every shop-window, whose name the theme of every drawing-room conversation, who has won colossal notoriety for himself, and has made a handsome fortune— for his manager? I think that there is a great deal to be said on the other side, and I mean to say it plainly, but tempe- rately. First, however, let me express my opinion that the responsibility of the blemishes to which I am about to call attention lies at the door, not of Mr. Sothern, not even at that of the playwright, who originally gave only the sketchy skeleton of a part which Mr. Sothern has clothed in such a vascular manner, but at the door of his audience. The gallery roar at him because he is full of laughable absurdities. The pit are de- lighted with him, because the pittites are mostly simple-minded country-folks, who know no more of the habits and manners of a live lord than they do of the private life of a hippopotamus. The stuck-up middle-classes in the boxes praise his impersonation as " so delightfully true to nature," because they themselves have rarely the opportunity of meeting with the aristocracy ; and because Mr. Sothern's Dundreary'^ the caricature of a caricature, the exaggeration of the sham copy they are themselves acquainted with — the Gov- ernment clerks and sucking bankers and stock- brokers' sons, who dress in an outre, manner, know the outside of all the clubs, walk arm 24 BKEAKFAST EN" BED ; OR, linked four abreast in Eotten Kow, and fancy themselves " swells." Mr. John Leech, even, who ought to know his swell by heart, has blun- dered in seizing upon the outer Dundreary as the type of the inner exquisite ; and the thou- sands who pin their faith to the social sketches in " Punch " are content to believe that if Mr. Leech, like Mr. Lincoln, " puts down his foot " on Lord Dundreary being identical with the real swells, with rny Lord Tomnoddy, and Lord Fre- derick Yerisopht, and — swells of swells! — the Marquis of Farintosh and the Honorable Percy Popjoy — Mr. Leech must be right, and no dog must dare bark at Sir Oracle. But I pass from assertion to proof. When so much is said about " life-like portraiture," and something " delight- fully true to nature," it behooves me to show in what manner Mr. Sothern sins against verisimi- litude in the character he assumes. I am in- clined, first, to think that Lord Dundreary's appearance in brilliantly-dyed black hair, mous- tache, and whiskers is, artistically considered, a mistake. Nine-tenths of our English swells are tawny. Old swells use hair-dye (on the employ- ment of which by Dundreary part of the plot of this precious piece turns); young swells never. I will, however, pass this by, as now and then one meets a phenomenally sable swell ; only Mr. Sothern " makes up " so very darkly as PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 25 to appear almost oriental. A much more repre- hensible solecism is his first entrance in an elabo- rately embroidered dressing-gown. Since when has such a careless style of attire been tolerated, even in the case of a nobleman, in the house of an English baronet, and in the presence of ladies and gentlemen who are all in walking dress ? Again, the real " swell," donkey as he frequently may be, would never be so positively rude and unmannerly to ladies as Mr. Sothern is. He might be lazy, lounging and limp ; but, as the English swell can generally ride, drive, and fence very well, he is hardly ever awkward. It is the perfectly calm self-possession and the languid politeness of the swell that give him so unmistakeable a stamp. Mr. Sothern is always committing blunders, tumbling over settees, knocking Over music-stools, or frightening old ladies out of their wits. He has not been three minutes on the stage, before he turns his back on the lady with whom he is conversing. I do not object to his speaking of Mrs. Mountches- sington, in an under tone, as "a d — d stupid old woman," for I am afraid that the swells are much given to quiet profanity ; but I do object to his jogging that lady in the stomacher and hustling her about the room : — I object simply for this reason, that if any Lord Dundreary adopted such a course of conduct in any English 2 26 BREAKFAST IN BED; OB, drawing-room, lie would infallibly be kicked down-stairs by the host. Of Mr. Sothern's drawl I have already expressed my admiration, His lisp is also very good, and is not offensive, for the more imbecile among the swells do imi- tate or acquire by habit a lisp. But that part of an actor's great reputation should rest upon his mimicry of so painful, lamentable, and repulsive a physical imperfection as stammering, strikes me as being very disgusting. A lisp is a slight matter : the stammerer and stutterer must be reckoned among the Almighty's afflicted crea- tures. If corporeal ailments are to be made the subject of "life-like portraiture" in "comedy," we shall have one actor famous for his wonderful delineation of the ringworm, another made famous through his stage-photography of a hare- lip, and a third gain renown for his curious copy of club-foot. In fact, Mr. Sothern very nearly approaches a parody of the last-named defect, in the shape of a hop, or " kick in his gallop," which a young English lady accounts for by say- ing that my Lord has been advised to run, and that he is doing his running by instalments. This young lady, Florence (very charmingly played by Mrs. Charles Young), also ridicules Lord Dundreary to his face for saying " wid- dle," instead of " riddle," an exercise of sarcastic humor I did not hitherto know to be habitual in polite society. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 27 Much of Mr. Sothern's popularity rests on the incoherent nonsense he talks, and the idiotic non seqidtvtrs in which he revels. The confusion arising from his utter want of the faculty of rea- son is certainly very amusing. For instance, when he tries to count his fingers and toes, and discovers that he has eleven of each ; when he sticks up one thumb to represent his mother, and another for his brother Sam's mother, until he gets into a haze between the two, and wonders who the d — 1 (he is nearly always swearing) his mother can be, it is impossible to avoid shouting with laughter. I wonder, supposing my friend Mr. Nicholas were to send me up a Born Idiot from the admirable Asylum at Earlswood, and I were to try to procure him an engagement at the Haymarket, whether the drivelling balderdash of the poor creature would excite the risibility of a highly cultivated audience ? Many of Mr. Sothern's non sequiturs are droll enough ; but they are not new. The enumeration of the fin- gers and toes is as old as the hills, and has made many generations of chaw-bacons grin when per- formed by Mr. Merryman in front of a booth at the fair. The transposition of proverbs in which Lord Dundreary delights is equally venerable ; and I had the pleasure of hearing the famous hotch-potch of " the early bird knows his own father," and " a wise child picks up the worm" 28 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, (if that be the precise formula of the nonsense), from the mouth of an English clown, in the cir- cus at Copenhagen, and in the year of grace 1856. Indeed, the majority of the jokes smell of the sawdust, and have been heard over and over again at Astley's. The more refined witti- cisms are drawn from other sources. The per- petual reference to " some other fellah" is only a paraphrase of the "any other man" of the nigger stump-orator at the music-halls; and the joint- stool conversation between Dundreary and Georgiana at the Dairy-farm is not very skil- fully copied from a wonderful bit of inane chit- chat in one of Mrs. German Reed's earlier enter- tainments. If I remember correctly, it hinged upon an asinine young gentleman's asking a lady whether she liked cheese, or whether, if she had a brother, she thought that he would like that caseous delicacy. Do I blame, do I quarrel with Mr. Sothern for making himself the mouthpiece of all this bald buffoonery ? Kot in the least. I only quarrel with the silly and depraved people who persist in crying up as a " life-like portraiture" and " as delightfully true to nature" what might just as w T ell be assumed to be the likeness of Beau Tibbs or Beau Brummel, as that of an English aristo- crat of the nineteenth century. I dare say the Americans admired Lord Dundreary hugely* To PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 29 the greater number of those who flock to see Mr. Sothern in England, he would be quite as wel- come if he wore a sky-blue coat, a false nose, and a pink wig. "We want quantity now-a-days, not quality, in our humor. The " Perfect Cure" has been an immense success ; so has " In the Strand, in the Strand ;£-and if anybody will tell me the real gist of those celebrated "comic" songs, I will give him any number of post obits, my MS. notes for the history of Merry Andrews, and a live guinea-pig. I apprehend that Mr. Sothern came to play this part in England in perfect good faith, and that he became a hero without being aware of it. Dundreary had had a tremendous run in Ame- rica ; why shouldn't it go down in England? Mr. Sothern has been, I believe, resident for many years in the United States and in the Colo- nies. It is not very probable that he could have enjoyed many opportunities of studying the pe- culiarities of the class of whom Lord Dundreary is erroneously supposed to be the type. He created the part, or at least filled it up from a mere vague outline. He saw how it would square with his own particular notion of humor, how he could adapt it to his own idiosyncrasy. He has been triumphantly successful in the pro- duction of a "life-like portraiture," not of a dandy Lord, but of an Eccentric. I don't deny 30 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OK, that there may be a Dundreary or two wander- ing up and down society ; but I utterly repudiate the theory accepted by the public, and endorsed by the powerful pencil of Mr. Leech, that Mr. Sothern's Dundreary is the representative of a class in the community. The Haymarket actor has, however, succeeded, perhaps unconsciously, in naturalizing in England a character who, for many years, has been highly popular on the French stage. I mean the traditional Jocrisse. The late Mr. Kenney gave a very humorous no- tion of him in the Billy Lackaday of Sweet- hearts and Wives; but Lord Dundreary is a thorough Anglicised Jocrisse. When this droll imbecile is sent for a quart of oil he holds out his cap, which contains a pint. When asked how he will carry the other pint, he turns the cap inside out. His master tells him to count the chickens, and he says that he has reckoned them all up except one, which ran about so that he couldn't count it. He digs a hole in the ground ; and when asked how he means to get rid of the earth thrown up, replies, " Put it in that hole, of course." He asks for some stale bread instead of new, at dinner, and being told that there is none, desires that some stale bread may be baked. He sees a fresh salmon at the fishmonger's, and announces his intention to save up his pocket-money until he can buy it. The PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 31 cat jumps on to the bird-cage, claws the canary out, and eats it. Hearing his mistress coming, Jocrisse thrusts the cat into the cage, and de- clares that the canary is quite safe, because it is Id-dedans, pointing to the imprisoned felina. There are Jocrisses, under various names, at Naples, at Palermo, at Madrid, at Constanti- nople, at Moscow, as I dare say there were like- wise in old Home and old Athens. Who doesn't know the old, old incongruity of the traveller who exclaimed, " They may well call this place Stoney Stratford, for I have been most terribly bitten by fleas !" What is that but a Dundreary- ism pure and simple ? The town has chosen to go mad after the English Jocrisse / and the town, I suppose, is perfectly right. Long live Lord Dundreary at the Haymarket, Blondin on the high rope, Leotard on the trapeze, the Perfect Cure, The Strand, the Strand ! and the Beni- zoug-zoug Arabs ! If I say that this vulgar farrago at the Haymarket, libellously called a comedy, and this clever droll, who has so suc- cessfully moulded it to his own purpose, made me think with shame and sorrow of the days when Weench, Steickland, Faeeen, Mathews, Yesteis, Glovee, Nisbett, trod its boards, and Buckstone gave us Englishmen to the life, and not galvanized travesties of Yankees, — what am I but a jaundiced and splenetic croaker? The 32 BKEAKFAST IN BED ; OK, drama is dead. Hurrah for " sensations," comio or tragic! The theatrical city of Paris is not free from similar crazes. All Paris crowded five- and-forty years ago to see Les Anglaises pour rire / thirty years ago to see Passe Minuit j twenty years ago to see Le The chez Madame Gibou ; ten years ago to see a performer who had, in his way, as great a specialty as Mr. Sothern. His name was Joseph Kelm ; and he created a furore by singing a comic song called LeSire do Framboisy, in which there was a truly Dundrearyish line, telling how the Sire cut off his wife's head d\m coup de son fusil : — with a musket shot. But it strikes me that all the extra- vaganzas I have named ran their course at little trumpery Boulevard theatres ; and that the hu- mors of M. Joseph Kelm were confined to the Funambules or the Folies Nouvelles. The Sire de Framboisy did not invade the chosen homes of comedy. He did not claim a triumph at the Theatre Francais. Yes : there certainly was either too much cay- enne-pepper, or too much Worcestershire sauce with — never mind what? the kidneys, the grilled haddock, the devilled fowl, — anything you like. Breakfast is over ; hot w T ater arrives ; and Black Care stands over against the shaving-glass and scowls at the shaver. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 33 ON A LITTLE BOY GOING TO SCHOOL. Shortly after eight o'clock every morning a little boy comes into the room where I Breakfast in Bed — a very little boy, not so high as the counterpane of the conch, and clad in a little suit of gray frieze. He passes to a little corner appointed to Jiim, partially disrobes himself, and, with a very grave and magisterial air, washes his little hands and face. That he has just partaken of a cold bath is patent from the fluffy appear- ance of his wet hair, a slight shiver which some- times pervades his frame, and the occasional trace of a half-dried tear on his dumpling face, which tear, I am led, not irrationally, to believe, has a direct connection with sundry early morning howlings, sometimes audible to me from the up- per regions. I will not do servant-maids the in- justice to suppose that they wilfully and design- edly rub yellow soap or the hard corners of towels into little boys' eyes ; but I well remember what tortures I used to undergo in the tub, where I was washed against my will, and was of the same opinion still that the making of dirtpies was pre- ferable. " Laissez-moi jouer dans cette belle 2* 34 BREAKFAST IN BED; OE, houe /" the Emperor JSTapoleon is reported to hare said, pointing to a magnificent puddle visible from the palace window at the Hague, when his mamma asked him what he would like for a new- year's gift. It is a dreadful thing to be exposed, weak and defenceless, in a Tub : yourself, all face as the Red Indians have it, and in that smooth shiny condition at once a prey and a temptation to the horny palm of a quick-tempered nursery- maid. However, as this little boy is to many in- tents and purposes master of the house in which he resides, I don't think that he suffers more than moderate tribulations in connection with the tub. At all events, his sorrows are over when he comes down to me. It is plain that the face-and-hands- laving he goes through in my presence is in his mind a pastime, not an irksome task. It is a sight to see him immerse his small paws in the water, demurely and decorously at first, but grad- ually ceding to an incontrollable impulse to splash. At 7.30 years of age what rich mines of happiness are there in making a mess ! His per- formances with the nail brush are wonderful ; but they are ornamental, not useful, the little boy having very little nails to speak of. He goes nevertheless through all the traditional etiquette of " making himself tidy," and in so doing re- minds me irresistibly of a kitten of which I have been lately bereaved, and now of a rabbit sprue- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 35 ing himself up in the presence of a boa-constrict- or, unconscious that the monster in the blanket is about to breakfast upon him — as 7, the domes- tic boa (or bore), propose to do presently upon the little boy — not truly to the extent of devour- ing him, but merely with a view to making him my theme for half-a-dozen pages or so. He pro- ceeds to comb the little auburn mop which sur- rounds his head like a carelessly-drawn nimbus, and makes about eight partings in indifferent directions in lieu of one. All of these faits et gestes are, I need scarcely observe, perfunctory, and merely devised for the purpose of "putting him in the way of things." Anon he will be made spruce and tidy by other hands. He has been by no means silent during these varied operations. He has on entering bidden me good morning, and " passed the time of day," as it is colloquially termed. He has likewise, in the course of about ten minutes, asked me about fifty questions. Some of these are, I must own, embarrassing. I admit that I am shaky as to my geography, and that I do not know the exact dis- tance from London to Turkey in Asia. I con- cede the general propositions started by the little boy that Russia looks very big on the map, and that it is a long way to Spain ; but when he pro- ceeds to cross-question me as to Sweden and Den- mark, and generally to retail to me so much as \ c 36 BREAKFAST IN BED; OB, he remembers of his last oral lesson from Misa Mangnall of the Preparatory Establishment for Young Gentlemen, I take refuge on my deaf side, hum something from the Trovatore, or artfully start a fresh topic of conversation. But I am proud to say that, however close I may be run, I never take refuge in the time-dishonored evasion that " little boys ought not to ask questions " — than which I think there is no crueller, stupider, or wickeder shield to your own ignorance and bar to another's enlightenment, extant. I re- member that, as a child, I used to be beaten for being inquisitive ; and I know that by this time I should be begging my bread and not earning it did I not pass the major portion of my time in asking questions. Good Heavens ! what would become of the world if little boys were not per- mitted to ask questions ? When grown up, they would be at grass with Nebuchadnezzar, and have one life with the beasts of the field. Yet may there be something belonging to the inner mystery of our being in this prohibition of know- ledge-seeking to infancy. How we lie and lie to children almost until they become men and wo- men ! How sedulously we keep secret the pri- mary things we know, and yet are so ready to impart the knowledge of that we know nothing of — the Devil ! The upas shadow of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is upon us, and PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 37 we dread to drag the bantlings into it. For who has puberty and reason bnt knows that he is per- petually pursued by a sphynx propounding the unanswerable enigma, " What is Life ?" — failing to answer which the sphynx devours him and he dies? There are other ways in which the little boy's interrogatories are perplexing. "When he comes up again while I am breakfasting, to bid me good-bye before proceeding to school, he some- times asks " why I have not eaten all my bread- and-butter ?" I may answer, " Because I have a headache." He may resume, " But why have I a headache ?" To this my response may be, " Be- cause I was out very late." " But why was I out very late ?" I may reply, " Because I was de- tained at the office correcting proofs." Here I have the little boy on the hip. The correction of proofs is as yet a profound mystery to him, and his inquisitive faculty does not at present ex- tend beyond " why." When he is eight, he will begin to ask " what " and " where." When he is a man, he will ask " who." He is a condescending little boy, not at all proud, and is glad to act as a species of domestic commissionnaire, fetching and carrying such small matters as letters, newspapers, anchovy paste up and down stairs. He is told that his performance of these little offices " saves the ser- 38 vants' legs ;" and I think that willingness and courtesy on the part of children save not only the servants' legs but their tempers likewise, and that to teach a child to say " if you please " when- ever he asks a retainer for anything, is almost as useful as a lecture upon geography. Have you not known a little boy the pest and nuisance of and entire house, and cursed by the subordinates he is permitted to bully ? The " bloated aristo- cracy " set us a shining example in this respect. Who keep their servants longest — for two gene- rations often — and leave them legacies when they die ? The haughtiest nobles, who, as a class, are uniformly courteous and urbane to their domes- tics. Who change their servants once a month — once a week sometimes — and are for ever wrans:- ling and jangling with them? The ignorant, envious, selfish, stuck-up classes. A little boy tyrannizing over a servant is, next to a little boy lending out his pocket-money at interest, the un- loveliest of human sights. And so this quiet little creature walks and talks in his Lilliputian way about the house, until it is time for him to go to school. It is the privilege of the cook to convey him thither, and to fetch him when school is over ; and although I think he knows the way to Miss Mangnall's Prepara- tory Establishment in Great Pinnock Street much better than Cook (who is from the country) knows PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 39 it, he very cheerfully acquiesces in the arrange- ment as part of his state of nonage and pupilage. He would as soon think of proceeding to school alone as of smoking a meerschaum-pipe on his way thither. He thoroughly accepts and under- stands his position as a very little boy. Now and then, when I am dawdling over a book, and he, playing with his few toys, is adjuring imaginary horses, locomotive engines, or railway porters "to come up," or marshalling mystical armies into position, I catch a shrewd glance in the corners of his eyes directed towards me, as though he were thinking, "I dare say that I am talking nonsense ; but why shouldn't I talk it, being such a very little boy !" Children have a wonderful power of conjuring up invisible interlocutors; and I think I would much sooner hear a little boy "playing at being" something he is not, or con- versing with a fancied playmate, than witness the hallucination of Justice Trice in Dryden's play, who is discovered " playing at tables with himself, spectacles on, and a bottle and parmesan before him," crying, " Cinq and cater: my cinq I play here, sir ; my cater here, sir. Bat first I'll drink to you, sir. Upon my faith, I'll do you reason." I have travelled about half-way through Break- fast in Bed when it is time for the little boy to depart for school. He comes, fully equipped for the Groves of Academe, to bid me farewell ; and 40 although he revisits the house at midday, I see no more of him until evening, when just before dinner and his bed-time he asks me a few — say half a hundred — more questions. I believe that in accordance with the modern formula of essay-writing I should properly cry, "I, curre!" to this little boy, and say something about his youth, his innocence,. his big blue eyes, and his fair hair curling like the young tendrils of the vine. I elect to do nothing whatever of the kind. lie is simply a very grave problem and study to me; and whither his life-journey may tend I am sure I don't know. For the sake of his few surviving relatives I trust that he will not be hanged ; but who knows ? Who can tell ? " Oh toi qui passes par ce cloitre, Recueilles-toi : tu n'es pas sur De voir s'allonger et s'accroitre Uu autre jour ton ombre au rnur." So sings very sweetly and sadly M. Theophile Gautier. So is it with the most tenderly-nurtured childhood. This little boy, I humbly hope, will lack no careful blue-aproned gardener, no hot- water pipes, no artful composts or well-glazed conservatory to grow him ; but when he is grown, what next? Can I insure the fruit against the inroads of innumerable animalcule, now to us invisible? For the credit of humanity, I hope and believe that most of those who have the PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 41 charge of a child regard that charge as awful in its responsibilities. I look around and see churches and schools crowded with young child- ren ; but, alas, are they only the neglected or the ill-treated ones who come to grief? The ab- surdity of a mother telling you that the baby she is nursing is to be an engineer or a barrister seems palpable enough ; but do not the sternest, most matter-of-fact parents and guardians fall into absurdities quite as ridiculous? Try to speculate upon the future of the thousands of charity children whose silver voices float up- wards, once a year, into the dusky space of the Great Dome of St. Paul's. Essay to predict what is to become of the eight hundred Eton boys who are nocking into the Great Western Railway carriages, and coming whooping home from the holidays. The charity boys and girls are sedu- lously and piously taught ; tlie Eton boys are watched over by grave and learned divines, destined perchance to become archbishops. And what next ? " That living flood, pouring through those streets, of all qualities, all ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, whither it is going % Aus der Ewiglceit) zu der Ewigheit hin — From Eternity, onwards to Eternity. These are ap- paritions : what else ?" The philoprogenitive reader will have scarcely failed to discover long before this that the little 42 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, boy I have been speaking of does not belong to me. Indeed he is no child of mine, Albeit I am his Uncle, no blood of mine is in his veins. He is a smiling young Anglo-Saxon, with an English face and English eyes. This admis sion may, as I have hinted, be entirely super- fluous. Lord bless you ! if he were my child, I should have broken out long since, in rap- tures. I should have apostrophised him as my pet, my poppet, my darling, my winsome, tricksome baby-boy. lie knows that I regard him as neither winsome nor tricksome, and that I would rather not have any of his tricks. There is nobody in the house to call him poppet or pet, or to cuddle and cocker him. Until he grows up and loses his heart to a woman, or has money to lend to a man, he will find none to flatter him. " Poor neglected cherub !" the fond mother may exclaim, " to pine "away under this cold, harsh tutelage !" I don't think, to judge from his ring- ing laughter, and the quantity of bread and but- ter he eats, that he is at all disposed to pine away. Indeed he seems to be about as happy as the day is long. If, by Heaven's wisdom, he has been deprived of that flood of passionate affection which only parents can bestow, he is safe, on the other hand, from those tempests of unjust anger and ferocity in which only parents are permitted to indulge. I have generally found that the in- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 43 dulgent parents thrash their darlings most. The spoilt child gets seldom that most inestimable boon in education — Equity — in the judgments passed upon him ; that Equity which is " the right witness that considereth all the particular circumstances of the deed, the which also is tem- pered with the sweetness of mercy." In house- holds where the honey-pot is always open, there seldom fails to be an abundance of wax (spelt " whacks") ; yet do I hope to solve the problem of bringing up a child that I have not begotten with- out spoiling and without laying a finger on him. O ho ! this paragraph must surely awaken Hircius and Spungius. " Misanthrope ! Egotist ! Yile sciolist !" I hear those worthies yelp. ?' Miser- able Yahoo, following in the trail of Swift. Does he, forsooth, wish to enter the nursery like an ogre, and declare war upon infants ? What does he know about children ? Had he ever a baby ?" Even so, I am childless ; but am I out of court ? Hircius, I know, has fruitful loins. He has but to cast a stone over the w T orkhouse wall to hit one of his brats. Spungius is great in babies ; deafens people with their praises while alive, borrows money to bury them when they die. If I had ever known this little boy in babyhood, I think I could manage to say something senti- mental on the baby-question. It would have been egotistical, but still an egotism that the 44: BREAKFAST IN BED J OB, whole world pardons. This is the country of baby worship ; and the baby-devotee is never accused of being an idolater. It is a safe thing to write sentimentally about babies. Baby litera- ture is sure to sell. Some modern authors have taken to saying their prayers in print ; others to praising their own works ; and a few to abusing their species ; but the most popular form of litera- ture is that which lends itself to pouring melted butter over one's own chicks. Here, by my bed- side is a fat little volume, gorgeous in crimson and gold, lately put out by Messrs. Eoutledge, and bearing the highly popular name of "William C. Bennett. I open the book at ran- dom, and read : " Cheeks as soft as July peaches ; Lips whose dewy scarlet teaches Poppies paleness ; round large eyes, Ever great with new surprise. * * * * Clutching fingers, straightening jerks, Twining feet whose each toe works. Slumbers — such sweet angel seemings, That we'd ever have such dreamings. * * * * Gladness brimming over gladness ; Joy in ease, delight .in sadness; Lovliness beyond completeness ; Sweetness distancing all sweetness; Beauty all that Beauty may be, — That's May Bennett, that's my baby." PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 45 There are over two-score couplets in this poem ; but I have only been able to quote a few lines. I am not at all inclined to sneer at these verses as namby-pamby, or to cavil at such somewhat too plastic versification as " gladness " and " sad- ness." " seemings " and " dreamings." I am glad to recognise in Mr. "William C. Bennett a very tender, musical, fascinating lyrist. I am sure .he means all that he says, and more. I am given to understand that he has earned the title of the " Laureate of the Babies," and that his chirping, kindly books sell by tens of thousands. And I shall not have, perhaps, one in a thousand readers who will regard my view of the baby question with anything but contempt and abhor- ence. I turn over the leaves of Mr. Bennett's pretty book, and light on an infinity of baby lyrics: "Baby May," "Baby's shoes," "Tod- dling May," " Cradle songs," " Mother's songs," " To our Baby Kate," " Epitaphs for infants," "On a Dead Infant," and many more on the same sweet, well-worn, but not worn-out theme. I have already expressed my faith in Mr. Ben- nett's sincerity. In his engraved portrait by the frontispiece he looks like a man who loves babies; and thousands of mothers, I have no doubt, tearfully murmured " God bless him !" when they read his poems. Surely it is wicked, sardonic, to come prowling into this baby para- 46 BEEAKFAST IN BED ; OE, dise and trample down the daisies. But Duty is a stern monitor, and Duty compels me to ask whether the intensity of baby worship does not depend, after all, on circumstances, and whether those circumstances do not often alter cases in a very strange and melancholy manner? It is probable that Mr. Bennett lives in a very nice house, and has everything that heart can wish for ; that his babies are brought to him at proper times and seasons, duly spruced and beautified, and that there is a five-barred gate on the nur- sery landing to prevent his young ones tumbling down-stairs. Yiewed through this radiant me- dium, this atmosphere of blue-kid shoes and satin bows, pap-spoons, corals, laced robes, em- broidered hoods, and plumed hats — with any amount of baby linen procurable from the Spon- salia, and a kind doctor always ready round the corner in case of infantile ailments — the baby becomes indeed a delight and a treasure ; it is another element in British comfort. It is as much a part of papa's home joys as his slippers, his " Illustrated News," or his evening tumbler. A well-to-do middle-class house is hardly com- plete without a filter, a Kent's knife-cleaner, a moderator lamp, and a baby. All these articles are to be found in their several places, and min- ister in their several degrees to the felicity and solace of those who possess them. But how PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 47 about the hovel where a baby is bom, and there is nothing but a baker's old jacket to wrap it in ? How about the babies of shame that are packed up in hampers, strangled in secret places, flung into dustbins, deserted on doorsteps ? "Who writes sonnets on the workhouse babies, or mourns over their fate when they are burnt to death by twenties ? When poverty and naked- ness and hunger sit grinning on the poor man's hearth, is the sick baby a household joy or a household misery? Oh, my brethren (since homilies are the fashion), how we brag and boast and bemuse ourselves about our own babies, and how little we reck about what be- comes of other people's babies ! How the pious and decorous matron drives frQm. her door the wretched nursemaid who has a base-born infant ! If this baby worship were sincere, and not a congested kind of personal vanity, often gro- tesque enough, and of which the still more ludi- crous side was to be seen in the abominable American baby-shows, should we not feel in- clined to devise some measures to prevent babies being murdered or starved, to force profligate men to make provision for their by-blows? What is the much-vaunted baby in the manufac- turing districts but a thing to be drugged with " cordials " and " elixirs," or to be " overlaid ?" Ask the parish undertaker what he knows about 48 BREAKFAST IN BED I OE the dark side of babyhood. Ask the parish doctor, ask Dr. Lankester the coroner. We go on simpering forth fiddledee about our own babies, and pass, indifferent, through a whole Golgotha of dead babies' bones. I am as poor, Heaven knows, as Job, and have a hard struggle to make both ends meet ; yet I would cheerfully work my fingers to the bone, and be my hun- dred pounds to any one else's hundred, to estab- lish were it the tiniest nucleus of a real Found- ling Hospital in lieu of that sham place in Guildford Street, where the " mother " is to "present herself before the committee" before the foundling can be admitted. I declare that jobbed and perverted charity is enough to make the bones of Thomas Coram turn in their grave. When I read of the delightful, smiling, tod- dling little thing Mr. Bennett so charmingly de- scribes — when I see the baby portraits and baby " pistolgrams " advertised — when I wander in a wilderness of perambulators, india-rubber balls, lollipops, hoops, kid-shoes, and so forth — I think sometimes that it is good to hang a bunch of hyssop in the wine cup, and to ask whether we do not plume ourselves somewhat too much about the beauty and happiness and purity of babyhood. I think I have glanced more than once upon a poor little gasping lump PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 49 of damp dough with a chronic stomach-ache. I think Shakespeare has drawn in half a dozen words a terrible life-like picture of the human baby. And, as a final corrective to overweening pride in babies, I turn to my Thomas a Kempis, and in the preface read these true and mournful lines : " The human infant is a picture of such de- formity, weakness, nakedness, and helpless dis- tress, as is not to he found among the home-born animals of this world. The chicken has its birth from no sin, and therefore comes forth in beauty j it runs and pecks as soon as its shell is broken ; the calf and the lamb go both to play as soon as the dam is delivered of them j they are pleased with themselves, and please the eye that beholds their frolicksome state and beauteous clothing J whilst the new-born babe of a woman, that is to have an %ipright form, and view the heavens, and worship the God that made them, lies for months in gross ignorance, weakness and impurity / as sad a spectacle when he first breathes the life of this world, as when, in the agonies of death, he breathes his last. 77 I think it would do all of us good, the childful as well as the childless, to ponder a little over these words before we bragged too much about Baby. 50 BKEAKFAST ET BED ; OB, 0£T MR. MAYOR'S SPELLING-BOOK. My Library is not a very extensive one. The publishers rarely send me copies of new works, for the very sufficient reason that, when they do, I generally abuse them. My brother authors, I fear, don't like me, and I certainly don't like them ; and so they have given up forwarding me pre- sentation copies of their productions. On my few shelves, I am glad to say, there are no works of my own. Who would wish to preserve the double-tooth, wrenched, after so many dire dental struggles, from the unwilling jaw? Who, but a hypo- chondriac would keep an assorted collection of coffin nails in his study — and what are a man's own printed writings but so many nails in his coffin ? When one has been long on the rack, and is quit of it till to-morrow morning, it is as well to double-lock the door of the Torture- Room, and hide the dismal engine of agony from view. How you, my eminent friend, regard the little noveh, essays, dramas, poems, etc., your facile pen has composed, I know not, To me the labors PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 51 of my hand are but so many memorials of research in vain, want, anguish, and defeat. But then, perhaps, you are not in the habit of wrestling with wild-beasts at Ephesus, or of endeavoring to convince a perverse generation. Better, no doubt, to be a comfortable lion in the Ephesian mana- ged e, and to take one's shinbone of beef thank- fully. In the preface to his noblest work, says Father Paul : " Tengo per fermo che quesf opera sard cli pochi letta, eel in breve tempo inanchera di vita, non temto per diffetto di forma, quant o perlanatura delta materia" — which in our tongue signifieth this: that there is no use in striving; that if vour book has all the learning of Bellar- min, and all the acumen of Dom Calmet, and all the painstaking of Florez, and all the majesty of Tillotson, and all the eloquence of Taylor, and all the wit of Swift, it shall not save its author from being sneered at, in a bankrupt review, as an ignorant dolt — sneered at by a boy-critic, who six months since was caned at school ; that, cunning, artistically, as your book may be, it must be essentially fading and ephemeral ; and that the highest tide of success will not rescue it at last from the fourpenny-box at a book- stall. And woe to him, unless he be a Giant, who dedicates his work to Posterity, and trusts in after ages to do him justice. Posterity! Posterity 52 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OK, will singe a goose with your magnum opus. After ages ! They will wrap penn'orths of pud- ding in the unsold sheets of your Epic. Waters of Marah to him who deems himself a benefactor to his kind, and holds himself as necessary to the world's scheme ! Jeremy Bentham so did ; and who, save a few who meet once a year to dine with his mummy, are grateful to Jeremy Ben- tham, the Father of Eeform ? Necessary ! " It is the disease of Princes," said Napoleon (when he found that the nations had had enough of him), " to believe themselves necessary. No man is necessary — I, no more than the others. Alex- ander and Caesar are dead, and still the world rolls on its course without them." And let this be a warning to you, Tupper, hero of six-and-forty editions. And yet I know there are authors who love to look upon the things they have written — nay, dote upon them, calling them by endearing names, thinking the worst the best, and bestow- ing Grollier and Renaissance bindings, gold scrolling, and blind tooling upon them. Our • deformed brats are often the best beloved. So used Monsieur Francois-Marie- Arouet, called Vol- taire, to fondle his multifarious writings. Be- hold the weazened, shrivelled, hatchet-faced, wicked-eyed Patriarch of Ferney, in coat of cut- velvet, and silken-covered spindle-shanks, and PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 53 towering white periwig, hugging the Edito Prin- cess of his " Pucelle," which he has had bound in sable morocco. When he is in a good temper, he caresses the scurril tome, and calls it " Ma Jeanne — maJeanneton /" — the old rascal ! When he is in evil case, and bethinks himself that a .Day must come for frying and howling, he spurns the polecat thing, and cries " Ce livre-ld a ete ecrit par un laquais ivre" The great authors of the present day may be equally par- tial to their bantlings. And those great authors, who are they ? Let me hasten to name the Editor of "Zadkiel's Al- manac," the scholar and gentleman who pens the dramatic criticisms in the "London Gazette" (published by authority), and Mr. George Francis Train. I would have whispered thy name, my Hircius ; but thou art modest. Spungius, thy alias should have been added to the list, but that I know thee to be fierce in opposition to the pre- sent Ministry ; nor would I expose Lord Palmer- ston by. indiscreetly calling attention to thy merits to the humiliation of seeing a proffered pension refused by Spungius, the upright and in- corruptible. " Ah, que nous ne sommes rien /" cried Bos- suet, preaching on earthly vanities before the gilded court at Yersailles, who, of a certainty, thought " some punkins " of themselves. Oh, 54 BREAKFAST IN BED; OK, Eagle of Meaux, thou errest ! Evil is an entity, and we are bad ; and to be bad is to be some- thing. For instance, this morning, Breakfasting in Bed, I feel as bad as bad can be, morally and physically. It is an abominable foggy morning. I have complained of the fog, which is wrong. To be right I should have been resigned to any little variation in the weather. Then I was angry because they would not let me have any muffins. Why should I be deprived of muffins ? There used to be muffins. But four months since, I had new-laid eggs every morning at dear old U. C. ; I never thought of Breakfasting in Bed there. JSTow, a dingy bolus, with dusky specks of straw glued to its shell, reminds me, by its mustiness, of the blessings of the Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce. A French egg this, and charged at the price of a new-laid one. The newspapers, too, came late. The mendacious newsboy said that the "machine had broken down." What ! all the machines ? Was there, then, a conspiracy against all the presses in pressdom? In fact, it was this lack of journal- ism that led me first to quarrel with my break- fast, and then to begin thinking about books, and thence to turn to their writers, and then to be- moan myself, and say that I didn't like my brother authors; whereas, the truth is, that I love them dearly, every one. Bless them ! It is PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 55 clear that I am in an envious, discontented, and thoroughly uncharitable state of mind this morning. Will the little book I keep under my pillow console me? I turn up page. 167, and read, " Constantly endeavor to do the will of another rather than thy own. Constantly prefer a state of want to a state of abundance. Constantly choose the lowest place, and to be inferior to all. He that doeth this, enters into the regions of rest and peace." These beautiful words either mean something or nothing. They cannot be accepted with a Jesuitical reservation. If I con- strue them literally, I must, if my publishers tell me to write down freedom, progress, and educa- tion, do their will and not my own, which runs in precisely the contrary direction. I must abandon all hopes of muffins, because it is the will of others that I should not have them. I must constantly prefer going in rags, dwelling in a garret, and pinching my belly, to wearing warm broadcloth, to living in a snug house, to dining on roast mutton. If I am invited to take the chair at the annual festival of the Charitable Crumpet-Makers, I must decline the honor, or solicit employment as a waiter or plate-washer at the London Tavern. The sentences I have quoted are not from an inspired writer, and I am therefore guiltless o£ irreverence in discussing 56 BREAKFAST IN BED J OR, them ; but I saw lately in the shop-window of a stationer in Chancery Lane a schedule of rules to be observed by pious persons in the conduct of their daily life, each rule fortified by a scriptural jtext. I say boldly, that if we acted up to the letter of these rules, society could not exist, and the world would become a howling desert. How could we get on if nobody took the chair ; if everybody went tattered, and denied himself food ; if nobody exerted the "Will that Heaven has implanted in him ? And is it not the grossest simulation, the most " unsophisticated hypocrisy,'' as Sir Jonah Barrington pleonastically puts it, to go on chattering about what we ought to do, when we are perfectly aware that we cannot do it, and that the whole scheme of human govern- ment and society forbids us even to attempt it ? Whereupon I return to my Library. The motive of my alluding to it at all you shall pre- sently hear. I am cudgelling my brains to re- member if it contains a Spelling-book. It is so many years since I conned that useful volume. Dictionaries and vocabularies I have galore, in many tongues. Do I not prize a certain dimly- printed collection of " Domestic Dialogues," written in French, German, Eussian, and Latin, in which there is positively a conversation on drinking beer and smoking tobacco : " De Fie- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 57 tilibus tvMs ad xisum NicoiianaP Says A of the Virginian weed: " Equidem fumi haustu non utor, sed pidvere abutor." A is no smoker, but a snuffer. Eemarks the Ciceronian B of beer, " Cerevisia inter Niootiaiva usum gratior gustus, sine qua ne uti quidem hoc possum; quippe qui sitim creet." This classical gentleman thinks that a glass of Allsopp's Bitter goes well with a pipe of bird's-eye, and acknowledges him- self a beery one ; for tobacco parches a man, says he. Then have I not the learned Harris's " Hermes", of which more anon, as the profound Hodderius says ; and Sir John Stoddart's " Uni- versal Grammar," which to me is as universal confusion as Kant's " Critique of Pure Eeason," (which Spungius understands so well) ? I pass over Trench " On Words," Grose's " Lexicon Bala- tronicum," Pegge's "Defence of the Cockney Dia- lect," and Home Tooke's " Diversions of Purley ;" for this morning I thirst only for a Spelling-book. "Where is Mavor? Is there a Mavor in the House ? The newspapers arrive, and I become more and more anxious for a Spelling-book. There is, it would seem, no work of reference of that description in my Library; but at last a dog's-eared fasciculus, much blurred with pencil- marks, and smutched and smirched — I trust not with infant tears — is discovered in the possession of the Little Boy introduced to the reader in the 8* 58 BREAKFAST IN BED; OR, second of these Papers. He is at first loth to give up Mavor ; but he at least is practically taught that it is his duty to do another's will in preference to his own. Mavor is taken from him for the use of his cruel uncle ; but a written re- ceipt and explanation of cause for detention is given to him, to bear him harmless on his arrival at Miss Man small's establishment. o Here is Mavor at last. Revised by Cecil Hart- ley, A.M. ; the one hundred and seventieth thou- sand. Here are the famous short lessons : " His pen has no ink in it ;" " I met a man with a pig ;" " Do as you are told, or it may be bad for you." This is rather fierce in its minatory style, and Dr. Mavor must have got it from Dr. Busby. " Come, James, make haste. Now read your book. Here is a pin to point with." Little boys are not allowed to point with pins nowadays. " Tom fell in the pond. He was a bad boy. Jack Hall was a good boy. He took pains to learn as he ought, and made all the great boys his friends." But these characters have been, I think, more tersely sketched in the unpublished Nursery Edcla of the Titmarshian Sage : "Little Jack Snook, Was fond of his book, And was much beloved by his master; But naughty Jack Spry Has got a black eye, And carries his nose in a plaster" PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 59 Then comes the story of the nice girl, but who was not good, and told fibs, and whose cake was eaten by a mouse; then the apologue of Miss Jane Bond, who had a new doll, aud whose good aunt gave her some cloth to make a shift for it. O Mr. Cecil Hartley, A.M., do you call this edit- ing Mayor? You should have discreetly sub- stituted for that sad passage about the S — a neat paragraph to the effect that Miss Jane Bond's aunt proceeded to the Lilliputian "Warehouse in Regent Street, and there purchased some " under- clothing " for her niece's doll. This benevolent lady was doubtless the Mrs. Bond who appears to have kept an inn or hotel in the rural districts, and who, when the travellers were hungry and desired that their stomachs might be filled, cried out to the ducks in the pond, " Dilly, dilly, dilly, come and be killed j" but they would not, whereupon Mrs. Bond " Flew in a very great rage, With plenty of onions and plenty of sage." And it was bad for the ducks, because they would not do what they were told. Frank Pitt and his fat cheeks ; Jane whose hand was tied up in a cloth ; the girl who tied the string to the bird's leg; and Harry who gorged his cake and was sick ; and Peter Careful, who ate a little piece of his cake (the young cur- mudgeon !) every day, but kept it till it grew 60 BEEAKFAST TX BED; 0E, mouldy and worthless : all these friends of my youth I meet and pass by ; and then I come to Richard — Richard Cceur de Lion he ou&'ht to be called — who said to his schoolmates, " I have got a cake ; let us go and eat it ;" and when they had all eaten, there remained a piece, which Richard put by, saying, " I will eat it to-morrow.' J But a blind man came into the play-ground — ■ but Mavor shall tell the rest : " He said, ' My pretty lads, if you will, I will play you a tune.' and they all left their sport, and came and stood round him. And Richard saw that while he played, the tears ran down his cheeks. And Richard said, < Old man, why do you cry V And the old man said, i Because I am hungry : I have no-bo- dy to give me any dinner or supper : I have nothing in the world but this little dog, and I cannot work. If I could work I would.' Then Richard went, without saying a word, and fetched the rest of his cake, which he had intended to eat another day ; and he said, ' Here, old man, here is some cake for you.' The old man said, < Where is it ? for I am blind ; I cannot see it.' So Richard put it into his hat. And the fiddler thanked him ; and Richard was more glad than if he had eaten ten cakes himself." I wish that Mr. Mulready or Mr. "Webster would take Richard and the blind fiddler as a subject for a picture; and I have often thought this simple story to be one of the noblest and PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 61 most pathetic narratives in the English lan- guage. Still turning over the trim tome bound in green cloth, which, by virtue of a forced loan from the Little Boy, has come into my possession, I cannot avoid murmuring that it is not the Havor of my youth ; that it has experienced change, and that the change has not been one for the better. My old spelling-book w r as bound in light-speckled sheepskin, and had a warm, portmanteau-like odor. The modern Mavor has portraits of animals, drawn w T ith symmetry and vigor by Mr. Harrison Weir; the old book was decorated with the vilest vignettes that sign- painter turned draughtsman ever imagined, or wood-chopper flourishing long before Bewick or Thurston ever hacked. Strange heraldic-looking animals — griffins, unicorns, roaring bulls of Bashan, monsters and chimeras dire — passed current for lions and tigers and the domestic animals. But what did we little children care, so long as we could smear the coarse cartoons with blue a.'id red and yellow ochre \ And was the fable of the Dog and the Shadow less suggestive because the dog was not in the least like his adumbrated duplicate, and was besides as big, according to the scale of comparison, as the ele- phant in the next cut? And the frontispiece, again ! The new Mavor shows a pretty tableaux of 62 BREAKFAST IN BED; OR Home ; a young mother, surrounded by a chirp- ing little brood of those children whom Mr. Gilbert draws so charmingly — little girls in long curls and short trousers, cherub-faced boys in pretty tunics. They are hanging over the spel- ling-book with as much pleased interest in their little faces as though Mavor were Baron Mun- chausen. In the foreground is a toy-horse of the regular buff-coat and red-wafer pattern. Ah, dear me, dear me ! the old Mavor had a very different kind of frontispiece. Showed it not three grim compartments, stages or floors ; in the uppermost a boy-class of shivering little wretches, ranged before the desk of a stern usher, who wore his hat and bore a cane ? We all settled that this was an usher; for although ferocious, he looked poor. There was a frigid gloom about that top-storey pic- ture, at once suggestive of the horrible winter mornings at school, the lessons before breakfast, and agonizing incandescence produced in numbed palms by " spats " of the cane. The middle compartment represented a ladies'-school : siwk a Miss Tickletoby in the chair, suck a Mrs. Teachem ! " Come here, Master Timothy Todd— Before we have done you'll look grimmer ; You've been spelling some time for the rod, But I'll have you to know I'm a Trimmer." PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 63 I am sure Thomas Hood must have had the woodcut portrait of this terrible old dame in his mind's eye when he wrote (and illustrated) the fancy portrait of Mrs. Trimmer in his " Comic Annual." It may be that I have been mixing up the pic- tures of the old Mavor with those of the old Dilworth. At all events, both spelling-books had strange representations of boys in frills, and coats with two-inch tails, of schoolmistresses in mob-caps, and pedagogues in long dressing- gowns. And Dilworth and Mavor were both illustrated with " cuts," while intempestive con- templation of their wood-blocks brought little boys into intimate connection with another block of wood, whence the engravings are struck off in red ink. I do not wish any one to laugh at these forced jests. Let them shudder, and shut up Mavor. But why did I ever open him ? What have I to do at my age with a baby's spelling-book % A great deal, I think. Mavor is an admirable corrective for conceit. A cursory reference to his pages will tell many a scholar, inflated with the big books he has been studying, a great many things he did not know before. I declare that, until breakfast time this morning, I did not know — or had forgotten — that cow's-horn is "used instead of glass for lanterns." I had 64: BREAKFAST IX BED ; OR, heard, of course, of horn lanterns, but deemed them to be obsolete. Judge of my astonish- ment to find them fflimmerino: in the Mavor of 1862! Again, that the white hair of goats was " valu- able for wigs." Ignoramus ! I thought that bar- risters' wigs were made of horsehair, and the Lord Mayor's coachman's jasey of spun-glass. "We are never too old to learn. The which confirms me in my estimate of the advantage we may derive from occasionally con- sulting in mature life the simplest elementary works. What do we know about things, after all ? I should like to get this exceedingly wide- awake Bishop Colenso into a corner, and put him through a course of Mavor, and Pinnock, and Mangnall, and the " Guide to Knowledge." The right reverend father is the author of a very good book on arithmetic, I am told ; but I doubt whether he has been lately bestowing much attention on such simple problems as " If a her- ring and a half cost three-halfpence, how many herrings can you get for a shilling ?" Propound this to me, O Colenso ! Do you know what ink is made of ? Can you tell me how the angles of Westminster Abbey are subtended on the retina of a bull's-eye ? Do you know anything about the manufacture of boot-varnish ? Can you bite-in a copper-plate ? Do you know who in- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 65 vented braces ? Can yon inform me when steel pens were first used ? Can yon find me a rhyme for Hippopotamus? Could you undertake to supply a weekly satirico-political cartoon for " Punch V Can you define what human wit is ? Do you know (but here I borrow from sturdy old Paley) how oval frames are turned ? Go away Bishop of the Black Man! Go to your Pinnock, or to your " Punch " even ; for you would derive more wisdom * from the study of that periodical, than from puzzling your poor brains about the Pentateuch ! Before the doubts of a Hume, a Gibbon, a Yolney, a Yol- taire, a Condorcet, a Mirabeau, one stands amazed, aghast, to see the mighty intellects ob- scured by clouds, the giants ridden by the incu- bus who wears a cock's feather in his cap, and in a shrill fluted voice Denies, Denies for ever. Before the perplexities of a Pascal, a Hobbes, a Gassendi, one stands awed and hushed. Nay, in the reckless foaming infidel, his hands clenched, his eyes glaring, his hair blown about by the Eternal Storm, and vociferating his hoarse "No!" there is something gigantic, though appalling. There maybe abandonment, but there may be rectitude. The martyrs of unbelief are often as self-sacrificing as the mar- tyrs of faith. But for this small-beer scepticism, this Tom Paineism in a white choker, this 66 Straussology adapted to small tea-parties, this genteel free-thinking for family reading — faugh ! it tastes in the mouth like a bad groat. Off, Dr. C. ! Away, Mr. Wilkie Collinso ! I will have none of your " sensations " about the Books of Moses. And, butler — my butler wears crinoline — H. M. and B. J. are coming to din- ner to-day, and we will have a bottle of the right red seal, not the cheap Cape I have bought lest Spungius should pop in. For I love not South- African port — nay, nor South-African theology. And before I shut up my Mavor, there is a particular class in society to which I desire to commend the attentive study of the Spelling- book. O you noble captains, you brave swells, you honest, jovial, intrepid, kind-hearted, igno- rant young officers in the Heavies and in the Prancers, rush off to your booksellers and invest in all the copies of the spelling-books that re- main unsold. Let your devotion henceforth be to Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo — but don't forget Mavor. If more English gentlemen belonging to the military patrician class, had a commonly decent acquaintance with English orthography, don't you think that we should have fewer " bubble bets," that the Admiral would not " abhor " the Colonel quite so often, and that one's Breakfast in Bed would not be poisoned by the "Turf PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 67 scandals," of which, the recapitulation has been lately the nuisance and disgrace of the morning newspapers ? Don't think that I wish to launch into a vio- lent tirade against Colonel Eawdon Crawley, or Captain De Boots, or Lieutenant Guy Living- stone. I think them much better fellows than Colonel James, or Captain Booth, or Lieutenant Lismahago. Nay, when I compare them with M. ie Chef le Bataillon Fracasse de la Tapagerie, or M. le Capitaine Gamelle Boutenfeu, I strike the balance in favor of the English officer, and think him no worse soldier for being a gentle- man. But he should learn to spell. He should, indeed. Colonel Rawdon Crawley should be able to write his letters without the aid of a " Johnson's Dictionary ;" Captain De Boots should be cured of spelling kept " kep," and Mediterranean " Meddytirainian." I know that Lord Malmesbury doesn't attach much value to accurate orthography ; and I can guess the reason. His Lordship's father was that same learned Mr. Harris who wrote the " Hermes " — alluded to at the commencement of this Paper — and who was one of the most eru- dite philological writers of whom this country can boast. Depend upon it, that the noble Lord had quite enough spelling-book cheer in his youth to last him for a lifetime ; the pastrycook's boy 68 BREAKFAST IN BED; OR, doesn't care much for jam-tarts ; the tailor's son is reluctant to assume the shears and French chalk of Mr. Snip, his papa, deceased. But Ma- yor is not to be banished from polite society be- cause Malraesbury frowns. I hope that, ere very long, at least a dozen Spelling-books may be added to the libraries of the Senior and Junior United Service, the Guards, and the Army and Navy Clubs. They need not entirely supersede the study of the " Eacing Calendar," or " Buff's Guide to the Turf ;" but they may be instrumental in spread- ing a mild and innocent love for the contempla- tion of words in two syllables, and eventually cause " Turf scandals " — if the Turf must be scandalous ; a quality I do not hold to be at all necessary to a noble and manly national pur- suit — to turn on some other topic than the ortho- graphy of Reindeer as against Raindeer. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 69 ON THE PBEYAILING MADNESS. Fkom all that I can see, or hear, or am told, and from a little, perhaps, that I feel, I am in- clined to apprehend that there is a good deal of Madness going about the world just now. If Sir Baldwin Leighton's Night Poaching Act is definitively to put down the unlicensed capture of feathered and furry game (which it will no more do than it will enable me to marry my grandmother), it should surely have contained a clause to warrant the shutting up, under the cer- tificate of two physicians, of all the hares next March ; for if they catch the epidemic which is raging among humanity, the chances are that they will go very mad indeed. This is most de- cidedly a mad world, my masters. Don't you think the Americans have gone mad, and that " a dark house and a whip" would be the fittest treatment for the delirium which has driven a mighty nation into the perpetration of political bankruptcy ? They must be mad, only they have duplicity enough not to howl or tear their flesh, or scrabble at the gate (as King David did when he feigned madness), until they have withdrawn 70 BREAKFAST IN BED I OR themselves from public observation. In one of Mr. Dickens's earlier works there is a terrific tale of a lunatic, who so kept the secret of his in- sanity for very many years. He slew his wife, and raved finely to himself when alone ; but as he wore a white neckcloth, talked about the wea- ther, and lent money at interest in polite society, he was accounted perfectly sane ; until, as ill luck would have it, it occurred to him to brain his brother-in-law with a chair, and to avow, in a succession of short yelps, that he was raving mad ; whereupon his relatives had out a commis- sion De Lwnatico against him, and locked him up, incontinent. It is a dangerous matter to meddle with your brother-in-law. As a rule, your father-in-law is merely a harmless bore, who borrows money from you, and in quiet confi- dence imparts to his friends the opinion that you never were quite the sort of fellow for his Emily ; but your heau-frere has got his mothers blood in him • and the children of the horseleech are younger and stronger than their parent. I knew a man of rare talent once, who went out of his mind ; whereupon quoth a cynical friend of his : " What a confounded fool X must be ! It's just like his indiscretion to go blurting out what nobody wanted to know. Tve been madder than he for years / but I always took good care not to let anybody know it." How would it be if some PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 71 sapient physician suddenly discovered that all those exterminating patriots in America yonder were mad, — that " Uncle Abe" had only ninety- nine cents out of the mental dollar ; that there was a tile off Mr. Seward ; that Mr. Chase was a gone 'coon ? The New Orleans Davoust-Haynau, Butler, may have been suffering, throughout, from cerebral congestion ; and the wretch M'lSTeil, at the time of the Palmyra massacres, was, per- chance, quite an unaccountable being. You know the gist of Dr. Forbes "VYinslow's teaching. The people at home, who govern me by making me think that I govern them, have carefully put away Dr. "W's. big book ; which, if *a man be at all nervous, he is apt to consult as frequently as though it were a kind of psychical looking-glass. A stumble or a stutter, inability to chip your egg in the proper manner, over drowsiness or over wide-awakedness, dimness of sight, or swimming in the head, or carillons in the ears, may all be so many symptoms of morbid diseases of the brain and mind. If you feel any one of these symptoms, the best thing you can do is to buy a strait-waistcoat, and go off at once to Dr. Forbes "Winslow, lest worse should ensue. This is the key-stone of the "Winslowian philosophy. But what would the learned Doctor think of the cerebral condition of the Distracted States ? Is Dixie's Land a whit saner than Columbia? 72 One ol ray newspapers this morning tells me that the dark gentleman who had formerly the honor of driving the President of Secessia's car- riage is just now in England, and is lecturing about among the pious folks with as profitable results to himself, I hope, as those hinted at by Mr. George Borrow in his "Wild Wales." What says Jefferson Davis's quondam slave of his mas- ter ? Is the Confederate Dictator a hero to his body-coachman ? The ex- Jehu declares that Jeff, "isn't of much account." When things go smoothly, he is pleasant and placable enough ; but when their course is roughened, he storms and goes on The rampage in the " skeariest" man- ner. I dare say that he is as mad as all the rest of the world. When his Lordship of Dundreary is unable to discern the drift of a j:>articular observation, he forthwith puts down the speaker as a lunatic. Why should not his Lordship be right— or any other " fellah ?" I dare say that Mr. Sothern (if he condescended to read the first number of "Breakfast in Bed") thought me as mad as a hatter for presuming to question the perfection of his impersonation. For my part, I have a firm persuasion of the lunacy of the people who grow ecstatic about Dundreary, or who sip their grog while the great Olmar*, or the greater Leotard, or the greatest Blondin may be capering PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 73 over their heads, at the imminent risk of tumb- ling down and smashing the skulls both of spec- tators and acrobats. I think that to take Druiy Lane Theatre — if you have any money to lose — is a sign of mental alienation so decided, that the mere act of signing the agreement should be a full warrant for the friends of the manager tak- ing care of him. I think half the people who are quaking with terror through fear of garotters, and cutting their trembling fingers with the bowie-knives they don't know how to handle — I speak with authority in this matter, for I have been garotted, and it didn't hurt me — are mad. I am sure the garotters are mad ; poor, pur- blind, darkened, demented creatures, running their heads against Newgate granite walls as a bull runs at a gate. I don't think that Sir Joshua Jebb is quite right in his mind when he countersigns a ticket-of-leave ; and I have little doubt but that if a commission sat upon Sir "Walter Crofton, they would discover that he was subject to delusions. The question is, I take it, less to find out who is mad than who isn't mad. Do you mean to tell me there is not a screw loose in the brainpan of those Greeks who are persisting in electing the candidate who won't stand, and in carting about, on the top of an om- nibus, as though it were the Golden Calf or an image of Juggernaut, the portrait of a Youno- 4 74 BREAKFAST IN BED; OK, Middy of whom they know nothing ? And that fine old Tory, the King of Prussia ! When the drill-sergeant monarch makes a speech to a loyal deputation from Kalbsfleisch- stein on the necessity of governing " outside the constitution," don't yon think him as crazy as his ancestor who used to cane his so$ Fritz and throw plates and dishes at his daughter Wilhel- mina ; or as his brother deceased, who was wont to wash his poor wandering head in Yermicelli soup ? And the illustrious historian of the Ho- henzollerns ! Is all quite right at Chelsea, think yon, when Great Tom booms forth peals of praise over tyranny and brutality, and makes a demi- god of the beery and brutal old bludgeon-man and crockery-breaker, with his Tab aks- Collegium, and other tomfooleries ? When^Lady Caroline Lamb (herself as de- mented as Madge Wildfire) first met Lord Byron, she made this entry against his name in her diary : " Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Lady Morgan, who tells the story, and whose bald and frivolous tittle-tattle has just been pub- lished under the auspices of Mr. Hep worth Dixon as an " Autobiography " — shade of " P.P., clerk of this parish," has it come to this ? — was mad with vanity and Radical politics. A mad generation will eagerly read all the antiquated gossip and scanmag of Dublin Castle PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 75 during the mad viceroyalty of the Duke of Richmond (who is said to have knighted a link- man between claret and coffee one night), and will chuckle over the eccentricities of the epoch when the ladies of the Irish Court — titled ladies — used to play at the pastoral game of " Cutcha- kachoo," which consisted in squatting down on the carpet with your hands clasped underneath your hams, and changing places with your partner as rapidly as was possible in that abnor- mal position. And Prince Puckler Muskau, whom Lady Morgan's friends used to call Prince Pickle Mustard, and who, being desirous of attending a banquet of the " Friends of Free- dom," wanted to know if the health of his High Dutchship would be proposed, and if his right to precedence as an " Altezza," or Highness, would be recognized — what are we to think of him % The Friends of Freedom didn't want the " Altezza " at their dinner under any circum- stances, and Sir Charles Morgan told him so ; whereupon my lady fell into an -agony of alarm lest the Prince should insist on fighting a duel with her husband. All the people in Lady Morgan's book (which will be forgotton the day after to-morrow) seem to be more or less bereft of their senses — from good-natured old Lady Cork, who used to pilfer small articles from the shop-counters where she BEEAKFAST IX BED: OR dealt — of whom I have read, but not in this^ " Autobiography " — to John Kernble the tra- gedian, who once meeting the " wild Irish girl," (afterwards Sidney Lady Morgan") at an evening- party, twined his fingers in her curly black locks, and said, in a voice husky with port-wine: " Little girl, where did you get your wig from V Stay, there is one personage in the "Auto- biography " who really seems to have possessed some sense. He was a poet, and bored the authoress of " The Book of the Boudoir " to get some of his effusions published ; and on her civilly declining to do so, wrote a second letter back, to say that he was also a practical boot and shoe maker, and that he would be very grateful to my Lady if she would use her influ- ence with Sir Charles Morgan to get him an order for a pair of boots. " St. Hierom," says Burton, " out of a strong imagination, conceived within himself that he then saw them dancing in Rome ; and if thou shalt either conceive or climb up to see, thou shalt soon perceive that all the world is mad ; that it is melancholy, dozes ; that it is (which Epichthonius Cosmopolites expressed not many years since in a map) made like a fool's head (with that motto, Caput hellebore* dignum), a crazed head ; cavea stultorum, a fool's para- dise; or, as Apollonius, a common prison of PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 77 gulls, cheaters, flatterers, etc., and needs to be reformed." This is a nice perspective. " For who, indeed," pursues this agreeable moralist, "is not a fool, melancholy, mad? Who is not brain-sick? Folly, Melancholy, Madness, are but one disease." Indeed ! " Delirium is a common name to all. Alexander, Gordonius, Jason, Pratensis, Guianerius, Montaltus (Con- jiaissez-vous ces gens-la f), confound them as differing magis et minus ; so doth David (Psalm xxvii. 5) ; and 'twas an old Stoical paradox, omnes stultos insanire — all fools are mad, though some madder than others. Who is not a fool, or free from Melancholia ?" Answer, O Hypo- chondriac, Breakfast in Bed ! " Who is not touched more or less in habit or disposition? What is sickness, as Gregory Tholosanus defines it " (I wish he lived in Saville Row, and would give me an audience between 10 and 1 a.m.), u but a dissolution or perturbation of the bodily league which health combines ?" As for the philosophers, they are all, according to the ana- tomist, as mad as the illiterate. Lactantius, in his Book of Wisdom (can I get it at Mudie's ?), proves them to be dizzards, fools, and madmen, so full of absurd and ridiculous tenets and brain- sick positions (in their critiques on the Penta- teuch and elsewhere), that to his thinking, never any old woman or sick person doted worse. 78 BREAKFAST EN" BED ; OR, Democritus took all from Leucippus, and left, saith he, the inheritance of his folly to Epicurus ; which, all spiteful as it was, was never so mad a bequest as that of old Mr. Hartley of Southamp- ton, who left a hundred thousand pounds to build a house for a collection of air-pumps and old bones ; and* out of which bequest the lawyers have carefully clutched forty thousand pounds for costs of litigation. Plato, Aristippus, and the rest were (according to Lactantius) all idiots ; and there was no difference between them and beasts, save that they could speak. Theodoret evinces the same of Socrates. Aristophanes calls him ambitious; his master, Aristotle, scurra atticus • Zeno, an enemy to all arts and sciences ; Athenius, an opinionative ass, a cavalier, and pedant ; Theod. Cyrensis, an atheist and pot- companion, and a very madman in his actions. Bravo, Lactantius! But, dear me, haven't I been aware of Lactantius in modern London? Surely he must be the man who edits the " Cads' Chronicle." If you desire to hear more about Apollonius, a great wise man, and Julian the Apostate's model author, I refer you to the learned tract of Ense- bius against Hierocles. / never read it, but Iiircius knows it by heart. You will find therein that the actions of the philosophers were prodi- gious, absurd, ridiculous, and their books and PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS 79 elaborate treatises full of dotage ; that their lives were opposite to their words ; that they com- mended poverty in others, and were most greedy and covetous themselves ; that they extolled love and peace, and yet persecuted one another with virulent hate and malice. But enough of this histoire de tout le monde. If I continue, it will be thought that I am attempting an essay on the History of Civilization. It is by this time, I hope, satisfactorily settled that you, I, and the majority of mankind are cracked. A famous physician has not hesitated to propound such a theory in a public court of justice ; and are we, poor ignorant laymen, to set ourselves against the Royal College of Pall Mall East ? Were we not all edified the other day when the poor, meek, placable, ill-used, long- suffering wife of a desperate crockery-dealer in Tottenham Court Road — a " dangerous lunatic," whose horrible hallucinations, springing from u drink and gay company," ending in his daring to protest against the unhappy, persecuted crea- ture, who had been his wedded (and outraged) wife for eight-and-twenty years, indulging in such harmless eccentricities as running up scores with tallymen, pawning his pots and pans, bringing crowds round his shop, and heaping mountains of Billingsgate on his head — were we not all profoundly struck with the perspicuity of the 80 BKEAKFAST IN BED; OK, Law of Lunacy, and the ample guarantees afforded by the Constitution for the liberty of the subject, when poor Mrs. Crockery got, by a process as easy as lying, a medical certificate, empowering *her to lock up her wicked, wicked husband (crazed by drink and gay company) in a mad- house ? It is true that an obtuse jury, misled by the Jesuitical oratory of Mr. Montague Chambers, and the illogical summing-up of an incompetent judge (who ever heard before of this Alexander James Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice of England ?) came subsequently to the conclusion that the naughty crockery-dealer wasn't mad ; that his wife hadn't any right to lock him up ; and that the medical gentleman had made rather a blunder in certify- ing to his insanity ; but what was that manifestly erroneous verdict, or even the hundred and fifty pounds damages which accompanied it, compared with the public revelation of the great principle, that a lady who does not love her lord may, after twenty-eight years of married life, pop him into a strait-jacket, and have him clapped up in Bed- lam ? No ; not in Bedlam. I retract. In that admirable and mercifully-conducted Institution, honorable alike to the Corporation of London and to the wise and good physicians who watch over its unhappy inmates (one good man and true, Dr. Charles Hood, has just been succeeded by another as true and as good, Dr. Helps), a PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 81 case such as that of the crockery-dealer's would be impossible. There is but one man in the lunatic wards of Bedlam who is sane (E. O., pot- boy, 18-10), and he must needs lie in hold during "her Majesty's pleasure;" for has he not com- mitted the unpardonable sin on earth ? So long as there are physicians simple enough to be galled by the tales of untamable shrews, or careless enough to grant certificates of insanity without proper inquiry, so long our better halves will have a terrible weapon in their hands. This awful power, which is to be exercised apparently by those who have the longest tongues and the greatest faculty for plausible representation, should serve to keep us men-folks in order. " Take heed of the axe," cried King Charles on the scaffold, when a gobemouche was sillily hand- ling the instrument of death. Take heed of the mufflers and the padded room, O you Bluebeard husbands. Not only " drink and gay company," but bad temper, bad language, tearing down wall-paper, objecting to doctors prying about the house, may all be construed into symptoms of raging madness. I intend to be very careful, in future, as to the criticisms I pass upon the com- ponent parts of my Breakfast in Bed. Not a word about the eggs, about the musty, musty bacon, about the weakness of the tea, the leatheri- ness of the toast, the absolute absence of the 4* 82 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, muffins ! No ebullitions of passion at the tardy response to the often-tugged bell ; no raging or roaring because the newspapers have not arrived ! In olden time, a birchen rod was hung up in the best-regulated nurseries, to frighten the little masters and misses into propriety. In imagina- tion, now, a strait-waistcoat occupies the place on the wall opposite my pillow, erst filled by the martyrology ; and once a week, when I open my " Punch," I expect to find that Mr. Shirley Brooks has made an end of all the bickerings of the Naggletons by the deportation of Mr. Naggleton to Munster House, at the requisition of Mrs. IS"., backed by a certificate from Peter Grievous. "What delightful domestic dialogues are those which take place between the Naggletons ! How infinitely superior to " Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lec- tures !" Douglas Jerrold (a sadly over-rated man, my love) had no knowledge of the world, no wit, no humor, no insight into character, no loving tenderness for the foibles of humanity. In the " Caudle Lectures " he could only show us a vul- gar, quick-tempered, aggravating, but thoroughly good-hearted woman, who scolded her husband frequently, but loved him clearly. Caudle and his wife used to wrangle and make it up again ; and, as times go, I dare say were as happy a couple as could be found between Camberwell and Chelsea PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 83 But a new prophet has arisen. A marvellous painter of manners comes forward to show us a sarcastic, sullen man, half-hyena, half-bear, caged with a tigress of a woman. They abuse one another, they bandy cruel epithets, they hate each other ; and I have little doubt that, but for the commendable reticence of the narrator, we could be informed that Mrs. Naggleton throws knives at Mr. Eaggleton, and that Mr. E". boxes Mrs. IST.'s ears. This is charming. I like to read " The haggle- tons " in bed. Their dialogues add a zest to my bread and butter. I call them Mustard and Cresswell. I had yet to learn that the lives led by the affluent middle-classes in England were of a nature akin to those which one might suppose to be led by the Devils of the Pit ; nagging, nagging, jeering, and snarling for ever and ever. I am thankful that I don't belong to the affluent middle-classes, but to the "lower middle ones*;" and I am pretty well, I thank you. Of course the Naggletons are mad — as clearly off their heads as that poor ambassador who, the other night, at Rome, walked in his night-gown into a dining-room full of royal and noble com- pany, demanded in tones of fury to know what the Prince and Princesses were doing there, and ordered them to decamp. 84 BREAKFAST IN BED; OR, By the way, didn't John Hunter, the famous surgeon, once do something of the same kind ? Didn't he come home weary and faint from dis- secting or lecturing, and find that his wife had convened a large company for a " quiet evening and a little music;" whereat cried honest John, " Turn all these catamarans out of the house, and bring me my night-gown and slippers !" Imagine how the Yolscians were fluttered; how the scrapers and tinklers levanted ; how spinet, harpsichord, theorbo, and viol di gamba were hushed ; how the " catamarans " retreated, darting withering looks at this uncivil old saw- bones. " A brute of a husband," was this most humane, enlightened, and upright»man most pro- bably pronounced ; and I only wonder that Mrs. Hunter didn't have him seized on the spot for a maniac. For he was mad, of course. Thus, then, having arrived at this comfortable conclusion, I lay down the newspapers edited by mad journalists, and ere I ring the bell for Crazy Jane the servant to bring up hot water — the mad barber who is to shave my head isn't come yet — I ponder in my darkened mind as to who the sane people on this harum-scarum ball may be. Do your duty in your state of life, work hard, live temperately, fare coarsely, give of your store PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 85 to the poor, fear God, honor the Queen, and train up your children in the way. they should go ; and Dr. A. may want to feel your pulse and inspect your tongue ; Dr. B. tap his forehead, and, looking at you, murmur, " Something wrong there ;" Dr. C. ask you how many legs a sheep has ; and Dr. D. consign you, by certifi- cate, to a madhouse. The only way in which I can discern the pos- sibility of establishing sanity is to be a dullard and a fool. Then, all the doctors will swear that you are not only in your senses, but a very wise man ; and you may hope in time to be made a K.G., or Governor-General of the For- tunate Islands. Who knows what eminence we may be hoisted to by the time we begin to drivel ? My people won't let me read Dr. Forbes "Winslow's big book ; but I got, long ago, the opening paragraph by heart, and they cannot rob me of that. 'Tis a quintette of wise apho- risms by Hippocrates, in Greek — I forbear to quote the Attic, in mercy to the compositors and the critics — and runs thus : " Life is short ; Art, long; the Occasion fleeting; Experience falla- cious ; Judgment difficult." From which I per- pend: young Mr. "Wyndham, George Francis Train, Captain Atcherly, Mrs. Cottle, Monsieur Veuillot, and Billy Barlow, are all sane; but 86 BBEAKFAST IN BED J OR, Joseph Garibaldi, Michael Faraday, John Stuart Mill, and Victor Hugo, are as mad as the Man in the Moon ; — and we don't know anything at all about it. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 87 ON THINGS GOING, GOING— GONE ! What will they pull down, root np, cut through, or trample upon next? I asked myself yesterday, throwing down the newspaper on the counterpane. It isn't alone our old institutions. They have gone by the board long ago, of course. It isn't alone the framework of society or the guarantees of morality. Of course, they have all disappeared since the Reform Bill was passed, and the Eleventh of George the Second enacted that law-pleadings were to be drawn no more in Latin, and the Test and Corporation Acts were abolished. But the terrible thing is in this pulling down London about our ears. Here am I, tranquilly Breakfasting in Bed this morning; but how do I know but that the ground-landlord is not Imnererins: to make a tabula rasa of a quiet street of Russell Square, and build a row of staring shops or bran new banking-houses in lieu of the present row of dingy middle-class mansions, in one of which a discontented scribbler, with a deranged liver, is gnawing dry toast in bed? Up and down the weary columns of the paper do mine eyes travel, 8£ BREAKFAST IN BED; OB, and their way is through a desert of demoli- tions with scarcely an oasis of stability. Un- derground Railway, forsooth ! Thames Embank- ment, quotha ! Main Drainage, save the mark! Strand Hotel, Adelphi Hotel, Charing- Cross Hotel — hotels everywhere and anywhere, and a murrain to them ! New streets built, old streets swept away. Where are we all going to ? "Why can't they leave things as they are ? To keep " things as they are " is understood to be one of the chief maxims of tllat great Conservative reaction popular among that very numerous class who, having got on in the world and made their fortunes by repeated changes and innovations, are anxious for an era of immu- table rest, in order that they may keep what they have acquired. I don't wonder at the kind of contemptuous pity with which politicians speak of "an ancient Whig." Is there not, indeed, something very nearly approaching senility in professing Liberal opinions when you have gotten your desire — a title, a gold stick, a commissionership of excise, a county-court judge- ship, or something else nice and comfortable, worth a thousand a year and upwards? Radi- calism, Liberalism, are all very well to chalk your shoes with as you climb up the rungs of the ladder ; but, the top one attained, there is nothing like a boot of good strong Conservative leather PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 89 to kick the ladder and the people clinging to it down, withal. Next to keeping things as they are, the favor- ite doctrine of your genuine true-blue Reaction- ists is, to restore " things as they used to he." I declare that it is quite refreshing to watch the phases of the mania for restoration : from illuminating, to "the old art of tatting ;" from the hoop-petticoats of 1745, and the 'round hats of 1813, to stained-glass windows and old Saxon fonts and columniated pulpits, irreverently called "parson coolers." Let us patch up the old churches, chapter-houses, guest-halls, and rood-screens, by all means. There is nothing new under the sun ; and it may be, " things as they used to was" are infinitely preferable to things as they are. We have gone back to Hes- sian boots. Why shouldn't we revert to cocked hats and pigtails ? The English language, as . at present written, or, as the Danish journalist lately described it, " the rich and sweet and mighty largely latinized Scandinavian dialect," is denounced by sapient critics as a mass of affectations and euphemisms. Let us return, O my literary brethren, to the " sounding Saxon" of our ancestors, as written by Sir John Cheke in his version of St. Matthew's Gospel, or talk Norse with Dr. Dasent. Restore the old ; scoff at the new. Stare jper antiquas 90 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OK, mas should be our motto. Old clothes are the only wear. I hear that old Madeira is much asked for ; only, as the wine in question has be- come almost as rare as a black tulip or a blue diamond, the cunning wine-merchants are com- pelled to minister to the public demand for an- tiquity by fabricating old Madeira from ]STew South African. Pray mark how eagerly the newspapers give insertion to the arguments put forward by the advocates for the line old methods of treating criminals. Hurrah for the jolly old gallows, the fine old cat-o'-nine-tails, and the noble pillory, the stocks, the ducking-stool, and the jougs ! I yet live in hopes to see a garotter flogged at the cart's- tail from Langham Place to the Duke of York's Column. I have a friend who wants all the ticket-of- leave men hanged. "Why not ? — why not break them on the wheel, burn, or fry, or flay them alive ? They used to do so in the good old times. And what a pestilent, meddling, prying Radical of a fellow was that Jack Howard — a plague on all philanthropists, say I — who found out that if felons' gaols were not made clean and airy and wholesom£, and if that terrible doom, depriva- tion of the liberty of going whither a man wills, were not compensated for by wholesome and regu- lar food, prisons would become the filthiest of PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 91 Augean stables, with fine old fevers and agues careering about, for the benefit of so many wild beasts and so many maniacs. The worst of the matter is, that with all your mending, restoring, and preserving labors, things won't keep as they are, and obstinately refuse to return to that which they used to be. 'Tis like an old hat that has been "molokered," or ironed and greased into a simulacrum of its pristine freshness ; or an old coat that has been black- and-blue revivered. For a day or two all is well, and the daw may strut about in his pea- cock's feathers, the envy of the entire farm-yard ; but the first shower of rain washes off the ficti- tious gloss, and scrubs the whitening off the se- pulchre, and exposes all the senility and shabbi- ness of the sham. You may bring the corpse of Antiquity to Surgeons' Hall, and galvanize its stark limbs into a hideous semblance of vitality ; but the spark once fled, not all the Ley den jars in the world shall make that mass of dead dough sentient. Better macerate the flesh from off the bones, and hang up the skeleton in a museum, ere it crum- bles into the dust from which it came. You see that, in a lofty rostrum, high up above us all, and our miserable sphere of power, there is a certain Great Auctioneer, who uses now his scythe, and now his hour-glass, for a hammer; 92 BREAKFAST IN BED \ OR, and he. — whose name is Time — brings all things human to public Konp, and sells them by inch of corpse-candle. For ever does he from his clattering jaw cry, "Going, going — gone!" " Going, going !" — put money in thy purse, — tick your catalogue with pencil-marks, — bid with wild haste, — fee agents and brokers, — catch the auctioneer's eye till it coruscates with nods and winks, when — thump ! — clown goes the hammer on the pulpit-ledge, and you find that the thing for which your desire lay and your soul was adrought is gone for ever. Gone whither, it is bootless, now, to inquire. I hold it for certain that few persons ever went to a sale to buy a certain thing, and were per- mitted to purchase precisely the article they longed for. Something is knocked down to them, — and dear is the price it has been run up to — but it is not the particular object. And so it is always. You get a wife, but not the wife. You are made Chief- Justice at Timbuctoo, not Attor- ney-General at the Cameroons ; and it is all one in the end. " Going, going — gone !" London is going even while I pen these lines — going in despite of topo- graphical Conservatives who wish to keep things as they are, and archaeological revivalists who strive to resuscitate things as they used to be. "Westminster Hall is itself, and more than PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEET8. 93 itself again ; and William Kufus might wag his shock red head with joy to look upon its won- drous roof, brave painted window, noble dais, and towering brass candelabra ; St.- Stephen's has cloisters once more, and, underground, its crypt has been cleared out; all over the metropolis we hear of churches being restored, Lady-chapels revivified, and palaces renovated. The reverse to this flattering medal is in the pig-headed determination evinced in some quar- ters to keep the bad old things— the filthy streets, the bulging rotten tenements, the haunts of fel- ons and vagrants, the abominable old nuisances and obstructions — as they are. Eight years ago I strove hard, in a journal called "Household Words," and in an essay entitled "Gibbet Street," to make the respectable classes aware of what a hideous, pestilential, fever, thief, and beggar in- fested place wa:s Charles Street, Drury Lane ; and how it was a hot-bed and forcing-house for the hulks and the scaffold. I remark that recently "S. G. O.," in the " Times," has been sailing (in the wind of indif- ference's teeth) on the same tack, and, under the generic term of "Guilt Gardens," has exposed the misery and the shame of these places. Yet do I fear that Charles Street, Drury Lane, and its congeners, will outlive both Lord Sidney Go- dolphin Osborne and his humble protest 94 BEEAKFAST IN BED ; OR, I have not yet beard anything about pulling down the Coal Yard, Church Lane, St. Giles's, or Dudley Street, or those most scandalous little ar- teries injected with the worst of human blood that stagnate and fester, varicose in their vaga- bondism, about Gray's Inn Lane. And Middle Row, Holborn ? and Clement's Lane, Strand ? and the cloaca of Clare Market ? and the Colon- nade behind Guildford Street, Russell Square ? These frightful dens yet exist, yet nourish in rank luxuriance ; and any number of vested interests would shrink with indignant affright were it pro- posed to pull them down. Proposed ! In my mind's eye I can see a phlegmatic-look- ing gentleman, in a w r ell buttoned frock-coat, smoking his cigarette in his cabinet de travail at the Tuileries, and, as he emits curling threads of blue vapor, or twists his spiky moustache, going over a map of Paris ; then placing his imperial finger on a labyrinth of slums, he says sharply to Baron Haussmann, " If. le Prefet, otez moi ce tas oVimmondices" — sweep me all this rubbish away before the name of Robinson (bight Jack) can be thrice pronounced. But, then, my friend, I should not like to give up my Habeas Corpus, and my right to good and substantial bail — with sundry other trifles light as air in the way of liberty — for the sake of getting rid of the Coal Yard or Middle Eow. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 95 The transformation of London, of which the commencement may be dated from the attain- ment of his majority by the Prince of "Wales, will be necessarily slow and gradual ; for we have no Prefects of the Thames — our municipal autho- rities are more retrogressive than progressive, and it would be easier, I take it, to obtain a grant of City money for furbishing up the Lord Mayor's coach, or replacing the rotten portals of Temple Bar, than for laying out Smithfield as a Park, or sweeping away the nasty purlieus of Finsbury. Yet even within the charmed circle wherein William the King, six hundred years ago, told William the Bishop and Godfrey the Portreve that all citizens should be law- worthy, and all children be their father's heirs after their father's days — even within the domains of Gog and Magog, there are numerous signs of a " Going, going — gone!" era. Temple Bar, it is true, stands as fast as the barber's on one side and the banking-house on the other can make it ; but Chancery Lane has been widened, and handsome edifices substituted for the queer, tumble-down, albeit picturesque old tenements, of which the only records now are the etchings of John Thomas Smith. Messrs. Adams and Ede the robe-makers, Par- tridge and Cozens the stationers, and the London 96 BREAKFAST IN BED J OE, Restaurant, have given a very different aspect to the Fleet Street corners of the Lane — which, how- ever, becomes antique enough as you progress northward, the fat, legal spiders interlacing their webs from Lincoln's Inn to Clifford and Sergeant's Inn — and to hives of chambers yet consecrated to dirt and dust and dry rot, the concoction of de- murrers, and the spinning of special pleas. Is there not likewise Symond's Inn, that back- yard of the law, that wretched little cour des miracles of twentieth-rate legal practitioners, where dubious articled clerks borrow admitted attorneys' names to grace their dusky panels, anoT the writ with which you are served by Spink s is issued in the name of Jinks ? Who is the phantom Jinks — this stalking-horse, this parchment aegis of the unqualified pettifogger, this plastron of Tidd's practice — is he alive or dead ? Does he call for the rent of his name regularly ? Does he look in at Symond's Inn from time to time, to see how hi? double is getting on ? Does the appellation he lets out on hire belong really to the fiend, like Peter Schlemil's shadow ? Some of these days, Symond's — the least known, perhaps, of all the obscure Inns of Chancery — must go by the board; and it is, even now, an anachronism.. I always fancy it the haunt of the last professors of the art of forestalling, regrating, and common barratry ; of old-world lawyers, who yet sue by mesne pro- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 97 cess, the Eleventh of George the Second notwith- standing, draw pleadings in Latin, and frame answers in Norman-French. I always look for the names of John Doe or Richard Koe on the door-jambs ; or expect to find John a' Nokes arguing in the centre of the court-yard with John a' Styles on the vexed question of the pied horses and the horses that were pied. But hie we through the bar again ; or better still, thread one of those astounding mazes of dirty lanes, full of chandlers' shops, bookstalls, law-writers, beggars, marine stores, fried-fish, and furniture brokers, that lie between-Carey Street and Clare Market. Glance at the filthy bye streets which recall the famous names of Denzil Holies, of the Earl of Clare, of the Duchess of Newcastle. Struggle down, as well as you can for costermongers' barrows and sprawling child- ren, past Wych Street, and ere you come into the Strand, and to Holywell Street, look to the gaping space to the left. That Sahara of rubbish, girt by a fringe of crumbling brickwork, was once Lyon's Inn. " On the subject of Lyon's Inn," writs Ire- land, " all historians remain silent." I wonder that .the distinguished papa of the Shakesperian forger, and who was himself by no means remark- able for veracity, did not think it worth his while 5 98 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, to fill up the historic vacuum which he laments, by means of a few lies. When Sam Ireland, senior, visited Lyon's Inn in the first year of the present century, he found the Hall (which was built in 1700) destitute of any circumstance to recommend it save its extreme filth, and opines that the use of mops and brooms was totally un- known to the principal and ancients of this honor- able society. 'A brood of chickens was tranquilly roosting on the haut pas, and an old hen was laying down the law to an attentive audience of cobwebs. And yet /this inconceivably dingy and decayed old place had been, according to the steward's account, an Inn of Chancery since the days of Henry Y. I can imagine Sir John Falstaff lodg- ing there, and being dunned for the rent of his chambers when Mrs. Quickly declined to afford him any more accommodation on trust at the Boar's Head, Ireland gives an etching of it, which may be found in his " History of the Inns of Court." It was in truth a very kennel, a cave of Adullam, whither repaired all that were in debt and all that were discontented. I wonder that it was not converted into a furniture bazaar, for from year's end to year's end the brokers were always " in " some one or other of the chambers ; as for the tenants, those who were not bankrupt were profligate — there was always somebody PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 99 down with low fever, and always somebody else up with delirium tremens. Lyon's Inn, as to its occupancy, was a receiving-house for the Insol- vent Debtors' Court, and an ante-chamber to Whitecross Street. Still had the unlovely little place its fasti — not very pleasant, but memorable ones nevertheless. Is it not recorded by Lock- hart, in his ballad on the Gill's Hill Lane murder, that the victim's name was " Mr. William Weare," and that he "dwelt in Lyon's Inn"? Yes ; in one of those mouldy sets of chambers lived the disreputable sharper and u mace man," who was only thwarted in his scheme to plunder three rogues by the three rogues aforesaid laying a plot, more cunning, more desperate, and more successful, for plundering him. The booty was a wretched one — not a tithe of what they ex- pected ; but Mr. Jack Thurtell — who I am given to understand was a rollicking boon companion, and only second as a convivial vocalist to his ad- mired associate Mr. Hunt — was a gentleman who would have meal if he could not get malt, and in default of either, blood ; so that, in default of spoil, he very punctually murdered Mr. William We are. That Lyon's Inn should have any connection with the First Napoleon may, at the first blush, appear strange and improbable. In a visit of the present Kuler of France in the old days, 100 BREAKFAST IN BED; OR, when lie was " Prince Bonyparty," the needy adventurer, to whom wiseacres would scarcely allow, any wits to live upon, there would have been little out of the way. He might have gone to Lyon's Inn to get a little bill done, or to pay the interest on one that was overdue. But Na- poleon the Great, Emperor and King and Pro- tector of the Confederation of the Khine ! what could he have had to do with the shady little Inn nestling in the purlieus of the Strand? Thus much : John "Wilson Croker, the late Secretary to the Admiralty, literary squidiish of the " Quarterly Keview," and friend of the Marquis of Hertford, in his celebrated endeavor to whitewash Sir Hudson Lowe, blacken the memory of Napoleon, and squelch Barry O'Meara, tells (Oct. 1822) a sufficiently curious story, setting forth how, a short time before his (0'Meara ? s) departure from St. Helena, a ship arrived from England, having on board a box of French books and a letter addressed to a Mr. Fowler, the partner of Mr. Balcombe, Buona- parte's purveyor. Mr. Fowler, on opening the letter, found that it contained nothing but an enclosure addressed to James Forbes, Esq. As he knew no James Forbes, he thought it his duty to carry the letter to the Governor ; fur- ther inquiries ascertained that there was no per- son of the name of James Forbes on the Island ; PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 101 and accordingly it was thought proper to open this mysterious letter before the Governor and Council, when it was found to begin with the words "Dear O'Meara;" it was dated LyorCs Inn, London, and signed William Holmes. And to think that Mr. William Holmes may be yet alive, while I am Breakfasting in Bed ! 'Tis but forty years since ; Mr. Holmes may have begun business early. Who shall say but that the placid, white-haired old gentleman I saw yester- day contemplating the ruins of Lyon's Inn was Mr. William Holmes, come to a green old age, and serenely unmindful of the dark, tempestuous time when he was the occult agent of the Captive of St. Helena, when he wrote : " I expect to hear from my friends at Rome and Munich, of which you shall have due information V Rome and Munich were then the residence of the banished princes and princesses of the Imperial family, of Eugene BeauTiarnais and Cardinal Fesch. Again writes the sibylline Holmes: "The 100,000 francs, lent in 1816, are paid ; likewise the 72,000 francs, which complete the 395,000 francs mentioned on the loth March. The 36,000 francs for 1817, and the like sum for 1819, have also been paid by the person ordered. Remain quiet as to the funds placed ; the farmers are good, and they will pay bills for the amount of the income, which must be calculated at the rate of four per cent." 102 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, " Going, going — gone !" William Holmes may have been an old, old man, ere lie was trusted with the secrets of the Napoleonic finance, and may have slept the last sleep these thirty years. He and his mysteries, and the Inn he transacted his business in, all fade away into a mass of crumbling rubbish, to be carted away, leaving no vestige behind. And Exeter 'Change — not the 'Change of Pid- cock and Crosse, and poor Chunee the Elephant, but the more modern structure — the lamentable arcade where none but crazy or impecunious tenants could be found for the dingy little dens of shops : of that, too, must be written fuit. And Hungerford Market, with Mr. Gatti's ice-shop ! The Market is gone, and the Bridge likewise. The adage is reversed, and the fish has become fieshified. There : I have no heart to read about any more metropolitan improvements. The London of the past, the London of my youth, the London in which I can remember the dancing bear and the camel with the monkey on his back, the climbing boys and the small-coal man, Padlock House, and Cranbourn Alley, Chalk Farm and the Holy Land, the Borough Mint and George the Fourth's statue at King's Cross, the Mews and Cotton Gar- den, the Quadrant Colonnade and the Thatched House Tavern — this London has disappeared for PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 103 ever. What next, I wonder ? Is Temple Bar to suffer the common lot? Does any bold icono- clast contemplate the removal of Middle Row ? Is the integrity of St. Martin's Workhouse threatened? Or will it occur to an innovating" Duke of Bedford that Russell Square, laid out as a public pleasure-garden, and surrounded by handsome mansions and hotels, with shops and cafes on the basement, might be made one of the most magnificent places in Europe ? Who knows ? Meanwhile I turn on my pillow, and, taking up the supplement to the " Times," observe with grim satisfaction that a twenty-one years' lease of a house in Golden Square is to be sold. Aha ! that choice resort of the dinginesses and the second-handisms is safe for nearly a quarter of a century. It will last my time, and the worms will be Breakfasting on me, in my Bed, ere the sepulchral cry of " Going, going — gone-!" is heard over Golden Square ! 104 BEEAKFAST IN BED J OR, ON BEING BURNT ALIYE. We have all of us, I deferentially infer, dreamt gome strange and curious and horrible things in our time — not necessarily after a supper of un- der-done pork-chops, but often under calm and placid outward circumstances, which one might naturally assume to be conducive to the most balmily-tranquil slumbers. I went to-bed the other night, with nothing particular on my con- science, and after no ccenal meal heavier than three pills. I woke up in the gray of the morn- ing in an agony of terror, for I had dreamt that I was Burnt Alive. Not merely condemned to the stake or deliv- ered over to the secular arm. No, no, no ! ] was actually and corporally (in my dream) con- sumed by Fire. A fearsome thing ! In that heterogeneous medley of humor, buf- foonery, eloquence, poetry, pathos, Scotch ego- tism and conceit, blind Toryism, abstract Repub- licanism, wit, gluttony, scurrility, philosophy, and drunkenness, the "Noctes Ambrosianoe," Professor Wilson makes the Ettrick Shepherd relate his experience, in a dream, of the gallows. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 105 Mr. Timothy Tickler expresses his opinion that to dream of being hanged is a luxury ; but the Shepherd sees nothing at all luxurious in it. "It's the warst job of a'," says the mythical James Hogg, " and gars my very sowl sicken wi' horror for sake o' the puir deevils that's really hang'd out and out, lon&fide, wi' a tangible tow, and a hangman that's mair than a mere appari- tion ; a pardoned felon, wi' creeshy second-hand corduroy breeks, and coat short at the cuffs, sae that his thick hairy wrists are visible when he's adjustin' the halter; hair red, red, yet no sae red as his bleared een, glarin' wi' an unaccountable fierceness." This is undeniably graphic, but too imagina- tive. The Shepherd had evidently never come in contact with the real hangman — the demure, highly respectable, Methodist-parson-looking man, who executes with quiet docorum the dread mandate of the law, and turns you off gingerly, for fear of spoiling your clothes, which he is go- ing to sell to Madame Tussaud for the Chamber of Horrors. Mr. Hogg, however, was not satisfied with be- ing hanged. It occurred to him to dream that he was beheaded. The ceremony took place on a scaffold, forty feet high, " a' hung wi' black cloth, and onen to a' airts." The headsman was " sax feet and some inches " high. He stood " wi' 5* 106 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, an axe over his shoulder, and his twa naked arms o' a fearsome thickness, a' crawlin' wi' sinews, like a yard o' cable to the sheet-anchor o' a man-o'- war." The executioner, it appears, turned squeam- ish over the task of cutting Mr. Hogg's head off. " The axe fell out o' his hauns, and, bein' sharp, its ain wecht drav' it quiverin' into the block, and close to my ear ; the verra senseless wood gied a groan. I louped up on to my feet. I cried wi' a loud voice, 6 Countrymen, I stand here for the sacred cause of Liberty all over the world.' .... I might have escaped ; but I was resolved to cement the cause with my martyred blood. I was not a man to disappoint the people. They had come there to see me die" — not James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd, but Hogg the Liberator — " and from my blood, I felt assured, would arise millions of armed men, under whose tread would sink the thrones of ancient dynasties, and whose hand would unfurl to all the winds the standard of Freedom, never again to encircle the staff till its dreadful rustling had quailed the kings — even as the mountain sough sends down upon their knees whole herds of cattle, ere rat- tles from summit to summit the exulting music of the thunder-storm." This is very fine and grand, and piles up the agony with a vengeance ; but still I don't be- lieve very strongly that worthy James Hogg ever PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 107 had such, a dream or dreams. The narrative was probably written by the eloquent Professor Wil- son, not when u aibliiis fou" at Mr. Ambrose's in Picardy Place, but with calm deliberation in his own study. As a rule, you may make cer- tain that the circumstances under which cele- brated literary exercitations are said to have been composed are not those which actually oc- curred ; and, equally as a rule, you may rest satisfied that the scenes and characters most ela- borately drawn and most minutely filled up are those with which the author has had the slightest personal acquaintance. For all that, I really am Breakfasting in Bed this morning, and I positively did dream last night that I was being Burnt Alive. It was terrible. I really felt the crackling agony of the flames. Schoolboys often dream of being flogged ; but the bodily is not commensu- rate with the mental pain, and the shadowy pe- dagogue's blows fall lightly as those of a bladder filled with peas. I have dreamt of being de- voured by wild beasts, but always woke as they were beginning to crunch my bones, and before they got to the marrow ; of drowning ; of suffo- cation by charcoal ; and especially of heing hu- rled alive. Arrah ! that horrible hot atmosphere of the coffin, and the grave-clothes that swaddle and hamper you as you kick for freedom, and 108 BREAKFAST IN BED J OB, the dreadful pressure of the coffin-lid on your nose ; while all the while you are visually con- scious of the gravedigger smoking a pipe and drinking cold rurn-and-water with your mother- in-law in the parlor of the Half-Moon and Seven Stars, the third house to the left round the cor- ner as you leave the cemetery ! " He wa'n't of much account," "says the grave- digger, burying his nose in the rum-and-Water. " He was a black-hearted villain," adds your mother-in-law, filling her second pipe. "What a disturbance the old lady used to make if you ventured on a mild havanna in the back drawing-room ! ^ And then you begin kicking again in your shroud and cerements, and — you wake ! I didn't wake for hours, so it seemed — for hours, for weeks, for months, for years, for cen- turies — while I was being burnt alive. The In- quisition did it all, of course. "In half an hour from the first spark the hills glowed with fire un- extinguishable by a waterspout. The crackle became a glow, as acre after acre joined the flames. Here and there a rock stood in the way, and the burning waves broke against it, till the crowning birch-tree took fire, and its leaves, like a shower of flaming diamonds, were in a minute consumed." Well, it wasn't like that. "Mil lions and millions of sparks of fire in heaven, but PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 109 only some six or seven stars. How calm the large lustre of Hesperus !" Certainly ; only Hes- perus didn't shine when I was burnt alive. Not only sparks, but stars, whole constellations, with any number of suns, moons, and comets to boot, danced before my eyes. "Not only my body, but my brain was on fire. I was bound to the stake, or the bedpost, or something of that sort. I think that at one stage of my agony I was a Hin- doo widow in the performance of the rite of suttee, with plenty of flax and fresh butter to keep me blazing, and a Brahmin gentleman, with a fine yellow streak of caste on his forehead, to assure me of eternal felicity immediately after my reduction to a cinder. Then I was transformed into a cat, and an enormous gorilla held me tight in one hairy arm, while with the other he guided my unwilling paw to sweep some chestnuts off a red-hot hob. Then, of course, in the usual man- ner of digressional dreaming, I ran off at several tangents, and became Sir Edwin Landseer, M. Paul de Chaillu, and the late Mr. Douglas Jer- rold's comedy of " The Cat's-paw ;" but I was still burning, and so continued to burn, till I could feel and writhe no longer — when I awoke. It is a gruesome thing to have undergone these torments even in a dream. JDeja ! Prince Tal- leyrand might have remarked, had I subjected 110 BREAKFAST IN BED I OR my tier j feelings to the most obvious and most usual degree of comparison. Of course I know what it all arose from. It wasn't indigestion. It wasn't liver. It wasn't determination of blood to the head ; and I don't think it was conscience. 'Twas merely the inco- herent embodiment of an imagination excited by the perusal of those dreadful accounts of young girls being burnt alive, of which we have had lately a melancholy succession. I had been read- ing about the catastrophe at ^ice ; about the grim tragedy of the transformation-scene at the Princess's Theatre ; about the accident in Harley Street; about Doctor Lankester, the coroner, and his indignant philippics agains^ crinoline. I had gone to bed with my head full of the poor suf- ferers who had been burnt alive, and sleep had knitted up the ravelled skein of preoccupation into a dire fabric of disasters to myself. One has but to glance from column to column of the paj)ers to breakfast — if you forswear sup- ping — full of horrors. Burnt alive ! Burnt alive ! Burnt alive ! the catalogue goes on in lurid iteration. The poor have woes enough of their own, God knows ; but this is an anguish of which the rich, so far from being exempt, seem the chosen and particular victims. Youth and beauty, carriages and horses, live- ried servants, rank, brave garments, lip-service, PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. Ill and homage, shall not wrest Lady Clara Yere de Yere from the clutch of the Fire Demon. Let her paint an inch thick, and to the complexion of charred and greasy ashes she comes — comes through insensate vanity and recklessness. The music of the ball is yet rippling in soft waves of sound through her ears; the sugared compli- ments of her cavaliers still, half-melted, leave a dulcet velvet-pile on her lips ; she is spreading mit the radiant finery in which she has fluttered through the festival. Poor little ephemeral fash- ion-gnat ! The flounces and furbelows which have made so many men enthusiastic, so many women jealous, still rustle round her, diaphanous and fluent, when all is changed to a dreadful flare and crackling. Like Facinata in her burning tomb, she writhes in a shroud of flame. The mili- ner's handiwork is beaten into powder by the Cinder Fiend. There is nothing left but scorched and naked limbs. And when the Fire comes, reprehending no vanity, placing his brand of interdict on no pre- posterous frenzy of fashion, but dipping his finger into the family wine-cup and setting it flaming, starting up from the cozy hearth, leaping like a treacherous beast of blood from out the bars of the grate— how is it then I When we were chil- dren, we used to nickname the live cinders that fell from the tire, to the imminent peril of the 112 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, hearth-rug, " purses " or M coffins." The first, when cold and shaken, had a pleasant money- jingling sound. The last had an ugly longitudi- nal form ; and the morbid-minded among us de- clared we could discern on the surface ominous little specks and spots, that were at once assumed to represent a coffin-plate and nails. Those leaping biers are grimly common just now. They disdain to smoulder in the woollen rug before the hearth. Their favorite resting- place is in the gauzy folds of the lady's dress. The coffins gape, they have grown into sepul- chres, and folly falls into them. I said the rich seemed marked out specially for such torment. Ah, vain and presumptuous as- sertion ! Ah, crudest of dogmatisms ! Who is exempt from aught ? That workhouse pauper is a martyr to the same lumbago which makes rigid the loins of the million-rich banker. The Fire may oftentimes seem spitefully faithful to afflu- ence, as though he said, " Aha ! I will show them that money-bags shall not avail against live coals. Oho ! I will prove that my furnace has a red- der hue than Burke's Peerage. Ai! ai! I will teach them to have balls, and bancpets, and junk- etings." But he comes back at last to the stern, impartial rule ; and he who is own brother to Death proclaims himself, like Death, mighty and just. Question not the equity of the Fire King's dis- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 113 pensation. All lie touches with red-hot sceptre : yon, and me, and all the world. Who of us, in his calendar of griefs, cannot recall some horrible red-letter days? When this old hat was new, it was encircled by a crape ; and for whom worn ? — the little, little kinsman, with his dark eyes, and merry laugh, and bright face, that made us remember, half-joy fully, half-tearfully, the lineaments of the dear dead that had gone before l.im. And he was playing before the fire in the upper room, when, with that cruel carelessness which makes us almost think some girls to be fiends, the ser- vant had left him — left him on so meddle chatter- ing errand. And his pinafore caught fire ; and there was an inquest — a grave judicial investiga- tion — on that poor little morsel of humanity. And — look you here, my brother. If we were all to mourn for ever and aye, and to refuse to be comforted, and to parade our grief before all the world, do you think this same world could go on? Do you think that He, whose wisest creature told us that "joy cometh in the morn- ing," would not have cause to cast us away as selfish and ungrateful? We read in the Book to which Dr. Cocker- Colenso has taken so many arithmetical objec- tions, that when the child that Uriah's wife bare to David was stricken with sickness, the king be- 114: OR, sought God for the child, and fasted, and went in and lay all night upon the earth, refusing to eat bread, or to be raised up by the elders of his house ; when on the seventh day the child died, and his servants feared to tell him. He never- theless discovered, from their scared looks, that the little one was lost ; and then " arose from the earth, and washed and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the Lord and worshipped: then he came to his own house / and when he required, they set bread "before him, and he did eat ;" answering, when his servants marvelled at the strange change in his behavior, " While the child was yet alive, 1 fasted and wept; for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live f But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast f Can I bring him bach again f I shall go to him / but he shall not return to me" These awful accidents by fire, which, with ter- rible similarity of occurrence, have made us all tremble and stand amazed, have, through that odd yet usual propensity of the English people for imitating the procedure of a bull running at a gate, been laid at the door of crinoline. If ladies did not persist in wearing exaggerated hoop-petticoats, urged the Bull-Run philoso- phers, there- would be no catastrophes from fire. I don't think such nonsense was ever talked PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 115 out of Bedlam ; yet you find plenty of people, ordinarily supposed to be sensible and even sa- gacious, who join in this parrot-cry. 'Tis on a par, for common sense, with the silly dogmatists among the " practical " penal philosophers, who are for having all criminals, whatsoever may be their offence, starved, flogged, and worked in chain-gangs, merely because their own coward- ice and avarice have been aroused and alarmed by the street-outrages of a couple of score garot- ters. I am not about to cry up crinoline. I am not favored with the acquaintance of any manu- facturers of steel-springs and horsehair petticoats, and have no wish to puff the dealers in such arti- cles. Nor am I disposed to deny that unduly bulging skirts have been the cause of numerous accidents by fire or otherwise. But do you think that young, middle-aged, or old ladies would cease to be burnt alive if petticoats were reduced to the circumference in fashion forty years ago, when a lady's dress fell in a perpendicular line close to her limbs from hip to ankle ; when the gown was, in fact, but " a pantaloon on one leg I" Bah ! dilated crinoline is a nuisance to men, and makes some women, very ridiculous; but the real root of the evil in fire-casualties is not crin- oline. When ironmongers abandon the abominable practice of building fashionable grates, of which 116 BREAKFAST IN BED; OR, the topmost bars are scarcely half a foot from the ground, and which present an ever-yawning fiery furnace, from which immaculate virtue would scarcely have saved Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego ; when masters of families sternly in- sist upon every grate in every room being per- manently protected by wire-guards ; and when, above all, mothers of families exert their author- ity to prohibit their daughters wearing sleezy gauze and muslin dresses in winter time — we may look for a surcease of suttee in drawing- rooms and parlors. I say this last is a matter which concerns Mater-familias, and her alone. I suppose the British mother has still some power left, notwithstanding the very fast manners of the rising generation. I don't want any cruelty, oppression, tyranny, to carry out the gauze- and-muslin taboo. I only call for a calm and determined expression of maternal will. "When the unsophisticated old lady from Ken- tucky first saw some New York young ladies indulging in the vagaries of the valse d deux temps, she very uncompromisingly stated how she would treat her daughters if they betook them- selves to such Terpsichorean gambadoes. " I'd give 'em the hickory," this Spartan parent ex- claimed, " if they were as big as Goliath and as old as Methusalem." We know what equally rigid discipline was prescribed by one of the in- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 117 terlocutors in George Colman's " Night-gown and Slippers" for boarding-school misses who ad- dicted themselves to the pernicious practice of novel-reading. Well, we don't want such a Brownrigge system of procedure as this. Only let Mamma say to her daughters, "My dears, you sha'n't be burnt alive, if I can help it ; and therefore I won't allow you to wear gauze, tarla- tans, or muslins in winter-time." As for crinoline itself, I am afraid that prohi- bitions, satiric, nay fierce, denunciations, will, for a time, be powerless against it. The ladies, old as well as young, have nailed their crinoline to the mast ; and, if they are determined to wear a certain thing, who shall gainsay them? The Duke of Tantivy's daughters wear top-boots, — tops, madam ; mahoganies ; hottes d revers ; " pickle-jars," — precisely as you choose to em- ploy one or the other more or less euphuistic (I mean slangy) locution. These fair pilasters, whose sire is a pillar of the state, enclose their slender shafts and pediments in the leathern coverings of which the use is ordinarily supposed to be confined to fox-hunters, post-boys, and farmers of the old school. I have it on author- ity. There is not the slightest compromise in the Duke's daughters' tops. They are not gaiters. They are not Balmorals prolonged upwardly to preternatural proportions. 118 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OB, Mv informant is acquainted with the Crispin employed to manufacture these articles for the Duke's daughters. Any fine afternoon during the full Brighton season you may see these young patricians, with their governess, Mile, de Cuir- bouilli, on the sea-highway between the Battery (or where, at least, the Battery used, and the new hotel is, to be) and Pool Valley. If the wind be indulging in even the smallest puff's of his char- tered libertinism (and he is scarcely ever on thoroughly' good behavior at Brighton), the demurest eye must glance perforce at the shining tops I allude to, pharoses, so to speak, in the surging sea of crinoline. This is a wonderful age, and we are a wonderful people, and the River Amazon has astounding tributaries in our country. When I laid out my annual half-a-crown last Christmas — and the outlay is one I trust to be permitted the indulgence of for some years to come — in the purchase of "Punch's Pocket- Book," and surveyed Mr. John Leech's panora- mic etching of " Sea-side Fashions for 1863," — and when I came upon the group of the fox- hunting-looking belles, in orthodox " pink," lea- thers, boots, and whips, — I could scarcely help exclaiming, " Mr. Leech, Mr. Leech, this is not character but caricature. This is a madness of the pencil, a frenzy of the etching-needle, the PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 119 hallucination of a humorous draughtsman, em- bracing his chimera.'' But, behold, January was yet young, and Nature had hardly manifested her abhorrence for the vacuum caused by the abstraction of the above-mentioned half-a-crown from my pocket, when, on undeniable authority, I was told that the Leechian cartoon was the graven embodiment, not of a myth, but of a literal truth, and that the Duke of Tantivy's daughters really wore top-boots. And why not ? This is a free country. Sump- tuary laws have been abolished for ever so many centuries. Where is the use of having a Habeas Corpus, if portions of the feminine corporate body are not to be thrust with impunity into such boots as caprice may suggest, or conve- nience dictate, or fashion warrant ? I see ladies driving in the Park in paletots made by Poole. Our wives are ceasing to employ mantle-makers, and beginning to order their coats from their husbands' tailors ; this ingenious contrivance having a double purpose — that of increasing your own sartorial accounts, and of giving the dear creatures an opportunity for spending on other finery the ready money which, either by passionate entreaty or gentle coercion, they will extract from you, whether coats or mantles, hats or bonnets, are the wear. Why not? I repeat. Some years since, our 120 BREAKFAST IN BED; OB, charmers used to wear shaggy pilot-jackets, with moth er-o'-pearl buttons of alarming circumfer- ence, into the pockets of which (the jackets, not the buttons) they were wont to thrust their tiny hands. Don't you remember, again, the waist- coat mania among the ladies — when they dis- covered that long gold chains were utterly use- less, and had, consequently, to be provided with Albert or brequet guards — including, of course, a quantity of " charms " — to secure their watches in their side-pockets ? "What kind of habiliments did Queen Christina of Sweden patronise ? Why, she dressed like a grenadier. And Joan of Arc ? "Why, she wore corslet and greaves, gauntlets and surcoat, like a man-at-arms. To be sure they burnt her alive (or are said to have done so, for many French archaeologists maintain that Joan lived to a good old age) for wearing too much crinoline — or plate-armor. I have read in the autobiography of the Czarina Catherine II., that her predecessor, Elizabeth, when a fat, passee dame, very unwieldy, and very fond (too fond) of champagne, was addicted to appearing at the court balls en cavalier ; that is to say, in a tightly-fitting hussar uniform. A squabby, elderly woman in tights is neither a very edifying nor a very delectable spectacle ; but who was to question the sovereign will and pleasure of Elizabeth, the Supreme Empress of PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 12l all the Russias, Great Duchess of Moscow, Pro- tectress of the Republic of ^Novgorod, and so forth ? The fashions vary, and the ladies please themselves. Vive la 'mode — et la bagatelle ! Who shall say that Semiramis didn't wear top- boots ; and that Ninus, that celebrated prototype of the hen-pecked husband, was not county- courted for the account by the Runciman of the period ?. More than a hundred years ago the beautiful Miss Gunnings were the reigning " sen- sational " toasts in London ; and they appeared at the drums and routs of the nobility and gen- try attired, or unattired, in the manner of Vhich the female artistes attached to the poses plastiques have now, without rivalry, a monopoly. A great French painter once told me that the wrinkled, snuffy old woman who swept out his studio was gazing one day upon a picture on his easel, representing Yenus (costume en chair, buff trimmings) rising from the sea. "Ah," she mur- mured, "les beaux jours! on se montrait ainsi, quasi-nue, au del, heinf Moi aussi fai pose clans le temps" She had filled the part (for a gratuity of ten francs nine sols) of Goddess of Reason in Maximilian Robespierre's famous Bed- lamite pageant, and had been drawn on a tri- umphal car through the streets of unbelieving Paris. " What costume did you wear ?" asked the painter. " Dam ! quetf chose comm' ca " 6 122 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OB, ("something like that"), replied the snuffy old sweeper, pointing to the Yenus with nothing to wear. You see, it was the fashion of those Re- publican times. The French, in liberty, equality, fraternity, and other things, outstripped all their contemporaries. There is a queer story about the Empress Jose- phine, when she was the citoyenne Beauharnais, going to a ball at Madame Tallien's in a full suit of fleshing-, and nothing else besides a translucid and spangled scarf. It was the fashion. The greatest proficients in made-dishes in the world began to dress cm naturel. In 1848 there was a brief feverish attempt to revive the Goddess-of- Eeason modes ; and M. Cham de Xoe, I recol- lect, gave the " Charivari" a humorous sketch, depicting the Commissary of Police presenting a blooming young-lady candidate for the office of coryphee at the approaching festival with her official costume. It was a fig-leaf. I am inclined, then, to think, on the whole, that we men -folks talk a great deal of nonsense in our denunciations of crinoline. It is certain that ladies were burnt to death centuries before crinoline was ever heard of; to say nothing of accidents by fire during the periods when hooj)- petticoats were in abeyance. It is equally cer- tain that the victims to fire-casualties are not the Wearers of silk or woollen-stuff over crinoline \ PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 123 but those silly women, young and old, who, through meanness or through vanity, persist in wearing their widely-distended framework with muslins and tarlatans in lieu of stouter fabrics. But the crinoline itself, accepting it as the gene- ric term for hencoops either of horsehair, steel- springs, wire-gauze, cane, or basket-work, I hold to be harmless. The ladies declare it to be emi- nently pleasant and convenient. The physicians say that it is healthy. There used to be no more painful sight in the streets on rainy days than the ladies holding up their flaccid, drooping, splashed, and draggled coats, in a vain attempt to protect them from the mud-lava and the fresh- ets of the gutter. I suppose ladies are as liable as others folks to rheumatic affections of the limbs, through damp garments clinging to them. I apprehend, the rather, that from this very cause, thousands of hapless women have suffered year after year excruciating agonies, of which we, coarse, selfi-h, exigent, intolerant men have never recked. The ladies have a habit of squeal- ing out about trifles, and s vying nothing about real ailments, which last f ey endure with heroic fortitude and resignati n. Ah, me ! how often the ch ek is quivering underneath the violet powder ! How often the blooming English belle is undergoing th? anguish of an Indian at the stake ! 124 BREAKFAST IK BED ; 0E, The lady who wrote in Queen Anne's time to the editor of the " Spectator," and asked him, with crushing curtness, what business petticoats were of his, denied, a priori, the right of the ruder sex to meddle in the criticism of feminine costume at all. Indeed, I question whether we have any right to discuss those articles of cos- tume which we merely see ; but we are entitled to say a word or two in praise or dispraise of those we really feel. For example, when the Sheriff of Middlesex comes down upon us, apro- pos of Madam's point-lace, parasols, double- width glaces, and innumerable bonnets. We feel that. Again : when our shins are in a state of per- manent ecchymosis, from the bobbing and rasp- ing of watch-spring crinolines there against, every time we walk with the adored one of our heart down Regent Street. We feel that, don't we ? And when we are stifled in omnibuses, or hustled out of our stall at the theatre, or put to me peine forte et dure at dinner-tables, the inconvenience we suffer becomes to a certain extent palpable and tangible. !Not long ago, in the wilds of Yorkshire, I went to church one Sunday morn- ing with a charming family of young ladies, 01 whose worthy papa I was the unworthy guest. (P)ease not to insert this in the " New York Eavesdropper," to the intent of my being brand- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 125 ed six months afterwards, in the columns of the " Asafoetida Eeview," as a dastardly betrayer of the secrets of the Lares and Penates.) The church was open, you see, to everybody, although I went in the family-pew ; and ninety-nine hun- dredths of the females among the congregation wore crinoline. A nice time I had of it. My four fellow-worshippers made as many "cheeses" of crinoline around me. There was no way out of it. Oh, for Lord Ebury to have shortened this one particular morning service ! There was so much distended whalebone about me, that I felt myself off the coast of Greenland ; a mere tub, thrown out for young whales. I could u't move ; I couldn't feel my hassock or my pocket- handkerchief. It was a continual uprising and down-plumping of crinoline. I was a miserable man. The sermon was an excellent one ; but I couldn't hear it. The singing was unusually good, for a country church ; but it grated on my ears. I shall never forget the agony of that ex- perience of the Litany under the influence of ex- aggerated crinoline. I could enlarge on my woes ; but desist, for fear of being Spurgeon- esque. Hircius, who is most orthodox, and was a church-rate martyr in 1836, just before he was bankrupt in the corn-and-coal line, would be shocked at my profanity ; and Spungius, who married a pew-opener when the secularist cheese* 126 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, monger's widow had thrown him over, would never forgive me. But, granting the aches and pains, pecuniary and personal, which may afflict the descendants of Adam through the addictedness to preposter- ous skirts of the daughters of Eve, I say boldly that the old garments of the ladies were quite as productive of mental and physical discomforts to us and to themselves. How about the frocks of 1830, worn high up above the ankles ? How about the monstrous ladies' hats, that knocked our own off, and took up all the room inside the Brighton " Highflyer ?" Discourse unto me, I pray thee, concerning those hideous bishop and leg-o'-mutton sleeves, forever flapped on our faces, or dabbled in the gravy at dinner. Con- jure up again the shawls you were always called upon to pin behind, the sandal shoe-strings that were always becoming untied ; to say no- thing — well, there can be no harm in mention- ing it. Every gentleman whose wife has not kept a lady's maid has been called upon, in the old time, to lace a lady's corset. In Haydn's song a young lady is desired by her mamma to " lace her bod- dice blue" herself; but in married life Benedict used to be, with perfect propriety, called upon to perform that cheerful oflice. I say, used to be ; for the days of stay-tyranny are happily gone PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 127 by. Many ladles have abandoned the use of cor- sets altogether ; while, for those who still adhere to these adjuncts to feminine symmetry, cunning Parisian corsetiercs have devised on anatomico- physiologico-hygienic principles, natty little struc- tures, of elastic nature, which are hooked-and- eyed, or buttoned or strapped, and slipped on and off, with the extremest comfort and despatch. Benedict is not called upon to lace Beatrice's stays now. Let us be joyful. Young English ladies used to kill themselves in the attempt to have wasp- waists. Dreadful stories used to be told of English mothers forcing their daughters to wear suffocating, chest-compressing, rib- crush- ing stays, by night and by day, or strapping them up to the bedpost, to get a better purchase while they laced them. And how hideous, after all, were the hour-glass bodices, the wasp-waists? A very famous English artist made the other day, I am told, par fantaisie, a drawing of the Yenus de Medicis as she stands in Florence — " to en- chant the world" — and the Yenus in stays and crinoline. Under the last-named aspect she looked frightful. Hogarth tried an analogous experiment in one of his prints ; and you may see a Yenus in a hoop in the background of the picture of " Modern Polite Conversation." Every schoolgirl knows that the rage for hoops, panzers, or marquises, as they were distinctly 128 called, was quite as fierce a century and a half ago as in our own time. The ladies' brocaded sacks were quite as ample, if not ampler, than our own moire antiques. c But just dwell for a moment on the very long duration of the huge-skirt mode. Hoops in some form or another lasted from the time of Queen Anne to the middle of the reign of George the Third — for at least seventy years. And don't sup- pose that crinoline in good Queen Anne's time was quite a new thing. The portraits of Titian and Parmegiano show that the dames of the middle ages understood to its very base the secret of ex- uberant skirts. Look at Zucchero's picture of Queen Elizabeth, and consider the kirtles and farthingales of her maids-of-honor, all stuffed and bombasted out with silk and wadding. Crino- line in some guise or another will endure, I am afraid, for years after I have been measured for my last surtout — elm, plain, richly studded with japanned nails — and skirts will be worn a la — ■ Halloa ! what's that ? Silence that dreadful bell! I know it too well ; and the dubious fe- male party with the mysterious parcel (shaped and pinned as no other parcel on earth is pinned and shaped), who glides upstairs and looks at me askance, as a creature to be loathed and scorned until it is time for him to pay a certain little bill. Thank goodness, I am safe in Bed, and at Break- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 129 fast-time she cannot blight me with her baleful glances. Skirts are worn a la Euination ; and that confounded ring at the bell must be from Somebody's Dressmaker. 6* 130 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OB, ON THE CONDITION OF MY POOR FEET. " Joseph," once said a wise man, who had just been utterly ruined and overthrown in the battle of life, to his attached man-servant, " I am going to bed. You will give me, if you please, forty drops of laudanum on a lump of sugar, and you will wake me up the day after to-morrow. After that we will see what can be done." There is nothing like going to bed under try- ing circumstances, and stopping there. If nature has not endowed yon with a somnolent faculty — if you don't, to your misfortune, belong to the great order of sleepy -heads — you had best take the laudanum on the lump of sugar, as per recipe foregoing. But I earnestly recommend you to sleep npon it. Stay in bed as long as ever you can. The world must go round ; and perhaps your affairs, having come to the worst, may take a turn with it. If you wake, turn over on to t'other side, and go to sleep again and again, until you find yourself so hungry that you must needs leap out of bed and proceed to devour some- thing or somebody. That same great order of sleepy -heads, to whom I have just alluded, are, 1 PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 13i after all, the people who get on best in the world. They don't "fash" themselves. They fret not themselves because of the ungodly* They just pull their night-caps over their brows, shut their eyes, find out the cosiest corner in the undula- tions of the pillow, and take forty times, or forty thousand times, forty winks ; and at their upris- ing the odds are forty to one that, desperate as things seemed when they fell a-snoozing, they have now mended. Caesar — J. Caesar of Rome, as poor crazy Mr. Train used to call that con- queror — desired to have men about him that were fat, and such as slept oint ; to a plain, prac- tical, tangible issue. The last excuse for digres- sion or desultory disquisition is taken away. If a man can't devote himself to the topic of break- fast while he is Breakfasting in Bed, of what use is it his breakfasting, or being in bed at all? "What, indeed ! save, perhaps, that he should go to sleep ; which may be, after all, a more sensi- ble manner of employing his time in a natural place of rest, than that of grumbling at a matu- tinal meal he should properly Have partaken of in the parlor, or philosophising between the sheets when he should have been penning moral essays at his desk. " On what people should have for breakfast ?" "Why didn't I grapple with that most important and little understood question last September? By this time I might have helped to clear away some mists of prejudice, to fish up some treacher- ously submerged torpedo of sophistry, to dredge away some bar of ignorance, to clear some chan- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 185 nel leading into the harbor of truth, to mitigate a nuisance, and to inaugurate a reform. Or, very probably, I might have done nothing whatever of the kind; and instead of rendering. a service to flie cause of comfort and common sense, merely stirred up a malignant controversy and provoked a fruitless discussion. To err is human ; with the best intentions we ofttimes come to grief. Look at the Eight Honorable William Ewart Gladstone and his proposition for licensing club- houses as though they were gin-shops. The right honorable gentleman persuaded himself, no doubt, that he was doing an uncommonly clever stroke of business, and giving to his financial scheme of '63 a brilliant gloss as a " poor man's budget." " I'll take the Clubs," he said to himself (of course in Attic Greek). " The reproach of there being one law for the rich and another for the poor, shall be heard no longer. What is sance for the goose shall be sauce for the gander. The equi- poise of justice shall be established between St. James's and St. Giles's." So he claps seventeen pounds ten and five per cent, for liquor, and three pounds ten and five per ditto for' tobacco license en to Pall Mall, and rubs his hands at the thought of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green falling into ecstasies at his impartiality ; and, behold, the right honorable gentleman pleases nobody ! " It is a disgraceful imposition," yells St. 186 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, James's, in a rage ; " it is a petty piece of tyranny, and Gladstone ought to be ashamed of himself. We don't sell wines, liquors, beer, or tobacco. We buy our own port, and our own cognac, and our own cigars out of our own fund?, and don't want a licence to divide that which is our own among ourselves." " It's all a something sham," mutters St. Giles's, surlily. " It's so much dust thrown in a cove's eyes. Mr. Gladstone he don't mean for to let the Peelers rummage about the Clubs ; he ain't going to shut 'em during the hours of der- vine service. He don't mean for to put an end to card-playing (and for precious high stakes, too) or to Darby sweeps among the nobs : and there's to be one law for the Clubs, and another for the ' Pig and Tinder-Box.' " Combined chorus of " He's a 'umbug and a do," from Whitechapel ; and, " He has violated every pledge he ever gave to his order," from Pall Mall. St. James's cuts Mr. Gladstone when he ven- tures to show himself at the Carlton, and sends him to Coventry if he puts in an appearance at the U. U. ; and St. Giles's sneers at him as " a 'igh feller as gammons coves that he likes to do what's low." Such is not unfrequently the fate of very clever and brilliant statesmen, who forget that PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 187 fluent rhetoric and specious casuistry are often swamped for the want of a little candor and a little sincerity. I am writing at the risk of pleasing nobody ; but I passionately entreat you to believe that I am both candid and sincere, and that on the topic of Breakfast in Bed, at least you shall hear nothing from me but words of honesty. I went the other day to an eminent medical man, and he, being sensibly of opinion that the question of diet was of more importance than that of pills or potions, asked me what I was in the habit of taking for breakfast. I answered : " At present, and as a rule, noth- ing but a cup of tea and the newspapers ; and equally, as a rule, I can't get through either 6f them. But in bygone days I used to make a very excellent breakfast." " "What on ?" my medico searchingly inquired. " Well," I returned, " I used to eat a mutton- chop, or a rump-steak, or a good plateful from a cold joint, or a couple of eggs broiled on bacon, or a haddock, or a mackerel, or some pickled salmon, or some cold veal-and-ham pie, or half a wild duck, or a devilled partridge, with plenty of bread-and-butter, or toast, or muffins, and per- haps some anchovy sauce, or potted char, or preserved beef; the whole washed down by a couple of cups of tea or coffee" 188 BEEAKFAST IN BED ; OR, He stopped me with a gesture of amazement, and a look of horror : " I wonder you didn't say a dish of chocolate and a glass of curacoa, by way of a wind up," he exclaimed. " No," I replied with modest ingenuousness ; " I used to wind up with a pipe of bird's-eye. I didn't Breakfast in Bed in those days, and my digestion was pretty good, I thank you." " Aud after these astounding confessions, you come to me," went on my doctor, " and grumble about your liver ! I am astonished that you have any left. You have been living in a man- ner that would kill half a dozen bricklayers' laborers. But there is time to reform. It is not yet too late. You should take for breakfast a very small quantity of dry toast, uniformly browned, and preferably without butter; or if you do hanker after adipose matter, the very thinnest possible veneer of butter upon it. Then, if you have appetite enough for it, I would advise you to take a small quantity of bacon cut from the back, not the streaky bacon, and toasted before the tire, until all the oil has been expelled from the tissue. After that — you say you can't drink tea ?" I stated that I could drink it by pailfuls, and was madly fond of it, but that it made me dis- tressingly nervous. " Coffee," he pursued, " is heating, unless you PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 189 have a minimum of the very finest Oriental berry, scientifically roasted and ground, to a maximum of the purest milk ; and such things are difficult to obtain in London, or even in England. Can you drink homoeopathic cocoa?" I answered in a spirit similar to that which is said to have prompted the response of the young Irish gentleman when he was asked if he could play the fiddle ; I said that I had no doubt of being able to drink homoeopathic cocoa, if I tried. " Then, try it," said my medico, " and come to me in three weeks' time." I do not lose a moment in admitting that my adviser's breakfast menu was an admirably sensi- ble one ; but I very much doubt whether I should not have gone raving mad if I had adhered without variation to a repast consisting of toasted bacon, dry toast, and homoeopathic cocoa. I tried it for a time, then gave it up. Bacon is a very nice thing. It is cruel and unjust, by incessantly consuming it, to have at last to loathe and abhor it. I tried my hardest to think it wholesome and appetizing ; but to no purpose. I found myself rapidly approaching the detestation stage, and I don't mean to have any more bacon for breakfast for three months. I have scarcely any need to point out that 190 BREAKFAST IN BED! OE variety in what you have for breakfast is the prime essential to enable yon to eat any break- fast at all. Man was not meant to live on bread — nay, nor on toasted bacon, nor homoeo- pathic cocoa — alone. If you don't vary his diet, if you don't give him something by way of a change, he will pine away, or refuse his victuals, and grow morose and refractory as a wild animal. "We have heard a great outcry within these latter days against the assumed luxurious man- ner in which criminals are fed in gaol. The rogues, it appears, live on savory soup, thickened with meal, and seasoned with vegetables, salt, and pepper. They have porridge and gruel, with milk and rich molasses, potatoes, boiled beef (free from bones) on stated days, and on others (the pampered Sybarites !) they are actu- ally regaled with hot suet-pudding. Has it any plums in it, I wonder ? Only fancy giving " plum-duff" to garotters, and burglars, and pickpockets, and the atrocious scoundrels who have been convicted, under the new Poach- ing Act, of being found in possession of a rabbit's skin, or a pheasant's net. Now persons of prac- tical experience, whether they be professed physiologists or not, are perfectly aware of these facts : that if you deprive a man of his liberty, and make him work at tasks uncongenial to his PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE , SHEETS. 191 tastes, and subject him to a grinding and inquisi- torial discipline, and feed him besides on bread and water, you will very soon drive him to idiocy, to murdering his gaoler, or to dashing his brains out against the walls of his cell. A very short term of such a punishment is one of the most terrible to conceive in the whole arsenal of penal inflictions. In some cases it may be salutary ; but, imposed for any lengthened period, it amounts simply to constructive murder. A criminal would infinitely prefer a thousand lashes to three weeks at Hollo way or Wands- worth on " low diet." Silly and irrational people, who can't see far- ther than the tips of their noses, think that because hard labor and the starvation system are efficacious when tried for a few days, criminals should be subjected to such a doom for months, for years, or for life. ]STo prisoners could live, and no prison-authorities could enforce such a system in perpetuity. Gaolers may look stern enough, but they are not vindictive or hard-hearted enough to meet all the requirements of the new school of philan- thropy. The neo-philanthropists are indignant because the food is of good quality and is well cooked. Do they expect the -county magistrates to insert advertisements in the papers, running, " Wanted, a dishonest contractor ;" " Wanted, a 192 BREAKFAST IN BED J OR, scoundrelly carcass-butcher, who will supply so many hundred-weight of offal, various bones, and meat generally unfit for human food ;" " Wanted, an idiot who can't cook;" ""Wanted, a jackass who can turn a well-built prison-kitchen topsy-turvy V\ Wherever you find order, clean- liness, a full supply of proper utensils, efficiency in the persons employed, and reasonably good qualities in the provisions supplied, there, I take it, must there be rations of well-cooked food, which those who know nothing about the matter term " luxurious." " Oh," cry the neo-philanthro- pists, " but we don't want any cooking at all for burglars and garotters. Feed the wretches once a day upon bread-and-water ; and if they grumble, flog them well." I humbly submit that, since the world began, a diet exclusively composed of bread-and-water for persons in cap- tivity has never been adopted, as a permanency, save where it was the deliberately-designed or avowed object to kill the captive. On the conti- nent of Europe, in the most barbarously-managed convict-prisons, the galley-slaves are allowed to purchase articles of food, in addition to the rations allowed them by the State. The forgats of Toulon are fed on soup and beans and wine- all execrable in quality, no doubt, but still pre- serving them from despair by offering them some variety to an eternal regimen of ammunition- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 103 bread and muddy water. In the prisons of England, before John Howard's time, those incarcerated who had money were suffered to buy their own provisions, liquors, and tobacco, and really lived in a state somewhat resembling luxury, though of a coarse, riotous, and bestial kind. Those who had no money, literally rotted and died of inanition. Suppose the bread- an d- water — and nothing but bread-and- water — system established permanently in a modern gaol. Do you know what the result would be after a few weeks' trial of the precious bill-of-fare \ The prisoners would become living skeletons ; on their knees and under their arms would rise dreadful glandular swellings. Their blood would turn to water, and that to an inconceivably horrible putrefaction. Try it, my lords and gentlemen. Try 'it, my neo-philanthropists. But, first of all, try the bread-and-water diet on your- selves, and tell me how you like it. There is a prison at Munich where they give the besl'-behaved convicts, from time to time, a pint of beer. That mawkish draught of Baerisch- Bier, attainable, perhaps, once a month, is found Ij be the* very highest and most efficacious incen- tive to exemplary conduct. At Gibraltar and Bermuda they used to give the felons a stick of Cavendish tobacco every week, and allow them a certain number of minutes every evening before 9 194: BREAKFAST IN BED; OK, gun-fire to "blow their baccy." I have not the slightest doubt that this evening pipe has pre- vented many a mutiny and stifled many a mur- der in embryo. Practice has never been, and never will be on this side eternity, so remorseless and so vindictive as theory. Thus the gentlemen who govern the victual- ling-department in prisons being, in nine cases out of ten, sensible, humane, and experienced men, who know what prisoners want and what they do not want much better than outside theorists, vary the breakfasts, dinners, and sup- pers of the unhappy persons confided to their charge to as great an extent as the exceedingly restricted dietary table will allow them to do. It is very easy to prate about convicts being pampered and coddled. It is also occasionally convenient to sneer at Sir Joshua Jebb and tho Home Secretary, and drive them out into a wil- derness of vituperation and misrepresentation, as scapegoats for our own shortcomings and blunder- ing in time gone by ; but I fancy that a couple of months' experience in the cell of a convict- prison would convince not a few of the virtuously- indignant-against-prisoners'-indulgence class, that the so-called pampering and coddling and luxury amount in the aggregate to a bare sufficiency of very plain, coarse, and distasteful food. Ko beer, no gin, no fried fish, no baked York- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 195 shire-pudding, no hot eel-soup, no baked potatoes, no tripe, no cow-heel, no liver and bacon, no singed sheep's-head: a pitiless divorce from all these things, which, to the criminal tribes, are held eminently toothsome and savory. These deprivations are, to the felonious mind, ill com- pensated for by allotted rations of the simplest character, and from which spicy seasonings, and especially gravy — that rich juice so dear to all humanity — are inexorably banished. Cocoa-nibs may be all very nutritious and wholesome ; but, ah ! what are they to rum and milk ? Molasses may be a comfort ; but what is treacle in com- parison with the dainties dispensed by the street- pieman ? We find among free men — among those classes whose members are not periodically locked up by the country for the country's good — that the want of variety in meals, but especially as re- gards breakfast, is surely productive of numerous evils to the body politic. Take schools, for in- stance. From year's end to year's end the hap- less infants in academies for young gentlemen, or seminaries for young ladies, are condemned to a changeless round of thick brcad-and butter and sky-blue milk-and-water. In a very few educational establishments, I am told — not one in halt* a hundred probably — the weakest of weak tea is served out ; a mournful 196 decoction, in which, luke-warm water preponder- ates, in which the taste of brown sugar is faintly felt, bat in which the infusion of tea-leaves is in- finitesimal. Some sprays and buds of a strangely herbaceous character float mournfully on the surface of this so-called tea ; and the entire bev- erage has a depressing and enfeebling effect on the consumer. Nevertheless such tea— albeit it is but a scornful misnomer so to qualify it — is reckoned a high and haughty luxury, to be re- joiced in only in establishments of the highest class ; and you may be tolerably certain that the generous preceptors who give tea to their scholars do not forget to put on something extra for the use of the teapot in their half-yearly bills. But that bread-and-butter knows no change, It may be that it is part of the private educa- tional code to compel the housekeeper to cut the young people's tartines of an unwieldy and al- most unmasticatory density. I suppose that it is good for their little healths that the bread should be stale. "You are not quite so insane as to eat new bread ?" my medical adviser said to me ; but I forgot to introduce the query in its proper place. I might have told him, but I didn't, that I always ate new bread, and suffered accordingly. There would be an end, of course, of all school- discipline if any but the parlor-boarders and the rniLOSoray between the sheets. 197 teachers were permitted to eat thin bread-and- butter, and a mutiny would be the infallible result of muffins. Of course the gradations of authority must be marked — in no place with more definite force than in a school. When a child is decently behaved, he gets thick bread with very little butter on it. When he is naughty, he has dry bread, or, under cer- tain circumstances of disgrace, no bread at all ; but, at the other end of the scale, his pastors and masters, his good and wise schoolmaster or school- mistress, revel in buttered toast ; delicious cubes of spongy matter; Bakat lakoum, " lumps of delight," through every pore of which the olea- ginous glue oozes. 'Tis a food for angels. When I was at school in England, for a very short time, I am happy to say, the principal, with a touching humility, used to take his meals with us. He and his wife and daughter sat at a cross table : we had the immutable bread-and-butter and sky-blue ; they had bacon, coffee, muffins, buttered toast. How often has my young soul yearned to make an onslaught on that well-filled upper end of the board — " groaning beneath all the delicacies of the season," as the reporters are accustomed to say of the annual dinner of the Sparkenhoe Farmers' Club — and carry off the middlemost layer of that mount of buttered toast, even at the risk of being hanged, expelled, or 198 BREAKFAST IN BED \ OR, thrashed within an inch of my life for the rash and desperate deed ! I knew a schoolmaster once who, at the end of each half, and on the morning of the day they went home for the holidays, used to give his boys an egg for breakfast. Was it in pure liberality of soul that the donative was bestowed ? or was it, the rather, the offspring of an artful ruse on the part of the astute pedagogue ? Did he think to mollify obdurate boys, to condone bygone grievances, to put a plaster on wheals that were yet green (or black-and-blue) on boyish limbs, or to stifle nascent complaints which, to anxious and inquiring parents, lie apprehended might be made ? I never knew ; but it is certain that he gave his boys eggs with their thick bread-and- butter and their sky-blue, twice a year. The stratagem — if it was a stratagem — the generosity — if generosity indeed it was — were both thrown away. Schoolboys are lamentably ungrateful. My friend's boys laughed his eggs to scorn. They imputed to him the worst and most interested motives. They declared the eggs to be musty. They forebore to eat, but pocketed them, and pelted one another with them in the playground. I remember a boy being caned, live minutes be- fore he went home to his fond parents, for secret- ing an egg, on which happening inadvertently to PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. ' 199 sit, lie squashed it, to the subversion of the good order of the establishment and the material in- jury of his pantaloons. The egg-trick ended in inglorious failure. I think that if you were to canvass a large number of intelligent boys, you would find the majority against bread-and-butter a very numer- ous and decided one. For cake — plum or seedy — they have an ungovernable affection ; bread and cheese even they will not spurn at ; of pud- dings and pies they will devour, unless judiciously checked, incalculable quantities; but to bread- and-butter, unless driven by the pangs of abso- lute hunger, they are generally inclined to give a contemptuous go-by. I was formerly aware of a boarding-school, where the morning and evening allowance to each boy was one entire slice cut right round a quartern loaf, and divided into four cubes or chunks. "Now there was a rule in the school, that anybody having eaten his allowance, and craving more, should, on rising, clearing his voice, and asking deferentially, and in the German language, if he might have another piece of bread-and-butter, be entitled to an additional chunk. I think the for- mula ran thus: " Herr Scldaghintem" — this wasn't the schoolmaster's name ; but 'twill serve — "written, Sic so gut seyn mir noch ein Siuch ButUrbrod zu geben ?" The condition was not a 200 BREAKFAST IN BED; OR, very onerous one, and all the boys in the school learnt German ; yet in the course of three halves, I only knew the extra chunk to be claimed by four boys, f Big Jack Lazenby, whose father was a Baro- net, and who was a fool — bless his honest, soft- hearted memory ! — spoke up for it, because an- other boy had made him a bet that he couldn't utter four words in German without making: three blunders. He made two ; but these lapses were sufficient to deprive him of the coveted chunk. Little Harry Skip with won it easily ; but he gave it away to his next neighbor (Harry was the boy who had a rich cake once a fort- night, and always brought five guineas to school, at the commencement of a new half, as pocket- money). Simon Dollamore, the rich City man's son (he is now a richer man than his father), was the densest of dunces at German ; but by labori- ous plodding he contrived to master the mystic sentence, and having obtained the chunk over and above, sold it for a halfpenny. The com- mercial operation was brought to light, and Simon Dollamore, besides suffering corporal an- guish on the palms of his hands from a ruler, was informed no further proficiency he might attain in the Teutonic tongue would avail in his obtain- ing extra bread-and-butter. The fourth claimant was that luckless Gumbyle, whose father was PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN TEE SHEETS. 201 always bankrupt, and consequently neglected to pay for the board and education of his son. GiiHibyle was egged-on one afternoon to rise and claim the bread-and-butter bonus ; but he hadn't got farther than " wollen Sie so gut seyn" when our revered preceptor inarched up to him, box- ed his ears, wondered at his impudence, and sternly bade him sit down again and hold his tongue. If you come to the opposite sex, you will find quite another feeling with regard to bread-and- butter. I don't believe that any of the stories told about the ravenous fondness of school-girls for Buttevorods are exaggerated. I know a lady who went to school at Kensington, and there the servants put the bread-and-butter — when they had cut it — for tea into a large clothes-basket to be handed round, and even then the clothes- basket would be found all too small. I hope I shall not be contradicted by physiologists when I assert, that in the majority of instances girls have a far more voracious appetite than boys. From nine to thirteen a girl would much sooner have a slice of bread-and-butter than a hoop, a doll, or a skipping-rope. This is why discreet governesses are able entirely to dispense with corporal punishment in girls' schools. A boy doesn't care much about being deprived of a meal ; a girl does. If you were to ask her whe- 9* 202 OE, tlier she preferred having her cars boxed or her knuckles rapped to going without her tea, she would answer — supposing her reply to be per- fectly candid — in the affirmative. Starvation is a quiet, genteel, unobtrusive punishment. It causes no frenzied struggles, no violent howling. It is very cheap ; and the establishment eaves money by the culprits who are put au pain sec. There comes a time, however, when we are our own masters and mistresses, and when it be- comes our, often grievous, duty to order our own breakfasts. The question, " What; shall we have for breakfast 2" is a far more difficult one to solve than "What shall we have for dinner?" W 7 e can appeal to the cook, to Soyer, or Francatelli, or Dr. Kitchener, or Lady Clutterbuck, or to the wife of our bosom. We can remember some of the dainties of which we have partaken at friends' houses, or at places of public resort during the past week ; or, at all events, we can throw our- selves on chops and steaks, or announce our in- tention of dining out. But breakfast brings a far different series of influences into play. The ques- tion is a momentous one, and you are easily stranded. If you are a family man, I will not assume that you can be, save in cases of extreme rarity, such a despicable and heartless ruffian as to breakfast away from home. I know there are some men, lost to all sense PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 203 of domestic propriety — monsters in human form — who, with a stony cynicism and unblushing hardihood, will abandon their Lares and Penates even while — the wretches ! — the kettle is sputter- ing on the hob and the urn simmering on the ta- ble. These bold bad men will go shamelessly down to their club and breakfast. Their insolent plea is, that an obsequious waiter will at once pour into their ears a copious catalogue of appe- tising things that can be had for breakfast — boil- ed, grilled, stewed, devilled, and cold ; that eve- rything is of first-rate quality, and served with exquisite neatness and admirable expedition ; that all the newspapers, ready cut, are at hand ; that no single knocks from duns are possible ; and that a much better breakfast than can be had at home costs much less money than it would among the Lares and Penates. Should you meet, my son, with any such hardened men, follow my counsel, and avoid them. Their ways lead as surely to perdition as a latch-key and a cigar-case lead to the unfa- thomable abyss of Sir Cresswell Cresswell's court and woe unutterable. 204: BREAKFAST IN BED ; OE, OJST HAYING SEEN" A GHOST AT HOX- TOJST, A1STD THE YEEY DEUCE HIMSELF IN PAEIS. Misery, we all know, makes a man acquainted with strange bedfellows ; but the converse, which might be suggested to such a proverb, does not hold. Strange beds do not always make men miserable. The rather, sometimes, are they pro- ductive of ease and gratulation to the unaccus- tomed sleeper. It is in the nature of mutable and capricious man to grow weary of everything when its occupation is prolonged. Satisfaction begets sameness, and sameness satiety ; and then we yawn and toss and tumble restlessly, and at last come to curse our day, as Job did. Couch us on rose-leaves, and we begin to grumble for St. Lawrence's gridiron. Softly smother us in eider-down, and, with ungrateful shrug, we declare that we should like a hea]?of red-hot coals by way of a change. When St. Louis was dying, he caused himself to be stretch- ed on a bed of ashes. Was that act of mortifica- tion due to pure, virtuous asceticism, think you, or to sheer weariness of soft feather-beds and PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 205 silken hangings \ There are seasons when the roomiest four-poster, the snuggest Arabian, pall upon and disgust us ; when we would gladly ex- change the fluted silk of the alcove for the white- washed walls of the hospital dormitory. Mattresses, paillasses, jmd feather-beds, bol- sters, pillows, and counterpanes, are all very well; but, ah, for the delights of a swinging hammock or a camp-bedstead ! — ah, for the in- vigorating change of a night in the open air, with the stars for a canopy, and nothing but a buffalo-robe between yourself and mother earth ! How glorious it is, for example, to retire to rest with a carpet-bag under your head, and wake up in the morning your cranium a mass of abnormal bumps, embossed there by contact with subjacent hair-brushes, pomatum-pots, and boot-heels ! How charming to repose by the bivouac-fire, and discover on the morrow that your toes have been half burnt off! And the pleasant nights when you don't go to bed at all! — when you pace the deck, a cigar between your lips ; or are jolted from side to side of a railway carriage ; or sink into a troubled slumber in the imverlale of a diligence, with your head on the shoulder of the condiccteur, who very summarily shakes you off every time the coach stops to change horses. 206 ■ BREAKFAST I2T BED ; OR, During the whole of the month of June just past, I have been sleeping in very strange beds, and eating stranger breakfasts in them. I have been a wanderer on the face of the earth, and have mooned half over Europe. I have drunk the waters of unwonted rivers. The Seine I have seen, the Marne, the Meuse, the Scheldt, the Rhine, the Moselle, and the decker; yea, and the Maine, the Inn, the Adige, the Arno, the Po, and the Rhone. Several nights, a dozen, perhaps, I have passed in my clothes, and without thinking of sleep ; but on all other occasions I have Breakfasted consistently in Bed. It is the fashion in outland- ish countries so to do ; at least to consume break- fast number one between the sheets. Breakfast number two, the dejeuner a la fourcheite^ I cau- tiously abjure, fearing apoplexy. I came abroad, when May was on the wane, with two brisk and valiant young Englishmen, determined to do at Rome — whither we didn't go — as the Romans did, and at Paris as the Paris- ians. They astounded and humbled me, an old and experienced traveller as I deemed myself, by their fluent acquaintance with Continental customs, especially those relating to eating and drinking. " Cafe au lait and bread-and-butter in bed at 8 A.M., of course, " quoth Englishman number PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 207 one. "And then," pursued the second Anglo- Saxon, in loud and strident tone, u at half-past twelve or so, we go out to a cafe, and have our regular breakfast — our dejeuner d la fourchette : eggs on the plate, a hiftek coux pommes, and so forth, and a bottle of Bordeaux apiece." In tremulous horror I shrunk from this alarm- ing programme. Protest I dared not, for my Englishmen were stout and strong, and would have beaten me ; but I meekly represented that I was accustomed to consume only two meals a clay ; that to partake of animal food at noon would be about equivalent to signing my death- warrant; that, in my opinion, after a substantial breakfast, a Christian man wanted nothing but a crust of bread and a glass of wine till dinner- time ; and that to imbibe the contents of a bottle of Bordeaux for lunch would surely cause me to spin round like a tee-totum on the Boulevard, or commit an aggravated assault on the nearest ser- gent cle mile. " Milksop !" I heard one of my companions murmur. " Hypocrite !" muttered the other. " I told you so. Coats of the stomach quite gone. Healthy appetite lost for ever. Wants to slink out and breakfast by himself on raw artichokes and absinthe." To clear myself from these cruel aspersions, I gave up my point, and fell into their ways, at the 208 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OS, imminent risk of tumbling down with a coup de sang. Ye Lars and Lemures, how those two young men ate and drank ! And yet they seemed none the worse for their excesses. I love them both, I esteem them both ; but I declare I felt a grim satisfaction when they departed from me, and left me to continue my journey alone and practise a sullen abstemiousness, for which I feel none the better. So I took to Breakfasting in Bed at any hour I chose, and reading in bed, and day-dreaming in bed, and talking to myself in bed, and some- times groaning in bed, and occasionally, as foreign fire-insurances were no concern of mine, smoking in bed. There is much virtue in an early morn- ing cigarette. If you presumed to smoke in bed in England, those who became acquainted witk your habit would declare you to be a Socinian, or a Freethinker, or hint that you poisoned your wife, or were on the brink of bankruptcy. But there are, happily, so many things you can do abroad which you cannot do at home. Such, at least, has been my experience. There are advan- tages fro and privations contra, I grant. On the one hand, you escape from tutelage, from be- ing scolded, from being asked what you would like for dinner, from receiving penny-post letters and morning visits, from being told that the Gas has called again, and that the coals are out, and PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 209 from reading the " Saturday Review " on your last literary performance. On the other hand, there is no one to " share your cup," or cheer it, or pour it out, or sweeten it, or throw it at you. There is no one to part your hair or tie your scarf. There is no one to give the soft answer which turnetli away wrath, or to utter the wrathful taunt which the soft an- swer assuages — sometimes. On the whole, I think it a pleas int thing, and useful and wholesome, to stay away now and then from your bed and board. 'T ! s sweet to hear the dulcet tones of " Willie, we have missed you," on your return ; and if your name doesn't hap- pen to be "Willie, and you don't hear the dulcet tones above mentioned, it is, at least, edifying to the philosophical mind to discover how comfort- ably the world has gone on in your absence, and how charmingly people have managed without you. ^ This morning I am Breakfasting in Bed at an hotel on the Boulevard Poissonniere, Paris, and I cry "Ha! ha!" over my cafe aio lait ; for, with the consistency of inconsistency, I have by this time grown tired of wandering, and strange breakfasts, and strange beds, and am longing for the old London treadmill, and the old delightful condition of always wanting to do what I like and never being allowed to do it. I cry " Ha ! 210 BREAKFAST IN BED; OB, lia !" for this night I am bound to London town, no more to leave it till I cross the Atlantic wave, the which, for aught I know, may transform itself betwixt this and August into the dull rolling billow of the leaden-hued Styx. I besought my bed-maker, who is of the male per- suasion — and. like the majority of his brother chambermen, a strong politician, a very civil and obliging fellow, and a shameless rogue — I besought Antoine to fetch me " Figaro." This is Thursday morning, and a new number is due. Antoine is Lugo, fa presto in his move- ments — when he's paid to be quick — and with celerity he brings me " Figaro " — not the witty barber of Seville, but the scarcely less witty journal non politique of Paris. It is delightful reading in bed. I am skimming over the chron- ique and the nouvelles d la main when my eye lights on the following paragraph : " M. Lambert Thiboust, dramatic author, and M. Ebstein, ditector of the Theatre du Chatelet, have left Paris for London, in order to investi- gate a trick (un true) which is said to have had great success on the English stage. "We will say nothing of the nature of this trick in order to detract from the astonishment which will surely be created by its appearance in Paris. Nor as yet will w T e mention the piece in which the said trick is to be introduced. It is one of Miss PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 211 Aurora's Secrets." (C'est le secret de Miss Aurore.) What is this wonderful trick? I asked myself. Has anybody succeeded in walking into a quart bottle, or making the Soho Theatre pay, since I left Loudon ? Have MM. Lambert Tliiboust and Hostein gone to study the art of trickery under Mr. Diana Boucicault ? By the way, M. Hostein, your last visit to London was not of a very gratifying character. Do you remember the year ? It was '48. Do you remember the piece you produced at Drury Lane Theatre ? It was " Monte Christo." Do you remember the result ? It was a riot. A stormy period was '48. Kings were being toppled oft' their thrones all over Europe, and " Monte Christo" w r as hooted off the stage of old Drury in the midst of an uproar to which the O. P. row must have been angelic calmness. Long I wondered and pondered over this mys- terious true. Had it anything to do with the " infamous truck system ?" Could it claim kindred with Mr. Gladstone's budget, or Mr. Disraeli's policy ? "Was it the bottle-trick, or the skeleton-trick, or the globe-of-gold-tish trick of our conjurors and pantomimists ? Surely, no. Those amusing deceptions are notoriously of foreign origin, and we have but taken French leave in adapting them en our boards. At last 212 BREAKFAST EST BED ; OR I saw a clue, and cried out Eureka. The Secret of Miss Aurore ! Why, under that queer title " Figaro " is now publishing, in a bi-weekly sup- plement, a translation of the famous novel of "Aurora Floyd ;" and who but the translator told me that M. Hostein is about to produce the said Secret cle Mademoiselle Aarore as ■ a grand melodramic spectacle at the Chatelet, and has positively engaged poor old Frederic Lemaitre to fill the part of " the Softy." The true must be the admired Ghost-trick of Professor Pepper and Mr. Dircks ; and, with the characteristic hardi- hood and scornful independence of the unities of proprietors and the probabilities of French dramatic authors, M. Lambert Thiboust> is about to present the Parisian public with Aurora Floyd and a Ghost into the bargain. Poor Miss Aurora ! poor Mrs. J. Mellish ! Who would ever have thought of that vivacious young lady addicting herself to spirit-rapping ? Rendering due justice to the genius and enter- prise of MM. Lambert Thiboust and Hostein, and only marvelling as to the particular part of Miss Braddon's romance into which they could contrive to pop Professor Pepper's Ghost, my vagrant thoughts revert to Iloxton town, in the borough of Finsbury, England. 'Twas there, last May, I saw the real, Pepperian, hair-stand- on-end-compelling Ghost. But five weeks since ! PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN" THE SHEETS. 213 It seems an age to me ; and even, dramatically speaking, it seems a year. Theatres and theatres have I beheld since Mr. Lane gave me a box for the Britannia. The Paris Grand Opera, the Cirque, and the Chatelet, I took first. Next came the clean, commodious theatre at Frankfort-on-the-Main, where I heard Meyerbeer's " Dinorah " and Gounod's " Faust." Then I dropped down to Munich, and saw " Guil- laumeTell" from the stalls of the magnificent Maximilian Theatre. Then the Genius of Vaga- bondism wafted me through the Tyrol, and down to Yerona, and landed me at Yenice ; where, alas ! I found the sumptuous Fenice shut up these five years, the San Benedetto doomed also to chronic closing, and only one little trumpery dramatic temple open, the Teatro Malibran, admission to the boxes thirty kreutzers (about eightpence). "What do you think they were playing at the Teatro Malibran ? 11 Segreto cli Miladi Audlei — " Lady Audley's Secret !" In the official Gazette of Yenice — a stern journal, full of rugose decrees from Yienna, and alarming police-edicts — I found the feuilleton to be an Italian translation of an English novel. For completeness' sake, it should have been either " Aurora Floyd " or " Lady Audley's Secret;" but it happened, for a wonder, ' to be something else. It was only Mrs. Henry Wood's " East Lynne," 214 BREAKFAST IN BED; OS, Back, back to Hoxton, fugitive remembrances. Hoxton ! where is Hoxton % I declare I don't know. '• Hear him I" Hircius and Spxmgius yelp. " Hear the base upstart plead ignorance as to the whereabouts of Hoxton. Hear him try to ape the dead cynic who asked where Russell Square was. Hoxton, and be hanged to him ! As though he never ate fried fish, or tramped about, shoeless, there." Well, H. and S., I donH know where Hoxton is. It is somewhere near the City Road, I think ; but I have not the least idea in what particular locality. I wrote to Mr. Lane, and with Ins customary urbanity he wrote back to say that he should be glad to see me at Hoxton. As I was pressed for time, and there happened to be a lady in the case on the appointed evening, I had a cab from Bloomsbury to Hoxton, and I had a cab back ; and, from that day to this, I have not been able to acquire more than the vaguest and mistiest notion of what Hoxton is like, or where it is situated, or what are the manners and customs of its inhabitants. I apprehend, however, that there must be several millions of people in Hoxton. The child- dren swarm there to such an extent, that had Professor Pepper and Mr. Dircks, C.E., raised the ghost of the late Rev. Mr. Malthus in lieu of that of the at the Britannia, the spectre of PHILOSOPHY BETWZEH" THE SHEETS. 215 the famous anti-population theorist would hare turned green with rage at the sight of so many human beings promising adolescence. Anti- Malthusian doctrines were happily at a discount at Mr. Lane's establishment, whither the millions (more or less) of Hoxton had on the particular May night in question despatched a varied depu- tation, a few thousands strong, to see the Ghost. There were a great many children in the theatre ; but they were all remarkably quiet, hushed to stillness probably by apprehension, by anticipa- tion of the Phantom. If there were any babies in arms among the audience, their mothers and nurses must have taken very good care of them ; for, from beginning to end of the entertainment, I heard not one squall. Perhaps these Hoxtonian infants, with a wisdom beyond their years, were aware of the salutary edicts levelled by the- management against babyhood of a nature so vociferous as to interfere with the general com- fort of the spectators. Perhaps they stuffed their little fists into their little mouths, held their little breaths, and cheerfully martyrized themselves, in order not to mar the decorous procession of the Ghost. At any rate, they were eclifyingly un- demonstrative ; and if, when they returned home, they compensated for their prolonged taciturnity by roarings the most deafening and squallings the most ear-piercing, small blame to the babies of Eoxton, say I. 216 It would be unjust to deny the grown-up por- tion of a closely-packed auditory a well-merited good word. I am not of those who habitually and glibly compliment the working-classes on their ci exemplary good behavior," and who think it rather a marvellous and phenomenal circum- stance, when two or three thousand honest and hard-working people are gathered together, that they do not immediately proceed to poke their fingers through the pictures, mutilate the statues, smash the glass cases, root up and trample clown the flower-beds, and tear up the benches of the galleries, museums, palaces, and theatres in which they are permitted gratuitously or by payment to disport themselves. I do not volunteer such conventional panegyrics, because 1 hold them to be perfectly uncalled for and grossly impertinent, and because 1 am bold enough to think that the working-classes know quite as well as the non- working-classes can do how to behave themselves in public and in private, and do, not unfrecpiently , behave themselves a great deal better. Still was there something in the aspect of this vast Britannia throng calling for something more than trite and perfunctory commendation. It was a Saturday night, and the majority of the working people there must have had their wages in their pockets, or— the next thing to it— in the pockets of the buxom wives who, as a praiseworthy rule, accompanied them. I did not see, nor indeed PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 217 could any one else, unless provided with the double-million magnifiers recommended by Mr. Samuel Weller, any disposition on the part of this dense throng in fustian and corduroy to rush out to the nearest beer-shops and gin-palaces to squander their ready money in intoxicating liquors, to return in a frantic state to batter and bruise their wives and families with pint pots, legs of tables, and other lethal weapons of a blunt nature ; and then, after pawning their saws and chisels, and running up scores on account of next week's wages, to assure Mr. Solly, and the editor of the "British "Workman," and other friends of the enslaved and oppressed, that " the drink had done it all," and that the only remedy for this alarming state of things was to petition the Legis- lature for the immediate enactment of the Maine liquor-law, and the wholesale closing of public- houses on week-days in general, and from Satur- day night to Monday morning in particular. I opine that, among the working-classes — as among^ the middle classes, and the " upper middle classes " (wherever they may be), and the upper classes, including the most ineffably Brahminical, with the yellowest streaks of caste on their fore- heads — there is, has been, and ever will be, a certain per centage of human hogs who choose to wallow in their own or the nearest licensed victualler's stye, and to go to the devil in their 10 218 BEEAKFAST IN BED ; OK, own way. Of the Hoxton hogs, the average per centage were doubtless getting howling, snivel- ling, or dumb drunk at the adjacent public- houses. It is certain that they were not at the Britannia to see the Ghost ; and it is equally cer- tain that, under even the slightest influence of alcohol, they would not have been allowed to pass the outer barriers of the theatre. The occupants of the " auditorium " were, as a rule, a great deal soberer than I have often seen, after dinner, the occupants of stalls and the back seats of the dress-circle at "West-End theatres ; but their sobriety was due to no teetotal code, to no compulsory Lane liquor-laws. There is an abun- dance of refreshment-counters attached to the Britannia Theatre. Beer between the acts is a recognised institution, and is extensively drunk on the premises. There is even a smoking-room, just as there is to be a fumoir at the new Paris Opera House ; nor, I believe, are those whose purses will support the expense debarred from partaking of hot and cold brandy-and- water, or champagne, or Johannisberg, or ITippocras, or Imperial Tokay, if they like to order it, and to pay for it, and it happen to be in the stock of the Britannia cellars. There was a great deal to be seen before the great attraction of the evening — the Ghost — wa« manifest. There was the house itself to gaze at. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 219 densely thronged, as I have said, "but not uncom- fortably so. In boxes as in gallery, in stalls as in pit, every one had ample scope and verge to sit at ease, and, in the intervals of the pieces, and at the close of the entire entertainment, to circu- late and depart without let or hindrance. The " vomitoria," as Mr. Boucicault would call them, were numerous, and skilfully constructed; and it was quite wonderful to see, when the night's diversions had been brought to a close, in how short a period of time — a few moments only it seemed — the immense area, so lately black with humanity, was deserted. Then there were the decorations of the house to admire — decorations, fittings, and appointments all handsome, tasteful, and commodious, without being either prodigal or meretricious. The stage of the Britannia is really superb both for size and proportions : — the width of the pro- scenium surprising. There is a very artistically- executed drop-curtain ; and of the scenery, pro- perties and dresses, all that I saw was not only creditable, but of a degree of excellence which would by no means have suffered by comparison with the haughtiest theatres of the West. And why should it so have suffered, I should like to know? The Britannia audience know a good thing when they see it, quite as well as other people ; nay, can at times be curiously apprecia- 220 BEEAKFAST IN BED ; 0E, tive and nicely critical. "We doesn't expect grammar at the "Wic," once cried out a gentle- man in the gallery, at the well-known home of transpontine melodrama when an unusually ill- set scene was put upon the stage — " we doesn't expect grammar; hut you might jine your flats." The Britannia audience are in advance of the Victorians, and would certainly resent, not only badly-joined, but carelessly-painted " flats ;" nay, more than this, from the slight experience I have had of the establishment, I am inclined to think that grammatical accuracy is by no means a drug in the market at Hoxton, and that very unmis- takable signs of disapprobation would be appa- rent were Priscian's head to be broken too fre- quently and in too outrageous a manner in the course of one evening. I frankly confess, that of the great spectacu- lar, non-natural, preternatural, supernatural, and thoroughly Hoxtonian melodrama of " TheWidow and the Orphan ; or, Faith, Hope and Charity" — if, at this distance of time and place, I am able to quote the title aright — I am unable to give anything beyond a very confused and involved account. To tell the truth, I couldn't make any- thing of the piece. It was too much for me. The plot was too complicated, the action too rapid, the incidents were too grandiose for my in- tellectual capacity. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 221 I am destitute of the faculty of comprehensive criticism. I cannot understand an aggregate. Give me a minute point, a subdivided section, and I can concentrate my attention on it and dis- course about it, tant Men que mat. But the task of comprehending a ^he Widow and the Orphan" was ten times too Herculean for me. I know that the widow was a very neat and dapper widow — as widows go — brimming over with moral sen- timents of the most unobjectionable character ; in short, a pattern to all widows, past, present and to come. There were two orphans, also, I think. One was meek, mild, uncomplaining ; the other sprightly, vivacious, and facetious, and "keeping her pecker up" — to employ an expres- sion which would be intolerably vulgar, I am afraid, even at Hoxton (why even at Hoxton ? is there no slang in high places ?) — under the most adverse circumstances. I think the part of the sprightly and vivacious orphan was filled by Mrs. Lane, the manager's wife, and the lady to whom much of the admirable discipline, organization, and tasteful arrangement which have made the Britannia a model to all London theatres is due. I am not certain, but this I opine, that the sprightly and vivacious orphan could be also, upon occasion, sentimental and pathetic, and was throughout graceful and ladylike. Then there 222 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OK, was a baronet in Hessian boots, and a wig and a cocked-hat, if my remembrance serves me, and who was, perhaps, one of the wickedest, cruellest, and most hypocritical old miscreants ever per- mitted to infest the neighborhood of Hoxton, or anywhere else. "What showers of five-cent pieces and decayed apples they would have cast on his congener on the Boulevard du Crime ! * What a storm of pea- nuts would have assailed him at the Bowery? The less demonstrative Britannia audience were content to shudder at his enormities, without pelting him. To this most depraved and flagi- tious member of the aristocracy perjury was a pastime, and bearing false-witness a bagatelle. He lied himself black in the face habitually. His profligacy was equal to his perfidy. Who but he locked up one of the orphans on a per- fectly unsustainable charge, thereby laying him- self open to an action and heavy damages for false imprisonment, and then — the hardened old sinner ! — wanted to " square" matters by marry- ing her? It is needless to say that his proffered hand was disdainfully refused by the wronged and outraged orphan. It was this baronet who saw — but I am fore- stalling matters. This hoary-headed villain had a son— at least, he hadn't a son, for the young man turned out in the last act to be somebody PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 223 else's — whom he was continually cursing, betray- ing, cheating, turning out of doors, and cutting off with a shilling; adding, besides, insult to in- jury, by calling him abusive names, and threat- ening him with his walking-stick. There were two more villains in the piece: — one a returned convict in high boots and a hairy cap, who looked Norfolk Island all over, with a dash of Bermuda, a tincture of Swan River, and a per- vading flavor of the New Cut ; the other a des- perate ruffian in black whiskers, a red waistcoat, and leather gaiters, who, in the first instance, was ready for any crime, from pitch-and-toss up to manslaughter — nay, beyond that last-named of- fence, for he devoted himself to assassination as blithely as Saltabadil in " Le Hoi s' Amuse," and tuait a la ca?npagne, ou en mile. Ultimately, be it recorded, to the honor of hu- man nature and the confusion of the theorists who maintain that crime is incurable, this aban- doned scoundrel became softly and sentimentally virtuous — quite a pastoral character, in fact — ■ and was instrumental in rescuing one of the or- phans who had been pitched down a well, recov- ering a stolen lease, and bringing the depraved baronet to justice. Then there was a comic groom, who afterwards became an agriculturist, and who elicited shouts of laughter both in his livery cockade and top- 224: boots, and in his smock-frock and wide-awake. I am glad to say that he made my sides ache, too, in a most unaccustomed manner, although I did not in the least know what -I was laughing *at. There were two bailiffs, and, if I mistake not, some of the county police concerned in the later transactions of the evening. There was a house on fire — a very carefully- managed conflagration, in the midst of which Mr. Hodges' fire-engine, or its twin brother, made its appearance on the stage; and I fancied that I could discern among the attendant supers the agile form of the Duke of Sutherland. If his Grace wasn't there, the Earl of Caithness must have been. Finally, there was a mysterious indi- vidual of ripe — almost overripe — age, with very thin legs, and a smock-frock very much patched, a pillicock hat, and a basket containing either rags, bones, or chickweed at his back. This ancient party was continually stumping about with a crooked staff, interfering with every- body's business, but with ultimately beneficent intentions. He was a violent democrat, and when the baronet called him an " old pauper," made that unfeeling and flagitious person the butt of some very stinging sarcasms against the vices and folly of the governing classes. In the end, it turned out that he wasn't a pauper, but a real gentleman of the highest respectability, only PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 225 he had " something on his mind," owing to his not having behaved well to his deceased wife, or his deceased wife not having behaved well to him: I couldn't exactly make out which, but either eventuality is feasible. All came right at last. The old gentleman flung by his basket of rags, bones, or chickweed, and appeared in irre- proachable coat, flapped waistcoat, and small- clothes. The good people were all made happy, and the bad people transported. Yice was tram- pled beneath the iron heel of the high-low of Yirtue ; and Faith, Hope, and Charity, came, like the Hebrew children, unharmed from the fiery furnace, and were triumphant. To have witnessed such a spectacle could not perhaps have done anybody's aesthetic and elas- tic taste much good ; but I am an antediluvian sprat if it could have done anybody's morals any harm. Stop, there was a kind of ante-climax, an in- tercalary tableaux, the apotheosis of somebody — the widow, I think — in which, after the famous model represented at the Princess's in " Faust and Marguerite," under Mr. Charles Kean's manage- ment, an emancipated spirit was seen ascending to realms of bliss, encircled by flying Cupids and flying coryphees, all brilliantly illumined by the electric light. This tableau, which, viewed spectacularly, was exceedingly effective, was 10* 2SJ6 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, greeted, I need not say, with the most vehement applause from the audience. But the Ghost ; the Ghost was the thing des- tined to make us all open our eyes in blank amazement, and to sear, as with a red-hot iron, the conscience of the guilty baronet. He had retired to his study with two pair of wax- candles, an oaken escritoire, and a couple of tables and high-backed chairs, to meditate and mature fresh deeds of yillany. Conscience smote him ; but he defied her. Then Conscience came up again in the guise of a Ghost, and again and again, Ghost after Ghost ; and the baronet yelped with terror. Conscience had him on the hip. Conscience made his spinal marrow assume the consistency of vanilla ice. Conscience brought out the cold drops on his hitherto brazen and unblushing brow. I am not bound to register what my conscience said, or to speculate upon what other people's consciences said to them, on the occasion ; but I avow that, although I knew the whole thing to be a clever optical delusion, devised, or patented, or registered by Mr. Dircks, C.E., and Professor Pepper, I shook all over, and my feet felt gelid in my anklejacks. There was Death with his dart — Death in the guise of a grisly skeleton. I didn't mind him much, for his anatomical development did not appear to me to be quite accurate, and PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 227 he looked a little too much like a King of Terrors on pasteboard. Still the suddenness of his appear- ance, and the more wonderful instantaneousness of his disparition, made my heart tumble abnor- mally on its axis. But when the Ghost of the widow came up, lurid and menacing, seemingly palpable and tan- gible, yet wholly unsubstantial — when she pointed to the baronet and reproached him with his sins, and cried, "Ha! ha!" — and when, like a flash of summer lightning, she disappeared — I too, knowing always this to be a clever optical delu- sion, shook more than ever in my shoes, and felt unwonted moisture on my forehead. This was the Ghost I saw at Hoxton. This is the Ghost, I presume, that all London has gone wild about since its first appearance at the Poly- technic — the Ghost that is now walking at the Adelphi, and that is speedily to harrow up the souls of the Parisians. As I finish my Breakfast in Bed this morning, the Hoxton Ghost rises up before me, vivid and sparkling as ever, and I laugh at the clumsy trickery of the Pilules die Didble I saw last night at the Porte St. Martin. "The Devil is an ass," quoth rare Ben Jonson ; and surely the P. S. M. diablerie was of the most asinine descrip- tion. The Ghost, after all, is the thing. Vive le revetumt ! But there is one thing which contin- BREAKFAST IK BED; OE, ues to puzzle me desperately. How on earth, or under the earth, or over the earth, will MM. Lambert Thiboust and Hostein contrive, with anything like that common reason which is said to be existent even in the roasting of eggs, to in- troduce the Polytechnico-Britannia Ghost into Le Secret de Miss Aurore f PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 229 ON THE DISCOYEKY IN ONE'S WAIST- COAT-POCKET OF SOME BONES OF UNUSUAL CHAKACTEE. Bones, forsooth, and in one's waistcoat-pocket too ! What next ? the outraged reader will pro- bably desire to know. But this is a plain, un- yarnished statement ; and the fact is as I set it down. Bones of an unusual character were dis- covered, while I was Breakfasting in Bed on the 2d of July, 1863, in a certain waistcoat -pocket, and the waistcoat to which that pocket "belonged was mine. Granted that such an article of male habili- ment is not precisely the place where, under ordi- nary circumstances, you would look for osseous fragments. The study of comparative anatomy seldom leads a man so far as to induce him to convert his pockets into depositories for bones. Besides, I am neither Professor Owen nor a me- dical student. You can keep a skeleton in your closet ; many persons nurture a serpent in their bosoms ; and more than one member of my ac- quaintance habitually wears a bee in his bonnet; 230 BREAKFAST IN BED; OR, but, for all this, it certainly seems wanting in congruity to turn your vest into a Golgotha. Whence and why these organic remains in the locality above mentioned? It is nevertheless undeniable that men do carry very strange and surprising things about with them. " The Mysteries of Men's Pockets " would furnish materials for a book fraught with direful interest. There are secrets hidden in the calico- lined recesses of broadcloth and shrunken tweed that would make you shudder if revealed. Yon- der rosy-cheeked man, with the simple-minded and unsophisticated countenance, who seems so pleasurably intent on a portrait of the Princess Alexandra in a newsvender's window — what do you think his pockets contain? Nothing less than two pairs of handcuffs, a revolver, a trunch- eon with a brass crown at the top, and a war- rant to take you up, my felonious friend. He is Inspector "Weasel of the Detective Force ; and, absorbed by the royal portrait as he appears to be, his actual eyes are fixed on William Sykes, Esquire, late of Bermuda, then of Portland, and now of Whitechapel, out of any trade or occupa- tion save burglary, who is lurking over the way, and upon whom he will, within the twinkling of a truncheon, incontinently pounce. And W. S., Esq., himself ? Who but the Inspector, to see William arrayed as a peaceable journeyman-car- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 231 penter, or innocuous bricklayer's laborer, or in- offensive railway-porter, would imagine that, lying perdu in William's pocket of velveteen or fustian, there were such unconsidered trifles as a jemmy or two and a couple of centrebits, a bunch of skeleton-keys, a crape-mask, a knuckle-duster, and three inches and a half of wax-candle — the entire apparatus of William's little housebreak- ing business, in fact ? Behold that down-looking individual, who in apparel reminds you equally of a charity school- master and a retired tradesman in a Dissenting neighborhood. Ask him what he has got in his pocket. A tract ? a hymn-book ? Not a bit of it. A coil of new rope; and you will swing in it, by bloodthirsty friend, as sure as the down- looking gentleman's name is Calcraft, next Mon- day morning. If we changed the venue from pockets to parcels, revelations as astounding could be made. Is it possible ever to forget that horribly face- tious story of Mr. Greenacre, lightly tripping out of the omnibus with a bundle of something in a blue bag under his arm, and remarking, with an air of banter to the conductor as he handed him his fare,, that he really thought he ought to have paid for two? The simple cad did not comprehend his meaning then ; but the gist of Mr. Greenacre's joke was apparent when it afterwards came out 232 BREAKFAST IK BED J OK, that the blue bag contained the head of Hannah Brown. It was on a smooth highway once, in mid- spring and in the pleasantest part of the pleasant county of Kent, that, with Eugenius and Orlando, I careered in an open fly. The sun shone ; the birds sang ; the corn waved. "We had lunched well, and proposed to dine even better. We laughed, and chanted carols of revelry. All at once came a rattling along the road, and a chaise- cart, drawn by a plump horse, passed us. There were two policemen in the cart, two merry mu- nicipals, who now giggled, and now guffawed, as they retailed, perchance, the scandal of the sta- tion, or girded at the inspector. One smoked a short pipe ; the other, who held the reins, chew- ed- the cud of sweet fancies in the shape of a flower. "Why should not policemen enjoy them- selves as well as other people? There jogged between them, in the cart, a certain jar of stone- ware, with a piece of leather tied over the top ; and, striking up an impromptu acquaintance with the official men, as by the freemasonry of the road we were warranted in doing, we joked them on what the jar might contain, playfully suggest- ing pickles, beer, or Old Tom, and challenging them to open and allow us to partake of its con- tents. " I don't think you'd like it, master," the policeman who wasn't driving, remarked, re- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 233 moving the short pipe from his lips. " What's in that jar ain't nice, I fancy. Itfs just the stomach of the old gentleman as was pisoned at Maidstone ?, and we're talcin 7 it to he hanalyzedP That day we laughed no more. The mention of this alarming occurrence does not, perhaps, tend to the elucidation of the ques- tion of domestic paleontology which forms the subject-matter of this Paper. You have my ad- mission that bones — strange bones — were found in my waistcoat-pocket (a dress- waistcoat, too, moire antiaue) ; but how came those bones, or any bones at all, there, where no # bones should be ? In this wise, candor compels me to relate. I presume that a family-man — a person, in short, who is habitually under the disciplinary control and supervision of other persons who torment him for his good, and make his life miserable in order that he may be happier afterwards — need experience no feeling of humiliation in the knowledge that the wearing-apparel he has cast off is, as a rule, searched before he breakfasts the next morning. If he do feel humiliated, it doesn't much matter. He will be searched all the same. You think, when you have laid your watch, purse, pocket-book, pencil-case, latch-key, and so forth on your dressing-table at night, that you have made a clean sweep of your pockets. " Get all that nonsense out of your head," as 234: BREAKFAST IN BED ; OE, C. J. Fox said to Napoleon. The domestic inquisition will be at work ; the domestic search- warrant will be issued ; you are sure to have for- gotten something in your pockets, and that some- thing is sure to be discovered before you rise again. A due consciousness of this inevitability has led some astute sages to select secret hiding- places in their garments calculated to elude the strictest search. To have secret drawers made in the heels of your boots, and in the event of their being discovered, to declare they are spur-boxes, may be, perhaps, going a little too far ; and occult pockets in the lining of the back of your ooat, are apt, if you use them as receptacles for personal effects, to give you the appearance of being humpbacked; but the inside of an umbrella is not a bad place for the concealment of trifles you don't wish discovered — say, the smoking-cap you purchased at Mrs. Pelham Yillars' stall at the fancy fair in aid of the funds for the Repent- ant "Ragamuffins' Turkish Baths Association. Let your umbrella be an ugly one, so that the search- ing officers of your household may not feel inclined to borrow it. An umbrella, however, is easily lost ; and the lining of your hat may be, after all, the very best hiding-place for things you are desirous of keep- ing perdu, such as your proofs of Rafaelle's Madonnas, your certificate as a member of the PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 235 Anti-Tobacco Association, your temperance nfredal, and the private addresses of the widows and orphans in £Tew Zealand and the Yalleys of Uganda, to whom you have (in the charity and philanthrophy of your heart) allocated small annual pensions. Why not lock these articles up ? you may ask. Bah ! puerility ! overween- ing fatuity ! As if other people were not always in the possession of means for opening your drawers and strong-boxes \ Women have all acquired, intuitively, an infallible " Open Sesame." It was Eve, wander- ing in Eden with nothing to do, save mischief, who first found the weasel asleep, and availed herself of the opportunity to shave off his eye- brows. O Mr. Joseph Charles Parkinson, author of " Under Government ;" O communicative writer of " The Master Key to Public Offices ;" O soul-harrowing editor of the " ISTote-Book of a Private Detective " — you don't know what goes on under crinoline government, or what master keys to private offices our domestic detectives keep hanging to the prettiest of chatelaines. You never imagine that dear, smiling Mrs. Can- dor was born Mademoiselle Fouche ; and that Mrs. Lambkin's first husbandwas- Captain Yarde, from Scotland. It is better that we should remain in ignorance of the whole extent of espionage that is exercised 236 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OK, over us. If everybody knew what other people knew about them, this world would be as intoler- able as the tigers' den at the Zoological Gardens in hot weather. I have said enough, however, it is to be hoped, to set all the Mrs. Candors and Mrs. Lambkins, who have anything to learn in their profession, busy searching Mr. C.'s umbrella and the lining of Mr. L.'s hat. Pending their anticipated dis- coveries, I will revert to the charnel-house topic. It was fortunate for me, on the morning when those bones came out, that nothing of a more incriminatory nature had been found upon me. It is not the season for masquerades ; but I have known dreadful scenes to arise through the turn- ing up of a crumpled bit of pasteboard covered with black silk, with two eyeholes and a fringe of sham lace. A pair of white kid-gloves, too, when you have left home in dark ones, may lead to much that is disastrous. A theatrical pass- check, with " Magenta " or " Hippopotamus " printed on it, does not look well ; and there are numerous other things a man may bring home in his pocket without being aware of them — circulars from the Church Missionary Society ; invitations to dine with the Gas and Gaiter Club ; four sovereigns won at cards, when he left home with two half-crowns and a fourpenny bit; tooth- picks ; programmes of the entertainments at PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 237 Cremorne ; champagne corks ; cribbage-pegs ; strange latch-keys ; and the like ; all of which, unless he have a talent for diplomatic explana- tion, may bring him into dire trouble. There was nothing against me on this particu- lar morning save the Bones. To diplomatize I deemed unworthy, and at once made a clean breast of it. You, lecteur debonnaire, shall be a party to the confession. I had been to dine at the annual festival of the Acclimatisation Society at St. James's Hall, Piccadilly ; I had partaken in moderation of grenouilles a la poulette, a fri- cassee of frogs in white sauce, which the Society seem to be seeking to acclimatise in our kitchens and on our dinner-tables — for frogs can scarcely be said to be exotic to our marshes and ponds — and which are, I assure you, very nice eating ; I had picked a number of frogs' bones clean, and I brought them home as a kind of spoil or trophy, to hang up, in lieu of the dried scalps of my foes, in the domestic wigwam. That is to say, I meant to keep them under a clockcase, where, completely desiccated, carefully perfumed, and tastefully gilt all over, I still preserve the shell of a crawfish which once decorated a vol au vent a la financiered and which I keep, not only by reason of its being a charming miniature model of a lobster, but because it serves as a memento of one of the friskiest fish-dinners at 238 BREAKFAST IX BED; OB, Blackwall at wliicli I ever had the honor of being an invited guest. So, the murder is out ; and it being difficult to associate any very flagrant degree of moral turpitude with the j)OSsession of the tibia and fibula of poor froggee, peace, for an instant dis- turbed by the unwonted appearance of the Bones, was soon restored, and I was permitted to expa- tiate on the peculiarities of a very strange but very succulent dinner. The Acclimatisation Society of Great Britain and Ireland, is composed of a number of ener- getic and public-spirited men, who do not stick at trifles. Approach thee like the rugged Rus- sian bear or the armed rhinoceros, and you won't frighten a member of the Acclimatisation Society. He will do his best to acclimatise the bear and the rhinoceros ; and if they are good to eat, he will devour them d la croque au set. Reader, I must deprecate any indignant feel- ings which may arise in your breast, if, in the course of the next page and a half of this Article, I make use of a good many w r ords of dubious French origin. I shall be compelled to quote the bill of fare ; and as Mr. Donald, of St. James's Hall, keeps a French chef, of course it w r as but natural for that functionary to draw up his menu in culinary French. The Acclimatisation Society dinner was of a duplex or rather a triplex nature. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 239 It comprised, first, the elements of a first-rate French banquet ; next, those of a substantial English repast ; and thirdly, a variety of abnor- mal dishes and wines of cosmopolitan extraction and exceptional character, specially introduced for the occasion by the Acclimatisation Society. Thus, we had clear turtle, and Msque and pot age d la Bedford, and then we were to have had " white soup of the Channel Islands ;" made of the conger eel — a creature so despised that the starving Irish have refused to add flavor and nutriment to their potatoes by boiling them with a salted steak of the conger ; and yet it is ad- duced, as a curious illustration of national preju- dice, that while starving Paddy rejects the conger, large quantities of the fish are boiled down into stock, to be used in the making of turtle-soup in London. I hope there wasn't any conger eel in my tortxie claire. I strive not to give way to prejudice as to what I eat or drink, and have swallowed in my time, not a few "exceptional" viands; but I don't think I could manage the white soup of the Channel Islands. It happened after all that the conger- eel soup did not make its appearance on the din- ner-table. A jar of it had been sent from Jersey, but, owing to the heat of the weather, had turned bad en route, and some potage a la reine had been substituted, which looked quite as nasty as the 24:0 BREAKFAST IN BED; 0E, " white soup " is said to be. I tried hard to eat it, but gave up the attempt at last in despair, mingled with disgust. I didn't presume to proclaim my aversion to the bilious-looking mess aloud; for the majority of the company present were " swells " of the very heaviest fashionable or scientific order ; but the facetious Mr. Bernal Osborne, behind whom I had the honor to sit, felt no such scruples. It happened that the Duke of Newcastle, who had been announced to take the chair, couldn't come. He had been asked to tea I believe, by royalty, at Kew ; and at the fifty-ninth minute Mr. Her- man Merivale, C. B., was elected to the presi- dency. But Mr. Osborne accounted for his grace's absence in quite another manner. He pointed out that the Duke had taken the chair at the Acclimatisation banquet in the previous year ; that he had been tempted to try the potage of conger eels ; that he hadn't quite recovered from the effects thereof ; and that he had stayed away from this year's dinner through a wholesome fear of being once more compelled to swallow a plate- ful of the abhorred white soup of the Channel Islands. The audience roared with laughter at this humorous hypothesis ; only the fact of the soup not being of conger eel at all, which after- wards oozed out, somewhat detracted from the force of Mr. Osborne's sarcasm. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 24:1 And yet, eels are savory things. Fried, they are delicious; spatch-cocked, they are glorious; and stewed — ah ! no more on that exciting topic. "When the Old Serpent appears in the guise of a stewed eel, it is impossible to resist him. Then, again, as a soup there was bouillabaisse. JS"ow there are a great many would-be epicures who profess to delight in this curious soache of fish, spice, and garlic, because Mr. Thackeray has written upon it one of the most beautiful lyrics extant in any language. When your young University man first goes to Paris, he is sure to inquire after " the new street of the little fields," and his soul thirsts after a mess of bouillabaisse and the " Chambertin with yellow seal." For the Chambertin, ga me va ; but as regards the bouillabaisse, I would rather take something " ex- ceptional" in the way of potage colimagon or tripes d la mode de Caen. It may stand high in the Provencale cuisine ; it may be the favorite fish-stew of the Bay of Biscay — imagine the ship- wrecked mariners : — " There they lay All that day (Devouring bovillabaisse) in the Bay of Biscay, oh !" but it is nevertheless horribly nauseous. The culinary sages of the Acclimatisation Society tell us that "it is made of various fishes, but its 11 242 BREAKFAST IN BED J OK, indispensable ingredients are red mullet, toma- toes, red pepper, red burgundy, oil, and garlic. Soles, gurnets, dories, and whitings are admis- sible into this dish." Yes, and there is another item admissible : but on which I fancy the Ac- climatisation Society, were they aware of it, would scarcely care to dwell. At Marseilles, where bouillabaisse is made in perfection, the cook always has at his side a caldron of boiling tallow — tallow, not oil, mind ! He plunges a long rolling-pin into this caldron, withdraws it, and holds it aloft till the tallow is congealed. Then he gives it another dip, and another and another, until the rolling-pin is sur- rounded by a sufficient thickness of solidified tallow. And then he plunges the greasy staff into the kettle of bouillabaisse and turns it round and round till all the tallow is melted from it, and has become incorporated with the delightful pot-pourri of " red mullet, tomatoes, red pepper, red burgundy, oil, and garlic." After this, go and eat your fill of bouillabaisse. Against fish-soups, however, I raise no voice. Turtle, terrapin, oyster, bisque, are all exquisite. The Italians, again, have their zuppa marinana, which is not (saving the presence of the A. S.) at all like bouillabaisse ; and the Russians make a very appetising piscine pottage (when you are acclimatised to it) called batwiaia. The stock of PHILOSOPHT BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 243 this is composed of Jcva^ or half-brewed barley- beer and oil, and into this is put the fish known as the sterlet of the Volga, or the sassina of the Gulf of Finland, together with bay-leaves, pepper, and lumps of ice, I will match batwinia any clay against bouillabaisse. So much for soups. Now for the fish proper. Salmon d la Duchesse de Sutherland, turbot stuffed d la Hollandaise, do not call for par- ticular remark. Blanchaille, I apprehend, is French for whitebait; and if that fish exist in France, or if whitebait be a real fish at all, and not an artful combination of batter, pepper, and currants thrown in to serve as eyes, I will bow to Mr. Donald's chef. " Caller salmon " was put forward as " exceptional," the peculiarity of the dish being that the salmon has been boiled as soon as possible after being taken from the water, so that the fat has curded between the flanks. I hope the zeal of the A. S. won't lead them to the discovery that the adipose matter in salmon may be curded even more rapidly by boiling the fish alive. "We have heard quite enough about crimped cod ; and after watching the evolutions of that noble, blue-black, armor-plated man-of-war in the vivarium at the Zoological Gardens, one almost feels inclined to recommend the practice of boiling lobsters alive to the notice of the 244 BREAKFAST DT BED ; OR, secretary of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. If " the cardinal of the seas," as Jules Janin, with amusingly blundering humor, called him, could only be born red, what an immensity of agony he might save himself, to be sure ! "Charr" was served fresh. It is usually served potted, and is a capital " pick up " if you are breakfasting in bed, and feel faint. It may vie as a restorative with dried cod-sounds. Caviar they gave us not ; yet to relish this delightful conserve of sturgeon I think the British public stand sadly in need of being ac- climatised. "We see the neat little kegs of caviar in Morel's or Fortnum and Mason's windows ; but only enthusiastic epicures think of buying them. To acclimatise yourself to caviar, you should begin on a course of Dutch herrings washed down by a couple of tumblers (taken lasting) of cod-liver oil. After that, empty a pot of black- currant jam into a salt-cellar, and cram the amalgamated contents into a sardine-box half full of fish. Stir well, and keep the box in a warm room for a fortnight. Then serve on bread-and-butter, and tell me how you like it. The mixture as before (with perhaps a little of Warren's blacking added) is very like caviar. In Mahomet's seventh heaven the houris always eat PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 245 a pound and a half of it for breakfast on Tues- days and Fridays. u Lncioperca " is the pike-perch found through- out Northern Europe. " Although excellent for the purposes of the table," writes the Apicius of the A. S., its voracity is such that its introduc- tion into this country is not recommended, ex- cept in ponds especially devoted to its propaga- tion." In these " special ponds, I suppose, the lu- ciopcrca would eat one another, until the sole survivor of the tontine assumed the dimensions of a whale. There were no sea-slugs this year, and there was no bird' s-n est soup : but there was plenty of sturgeon, which reminds you of a tough veal- cutlet sent for his misdemeanors on board ship and returned with a fishy flavor. 1 missed kan- garoo-steamer also, and gambo-soup : nor, so far as I could ascertain, was there any parrot-pie on the table. The entrees^ however, were very rich and varied. The supremes de volatile cocks- combed or truffled, the crousiades of quails, the cutlets and curries and Icromeshis and sweet- breads, I dismiss at once. They belong to Mr. Donald, not to the Society. In the " exceptional " domain we had pepper-pot, that wondrous West- Indian dish, that salmagundi of fowl, beef, and mutton, peppered up to the maintruck, and sauced with the cassareep or inspissated juice of 246 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, the manioc root ; the whole kept simmering and seething in a huge jar or pipkin. I consumed vast quantities of pepper-pot. Dear old mess ! I felt to the manner born of it ; it was my jpot au feu. Shall an Irishman not loye his praties, a Scotchman his oatmeal-porridge ? I was weaned on pepper-pot and mangoes. The taste of the easfareep brought floating before my mind memories of the dead and gone past ; preserved ginger and guava jelly, yams and plantains, tamarinds and arrowroot, banyans and pig-galls, and grinning servants with black faces and yel- low kerchiefs twisted round their woolly pates. And yet I was never in the West Indies in my life. " Some " Pallas sand-grouse" proved very tooth- some. These are the birds whose recent visits to this country have given the chatty correspon- dents of " The Field" so capital an opportunity for displaying their acumen, and whose dusky selves are among the chief attractions of those charming Sunday afternoons when the British aristocracy are pleased to disport themselves at the Zoo. I didn't eat any of the poultry introduced with the fantastic title of poulets d V emancipation des negres ; but I heard them very well spoken of. " The peculiarity of this fowl," I quote Apicius, or J. L.j Esq., " is, that the skin and periosteum PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 247 are quite black, but the flesh is perfectly white." Mr. Tegetmeier, of the Philoperisteron Society, says that it is the coq negre of Tammerick, and must not be confounded with the small silky bantam known as the coq a duvet. But I am in a hurry to get to the grosses pieces. Haunch of venison, saddle of mutton — we know all about these ; but what think you of agneau chinois roti entier, farci aux jpistaches, servi ecu pilaff et couscoussou! — a Chinese lamb roasted whole, stuffed with pistachio-nuts and served with couscoussou, which last is a preparation of wheat used among the Moors, Algerines, and other natives of the North- African littoral, in place of rice. I have heard that the Moorish young ladies are fattened for the matrimonial market by a diet ad libitum of this strengthening compound. The couscoussou is made into balls and stuffed into the mouth of the marriageable young lady, till she grows as tired of balls as a belle who has been through three seasons of quadrilles and polkas without getting a single offer. If the damsel won't eat any more couscoussou, they administer the bastinado till she feels hungry again. They do such odd things in Barbary ! Well, how about the education of goose-livers with a view to pate de foie gras f How about stuffing turkeys? and don't we send our sons 248 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, to a crammer when we are anxious that they should obtain a Government clerkship or a direct commission ? "In the lamb roasted whole," says Apicius (or J. L., Esq.), "we have one of the earliest dishes on record in the history of cookery. Stuffed with pistachio-nuts and served with pilaff, it at the same time illustrates the anti- quity of the art, and gives an example of the food upon which millions of our fellow-creatures are sustained. The lamb proves the excellent flavor of the Ong-Ti breed of Chinese sheep, the introduction of which is one of the special objects of this society. Thus far Apicius ; but I take the liberty of stating that I should prefer Ong-Ti mutton to Ong-Ti lamb. The Chinese lamb was decidedly flabby, and, as is usually the case when an animal is cooked entire, the fire had burnt up one part and left the others nearly raw. The carver did not love or fear me sufficiently to give me a liberal allowance of pistachio, and the pilaff stood in need of a little ghee or fluid butter (rancid, if you please) being poured over it. However, it was a noble experiment, and shows that the society are disposed to adopt no half-measures. " Fawn of fallow deer," " ribs of beef between buffalo and Kerry cow " — these were pieces de resistance whose presence only I am enabled to PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 249 record. " Their names," says J. L. Apicius, Esq., pithily, "explain their intention." There was a red-deer ham, and one of bear — very succulent ; but why couldn't the society have made an arrangement with an enterprising hair-dresser, and caused " another fine bear" to be slaughtered, in order that the company might taste a bear- steak and a tender sirloin? I ate bear once at a Kussian dinner-party (where it was introduced, I admit, as a curiosity, and not as an ordinary dish), and a half-a-dozen mouthfuls made me sick for a fortnight afterwards. The meat was tough, glutinous, and had, besides, a dreadful, half- aromatic, half-putrescent flavor, as though it had first been rubbed with asafcetida and then hung up for a month in Mr. Eimmel's shop. Bison tongues, Chinese yam, Bayonne ham, I dismiss ; but was disappointed at not seeing on the table any of the famous donkey-flesh sausages of Bologna. A roast monkey, too (most delicious eating when stuffed with chestnuts), was a desi- deratum ; and I asked in vain for rat. Snails, too, were absent; but en revwnche I took my fill of frogs. When yon were a little boy at school, you probably ate a good many frogs. Our practice was, when we had caught them, to pinch our nostrils with the fingers of one hand, and holding the dapper little froggee lightly with the other, 11* 250 BREAKFAST IN BED; OR, to allow him to jump down our throats. There was a tradition among us that to swallow live frogs (for the process could not be called eating) made a boy strong and valorous, and almost un- sentient to the cuts of the cane. As we advanced in years we took a distaste for frogs. . We were patriots. We grew to hate frogs because we heard that the French liked them and that they formed a principal item in the diet of that viva- cious and ingenious people. The truth is, how- ever, that frogs are regarded in France as a most luxurious delicacy, and are correspondingly ex- pensive. The Marche St. Honore is the most usual place for their vendition ; and as only the hind-legs are eaten by the Parisians, and the price is seldom under fifteen francs a dozen, a dish of frogs is only seen at the table of a million- aire. Of their tenderness, succulence, and deli- cacy of flavor, there can be no question. The gr'enouilles a la pouletie at the Acclima- tisation dinner were superb. The white sauce left nothing to be desired. I ate as much frog as ever I could get ; and, as related above, I brought the bones home in my waistcoat-pocket as a trophy of victory over a stupid and irrational pre- judice. We eat the dirty pig, the dirtier duck, and yet we turn up our noses at the clean-living, and clean-feeding fro^. Had not the Acclima- tisation Society a hundred other claims to public PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 251 support, our gratitude would be due to them for thus bravely teaching Englishmen to eat frogs. This Homeric, this Apician, this Vitellian, this Gargantuan banquet — the like of which I never saw before, but fondly hope to see again — was washed down by copious streams of Sherry, Hock, Meursault (very good), Eed Burgundy, Cham- pagne, and Moselle. Among exceptional wines we had a whole host of Greek ones. Santorin we quaffed, and Thera, and St. Elie, and Corinth, and Mount Hymettus, Yi Santo, Cyprus, and Lacrima Cristi; while from the Magyar vineyards came Muscat, Badas- conyer, Dioszeger Bakatar, Hock, Ruszte, Szama- rodny, Adlerberger Ofner, and Tokay. Among the Greeks, my humble verdict is recorded in favor of St. Elie. The Hungarian are stout wines, of a swashbuckling flavor; but a man needs a strong head to drink pottle deep of them. Such was the dinner to which I came a little late, and whence I brought away the Bones. Tarde venientibus^ ossa. I laughed as well as I could for eating and drinking strange things all the evening. The room was very hot, and crammed besides with nearly all the notabilities of the day ; but the feast was so rich and so rare that we should have cheerfully partaken of it even in a Turkish bath. There were but few drawbacks to the en- tertainment. 252 BREAKFAST IN BED ; 02, The chairman, it is true, talked Colonial Office and "Quarterly Review" in a torrent of fluent platitudes, till I ran my eye down the bill of fare to see if red tape au naturel wasn't included in the removes ; but we were not there for the pur- pose of listening to speechifying. The "exceptional" dishes had deprived the waiters of the few wits conferred on them by na- ture ; and one or two of their body appeared to have been partaking surreptitiously of white soup of the Channel Islands Until the decomposed con- ger eel had got into their heads. The ostrich eggs, again, were not forthcoming, to the bitter disappointment of Mr. Bernal Osborne; and there was no horse. Almost everything else, however, in the way of edible or potable rarity was to be found on the table ; and I believe that, had those latest lions of London, the Maori chiefs, been among the guests, the Council of the So- ciety would have revolved, at least, the expe- diency of serving up a cold boiled missionary, with a stewed baby and a baked young woman to follow, as a delicate attention to the distin- guished New Zealanders. They were not there, however; nor, unfortu nately, was another gentleman, whose absence, was most sincerely to be deplored, not only for our sakes, but for his own. The joint secretaries to the Acclimatisation Society are Messrs. Frank Buckknd, the dis PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 253 languished naturalist and promoter of piscicul- ture, and James Lowe, who in a gastronomi- cal tournament would cheerfully give the ghost of Brillat-Savarin twenty, and with his arms tied behind his back, defeat Dr. Kitchener, Prince Cambaceres, and Mr. Hayward. At the last moment Mr. Lowe was attacked by sud- den illness, and his attendance at the banquet was compulsorily foregone. It was a heavy blow for everybody, including Mr. Lowe. But such is life. 254: ON A YOUNG LADY IN A BALCONY. A distinguished English writer has been occu- pied, I am informed, for some years in the com- position of a book with the seductive title of the " Footsteps of Luther." My acquaintance with contemporary literature is of so limited a nature, and I know so little of what is .^oin^ on in the great world, that it is quite possible that the book I speak of may have been completed, published, and reviewed these six months past, and that its gifted author has been long since crowned with laurel or overwhelmed with abuse : the terms be- ing, to many intents and purposes, synonymous. If this be indeed the case, I am sure I beg the author's pardon very humbly. I know that he went to Germany to Write the book, and took a camera and a quantity of collodion with him to photograph the footprints of the Great Keformer as he wandered ; but here my positive informa- tion ceases. My only object in alluding to the u Footsteps of Luther " was to point out that, good as that title was, it seemed to me that I knew of a better. PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 255 In Protestant England, of course, every tittle of information having even the remotest connection with mighty Doctor Martin is interesting, and, after a kind, sacred ; but at Geneva, it may be, the Sire Jean Chauvin, otherwise Calvin, is first favorite in the Keforming heart ; and if we go southwards, and across certain mountains, we shall find many millions of religionists who wick- edly maintain that, if Martin Luther could have been made, by persuasion of the secular arm, to dance upon nothing, such aerial footsteps would have been the gratefullest to the Church at large. But here is a book whose title, were it faithfully and skilfully borne out by its matter, would be sure to please all, and could offend none. "What do you think of "The Footsteps in Italy of William Shakespeare ?" Can you imagine a tome more delightful ? Once, when I was young and hale, and my heart fat as butter with con- ceit, 1 thought of sitting down to write such a book myself. It was years and years ago — be- fore I had been set face to face with my own ignorance, and, glancing in the glass of expe- rience, had found how very long my ears were. I remember that I propounded my design in the boxes of the Porte St. Martin Theatre in Paris (where they were playing Alexandre Dumas's "Oresiie") to a great English man of letters. The illustrious personage saw my drift at once, 256 BKEAEFAST IN BED; OB, and deigned to say to me, " I envy you your sub- ject." 11 Va hien dit, he who never envied mor- tal man, .but ever strove to help and to encourage the weakest and the dullest, and to give frank praise to his few compeers. Well, I never grap- pled with the subject that he professed to envy me. I did not forget, I simply neglected it. I have been haunted by this abandoned one many a time. Here it is still, an embryo crying for maturity; a blossom that, were I worthy, would have given place, ere now, to ripe and luscious fruit. However, it is now too late ; so, to pre- serve my bantling from atrophy (here is a fine confusion of metaphors at your service !) I desert it on a doorstep. With averted face, and tearful eye, and remorseful heart, I place it in the turn- ing-cradle. May some good Sister of Charity re- ceive, to cherish it ; and may it find better for- tune in the Foundling Hospital for Wit than in my brains ! Only last night (I remember now, as I Break- fast for the last time in Bed), sitting in the stalls of the Princess's Theatre, and witnessing the tra- gedy of " Romeo and Juliet," the image of my abortive book came across me, and I longed to find some man or woman of wit and parts who would turn my vision into reality. For I should be loth to see the task undertaken by one of the common herd of scribblers. Naturally, now that PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 257 the notion is common property, every botcher has a right to try his 'prentice hand upon it. Hircius probably will swear that he thought ten years ago of following Shakespeare tip and down Italy ; and Spungius may endeavor to raise money on ac- count from the booksellers on the security of the idea. But to do the thing thoroughly, a host of rare qualities would be needed. M. cl'Alembert once dotted down a few of the acquitments which, in his opinion (and D'Alembert knew a thing or two), were requisite to a writer who aspired to be a Biblical critic. The dottings-d :>wn filled half a dozen closely-printed pages ; the which I re- spectfully commend (together with Yoltaire's "Defense de mon Oncle," and Bayle's second "Life of David") to the attention of the Eight Reverend Father in Mumbo Jumbo, Dr. Colenso. He will find that there were some strong men before Agamemnon, and some hard nuts, which stronger men than he essayed to crack before the demolition of the authenticity of the Pentateuch became as fashionable an amusement as rabbins: one's nose against Zadkiel's crystal ball, or going to see Blondin on the high rope. He who would write the " Footsteps in Italy of William Shakespeare" (I thought in my stall, should be, first, a copious and profound Shakesperian scholar, and an acute Shake- sperian critic. He should know the plays by 258 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OK, heart ; have the poems on the tip of his tongue ; and harbor some tangible hypothesis on the son- nets. He should be well up in his Hazlitt, his Schlegel, his Maginis, his Coleridge, his Dyce, his Staunton, and his Halliwell. All that Malone and Steevens have written should be familiar to him. Then he should be a linguist, who had read through Guicciardini without being daunted at, the War of Pisa, and mastered all the Foreign State-Papers in our Record Office (unhappy Turn- bull !) and all the Relations of the Venetian Am- bassadors lately disentombed by "M.. Armand Baschet from the Convent of the Frari. Further- more, he should be an artist, practised in the va- rious styles of Turner and Calcott, of Stanfield and Holland. In addition, he should be a pol- ished, patient, appreciative, and observant travel- ler ; a Rogers, a Lear, a Eustace, a Kingl-ake, a Canon "Wordsworth. Finally, he should bring to his Italian journey ings the mordant humor of Heinrich Heine, the metaphysical sentiment of George Sand, the voluptuous word-painting of Byron, the minute pencilling of the President de Brosses. Finally, he should be a gentleman. Armed cap-a-pie with all these qualities, and with plenty of money, time, industry, and health, and sufficient reticence to burn his MS., sheet by sheet, if it proved faulty, he might in the end pro- duce, I think, such a work as would infinitely PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 259 delight this generation, and one that posterity would not willingly let die. I don't think it militates in the slightest degree against the value of my ideal book to be told that Shakespeare never was in Italy. He had been everywhere, as he was everything, in the spirit. The people who cudgel their brains as to his medical knowledge and his legal knowledge — as to whether he was ever a scrivener or an apo- thecary, a soldier or a sailor, a butcher or a horse-couper — are, to my mind, donkeys, and nothing more. He was a clairvoyant. His Elsinore is in the very Denmark ; his Dunsinane in Scotland ; his forests near Athens ; his Cliff in Kent ; his Belmont in Yenetia (I have seen Portia's house ; it is on the Banks of the Brenta, and is now inhabited by an enriched prima donna)', his " park and palace in Navarre " in the Basque country ; not necessarily because he ever actually or corporeally journeyed to thos,e places, but because the Almighty had gifted him with the power of seeing things in his soul, and of describing them in matchless music. And in the main, though all his absolute peregrina- tions may have extended no further than between London and Stratford, and the suburbs of tho metropolis, he is a more trustworthy traveller than Mandeville or Purchas, Hackluyt or Marco Polo. 260 BREAKFAST IN BED ; OK, In the whole Shakesperiaii catalogue there is no play more thoroughly Italian than " Romeo and Juliet." Enthusiasm for the mighty master may be the parent of such an opinion, you may surmise ; but just take a through ticket by the Yictor Emmanuel Railway, and leave the train at the Porta Nuova, Verona, and trot on the next day to Mantua, and you will come to be of my mind. Gorgeous as are Mr. John Gilbert's illustrations to the Routledge edition, his superb designs, when he touches the Italian dramas, seem to me meagre and shrivelled. It is in the text that you must look for the genuine local coloring, the choice Italian. There you will feel the real Italian sunshine, the balmy nights, the bath of moonlight, the lounging, lazy lives of the men and women, the saunterings and sighings and whisperings, chequered every now and then •by fierce outbreaks of passion — by the sharp scream, the torrent of passionate invective, the quick curse, the sudden stab. Upon my word, not six weeks since at Verona I saw Sampson biting his thumb at Abra?n } and Gregory back- ing him up ; and then there was a rixe, and the Capnlet women rushed out of their houses and slapped the Montague children violently; and Benvolio strove in vain to quell the turmoil, and old Capulet in his gown (he carried on the pro- fession of a money-changer, and had been dis- PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 261 turbed from his siesta) came shuffling out of his shop, with Lady Capulet, in a clingy bed-gown, clinging to him : and then the venerable Jlon- tague (who had subsided into the peaceful pursuit of vending saffron-tinted sausages) issued from his back parlor, accompanied by his lady, and gave Capulet a piece of his mind; and then the women scolded, and the men stormed, and the dogs barked, and everybody bit his or her thumb, or snapped their fingers at everybody else ; and people who had seemingly nothing on earth to do with the fray, flung open third-floor case- ments, and joined with shrill verbiage in it ; and there was, on the whole, a devil of a commotion. It did not concern me ; but I felt so excited, that had I had a weapon on my thigh, I am afraid I should have drawn, and had a lunge at some- body. As it was, I found myself in fierce parley with an old woman who sold lemonade under an archway ; and where it would have ended I know not, had not, in the nick of time, Prince Escalus (represented for the nonce by an Austrian cor- poral's guard with fixed bayonets) come up, and abused the combatants all round in Teutonic Italian. Some one — I believe Gregory — was marched off to»the guard-house \ and I made my peace with the old lady who sold lemonade ; and Capulet went back to his siesta, and Montague to his sausages. But until I left Yerona by the 262 BREAKFAST IN BED J ORj Porta Yescova, I was in a perpetual day-dream about " Romeo and Juliet." Wherever the road bifurcated, I exj^ected to meet the fiery Tybalt, his sword drawn, raging up one thoroughfare, in search of the pacific Benvolis (an Italian quaker he) who was quietly trotting down another. What a man of men he was, that Tybalt ! Shakespeare knew well enough that he would be possible nowhere but in Italy ; so he put him in Yerona. The heat of the climate made him mad. His sword turned red-hot in its scabbard, and burnt through the leather, and scorched his thigh. Then he went at it, hammer and tongs : " Non schirar, non parar, non ritirarsi Yoglion costor, ne qui destrezza ha parte ; Non danno i colpi, or finti, or pieni, or scarsi ; Toglie F ira e '1 furor 1' uso dell' arte. Odi le spade orribilmente urtarsi A mezzo il ferro ! II pie d' orma non parte : Sempre e il pie fermo, e la man sempre in moto ; Ne scende taglio in van, ne punto a voto." * Here is the real Tybalt for you, when he has gotten an antagonist worthy of his blood-lustful • " They wish neither to avoid the combat, to parry the blows, nor to fly. Skill hath no part in the conflict ; their thrusts are no make-believes : now straightforward, now oblique. Rage and hatred rob them of the resources of art. Here the horrible shock of their swords clashing together ! Their feet are firm and motionless ; their hands always on the move. Not a blow is given in vain ; not a thrust is lost." PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 263 steel. He is a good swordsman ; but in his craze for killing, he despises carte and tierce and reason demonstrative. Here is Tybalt foaming at the month, blind with fury, hacking, hewing, slash- ing, stabbing away. Surely Shakespeare must have read these burning lines of the old Italian poet, and conjured up the fiery Tybalt from the ringing rhyme. That " Odi le spade orribilmente urtarsi a mezzo il ferro /" was amply sufficient for the clairvoyant. And indeed I am, in this surmise, not winnowing the wind ; for there is every likelihood that William Shakespeare did read the lines I have transcribed. They are quoted by Montaigne, and Montaigne's Essays were, we know, from an undoubted autograph, among the favorite reading of our poet. I never heard a burst of laughter from a cafe that afternoon in Verona without peeping in to see the gallant Mercutio swinging his legs on a marble table, and bantering the love-lorn Romeo sighing over his sugar-and-water. I went to see the so-called tomb of the ill-starred lovers ; but that apocryphal monument did not help my illusion. The streets were enough for me. What does it matter, I asked myself, whence the master obtained his plot, or who the lovers really were ; whether, as Mr. Douce essayed to prove, the original tale comes from a Greek author, one Xenophon Ephesius; or whether the events 264: BREAKFAST IN BED ; OR, recorded took place, not at Verona, bat at Sienna, Homeo being "a young man of good family, named Mariotti Mignaletti," and Juliet a certain Donna Gianozza ? All these are trifles. Whether the romance was of Luigi da Porto's making, or of Bandello's, or of Boisteau's, thence translated by Arthur Brooke, frets me little. It is enough that Shakespeare, from a lovely legend, was permitted to make an immortal drama : that he has laid the scene in Italy ; and that the play is Italian to the very core. In what part of the continent if you please, save Italy, would that garden-scene have been feasible ? Italy is the country where, after the scorching day, comes a cool but temperate night. Italy is the land where young people sit up all night to make love, and where, too, they do tumble into love with one another at first sight. In decorous England, Juliet's sudden passion for Borneo might have been considered improper. In Italy, nothing could be more natural. It is where the sun is so warm that the corn ripens so quickly. And the impromptu masquerade ; and the pretty fib told by Juliet that she was going out to confession, when she is bent on being mar- ried ! In England, a young lady would have told her mamma that she was going to Mudie's or to Kegent Street to purchase two yards and a half of maize-colored ribbon. And then the PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 265 changes of scene, the frequent dialogues that take place " in a street," " another street," " a public place!" Italy is the country above all others where people meet in streets and public places to talk together by the hour, to chat, to gossip, to flirt, and to quarrel ; for those streets and places, you see, are lined with cool and shady arcades, along whose pavements you can saunter, against whose pillars you can lean, free from dust, or heat, or jostling crowds. But farewell, fair Yerona, and Heaven deliver thee speedily from the Austrian corporal's guard and the dominion of the double-headed eagle generally ! I must not forget that I am in Oxford Street, and in the stalls of an English playhouse, and that my business to-night is only, by implication, with " the footsteps in Italy of William Shakespeare," but more directly with Mademoiselle Stella Colas, from the Imperial French Theatre at St. Petersburg, who under- takes the part of Juliet^ and, thorough French- woman as she is, plays it in English. The pretty creature ! Mademoiselle S telle Colas is by this time gone back to St. Petersburg, and the praise or blame I am presumptuous enough to mete out to her will probably never reach her ears, unless indeed the editor of the " Nevsky Magazine" chooses to transfer this article (to which he Is very welcome) to the next number 12 266 ESEAKFAST £S BED ; OK, of his publication. Nor, perhaps, were this u Breakfast in Bed " brought under the notice of the charming Stella, would she be much the wiser for it ; for I have heard spiteful people on this side of the water hint that her acquaintance with the English vernacular was of the most limited nature, and that she mastered the speeches set down for Capulefs hapless daughter mainly in the poll-parrot fashion. J Tis no dis- grace for a French tragedienne to have done so. Have we not all been told that the illustrious Rachel herself was not gifted with the faculty of understanding much of the purport of the lines she spoke, all native as the language was to her; that, word by word, and syllable by syllable, the couplets had to be laboriously drummed- into her, until she was in a position to debiier la tirade, to roll forth her lava stream of declamation ; and that those wonderful move- ments and bits of by-play — few in number, cer- tainly, and somewhat monotonous — which used to excite our amazement and admiration were ail taught her, in the purest mechanical manner, by her instructor, Monsieur Sanson? Rachel did not care much as to what author she recited from; Racine, Corneille, Moliere, Ducis, or Legouve, were all the same to her. She had something in her — wonderful, Heaven-given genius; but it lay deep, dormant; it wanted PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 267 smelting ; the gold needed to be separated from the ore ; and it was for Monsieur Sanson to rise the divining rod and the digger's cradle. The English actor — perhaps Mr. John Ryder ? — "whose pleasant task it was to " coach " Stella Colas had not, perhaps, so difficult a labor. This fascinating young woman was evidently highly appreciative amd imaginative, and probably seized the scope and meaning of Juliet's charac- ter long ere she understood the half of Shake- speare's words. I question whether, after all, she had anything beyond a vaguely general com- prehension of them. The pretty creature ! I say again. Was there ever such a darling Juliet f Lest I CD should be accused of impertinent personality in thus publicly expressing my admiration for a pretty girl, let it be understood that my com- pliments arc addressed not to her, but to the series of cartes de visile published towards the close of her engagement. Her photographs were well-nigh as pretty as herself. Such childish innocence ; such langorous love of the handsome Montague with the green-silk legs ; such winning fondness for the nurse who scolded but idolized her ; such affectionate reve- rence for her harsh papa and mamma ; such trust and confidence in Friar Lawrence; such sweet and simple womanly daintinesses 268 BREAKFAST IN BED J OR, were probably never developed by the camera before. And here let me be permitted a slight digres- sion. To ns English people of the nineteeth century, the behavior of Capulet and his wife to their daughter, can scarcely fail to appear barbarous and unnatural. We have match-mak- ing mammas in our midst, no doubt, who lead their daughters a terrible life on vexed questions of matrimonial alliance ; and ill-natured papas, who threaten to cut their girls off with a shilling if they don't immediately discard the penniless captain for the rich cotton spinner. But the Cajpulets in modern life are, I hope, extinct ; or, if they are to be found lurking in odd nooks and corners, they must be set down as monstrosities. Take yourself back to medieval Italy, however, and JuliePs papa and mamma become the most, natural people in the world. The old Italian novels and chronicles are full of Lord and Lady Cajpulets. If we glance at a recent, to say little of the present, state of French society, we shall find parental harshness carried to an extent scarcely less hideous. Do you remember Gin- evr&i the heroine of Honore de Balzac's most pathetic romance? Ginevra is only Juliet. Her vindictive Corsican parents are only Gapu- lets ; the man she persists in marrying is simply a Montague. " Marry the 'County Paris, or get PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 269 " Many the County Parts, or be turned out of doors." " Do as you are bidden, or be locked up in the coal-cellar on bread-and- water." " Choose your bridal dress, or never see your papa and mamma's faco again." These were the agreeable refrains of the family ditty. I am afraid that, if we turned away from Italy and directed our glance towards England, we should find enough of parental cruelty and to spare, not only in Shakespeare's time, but for a hundred and fifty years afterwards. In one of Gibber's comedies, a young married lady, say Berintliia, asks another youthful matron, say Clarissa (who detests her husband), why she did not marry the man of her choice. " My mother would have whipped me," answers Clarissa sim- ply. And Materfamilias would have whipped her, too, soundly. The story of Dr. Johnson and the young ladies in Lincolnshire might be quoted in confirmation ; likewise old Aubrey's garrulous account of things as they were in his youth (close upon Shakespeare's time), when mothers corrected their daughters with their fans — the handle at least half a yard long — and " in the days of their besom discipline used to slash their daughters when they were perfect women." In the great case of the Reverend Mr. Croftoa, a Puritan divine, who was prosecuted 270 OR, for barbarously beating his servant-girl, he was asked why he had not used a wand or cane for the purpose of chastisement; whereupon his reverence replied that " his mother, once beating her maid with a wand, did chance to strike out her eye, which caused him thenceforth to mislike such usage." A pretty state of things ; but our great-great-grandmothers were nevertheless, sub- ject to it. Hear Aubrey again: "The gentry and citizens had little learning of any kind, and their way of breeding up their children was suit- able to the rest. They were as severe to their children as their schoolmasters, and their school- masters as masters of the House of Correction. The child perfectly loathed the sight of his parents, as the slave his torture. Gentlemen of thirty and forty years old were to stand like mutes and fools bareheaded before their parents; and the daughters (grown women), were to stand at the cupboard-side during the whole time of the proud mother's visit, unless (as the fashion was) leave was desired, forsooth, that a cushion should be given them to kneel upon, brought by the serving-man, after they had done sufficient penance in standing." Ah, the grand old days of author- ity and discipline ! There is a " court cup- board " mentioned in "Romeo and Juliet,'* and it was doubtless hj this " cupboard-side " PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS 271 that poor Juliet stood when it pleased her " proud mother" to visit her. "With this you may compare Lady Jane Grey's account of her early tribulations, and her nip- pings and pinchings in the Suffolk family ; but to my mind the clearest gloss on the GapuUts? usage of their daughter is to be found in the undeniably old ballad of " Willikins and his Dinah," revived in our time with such brilliant success as a comic song by Mr. Robson : "As Dinah was a walkin' in the garden one day, She met with her father, who to her did say, * Right tooral, right tooral,' etc. * Go! Dinah, go dress yourself in gorgeous array, For I've met with a young man so pleasant and gay ; I've met with a young man of ten thousand a year, And he says that he'll make you his love and his dear. ' Right tooral, right tooral,' " etc. You know how Dinah pleads her youth, and that " to marry that moment she's not much in- clined ;" and how her " stern parient " flies into a passion, and threatens to leave his large fortune to the nearest of kin ; whereupon Dinah commits suicide, and Willikms felo de se. You may object that all this is but an after parody of Shakes- peare's tragedy, 4i cup of cold pison " included ; but I hold the " London Liquor Merchant," from which Mr. Robson's comic ditty was derived, to be at least as old as " Barbara Allen " and the 272 BREAKFAST IN BED: OB, "Bailiff's Daughter of Islington," and if not contemporary with, anterior to, Shakespeare's age. Both the ballad and the play are indig- nant protests against paternal harshness; and there may be some truth in the tradition that Shakespeare was incited by Lords Essex and Southampton to bend his wonderful genius to the embodiment of such a protest on the stage ; to call down public indignation on a Draconic domestic code imported from abroad, and which, if we are to believe the memoirs of Silvio Pellico, existed in Italian households so late as the begin- ning of the present century. And I have kept poor dear Steila Colas wait- ing all this time ! Well, with fifteen hundred admirers, at the very least, watching her every movement, and applauding her to the very echo, she con well afford to spare my oblique gaze. Did I like the French Juliet f Did I prefer her to Fanny Kemble, to Ellen Tree, Helen Faucit ? Well, she was very, very pretty. She dressed in excellent taste. She had one of the most sensi- ble, polished, and gentlemanlike Bomeos I ever desired to see — Mr. Walter Montgomery — who, on his part, had a wonderful Apothecary in Mr. Beimore. She had an admirable Friar Law- rence in Mr. Henry Marston, one of "the best actors on the English stage. And* what else? Well, if the truth must out. I should have liked PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS. 273 to witness Mademoiselle Stella Colas' imperson- ation of Juliet with a ball of cotton securely stuffed iuto each of my ears. Her pantomime was marvellous. She was full of grace, agility, intelligence, fascination ; but I do not like to hear the words of Shakespeare murdered ; and that she did so murder them — murdering even while she smiled — is a certainty. In this I may be hypercritical. Foreign tragedians, male and female, on the English boards have become the fashion. *\Ye have had a Hiffh-Dutch Hamlet. We have now had a French Juliet. I live in hopes of seeing a Spanish Ophelia, and a Cochin-Chi- nese Lady Macbeth. Of Mademoiselle Stella Colas' astounding in- tensity of passionate grief, the critics have dis- coursed until they have become well-nigh as hoarse as the pretty French actress at the end of her screeds of woe. Said a very clever and a very witty lady, who sat by my side in the stalls, to me, u Of what does that last agony of anguish re- mind you?" " Of Niobe, of Rachel, of Sappho, of the Py- thoness, of Madge Wildfire," I answered, heed- lessly. " ISot at all," pursued my interlocutor. " Vous rfy etes pas 1 Does not that appalling lament remind you, somehow, of a cat upon the tiles ?" 274 BREAKFAST EST BED ; OR, Tlie lady was not an Englishwoman ; and abroad, as yon may know, it is the custom to call things by their names. But she was a pretty creature. Oh ! she was fair. I hope she filled Mr. George Vining's treasury to overflowing. I hope she will marry a Russian Grand-Duke at the very least ; and when next Mr. Walter Montgomery plays Romeo, I trust he will be enabled to find another Juliet as comely and as graceful as Stella Colas. But I very much doubt it. Lo ! I hear the clatter of the crockery-ware on the stairs ; and, for the last time, Crazy Jane brings me up my " Breakfast in Bed." For twelve months I have partaken of my morning meal on my back, and feebly philosophized be- tween the sheets. But the year is out. I have grown to acknowledge that my lie-a-bed habits are highly deleterious, not to say immoral ; and for the future, I am sternly resolved to rise at seven o'clock, and have my tea and toast in a decent breakfast-parlor punctually at eight. Good-bye, ladies and gentlemen ; may your shadows and digestions never be less. Good- bye, Hircius and Spungius, engaging " Compan- ions of my Solitude," inexhaustible themes for " Essays written in the intervals of Business." Farewell, my best beloved ; we may meet again, PHILOSOPHY BET W JOT THE SHEETS. 275 shortly. I take my leave with feelings of affec- tion towards all the world — feelings that o'er- brim my eyes and swell my bosom. What are riches, honors, dignities? Give me 1IEAET! Bless everybody ! ftnri? THE END THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO 50 CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. FEB 13 19 35 MAB I" 935 s" MC ay /