■V*"
 
 THE 
 
 WORKS 
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 TO WHICH ARE PREFIXED, 
 
 HIS LETTERS, 
 
 A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE 
 
 THOMAS NOON TALFOURD, 
 
 ONE OF BIS EXECUTORS. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 
 VOL. II. 
 
 NEW- YORK: 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, 82 CLIFF-ST. 
 1849.
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVEBPTTY NIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 A2 
 
 cr. Z 
 
 MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY, ESQ. 
 
 Forgive me, Burney, if to thee these late 
 
 And hasty products of a critic pen, 
 
 Thyself no common judge of books and men, 
 
 In feeling of thy worth I dedicate. 
 
 My verse was offer'd to an older friend ; 
 
 The humbler prose has fallen to thy share: 
 
 Nor could I miss the occasion to declare, 
 
 What, spoken in thy presence, must qrlend — 
 
 That, set aside some few caprices wild, 
 
 Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days, 
 
 In all my threadings of this worldly maze, 
 
 (And I have watch'd thee almost from a child,) 
 
 Fret from self-seeking, envy, low design, 
 
 I have not found a whiter soul than thine.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA. 
 
 This poor gentleman, who for some months past had 
 been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final 
 tribute to nature. 
 
 To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour 
 of the thing, if there ever was much in it, was pretty 
 well exhausted ; and a two years' and a half existence 
 has been a tolerable duration for a phantom. 
 
 I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have 
 heard objected to my late friend's writings was well 
 founded. Crude they are, I grant you — a sort of un- 
 licked, incondite things — villanously pranked in an af- 
 fected array of antique modes and phrases. They had 
 not been his if they had been other than such ; and bet- 
 ter it is that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing 
 quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that 
 should be strange to him. Egotistical they have been 
 pronounced by some who did not know that what he 
 tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) 
 of another; as in a former essay (to save many instances) 
 — where, under the first person, (his favourite figure,) he 
 shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed 
 at a London school, far from his friends and connexions — 
 in direct opposition to his own early history. If it be 
 egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the 
 griefs and affections of another — making himself many, 
 or reducing many unto himself — then is the skilful nov- 
 elist, who all along brings in his hero or heroine, speak- 
 ing of themselves, the greatest egotist of all ; who yet has 
 never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And 
 how shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who 
 doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by another, 
 oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most inward feel- 
 ings, and expresses his own story modestly ? 
 
 My late friend was in many respects a singular char-
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 acter. Those who did not like him, hated him ; and 
 some, who once liked him, afterward became his bitterest 
 haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little concern 
 what he uttered, and in whose presence. He observed 
 neither time nor place, and would e'en out with what 
 came uppermost. With the severe religionist he would 
 pass for a free-thinker ; while the other faction set him 
 down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied 
 his sentiments. Few understood him ; and I am not cer- 
 tain that at all times he quite understood himself. He 
 too much affected that dangerous figure — irony. He 
 sowed doubtful speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal 
 hatred. He would interrupt the gravest discussion with 
 some light jest ; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant, in 
 ears that could understand it. Your long and much talk- 
 ers hated him. The informal habit of his mind, joined 
 to an inveterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be 
 an orator ; and he seemed determined that no one else 
 should play that part when he was present. He was 
 petit and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have 
 seen him sometimes in what is called good company, but 
 where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected 
 for an odd fellow ; till some unlucky occasion provoking 
 it, he would stutter out some senseless pun, (not altogether 
 senseless, perhaps, if rightly taken,) which has stamped 
 his character for the evening. It was hit or miss with 
 him ; but, nine times out of ten, he contrived by this de- 
 vice to send away a whole company his enemies. His 
 conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his hap- 
 piest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He has 
 been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was 
 but struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He 
 chose his companions for some individuality of character 
 which they manifested. Hence, not many persons of sci- 
 ence, and few professed literati, were of his councils. 
 They were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain 
 fortune ; and as to such people commonly nothing is more 
 obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) 
 income, he passed with most of them for a great miser. 
 To my knowledge tins was a mistake. His inlniiados, 
 to confess a truth, were, in the world's eye, a ragged regi- 
 ment. He found them floating on the surface of society, 
 and the colour, or something else, in the weed pleased
 
 PREFACE. Vll 
 
 him. The burrs stuck to him — but they were good and 
 loving burrs, for all that. He never greatly cared for the 
 society of what are called good people. If any of these 
 were scandalized, (and offences were sure to arise,) he 
 could not help it. When he has been remonstrated with 
 for not making more concessions to the feelings of good 
 people, he would retort by asking, what one point did 
 these good people ever concede to him ? He was tern 
 perate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a lit- 
 tle on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of 
 the Indian weed he might be thought a little excessive. 
 He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry 
 — as the friendly vapour ascended, how his prattle would 
 curl up sometimes w r ith it ! the ligaments which tongue 
 tied him were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a 
 statist ! 
 
 I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice 
 that my old friend is departed. His jests were beginning 
 to grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. He 
 felt the approaches of age ; and while he pretended to 
 cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to 
 bind him. Discoursing with him latterly on this subject, 
 he expressed himself with a pettishness which I thought 
 unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban re- 
 treat (as he called it) at Shacklewell, some children be- 
 longing to a school of industry had met us, and bowed 
 and courtesied, as he thought, in an especial manner to 
 him. " They take me for a visiting governor," he mut- 
 tered, earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to a 
 foible, of looking like anything important and parochial. 
 He thought that he approached nearer to that stamp daily. 
 He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave 
 or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the 
 advances of age that should so entitle him. He herded 
 always, while it was possible, with people younger than 
 himself. He did not conform to the march of time, but 
 was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged 
 behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. 
 The toga virilis never sat gracefully on his shoulders. 
 The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he 
 resented the impertinence of manhood. These were 
 weaknesses ; but, such as they were, they are a key to 
 explicate some of his writings.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 OP 
 
 THE SECOND VOLUME. 
 
 FAQS 
 
 Preface 5 
 
 The South Sea House 13 
 
 Oxford in the Vacation 19 
 
 Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty Years ago 24 
 
 The Two Races of Men 35 
 
 Newyear's Eve 40 
 
 Mrs . "Battle's Opinions on Whist 46 
 
 A Chapter on Ears 51 
 
 All Fools' Day 56 
 
 -A Quaker Meeting 59 
 
 The Old and the New Schoolmaster 63 
 
 Valentine's Day 70 
 
 'Imperfect Sympathies 73 
 
 -Witches, and other Night Fears 80 
 
 My Relations 85 
 
 Mackery Knd, in Hertfordshire 91 
 
 Modern Gallantry 95 
 
 The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple 98 
 
 Grace before Meat 108 
 
 My First Flay 114 
 
 Dream Children ; a Revery 113 
 
 Distant Correspondents 121 
 
 The Praise of Chimney-sweepers 126 
 
 A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis . . . 132 
 
 -A Dissertation upon Roast Pig 138 
 
 A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People . . 145 
 
 On some of the Old Actors 151 
 
 On the Artificial Comedy of the last Century 160 
 
 On the Acting of Munden 167 
 
 Blakesmoor in H shire 169 
 
 Poor Relations 173 
 
 Stage Illusion 179 
 
 To the Shade of Elliston 182 
 
 Ellistoniana 184 
 
 Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading 189 
 
 The Old Margate Hoy 194 
 
 The Convalescent 201 
 
 Sanity of True Genius 204 
 
 Captain Jackson 207 
 
 —The Superannuated Man 211 
 
 The Genteel Style in Writing 217 
 
 -Barbaras 221 
 
 The Tombs in the Abbey 225 
 
 Amicus Redivivus 228 
 
 Some. Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney 232 
 
 Newspapers thirty-five V'ears a?o ....... 238 
 
 Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modem 
 
 Art 245
 
 X CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Rejoicings upon the New Year's coming of Age .... 254 
 
 The Wedding 259 
 
 The Child Angel 263 
 
 Old China 266 
 
 Confessions of a Drunkard . . 271 
 
 Popular Fallacies — 
 
 I. That a Bully is a Coward 278 
 
 II. That ill-gotten Gain never prospers 279 
 
 III. That a Man must not laugh at his own Jest .... 279 
 
 IV. That such a one shows his Breeding. — That it is easy to per- 
 
 ceive he is no Gentleman 280 
 
 V. That the Poor copy the Vices of the Rich .... 281 
 
 VI. That Enough is as good as a Feast 282 
 
 VII. Of two Disputants, the warmest is generally in the wrong . 283 
 VIII. That Verbal Allusions are not Wit, because they will not bear 
 
 Translation 284 
 
 IX. That the worst Puns are the best . . . ' . , . 285 
 
 X. That Handsome is that Handsome does 287 
 
 XI. That we should not look a Gift Horse in the Mouth . . 289 
 
 XII. That Home is Home, though it is never so homely . . . 291 
 
 XIII. That you must love me, and love my Dog .... 294 
 
 XIV. That we should rise with the Lark 297 
 
 XV. That we should lie down with the Lamb 300 
 
 XVI. That a Sulky Temper is a Misfortune 301 
 
 Rosamund Gray 305 
 
 Recollections of Christ's Hospital 337 
 
 ESSAYS. 
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspeare 349 
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers contemporary with Shakspeare . 365 
 
 Specimens from the Writings of Fuller 381 
 
 On the Genius and Character of Hogarth 388 
 
 On the Poetical Works of George Wither 405 
 
 LETTERS 
 
 Under assumed Signatures. 
 
 The Londoner 41 1 
 
 On Burial Societies, &c 413 
 
 On the Danger of confounding Moral with Personal Deformity . . 418 
 
 On the Inconveniences resulting from being Hanged .... 423 
 
 On the Melancholy of Tailors 431 
 
 Hospita on the immoderate Indulgence of the Pleasures of the Palate 435 
 
 Edax on Appetite 438 
 
 Curious Fragments 445 
 
 Mr. H , a Farce, in Two Acts 451
 
 THE 
 
 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 
 
 THE SOUTH -SEA HOUSE. 
 
 Reader, in thy passage from the bank — where thou hast 
 been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art 
 a lean annuitant like myself) — to the Flower Pot, to secure a 
 place for Dalston,or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban 
 retreat northerly — didst thou never observe a melancholy- 
 looking, handsome brick and stone edifice to the left — where 
 Threadneedle-street abuts upon Bishopsgate ? I dare say thou 
 hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, 
 and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pil- 
 lars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out — a des- 
 olation something like Balclutha's.* 
 
 This was once a house of trade — a centre of busy inter- 
 ests. The throng of merchants was here — the quick pulse 
 of gain — and here some forms of business are still kept up, 
 though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen 
 stately porticoes ; imposing staircases ; offices roomy as the 
 state apartments in palaces — deserted or thinly peopled with 
 a few straggling clerks ; the still more sacred interiors of 
 court and committee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, 
 doorkeepers — directors seated in form on solemn days (to 
 proclaim a dead dividend) at long wormeaten tables, that 
 have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather coverings, 
 supporting massy silver inkstands long since dry ; the oaken 
 wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub- 
 governors, of Queen Anne, and the first two monarchs of the 
 Brunswick dynasty ; huge charts, which subsequent discov- 
 eries have antiquated ; dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams 
 — and soundings of the Bay of Panama ! The long passages 
 hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls whose 
 
 * I passed by the walls of Baiciutha, and they were desolate,— Ossux
 
 14 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 substance might defy any, short of the last conflagration ; with 
 vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces 
 of eight once lay an " unsunned heap," for Mammon to have 
 solaced his solitary heart withal — long since dissipated, or 
 scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous 
 Bubble. 
 
 Such is the South-Sea House — at least, such it was forty 
 years ago, when I knew it — a magnificent relic ! What al- 
 terations have been made in it since, I have had no oppor- 
 tunities of verifying. Time, I take for granted, has not fresh- 
 ened it. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping 
 waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The 
 moths, that were then battening upon its obsolete legers and 
 daybooks, have rested from their depredations, but other light 
 generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork among 
 their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accu- 
 mulated (a superfetation of dirt !) upon the old layers, that 
 seldom used to be disturbed, save by some curious finger now 
 and then, inquisitive to explore the mode of bookkeeping in 
 Queen Anne's reign ; or, with less hallowed curiosity, seeking 
 to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous hoax, 
 whose extent the petty peculators of our day look back upon 
 with the same expression of incredulous admiration, and hope- 
 less ambition of rivalry, as would become the puny face of 
 modern conspiracy contemplating the Titan size of Vaux's 
 superhuman plot. 
 
 Peace to the manes of the Bubble ! Silence and desti- 
 tution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial. 
 
 Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living 
 Tommerce — amid the fret and fever of speculation ; with the 
 Dank, and the 'Change, and the India House about thee, in the 
 heyday of present prosperity, with their important faces, as 
 it were, insulting thee, their poor neighbour out of business — 
 to the idle and merely contemplative — to such as me, old 
 house ! there is a charm in thy quiet ; a cessation — a cool- 
 ness from business — an indolence almost cloistral — which is 
 delightful ! With what reverence have I paced thy great 
 bare rooms and courts at eventide ! They spoke of the past : 
 the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, 
 would flit by me, stiff" as in life. Living accounts and ac- 
 countants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy 
 great dead tonics, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the 
 present day could lift from their enshrining shelves — with 
 their old fantastic flourishes and decorative rubric interlaeings 
 — their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal 
 ^upulluity oi' ciphers — with pious ywHcncua jtf the beginning,
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 15 
 
 without which our religious ancestors never ventured to open 
 a book of business, or bill of lading — the costly vellum covers 
 of some of ihem almost persuading us that we are got into 
 some better library — are very agreeable and edifying specta- 
 cles. I can look upon these defunct dragons with compla- 
 cency. Thy heavy, odd-shaped, ivory-handled penknives (our 
 ancestors had everything on a larger scale than we have 
 hearts for) are as good as anything from Herculaneum. The 
 pounce boxes of our days have gone retrograde. 
 
 The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House 
 — I speak of forty years back — had an air very different from 
 those in the public offices that I have had to do with since. 
 They partook of the genius of the place ! 
 
 They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of 
 superfluous salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not 
 much to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of mind. 
 Oldfashioned, for a reason mentioned before. Humorists, 
 for they were of all descriptions ; and, not having been brought 
 together in early life, (which has a tendency to assimilate the 
 members of corporate bodies to each other,) but, lor the most 
 part, placed in this house in ripe or middle age, they neces- 
 sarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, unqual- 
 ified, if I may so speak, as into a common stock. Hence they 
 formed a sort of Noah's ark. Odd fishes. A lay monastery. 
 Domestic retainers in a great house, kept more for show than 
 use. Yet pleasant fellows, full of chat — and not a few among 
 them had arrived at considerable proficiency on the German 
 flute. 
 
 The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton. 
 He had something of the choleric complexion of his country- 
 men stamped on his visage, but was a worthy sensible man at 
 bottom. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed 
 out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in carica- 
 tures of what were termed, in my young days, Macaronics. 
 He was the last of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a gib- 
 cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I see him making 
 up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if hu 
 feared every one about him was a defaulter ; in his hypo- 
 chondria ready to imagine himself one ; haunted, at least, with 
 the idea of the possibility of his becoming one : his tristful 
 visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Au- 
 derton's at two, (where his picture still hangs, taken a little 
 before his death by desire of the master of the coffee-house 
 which he had frequented for the last, five-and-twenty years,] 
 but not attaining the meridian of its animation till evening 
 brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The simultamou
 
 16 ESSAYS OF ELLA. 
 
 sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of 
 the clock announcing six, was a token of never-failing mirth 
 in the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with 
 his presence. Then was his forte, his glorified hour ! How 
 would he chirp and expand over a muffin ! How would he 
 dilate into secret history ! His countrymen, Pennant himself, 
 in particular, could not be more eloquent than he in relation 
 to old and new London — the sites of old theatres, churches, 
 streets gone to decay — where Rosamond's pond stood — the 
 mulberry gardens — and the Conduit in Cheap — with many a 
 pleasant anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those 
 grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalized in his pic- 
 ture of Noon — the worthy descendants of those heroic con- 
 fessors, who, flying to this country from the wrath of Louis 
 the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure 
 religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hog Lane, and the vi- 
 cinity of the Seven Dials ! 
 
 Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the 
 air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for 
 one, had you met him in one of the passages leading to West- 
 minster Hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the 
 body forward, which, in great men, must be supposed to be 
 the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the appli- 
 cations of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, 
 you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The confer- 
 ence over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative 
 insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you. 
 His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach 
 to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original state of 
 white paper. A suckling babe might have posed him. What 
 was it then ? Was he rich 1 Alas, no ! Thomas Tame was 
 very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentle- 
 folks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. She 
 had a neat meager person, which it was evident she had not 
 sinned in over pampering ; but in its veins was noble blood. 
 She traced her descent by some labyrinth of relationship, 
 which I never thoroughly understood — much less can explain 
 with any heraldic certainty at this time of day — to the illus- 
 trious but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was 
 the secret of Thomas's stoop. This was the thought — the 
 sentiment — the bright solitary star of your lives — ye mild and 
 happy* pair — which cheered you in the night of intellect, and 
 in the obscurity of your station ! This was to you instead of 
 riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attainments : and 
 it was worth them all together. You insulted none with it; 
 but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 17 
 
 no insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus et so- 
 lamen. 
 
 Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John 
 Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor in good truth 
 cared one fig about the matter. He " thought an accountant 
 the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest 
 accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. 
 The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, 
 with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, 
 scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suit of official 
 rooms in Threadneedle-street, which, without anything very 
 substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's 
 notions of himself that lived in them, (I know not who is the 
 occupier of them now,) resounded fortnightly to the notes of 
 a concert of "sweet breasts," as our ancestors would have 
 called them, culled from clubrooms and orchestras — chorus 
 singers — first and second violoncellos — double basses — and 
 clarionets — who ate his cold mutton, and drank his punch, 
 and praised his ear. He sat like Lord Midas among them. 
 But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature 
 Thence all ideas that were purely ornamental were banished. 
 You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. 
 Politics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined 
 and abstracted. The whole duty of man consisted in writing 
 off dividend warrants. The striking of the annual balance in 
 the company's books (which, perhaps, differed from the bal- 
 ance of last year in the sum of 251. Is. 6d.) occupied his davs 
 and nights for a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to 
 the deadness of tilings (as they call them in the city) in his 
 beloved house, or did not sigh for a return of the old stirring 
 days when South-Sea hopes were young — (he was indeed 
 equal to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the 
 most flourishing company in these or those days) — but to a 
 genuine accountant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. 
 The fractional farthing is as dear to his heart as the thousands 
 which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his 
 part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity. 
 With Tipp, form was everything. His life was formal. His 
 actions seemed ruled with a ruler. His peir was not less 
 erring than his heart. He made the best executor in the 
 world : he was plagued with incessant executorships accord- 
 ingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in 
 equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little 
 orphans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like 
 the grasp of the dying hand that commended their interests 
 to his protection. AVith all this there was about him a sort 
 2*
 
 18 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 of timidity — (his few enemies use to give it a worse name) — 
 a something which, in reverence to the dead, we will place, 
 if you please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature cer- 
 tainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a sufficient 
 measure of the principle of self-preservation. There is a 
 cowardice which we do not despise, because it has nothing 
 base or treacherous in its elements ; it betrays itself, not you : 
 it is mere temperament ; the absence of the romantic and the 
 enterprising ; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with 
 Fortinbras, " greatly find quarrel in a straw," when some sup- 
 posed honour is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a 
 stage coach in his life ; or leaned against the rails of a bal- 
 cony ; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet ; or looked 
 down a precipice ; or let off a gun ; or went upon a water 
 party ; or would willingly let you go if he could have helped 
 it : neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intim- 
 idation, he ever forsook friend or principle. 
 
 Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom 
 common qualities become uncommon ? Can I forget thee, 
 Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the author, 
 of the South-Sea House ? who never enteredst thy office in a 
 morning, or quhtedst it in midday, (what didst thou in an 
 office ?) without some quirk that left a sting ! Thy gibes 
 and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten 
 volumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from a stall 
 in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, 
 epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these 
 fastidious days — thy topics are staled by the "newborn 
 gauds" of the time : but great thou used to be in Public 
 Legers, and in chronicles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne, and 
 Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne,and Clinton, and the 
 war which ended in tearing from Great Britain her rebellious 
 colonies — and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, 
 and Dunning, and Pratt, and Richmond — and such small 
 politics. 
 
 A little less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, 
 was fine, rattling, rattle-headed Plumer. He was descended 
 — not in a right line, reader, (for his lineal pretensions, like 
 his personal, favoured a little of the sinister bend,) from the 
 Plumers of Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him out ; and 
 certain family features not a little sanctioned the opinion. 
 Certainly old Walter Plumer (his reputed author) had been a 
 rake in his days, and visited much in Italy, and had seen the 
 world. He was uncle, bachelor uncle, to the fine old whig 
 still living, who has represented the county in so many suc- 
 cessive parliaments, and has a fine old mansion near Ware
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 19 
 
 Walter flourished in George the Second's days, and was the 
 same who was summoned before the house of commons 
 about a business of franks, with the old Duchess of Marlbo- 
 rough. You may read of it in Johnson's life of Cave. Cave 
 came off cleverly in tbat business. It is certain our Plumer 
 did nothing to discountenance the rumour. lie rather seemed 
 pleased whenever it was, with all gentleness, insinuated. 
 But, besides his family pretensions, Plumer was an engaging 
 fellow, and sang gloriously. 
 
 Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sangest, mild, child- 
 like, pastoral M ; a flute's breathing less divinely whis- 
 pering than thy Arcadian melodies, when, in tones worthy 
 of Arden, thou didst chant that song sung by Amiens to the 
 banished duke, which proclaims the winter wind more len- 
 ient than for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old 
 surly M , the unapproachable churchwarden of Bishops- 
 gate. He knew not what he did when he begat thee, like 
 spring, gentle offspring of blustering winter — only unfortu- 
 nate in thy ending, which should have been mild, conciliatory, 
 swanlike. 
 
 Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but 
 they must be mine in private : already I have fooled the 
 reader to the top of his bent — else could I omit that strange 
 creature Woollet, who existed in trying the question, and bought 
 litigations? — and still stranger, inimitable, solemn Hepworth, 
 from whose gravity Newton might have deduced the law o« 
 gravitation. How profoundly would he nib a pen — with wha 
 deliberation would he wet a wafer ! 
 
 But it is time to close — night's wheels are rattling fas 
 over me — it is proper to have done with this solemn mockery 
 
 Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while 
 — peradventure the very names which I have summoned up 
 before thee are fantastic — unsubstantial — like Henry Pim- 
 pernel and old John Naps of Greece. 
 
 Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a 
 being. Their importance is from the past. 
 
 OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 
 
 Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article 
 — as the wary connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye, (which, 
 while it reads, seems as though it read not,) never fails to
 
 20 ESSAYS OP ELIA. 
 
 consult the quis sculpsit in the corner, before he pronounces 
 some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet — methinks I 
 hear you exclaim, reader, Who is Elia ? 
 
 Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-for- 
 gotten humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house 
 of business, long since gone to decay, doubtless you have al- 
 ready set me down in your mind as one of the selfsame col- 
 lege — a votary of the desk — a notched and cropped scrivener 
 — one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are 
 said to do, through a quill. 
 
 Well, I do agnize something of this sort. I confess that it 
 is my humour — my fancy in the fore part of the day, when 
 the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation — 
 (and none better than such as at first sight seems most abhor- 
 rent from his beloved studies) — to while away some good 
 hours of my time in the contemplation of indigoes, cottons, 
 raw silks, piece goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first 
 place * * * and then it sends you home with such in- 
 creased appetite to your books * * * not to say that 
 your outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do re- 
 ceive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of 
 sonnets, epigrams, essays — so that the very parings of a 
 counting house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author. 
 The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among 
 the cart-rucks of figures and ciphers, frisks and curvets so at 
 its ease over the flowery carpet ground of a midnight disser- 
 tation. It feels its promotion. * * * So that you see, 
 upon the whole, the literary dignity of Elia is very little, if 
 at all, compromised in the condescension. 
 
 Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities in- 
 cidental to the life of a public office, I would be thought blind 
 to certain flaws, which a cunning carper might be able to pick 
 in this Joseph's vest. And here I must have leave, in the ful- 
 ness of my soul, to regret the abolition, and doing away with 
 altogether, of those consolatory interstices, and sprinklings of 
 freedom, through the four seasons — the red-letter days, now 
 become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days. There 
 was Paul, and Stephen, and Barnabas — 
 
 " Andrew and John, men famous in old times" — 
 
 we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as 1 
 was at school at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the 
 same token, in the old basket Prayer Book. There hung Peter 
 in bis uneasy posture ; holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act 
 of flaying, after the famous Marsyas by Spagnolette. I hon- 
 oured them all, and could almost have wept the defalcation of
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 21 
 
 Iscariot, so much did we love to keep holy memories sacred ; 
 only methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better 
 Jude with Simon, dubbing (as it were) their sanctities tog 
 to make up one poor gaudy-day between them, as an economy 
 unworthy of the dispensation. 
 
 These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's 
 life, " far off their coming shone." I was as good as an alma- 
 nac in those days. I could have told you such a saint's day 
 falls out next week, or the week after. Peradventure the 
 Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity, would, once in six 
 years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better than one 
 of the profane. Let me not be thought to arraign the wisdom 
 of my civil superiors, who have judged the further observation 
 of these holy tides to be Papistical, superstitious. Ordy in a 
 custom of such long standing, methinks, if their holinesses 
 the bishops had, in decency, been first sounded — but I am 
 wading out of my depths. I am not the man to decide the 
 limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority — I am plain Elia — 
 no Selden, nor Archbishop Usher, though at present in the 
 thick of their books, here in the heart of learning, under the 
 shadow of the mighty Bodley. 
 
 I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such 
 a one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years 
 of the sweet food of academic institution, nowhere is so pleas- 
 ant, to while away a few idle weeks at, as one or other of the 
 universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of the year, falls 
 in so pat with ours. Here I can take my walks unmolested, 
 and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please. I seem 
 admitted ad eundum. I fetch up past opportunities. I can 
 rise at the chapel bell, and dream that it rings for me. In 
 moods of humility, I can be a sizer or a servitor. When the 
 peacock vein rises, I strut a gentleman commoner. In graver 
 moments, I proceed master of arts. Indeed, I do not think I 
 am much unlike that respectable character. I have seen your 
 dim-eyed vergers, and bedmakers in spectacles, drop a bow 
 or courtesy as I pass, widely mistaking me for something of the 
 sort. I go about in black, which favours the notion. Onlv 
 in Christ Church reverend quadrangle, I can be content to 
 pass for nothing short of a seraphic doctor. 
 
 The walks at these times are so much one's own — the tall 
 trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen ! The halls de- 
 serted, and with open doors inviting one to slip in unperceived, 
 and pay a devoir to some founder, or noble or royal beriefa'c- 
 tress (that should have been ours) whose portrait seems to 
 smile upon their overlooked beadsman, and to adopt me for 
 their own. Then, to take a peep in, by-the-way, at the bui-
 
 22 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 teries and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality : the im- 
 mense caves of kitchens, kitchen fireplaces, cordial recesses; 
 ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago ; and 
 spits which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest 
 minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his 
 imagination, and the cook goes forth a manciple. 
 
 Antiquity ! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, be- 
 ing nothing, art everything ! When thou loert, thou wert not 
 antiquity — then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter anti- 
 quity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind venera- 
 tion ; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern ! What 
 mystery lurks in this retroversion ? or what half Januses* are 
 we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with 
 which we for ever revert ! The mighty future is as nothing, 
 being everything ! the past is everything, being nothing ! 
 
 What were thy dark ages 1 Surely the sun rose as brightly 
 then as now, and man got him to his work in the morning. 
 Why is it that we can never hear mention of them without an 
 accompanying feeling, as though a palpable obscure had 
 dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered 
 to and fro groping ! 
 
 Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride 
 and solace me, are thy repositories of mouldering learning, 
 thy shelves — 
 
 What a place to be in is an old library ! It seems as though 
 all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their la- 
 bours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dor- 
 mitory or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane 
 the leaves — their winding sheets. I could as soon dislodge a 
 shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage ; 
 and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant 
 as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid 
 \he happy orchard. 
 
 Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS. 
 Those varies lectiones, so tempting to the more erudite palates, 
 do but disturb and unsettle my faith. I am no Herculanean 
 raker. The credit of the three witnesses might have slept 
 unimpeached for me. I leave these curiosities to Porson and 
 to G. D. — whom, by-the-way, I found busy as a moth over 
 some rotten archive, rummaged out of some seldom-explored 
 press, in a nook at Oriel. With long poring, he is grown al- 
 most into a book. He stood as passive as one by the side of 
 the old shelves. I longed to new-coat him in Russia, and 
 assign him his place. He might have mustered for a tall 
 Scapula. 
 
 * Januses of one face. — Sir Thomas Browne.
 
 ESSAYS OF EL1A. 23 
 
 T). is assiduous in his visits to these seats of learning. No 
 inconsiderable portion of his moderate fortune, I apprehend, is 
 consumed in journeys between them and Clifford's Inn, where, 
 like a dove on the asp's oest, lit- lias long taken up his uncon- 
 scious abode, amid an incongruous assembly of attorneys, attor- 
 neys' clerks, apparitors, promoters, vermin of the law, among 
 whom he sits " in calm and sinless peace." The fangs of the 
 law pierce him not — the winds of litigation blow over his hum- 
 ble chambers — the hard sheriff's officer moves his hat as he 
 passes — legal nor illegal discourtesy touches him — none thinks 
 of offering violence or injustice to him — you would as soon 
 " strike an abstract idea." 
 
 D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a course of la- 
 borious years, in an investigation into all curious matter con- 
 nected with the two universities ; and has lately lighted upon a 
 
 manuscript collection of charters, relative to C , by which 
 
 he hopes to settle some disputed points — particularly that long 
 controversy between them as to priority of foundation. The 
 ardour with which he engages in these liberal pursuits, I am 
 afraid, has not met with all the encouragement it deserved, 
 either here or at C . Your caputs, and heads of col- 
 leges, care less than anybody else about these questions. 
 Contented to suck the milky fountains of their alma maters, 
 without inquiring into the venerable gentlewomen's years, they 
 rather hold such curiosities to be impertinent — unreverend. 
 They have their good glebe lands in manu, and care not much 
 to rake into the title deeds. I gather at least so much from 
 other sources, for D. is not a man to complain. 
 
 D. started like an unbroke heifer, when I interrupted him. 
 A priori, it was not very probable that we should have met in 
 Oriel. But D. would have done the same had I accosted him 
 on the sudden in his own walks in Clifford's Inn, or in the 
 Temple. In addition to a provoking short-sightedness, (the 
 effect of late studies and watchings at the midnight oil.) D. is 
 the most absent of men. He made a call the other morning 
 at our friend 3f.'s in Bedford Square ; and, finding nobody at 
 home, was ushered into the hall, where, asking for pen and 
 ink, with gTeat exactitude of purpose he enters me his name 
 in the book — which ordinarily lies about in such places, to 
 record the failures of the untimely or unfortunate visiter — and 
 takes his leave with many ceremonies and professions of re- 
 gret. Some two or three hours after, his walking destinies 
 returned him into the same neighbourhood again, and again 
 the quiet image of the fireside circle at #f/s — .Mrs. M. pre- 
 siding at it like a Queen Lar, with pretty A. S. at her side — 
 striking irresistibly on his fancy, he makes another call, (for-
 
 •24 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 getting that they were " certainly not to return from *\e coun- 
 try before that day week,") and, disappointed a second time, 
 inquires for pen and paper as before : again the book is 
 brought, and in the line just above that in which he is about 
 to print his second name, (his rescript,) his first name (scarce 
 dry) looks out upon him like another Sosia, or as if a man 
 should suddenly encounter his own duplicate ! The effect 
 may be conceived — D. made many a good resolution against 
 such lapses in future. I hope he will not keep them too rig- 
 orously. 
 
 For with G. D. to be absent from the body, is sometimes 
 (not to speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At 
 the very time when, personally encountering thee, he passes 
 on with no recognition ; or, being stopped, starts like a thing 
 surprised : at that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor, or 
 Parnassus ; or co-sphered with Plato : or, with Harrington, 
 framing " immortal commonwealths ;" devising some plan of 
 amelioration to thy country, or thy species ; peradventure 
 meditating some individual kindness or courtesy, to be done to 
 thee thyself, the returning consciousness of which made him 
 to start so guiltily at thy obtruded personal presence. 
 
 D. is delightful anywhere, but he is at the best in such 
 places as these. He cares not much for Bath. He is out of 
 his element at Buxton, at Scarborough, or Harrowgate. The 
 Cam and the Isis are to him " better than all the waters of 
 Damascus." On the muses' hill he is happy, and good, as 
 one of the shepherds on the Delectable Mountains ; and 
 when he goes about with you to show you the halls and col- 
 leges, you think you have with you the Interpreter at the 
 House Beautiful. 
 
 CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 
 
 FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 
 
 In Mr. Lamb's " Works," published a year or two since, I 
 find a magnificent eulogy on my old school,* such as it was, 
 or now appears to him to have been, between the years 1782 
 and 1789. It happens, very oddly, that my own standing at 
 Christ's was nearly corresponding with his ; and, with all 
 
 * Recollections of Christ's Hospital,
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 2.3 
 
 gratitude to him for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think 
 he has contrived to bring together whatever can be said in 
 praise of them, dropping all the other side of the argument 
 most ingeniously. 
 
 I remember L. at school ; and can well recollect that he 
 had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his 
 schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town, and were 
 near at hand ; and ho had the privilege of going to see tin in, 
 almost as often as he wished, through some invidious dis- 
 tinction, which was denied to us. The present worthy sub- 
 treasurer to the Inner Temple can explain how that happened, 
 lie had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while we were 
 battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf — our crug — mois- 
 tened with attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smack- 
 ing of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. Our 
 Monday's milk porridge, blue and tasteless, and the pease 
 soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him 
 with a slice of " extraordinary bread and butter," from the 
 hot loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, 
 somewhat less repugnant, (we had three banyan to four 
 meat days in the week,) was endeared to his palate with a 
 lump of double refined, and a smack of ginger (to make it go 
 down the more glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of 
 our half-picklcd Sundays, or quite fresh boiled beef on Thurs- 
 days, (strong as caro equina,) with detestable marigolds float- 
 ing in the pail to poison the broth — our scanty mutton crags on 
 Fridays — and rather more savoury, but grudging, portions of 
 the same flesh, rotten-roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays — (the 
 oidy dish which excited our appetites, and disappointed our 
 stomachs, in almost equal proportion) — he had his hot plate 
 of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics unknown 
 to our palates) cooked in the paternal kitchen, (a great thing,) 
 and brought him daily by his maid or aunt ! 1 remember the 
 good old relative (in whom love forbade pride) squatting down 
 upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters, disclosing 
 the viands, (of higher regale than those cates which the ra- 
 vens ministered to the Tishbite,) and the contending passions 
 of L. at the unfolding. There was love for the bringer ; 
 shame for the thing brought and the manner of its bringing ; 
 sympathy for those who were too many to share in it ; and, at 
 top of all, hunger (eldest, strongest of the passions !) predom- 
 inant, breaking down the stony fences of shame, and awk- 
 wardness, and a troubling over-consciousness. 
 
 I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who 
 should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances 
 of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in 
 3 B
 
 26 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the 
 grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew 
 tired of my holyday visits. They seemed to them to recur 
 too often, though I thought them few enough ; and, one after 
 another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six 
 hundred playmates. 
 
 Oh the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early home- 
 stead ! The yearning's which I used to have towards it in 
 those unfledged years ! How in my dreams would my native 
 town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, 
 and fac.es ! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish 
 of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire ! 
 
 To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the 
 recollection of those friendless holy days. The long warm 
 days of summer never return but they bring with them a gloom 
 from the haunting memory of those whole day leaves when, by 
 some strange arrangement, we were turned out, for the live- 
 long day, upon our ov/n hands, whether we had friends to go 
 to, or none. I remember those bathing excursions to the 
 New River, which L. recalls with such relish, better, I think, 
 than he can — for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not 
 much care for such water pastimes : how merrily we would 
 sally forth into the fields ; and strip under the first warmth of 
 the sun ; and wanton like young dace in the streams ; getting 
 us appetites for noon, which those of us that were penniless 
 (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the 
 means of allaying — while the cattle, and the birds, and the 
 fishes were at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy 
 our cravings ; the very beauty of the day, and the exercise 
 of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a keener edge 
 upon them ! How faint and languid, finally, we would return, 
 towards nightfall, to our desired morsel, half rejoicing, half 
 reluctant, that the hours of our uneasy liberty had expired ! 
 
 It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about 
 the streets objectless — slavering at cold windows of print 
 shops, to extract a little amusement ; or haply, as a last resort, 
 in the hope of a little novelty, to pay a fifty times repeated visit 
 (where our individual faces should be as well known to the 
 warden as those of his own charges) to the lions in the 
 Tower — to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a 
 prescriptive title to admission. 
 
 L.'s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to 
 the foundation) lived in a manner under his paternal roof. 
 Any complaint which he had to make was sure of being at- 
 tended to. This was understood at Christ's, and was an 
 effectual screen to him against the severity of masters, or
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 27 
 
 worse tyranny of the monitors. The oppressions of these 
 young brutes are heart sickening to call to recollection. I 
 have, been called out of inv bed, ami waked for the -purpose, in 
 thfl coldest winter nights — and tins not once, but night after 
 iii^lit — in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong*, 
 with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased my callow 
 overseer, when there has been any talking heard after we 
 were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the dormitory, 
 where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an 
 offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the power to 
 hinder. The same execrable tyranny drove the younger part 
 of us from the fires, when our feet were perishing with snow ; 
 and, under the crudest penalties, forbade the indulgence of 
 a drink of water, when we lay in sleepless summer nights, 
 fevered with the season and the day's sports. 
 
 There was one H , who, I learned in after days, was 
 
 seen expiating some maturer offence in the hulks. (Do I 
 flatter myself in fancying that this might be the planter of that 
 name, who suffered — at Nevis, I think, or St. Kitts — some 
 few years since? My friend Tobin was the benevolent in- 
 strument of bringing him to the gallows.) This petty Nero 
 actually branded a boy who had offended him, with a red-hot 
 iron ; and nearly starved forty of us, with exacting contribu- 
 tions, to the one half of our bread, to pamper a young ass, 
 which, incredible as it may seem, with the connivance of the 
 nurse's daughter, (a young flame of his,) he had contrived to 
 smuggle in, and keep upon the leads of the tmrd, as they 
 called our dormitories. This game went on for better than a 
 week, till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but he must 
 cry roast meat — happier than Caligula's minion, could he have 
 kept his own counsel — but foolisher, alas ! than any of his 
 species in the fables — waxing fat, and kicking, in the fulness 
 of bread, one unlucky minute would needs proclaim his good 
 fortune to the world below ; and, laving out his simple throat, 
 blew such a ram's-horn blast, as (toppling down the walls of 
 his own Jericho) set concealment any longer at defiance. 
 The client was dismissed, with certain attentions, to Smith- 
 field ; but I never understood that the patron underwent any 
 censure on the occasion. This was in the stewardship of 
 L.'s admired Perry. 
 
 Under the same facile administration, can L. have forgotten 
 the cool impunity with which the nurses used to carry away 
 openly, in open platters, for their own tables, one out of two of 
 every hut joint, which the careful matron had been seeinu' scru- 
 pulously weighed out tor our dinners ' These things wire daily 
 practised in that magnificent apartment, which L. (grown con- 
 
 B 2
 
 28 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 noisseur since, we presume) praises so highly for the grand 
 paintings, " by Verrio, and others," with which it is " hung 
 round and adorned." But the sight of sleek, well-fed, blue-coat 
 boys in pictures was, at that time, 1 believe, little consolatory 
 to him, or us, the living ones, who saw the better part of our 
 provisions carried away before our faces by harpies, and our- 
 selves reduced (with the Trojan in the hall of Dido) 
 
 To feed our mind with idle portraiture. 
 
 L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to gags, or 
 the fat of fresh beef boiled ; and sets it down to some super- 
 stition. But these unctuous morsels are never grateful to 
 young palates, (children are universally fat haters,) and in 
 strong, coarse, boiled meats, unsalted, are detestable. A gag- 
 eater in our time was equivalent to agoule, and held in equal 
 detestation. suffered under the imputation. 
 
 'Twas said, 
 He ate strange flesh. 
 
 He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather up the 
 remnants left at his table — (not many, nor very choice frag- 
 ments, you may credit me) — and in an especial manner, these 
 disreputable morsels, which he would convey away, and 
 secretly stow in the settle that stood at his bedside. None 
 saw when he ate them. It was rumoured that he privately 
 devoured them in the night. He was watched, but no traces 
 of such midnight practices were discoverable. Some reported, 
 that, on leave days, he had been seen to carry out of the 
 bounds a large blue check handkerchief, full of something. 
 This, then, must be the accursed thing. Conjecture next was 
 at work to imagine how he could dispose of it. Some said 
 he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally prevailed. 
 He went about moping. None spake to him. No one would 
 play with him. He was excommunicated ; put out of the 
 pale of the school. He was too powerful a boy to be beaten, 
 but he underwent every mode of that negative punishment, 
 which is more grievous than many stripes. Still he perse- 
 vered. At length he was observed by two of his schoolfel- 
 lows, who were determined to get at the secret, and had 
 traced him one leave day, for that purpose, to enter a large 
 worn-out building, such as there exist specimens of in Chan- 
 cery Lane, which are let out to various scales of pauperism, 
 with open door and a common staircase. After him they 
 silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four flights, and 
 saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened by an aged 
 woman, meanly clad. Suspicion was now ripened into cer-
 
 ASSAYS OF ELI A. 29 
 
 tainty. The informers had secured iheir victim. They bad 
 him iu their toils: Accusation was formally preferred, and 
 retribution most signal was looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the 
 
 then steward, (lor this happened a little after mv time;) with 
 that patient sagacity which tempered all his conduct, deter- 
 mined to investigate the matter before he proceeded to sen- 
 tence, The result was, that the supposed mendicants, the 
 receivers or purchasers of the mysterious scraps, turned out 
 
 to be the parents of , an honest couple cone to decay, 
 
 whom this seasonable supply had, in all probability, saved 
 from mendicancy ; and that this young stork, at the expense 
 of his own good name, had all this while been only feeding 
 the old birds ! The governors on this occasion, much to their 
 honour, voted a present relief to the family of , and pre- 
 sented him with a silver medal. The lesson which the 
 steward read upon rash judgment, on the occasion of pub- 
 licly delivering the medal to , I believe, would not be lost 
 
 upon his auditory. I had left school then, but I well remem- 
 ber . He was a tall, shambling youth, with a cast in 
 
 his eye, not at all calculated to conciliate hostile prejudices. 
 I have since seen him carrying a baker's basket. I think I 
 heard he did not do quite so well by himself as he had done 
 by the old folks. 
 
 I was a hypochondriac lad ; and the sight of a boy in fet- 
 ters, upon the day of my first putting on the blue clothes, was 
 not exactly fitted to assuage the natural terrors of initiation. 
 I was of tender years, barely turned of seven ; and had onlv 
 read of such things in books, or seen them but in dreams. I 
 was told he had run away. This was the punishment for 
 the first offence. As a novice, 1 was soon after taken to 
 see the dungeons. These were little, square. Bedlam cells, 
 where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a 
 blanket — a mattress, 1 think, was afterward substituted, with 
 a peep of light, let m askance, from a prison orifice at top, 
 barely enough to read by. Here the poor boy was locked in 
 by himself all day, without sight of any but the porter who 
 brought him his bread and water — who might not speak to 
 him ; or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him 
 out to receive his periodical chastisement, which was almost 
 welcome, because it separated him for a brief interval from 
 solitude : and here he was shut up by himself of nights, out 
 of the reach of any sound, to sutler whatever horrors the weak 
 nerves and superstition incident to his time of life might sub- 
 ject him to.* This was the penalty for the second offence. 
 
 * Ono or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, according!}, at 
 length convinced the governors ot the impolicy ol this part of the sentence, 
 3*
 
 80 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 Wouldst thou like, reader, to see what became of him in the 
 next degree ? 
 
 The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and 
 whose expulsion was at this time deemed irreversible, was 
 brought forth, as at some solemn auto da fe, arrayed in un- 
 couth and most appalling attire — all trace of his late " watchet 
 weeds" carefully effaced, he was exposed in a jacket, resem- 
 bling those which London lamplighters formerly delighted in, 
 with a cap of the same. The effect of this divestiture was 
 such as the ingenious devisers of it could have anticipated. 
 With his pale and frighted features, it was as if some of those 
 disfigurements in Dante had seized upon him. In this dis- 
 guisement he was brought into the hall, (L.\? favourite state- 
 room,) where awaited him the whole number of his school- 
 fellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was thenceforth to 
 share no more ; the awful presence of the steward, to be seen 
 for the last time ; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state 
 robe for the occasion ; and of two faces more, of direr import, 
 because never but in these extremities visible. These were 
 governors ; two of whom, by choice or charter, were always 
 accustomed to officiate at these Ultima Supplicia ; not to miti- 
 gate, (so at least we understood it,) but to enforce the utter- 
 most stripe. Old Bamber Gascoigne and Peter Aubert, I 
 remember, were colleagues on one occasion, when the beadle 
 turning rather pale, a glass of brandy was ordered to prepare 
 him for the mysteries. The scourging was, after the old 
 Roman fashion, long and stately. The lictor accompanied 
 the criminal quite round the hall. We were generally too 
 faint with attending to the previous disgusting circumstances, 
 to make accurate report with our eyes of the degree of cor- 
 poreal suffering inflicted. Report, of course, gave out the back 
 knotty and livid. After scourging, he was made over, in his 
 San Benito, to his friends, if he had any, (but commonly such 
 poor runagates were friendless,) or to his parish officer, who, 
 to enhance the effect of the scene, had his station allotted to 
 him on the outside of the hall gate. 
 
 These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as 
 to spoil the general mirth of the comnnmitv. We had plenty 
 of exercise and recreation after school hours ; and, for myself, 
 I must confess that I was never happier than in them. The 
 upper and the lower grammar schools were held in the same 
 room, and an imaginary line only divided their bounds. Their 
 
 nnil the midnight torture to the spirits was dispensed with. This fancy of 
 dungeons for children was a sprout of Howaid's brain; for which, (saving 
 the reverence due to Holy Paul,) methinks I could willingly spit upon his 
 statue.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 31 
 
 character was as different as that of the inhabitants on the 
 two sides of the Pyrenees. The Rev. James Buyer wis 
 the upper master; but the Rev. Matthew Field presided over 
 that portion of the apartment of which I had the good fortune 
 to he ,i member. We lived a life as careless as birds. We, 
 talked and did just as we pleased, and nobody molested 08. 
 We earned an accidence, or a grammar, for form ; but, for 
 any trouble it gave us, we might take two years in getting 
 through the verbs deponent, and another two in forgetting all 
 that we had learned about them. There was now and then 
 the formality of saying a lesson, but if you had not learned 
 it, a brush across the shoulders (just enough to disturb a ilv) 
 was the sole remonstrance. Field never used the rod ; and, 
 in truth, he wielded the cane with no great goodwill — holding 
 it "like a dancer." It looked in his hands rather like an em- 
 blem than an instrument of authority ; and an emblem, too, 
 he was ashamed of. He was a good easy man, that did not 
 care to ruffle his own peace, nor perhaps set any great con- 
 sideration upon the value of juvenile time. He came among 
 us, now and then, but often staid away whole days from us ; 
 and when he came, it made no difference to us — he had his 
 private room to retire to, the short time he staid, to be out of 
 the sound of our noise. Our mirth and uproar went on. We 
 had classics of our own, without being beholden to " insolent 
 Greece or haughty Rome," that passed current among us — 
 Peter Wilkins ; the Adventures of the Honourable Captain 
 Robert Boyle ; the fortunate Blue-Coat Boy ; and the like. Or 
 we cultivated a turn for mechanic or scientific operations ; ma- 
 king little sun dials of paper ; or weaving those ingenious 
 parentheses called cat cradles ; or making dry peas to dance 
 upon the end of a tin pipe ; or studying the art military over 
 that laudible game " French and English," and a hundred 
 other such devices to pass away the time — mixing the useful 
 with the agreeable — as would have made the souls of Rous- 
 seau and John Locke chuckle to see us. 
 
 Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest divines who 
 affect to mix in equal proportion the gentleman, the scholar, 
 and the Christian ; but, I know not how, the first ingredient 
 is generally found to be the predominating dose in the compo- 
 sition. He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtlv 
 bow at some episcopal levee, when he should have been at- 
 tending upon us. He had for many years the classical charge 
 of a hundred children, during the four or five first years of 
 their education; and his very highest form seldom proceeded 
 further than two or three of the introductory fables of Phae- 
 drus. How things were Buffered to go on thus, I cannot
 
 32 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 
 
 guess. Boyer, who was tlie proper person to Lave remedied 
 these abuses, always affected, perhaps felt, a delicacy in in- 
 terfering in a province not strictly his own. I have not been 
 without my suspicions, that he was not altogether displeased 
 at the contrast we presented to his end of the school. We 
 were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans. He would 
 sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the 
 under master, and then, with sardonic grin, observe to one of 
 his upper boys, " how neat and fresh the twigs looked." 
 While his pale students were battering their brains over Xen- 
 ophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as that enjoined by 
 the Samite, we were enjoying ourselves at our ease in our 
 little Goshen. We saw a little into the secrets of his disci- 
 pline, and the prospect did but the more reconcile us to our 
 lot. His thunders rolled innocuous for us ; his storms came 
 near, but. never touched us ; contrary to Gideon's miracle, 
 while all around were drenched, our fleece was dry.* His 
 boys turned out the better scholars ; we, I suspect, have the 
 advantage in temper. His pupils cannot speak of him with- 
 out something of terror allaying their gratitude ; the remem- 
 brance of Field comes back with all the soothing images of 
 indolence, and summer slumbers, and work like play, and in- 
 nocent idleness, and Elysian exemptions, and life itself " a 
 playing holyday." 
 
 Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, 
 we were near enough (as I have said) to understand a little 
 of his system. We occasionally heard sounds of the Ulular.- 
 tcs, and caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. 
 His English style was cramped to barbarism. His Easter 
 anthems (for his duty obliged him to those periodical flights) 
 were grating as scrannel pipes. \ He would laugh, ay, and 
 heartily, but then it must be at Flaccus's quibble about Rex — 
 or at the tristis scveritas in vultu, or inspicere in patinas, of 
 Terence — thin jests, which at their first broaching could 
 hardly have had vis enough to move a Roman muscle. He 
 had two wigs, both pedantic, but of different omen. The one 
 serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a mild day. The 
 other, an old, discoloured, unkempt, angry caxon, denoting 
 frequent and bloody execution. Wo to the school when he 
 
 * Cowley. 
 
 t In this and everything B. was the antipodes of his coadjutor. While the 
 former was digging his brains for crude anthems, worth a pignut. F. would be 
 recreating his gentlemanly fancy in the more flowery walks ol the muses. A 
 little dramatic effusion of his, under the name of Veituminis and Pomona, is 
 not yet forgotten by the chroniclers of that sort ol literature. It was accepted 
 by Garrick, but the town did not give it their sanction. B. used to say of it, in 
 a way of half compliment, half irony, that it was too classical for representation.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 33 
 
 mule his morning appearance in his passy, or passional t icig. 
 No comet expounded surer. J. B. Had a heavy hand. I have 
 known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling chili!, 
 (the maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips,) with a '• Sirrah, 
 do von presume to set your wits at me ?" Nothing was more 
 common than to see him make a headlong entry into the 
 schoolroom, from his inner recess, or library, and, with tur- 
 hulenteye, singling out a lad, roar out, " Odd's my life, sirrah," 
 (his favourite adjuration,) " I have a great mind to whip vou" 
 — then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into 
 his lair — and, after a cooling lapse of some minutes, (during 
 which all hut the culprit had totally forgotten the context.) 
 drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as 
 if it had been some devil's litany, with the expletory yell — 
 "and I will, too." In his gentler moods, when the ralidus 
 furor was assuaged, he had resort to an ingenious method, 
 peculiar, for what I have heard, to himself, of whipping the 
 boy and reading the Debates at the same time ; a paragraph, 
 and a lash between ; which in those times, when parliamen- 
 tary oratory was most at a height and flourishing in these 
 realms, was not calculated to impress the patient with a ven- 
 eration for the diffuser graces of rhetoric. 
 
 Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known to fall in- 
 effectual from his hand — when droll squinting W , having 
 
 been caught putting the inside of the master's desk to a use 
 for which the architect had clearly not designed it, to justify 
 himself, with great simplicity averred, that he did not knoio 
 that the thing had been forewarned. This exquisite Precogni- 
 tion of any law antecedent to the oral or declaratory, struck 
 so irresistibly upon the fancy of all who heard it, (the peda- 
 gogue himself not excepted,) that remission was unavoidable. 
 
 L. has given credit to B.'s great merits as an instructer. 
 Coleridge, in his literary life, has pronounced a more intelli- 
 gible and ample encomium on them. The author of the 
 Country Spectator doubts not to compare him with the ablest 
 teachers of antiquity. Perhaps we cannot dismiss him better 
 
 than with the pious ejaculation of C , when he heard that 
 
 his old master was on his deathbed — " Poor J. B. ! may all 
 his faults be forgiven ; and may he be wafted to bliss by little 
 cherub bovs, all head and wings, witli no bottoms to reproach 
 his sublunary infirmities." 
 
 Under him were many good and sound scholars bred. 
 First Grecian of my time was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kind- 
 est of bovs and men, since co-grammar master (and insep- 
 arable companion) with Dr. T e. What an edifying 
 
 spectacle did this brace of friends present to those who re- 
 
 l; 3
 
 34 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 membered the anti-socialities of their predecessors '. You 
 never met the one by chance in the street without a wonder, 
 which was quickly dissipated by the almost immediate sub- 
 appearance of the other. Generally arm in arm, these kindly 
 coadjutors lightened for each other the toilsome duties of 
 their profession ; and when, in advanced age, one found it 
 convenient to retire, the other was not long in discovering 
 that it suited him to lay down the fasces also. Oh, it is 
 pleasant, as it is rare, to find the same arm linked in yours 
 at forty, which at thirteen helped it to turn over the Cicero 
 de Amicitia, or some tale of antique friendship, which the 
 young heart even then was burning to anticipate ! Co-Grecian 
 
 with S. was Th , who has since executed with ability 
 
 various diplomatic functions at the Northern cotirts. Th 
 
 was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing of speech, with 
 raven locks. Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed him, (now 
 bishop of Calcutta,) a scholar and a gentleman in his teens. 
 He has the reputation of an excellent critic ; and is author 
 (besides the Country Spectator) of a Treatise on the Greek 
 article against Sharpe. M. is said to bear his mitre high in 
 India, where the regni novitas (I dare say) sufficiently justifies 
 the bearing. A humility quite as primitive as that of Jewel 
 or Hooker might not be exactly fitted to impress the minds of 
 those Anglo-Asiatic diocesans with a reverence for home in- 
 stitutions, and the church which those fathers watered. The 
 manners of M. at school, though firm, were mild and unas- 
 suming. Next to M. (if not senior to him) was Richards, 
 author of the Aboriginal Britons, the most spirited of the Ox- 
 ford prize poems ; a pale, studious Grecian. Then followed 
 poor S , ill-fated M ! of these the muse is silent. 
 
 Finding some of Edward's race 
 Unhappy, pass their annals by. 
 
 Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day- 
 spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before 
 thee — the dark pillar not yet turned — Samuel Taylor Cole- 
 ridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard ! How have I seen the 
 casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with 
 admiration, (while he weighed the disproportion between the 
 speech and the garb of the young Mirandula,) to hear thee 
 unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of 
 Jamblichus, or Plotinus, (for even in those years thou waxedst 
 not pale at such philosophic draughts,) or reciting Homer in 
 his Greek, or Pindar — while the walls of the old Gray Friars 
 re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy! Many 
 were the " wit combats" (to dally a while with the words of
 
 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 35 
 
 old Fuller) between him and C. V. Le G , " which two 
 
 I behold like ;i Spanish great galleon, and an English man- 
 of-war ; Master Coleridge, like the former, was built far 
 higher in learning .solid, but slow in his performances. C 
 \ . L., with the English man-of-war, lessor in bulk, but lighter 
 in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take ad- 
 vantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and in- 
 vention." 
 
 Nor shall thou, their compeer, be quickly forgotten, Allen, 
 with a cordial smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which 
 thou wert wont to make the old cloisters shake, in thy cogni- 
 tion of some poignant jest of theirs ; or the anticipation of 
 some more material, and, peradventure, practical one of thine 
 own. Extinct are those smiles, with that beautiful counte- 
 nance, with which, (for thou wert the Nireus formosus of the 
 school,) in the days of thv maturer waggery, thou didst disarm 
 the wrath of infuriated town damsel, who, incensed by pro- 
 voking pinch, turning tigresslike round, suddenly converted 
 
 by thy angel look, exchanged the half-formed, terrible " bl " 
 
 for a gentler greeting — " Bless thy handsome face /" 
 
 Next follow two, who ought to be now alive, and the friends 
 
 of Elia — the junior Le G and F ; who, impelled, the 
 
 former by a roving temper, the latter by too quick a sense of 
 neglect — ill capable of enduring the slights poor sizers are 
 sometimes subject to in our seats of learning, exchanged 
 their alma mater for the camp ; perishing, one by climate, 
 
 and one on the plains of Salamanca : Le G , sanguine, 
 
 volatile, sweet natured ; F , dogged, faithful, anticipative 
 
 of insult, warm hearted, with something of the old Roman 
 height about him. 
 
 Fine, frank-hearted Fr , the present master of Hertford, 
 
 with Marmaduke T •, mildest of missionaries — and both 
 
 my good friends still — close the catalogue of Grecians in my 
 time. 
 
 THE TWO RACES OF MEN. 
 
 fortrj of it, is composed ol two distinct races, the mm who bar- 
 row, and the mm ir'io lend. To these two original diversities 
 reduced all those impertinent classifications of the 
 ■>lnc and Celtic tribes white men, black men, red m< n
 
 36 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 All the dwellers upon earth, " Parthians, and Medes, and 
 Elamites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in with one or 
 the other of these primary distinctions. The infinite superi- 
 ority of the former, which 1 choose to designate as the great 
 race, is discernible in their figure, port, and a certain instinct- 
 ive sovereignty. The latter are born degraded. " He shall 
 serve his brethren." There is something in the air of one of 
 this cast, lean and suspicious ; contrasting with the open, 
 trusting, generous manners of the other. 
 
 Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all ages 
 — Alcibiades, Falstaff, Sir Richard Steele, our late incompara- 
 ble Brinsley — what a family likeness in all four ! 
 
 What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower ! 
 what rosy gills ! what a beautiful reliance on Providence doth 
 he manifest — taking no more thought than lilies ! What con- 
 tempt for money — accounting i^ (yours and mine especially) 
 no better than dross ! What a liberal confounding of those 
 pedantic distinctions of meum and tuum ! or rather what a 
 noble simplification of language, (beyond Tooke,) resolving 
 these supposed opposites into one clear, intelligible pronoun 
 adjective ! What near approaches doth he make to the primi- 
 tive community ! to the extent of one half of the principle at 
 least ! 
 
 He is the true taxer who " calleth all the world up to be 
 taxed ;" and the distance is as vast between him and one of 
 us, as subsisted between the Augustan majesty and the poor- 
 est obolary Jew that paid ittribute pittance at Jerusalem ! His 
 exactions, too, have such a cheerful, voluntary air ! so far re- 
 moved from your sour parochial or state gatherers — those 
 inkhorn varlets, who carry their want of welcome in their 
 faces ! He cometh to jou with a smile, and troubleth you 
 with no receipt ; confining himself to no set. season. Every 
 day is his Candlemas, or his feast of Holy Michael. He ap- 
 plicth the lene tormentum of a pleasant look to your purse — ■ 
 which to that gentle warmth expands her silken leaves as 
 naturally as the cloak of the traveller, for which sun and wind 
 contended ! He is the true Propontic which never ebbeth ! 
 The sea which taketh handsomely at each man's hand. In 
 vain the victim, whom he delighteth to honour, struggles with 
 destiny ; he is in the net. Lend therefore cheerfully, oh man 
 ordained to lend — that thou lose not in the end, with thy 
 wordly penny, the reversion promised. Combine not prepos- 
 terously in thine own person the penalties of Lazarus and of 
 Dives 1 but, when thou seest the proper authority coming, 
 meet it smilingly, as it were halfway. Come, a handsome
 
 ES8AY3 OF ELIA. 
 
 37 
 
 Sacrifice ! See how light he makes of it ! Strain not cour- 
 tesies with a noble enemy. 
 
 Reflections like the foregoing we/e forced upon my mind 
 By the death of my old friend; Ralph Bigod, Esq., who de- 
 parted this life on Wednesday evening; dying, as he had 
 lived, without much trouble. He boasted himself a descendant 
 from mighty ancestors of that name, who heretofore held 
 ducal dignities in this realm. In his actions and sentiments 
 he belied not the stock to which he pretended. Early in lite 
 he found himself invested with ample revenues ; which, with 
 that noble disinterestedness which I have noticed as inherent 
 in men of the great race, he took almost immediate measures 
 entirely to dissipate and bring to nothing ; for there is some- 
 thing revolting in the idea of a king's holding a private purse ; 
 and the thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus furnished, 
 by the very act of disfurnishment ; getting rid of the cumber- 
 some luggage of riches, more apt (as one sings) 
 
 "To slacken virtue and abate her edsje, 
 Than prompt her to ilo aught may merit praise," 
 
 he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his great enterprise, 
 " borrowing and to borrow !" 
 
 In his periegesis, or triumphant progress throughout this 
 island, it has been calculated that he laid a tithe part of the 
 inhabitants under contribution. 1 reject this estimate as 
 greatly exaggerated : but having had the honour of accompa- 
 nying my friend, divers times, in his perambulations about this 
 vast city, I own I was greatly struck at first with the prodi- 
 gious number of faces we met, who claimed a sort of respect- 
 ful acquaintance with us. lie was one day so obliging as to 
 explain the phenomenon. It seems these were his tributa- 
 ries ; feeders of his exchequer ; gentlemen, his good friends, 
 (as he was pleased to express himself,) to whom he had oc- 
 casionally been beholden for a loan. Their multitudes did no 
 way disconcert him. He rather took a pride in numbering 
 them ; and, with Coinus, seemed pleased to be "stocked with 
 so fair a herd." 
 
 With such sources, it was a wonder how he contrived to 
 keep his treasury always empty. He did it by force of an 
 aphorism, which he had often in his mouth, that " money kepi 
 longer than three days, stinks." So he made use of it while 
 it was fresh. A good part he drank away, (for he was an 
 excellent tosspot,) some he gave away, the rest he threw 
 away, literally tossing and hurling it violently from him — as 
 boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious — into ponds, or 
 ditches, or deep holes — inscrutable cavities of the earth ; 
 4
 
 38 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 or he would bury it (where he would never seek it again) by 
 a river's side under some bank, which (he would facetiously 
 observe) paid no interest — but out away from him it must go 
 peremptorily, as Hagar's offspring into the wildnerness, while 
 it was sweet. He never missed it. The streams were per- 
 ennial which fed his fisc. When new supplies became ne- 
 cessary, the first person that had the felicity to fall in with 
 him, friend or stranger, was sure to contribute to the defi- 
 ciency. For Bigod had an undeniable way with him. He 
 had a cheerful open exterior, a quick jovial eye, a bald fore- 
 head, just touched with gray (cana fides.) He anticipated no 
 excuse, and found none. And, waiving for a while my the- 
 ory as to the great race, I would put it to the most untheori- 
 zing reader, who may at times have disposable coin in his 
 pocket, whether it is not more repugnant to the kindliness of 
 his nature to refuse such a one as I am describing, than to 
 say no to a poor petitionary rogue, (your bastard borrower,) 
 who, by his mumping visnomy, tells you that he expects no- 
 thing better ; and, therefore, whose preconceived notions and 
 expectations you do in reality so much less shock in the re- 
 fusal. 
 
 When I think of this man ; his fiery glow of heart ; his 
 swell of feeling ; how magnificent, how ideal he was ; how 
 great at the midnight hour ; and when I compare with him the 
 companions with whom I have associated since, I grudge the 
 saving of a few idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into the 
 society of lenders and little men. 
 
 To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in lea- 
 ther covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of 
 alienators more formidable than that which I have touched 
 upon ; I mean your borrowers of books — those mutilators of 
 collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators 
 of odd volumes. There is Comberbatch, matchless in his 
 depredations. 
 
 That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great 
 eye tooth knocked out — (you are now with me in my little 
 back study in Bloomsbury, reader !) with the huge Switzer- 
 like tomes on each side, (like the (Juildhall giants, in their re- 
 formed posture, guardant of nothing,) once held the tallest of 
 my folios, Opera Bonavcntura, choice and massy divinity, to 
 which its two supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser 
 calibre — Bellarininc, and Holy Thomas) showed but as dwarfs 
 — itself an A sea part ! that Comberbatch abstracted upon the 
 faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess, for 
 me. to suffer by than to refute, namely, that " the title to prop- 
 erty in a book, (my Bonaventure, for instance,) is in exact
 
 ESSAYS OF EMA. 39 
 
 ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appre'i i,i- 
 ting the same." Should he go on acting upon this theory , 
 winch of our shelves is safe? 
 
 The slight vacuum in the left-hand case — two shelves from 
 the ceiling — scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eyi oi 
 a loser — was whilom the commodious resting place of Brown 
 on Urn Burial. C will hardly allege that he knows more 
 about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and 
 was indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties 
 — but so have I known a foolish lover to praise his mistn B8 in 
 the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her off than 
 himself. Just below, Dodsley's Dramas want their fourth 
 volume, where Yittoria Corombona is ! The remainder nine 
 are as distasteful as Priam's refuse sons, when the fates bor- 
 rowed Hector. Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in 
 sober, state. There loitered the Complete Angler ; quiet as in 
 life, by some streamside. In yonder nook, John Buncle, a wid- 
 ower volume, with " eyes closed," mourns his ravished mate. 
 
 One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, 
 like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sealike, 
 he throws up as rich an equivalent to match it. I have a 
 small under collection of this nature, (my friend's gatherings 
 in his various calls,) picked up, he has forgotten at what odd 
 places, and deposited with as little memory at mine. I take 
 in these orphans, the twice deserted. These proselytes of 
 the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. There they stand 
 in conjunction ; natives, and naturalized. The latter seem as 
 little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am. 1 
 charge no warehouse room for these deodands, nor shall ever 
 put mvself to the ungentlemanly trouble of advertising a sale 
 of them to pay expenses. 
 
 To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in 
 it. You are sure that he will make one hearty meal on your 
 viands, if he can give no account of the platter after it. But 
 what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K., to be so importunate 
 to carry off with thee, in spite of tears and abjurations to thee 
 to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice 
 noble Margaret Newcastle ? — knowing at the time, and know- 
 ing that I knew also, thou most assuredly wouldst never turn 
 over one leaf of the illustrious folio — what but the mere 
 sj.iiit of contradiction, and childish love of getting the better 
 of thy friend? Then, worst cut of all! to transport it with 
 line to the Gallican land — 
 
 ' Unworthy land to harbour such :> Bweetnejss, 
 
 \ \ l 1 1 « i. ■ in \s liirli all ennoblra welt, 
 
 I'll re thoughts, kind ill- thOUgtitS, li-.T sex's WO'lilcr '"
 
 40 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 — hadst thou not thy play books, and books of jests and fan- 
 cies, about thee, to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest all 
 companies with thy quips and mirthful tales ? Child of the 
 greenroom, it was unkindly done of thee. Thy wife, too, 
 that part French, better part Englishwoman ! — that she could 
 fix upon no other treatise to bear away, in kindly token of re- 
 membering us, than the works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brook 
 — of which no Frenchman, nor woman of France, Italy, or 
 England, was ever by nature constituted to comprehend a 
 tittle ! Was there not Zimmerman on Solitude 1 
 
 Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, 
 be shy of showing it ; or if thy heart overflows to lend them, 
 lend thy books ; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. — he 
 will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) 
 with usury ; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. 
 I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of 
 his — (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfre- 
 quently, vying with the originals) — in no very clerkly hand — 
 legible in my Daniel ; in old Burton ; in Sir Thomas Browne ; 
 and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas ! 
 wandering in pagan lands. I counsel thee, shut not thy 
 heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C. 
 
 NEWYEAR'S EVE. 
 
 Every man has two birthdays : two days, at least, in 
 every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, 
 as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in 
 an especial manner he terms his. In the gradual desuetude 
 of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper 
 birthday has nearly passed away, or is left to children, who 
 reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand any- 
 thing in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a new 
 year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or 
 cobbler. No one ever regarded the first of January with 
 indifference. It is that from which all date their time and 
 count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common 
 Adam. 
 
 Of ;ill sound of all bells — (bells, the music nighest border- 
 ing upon heaven) — most solemn and touching is the peal 
 which rings out the old year. I never hear it without a 
 gathering up of my mind to a concentration of all the images
 
 EQSAYS OF £LIA. 41 
 
 that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth ; all i have 
 done or suffered, performed or neglected — in that regretted 
 time, I begin to know us worth, as when a person dies. It 
 takes a personal colour ; nor was it a poetical llight in a con- 
 temporary, when he exclaimed, 
 
 " I saw the skirts of the departing year." 
 
 It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us 
 seems to be conscious of, in that awful leavetaking. I am 
 sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night ; though some 
 of my companions affected rather to manifest an exhilaration 
 at the birth of the coming year, than any very tender regrets 
 for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of tho.su 
 who 
 
 " Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest." 
 
 I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties — new books, 
 new faces, new years — from some mental twist which makes 
 it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased 
 to hope ; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other 
 (former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and conclu- 
 sions. I encounter pellmell with past disappointments. I am 
 armour proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or. 
 overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again for 
 love, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid 
 so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward 
 accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more 
 alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. 
 Methinks it is better that I should have pined away seven of 
 my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and 
 
 fairer eyes, of Alice W n, than that so passionate a love 
 
 adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should 
 have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, 
 than that I should have at. this moment two thousand pounds 
 in banco, and be without the idea of that specious old rogue. 
 
 In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look 
 back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox when 
 I say, that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a 
 man may have leave to love himself, without the imputation 
 of self-love ? 
 
 If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is intro- 
 spective, and mine is painfully so, can have a less respect l"T 
 his present identity, than I have for the man Elia. 1 know 
 
 him to be light, and vain, ami humoursome ; a notorious ; 
 
 addicted to ; averse from counsel, neither taking it nor 
 
 offering it ; besides ; a stammering bulfoon ; what you 
 
 4*
 
 42 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 will ; lay it on, and spare not ; I subscribe to it all, and much 
 more than thou canst be willing to lay at his door — but for 
 the child Elia — that " other me," there, in the background — 
 I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young 
 master, with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid change- 
 ling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other 
 house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient 
 smallpox at five, and rougher medicaments. I can lay its 
 poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ's, and wake 
 with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness 
 hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know 
 how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood. God 
 help thee, Elia, how art thou changed ! Thou art sophisti- 
 cated. I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) 
 it was ; how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful ! From 
 what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed 
 myself, and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false 
 identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regu- 
 late the tone of my moral being ! 
 
 That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, 
 in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly 
 idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause ; simply, that 
 being without wife or family, I have not learned to project 
 myself enough out of myself ; and having no offspring of my 
 own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my 
 own early idea as my heir and favourite ? If these specula- 
 tions seem fantastical to thee, reader, (a busy man perchance,) 
 if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly 
 conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the 
 phantom cloud of Elia. 
 
 The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a char- 
 acter not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old 
 institution, and the ringing out of the old year was kept by 
 them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. In those 
 days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed 
 to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train 
 of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce con- 
 ceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that con- 
 cerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till 
 thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it 
 indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the 
 fragility of life ; but he brings it not home to himself, any 
 more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagina- 
 tion the freezing days of December. But now, shall I con- 
 fess a truth ? 1 feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin 
 to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 43 
 
 expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser's far- 
 things. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, 
 I set more rount upon their periods, and would fain lay inv 
 ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am 
 not content to pass away " like a weaver's shuttle." Those 
 metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the Unpalatable draught 
 of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that 
 smoothly bears human life to eternity ; and reluct at the in- 
 evitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green 
 earth ; the face of town and country ; the unspeakable rural 
 solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up 
 my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to 
 which I am arrived — I, and my friends : to be no younger, no 
 richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age ; 
 or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. Any 
 alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles 
 and discomposes me. My household gods plant a terrible 
 fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do 
 not willingly seek LaVinian shores. A new state of being 
 staggers me. 
 
 Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer 
 holydays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices 
 of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and 
 candlelight, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities 
 and jests, and irony itself- — do these things go out with life ? 
 
 Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you 
 are pleasant with him 1 
 
 And you, ray midnight darlings, my folios ! must I part 
 with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in mv 
 embraces ? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, 
 by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by 
 this familiar process of reading ? 
 
 Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indica- 
 tions which point me to them here, the recognisable face ; 
 " the sweet assurance of a look ?" 
 
 In winter, this intolerable disinclination to dying, to give it 
 its mildest name, does more especially haunt and beset me. 
 In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is 
 almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as 
 myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. 
 Then are we as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, 
 and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me 
 puts me in thoughts of death. AH things allied to the unsub- 
 stantial wait upon that master feeling ; cold, numbness, 
 dreams, perplexity ; moonlight itself, with its shadow v and 
 spectral appearances, that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus's
 
 44 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the Can- 
 ticles : I am none of her minions ; I hold with the Persian. 
 
 Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings 
 death into my mind. All partial evils, like humours, run into 
 that capital plague sore. I have heard some profess an indif- 
 ference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as a 
 port of refuge ; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in 
 which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed 
 death — but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom.'. I 
 detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six- 
 score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or toler- 
 ated, but shunned as a universal viper ; to be branded, pro- 
 scribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to 
 digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more frightful 
 and confounding Positive 1 
 
 Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are 
 altogether frigid and insulting like thyself. For what satis- 
 faction hath a man, that he shall " lie down with kings and 
 emperors in death," who in his lifetime never greatly coveted 
 the society of such bedfellows ? or, forsooth, that " so shall 
 the fairest face appear ?" — why, to comfort me, must Alice 
 
 W n be a goblin ? More than all, I conceive disgust at 
 
 those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed 
 upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take 
 upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that 
 " such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, 
 friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the mean time I am 
 alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know 
 thy betters ! Thy Newyear's days are past. I survive, a 
 jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine ; and while 
 that turncoat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obse- 
 quies of 1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings in a 
 successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like 
 occasion by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton : — 
 
 THE NEW YEAR. 
 
 Hark, the cock crows, and yon bright star 
 Tells us the day himself 's not far ; 
 And see where, breaking from the night, 
 Me gilds the western hills with light. 
 With him old Janus doth appear, 
 Peeping into the future year, 
 With such a look, as seoms to say, 
 The prospect is not good that way. 
 Thus do we rise ill sights to see. 
 And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy; 
 When the prophetic fear of things 
 A more tormenting mischief brings,
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 45 
 
 More full of soul-tormenting gall, 
 
 Than direst mischii stall. 
 
 Km stay ' tut t siav ' metbinka my sight, 
 
 licitcr inform'd by clearer light, 
 
 Discern! m renensss m trial broW, 
 
 Thai ''II ooDtracted seem'd but now. 
 
 His reversed face ma* Bhow distaste, 
 
 And frown upon the His are ]>:is t ; 
 
 But that which this way looks is clear, 
 
 And smiles Upon tiic newborr) year. 
 
 He Looks! too, from a place bo lugh, 
 
 The year lies open to Ins eye ; 
 
 And all the moments opp^ are 
 
 To the exact discoverer. 
 
 Yet more and more he smiles upon 
 
 The happy revolution. 
 
 Why should we then suspect or fear 
 
 The influences of a year, 
 
 So smiles upon us the first mom, 
 
 And speaks us good as soon as horn ? 
 
 Plague on't ! the hist was ill enough, 
 This cannot but make latter proof . 
 
 Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through 
 
 The last, why so we may this too ; 
 And then the next in reason should 
 Be superexcellently good : 
 For the worst ills (we daily see) 
 Have no more perpetuity 
 Than the best fortunes that do fall ; 
 Which also bring us wherewithal 
 Longer their being to support 
 Than those do of the other sort ; 
 And who has one good year in three, 
 And yet repines at destiny, 
 Appears ungiateful in the case, 
 And merits not the good he has. 
 Then let us welcome the new guest 
 With lusty brimmers of the best ; 
 Mirth always should good fortune meet, 
 And renders e'en disaster sweet; 
 And though the princess turn her back, 
 Let us hut line ourselves with sack, 
 We better shall by far hold out. 
 Till the next year she face about. 
 
 How say you, reader — do not these verses smack of the 
 rough magnanimity of the old English vein ? Do they not 
 fortify like a cordial ; enlarging the heart, and productive of 
 sweet blood, and generous spirits in the concoction ? Where 
 be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected ? 
 Passed like a cloud — absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear 
 poetry — clean washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, 
 your only spa for these hypochondries. And now another 
 cup of the generous ! and a merry Newyear, and many of 
 them, to you all, my masters !
 
 46 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. 
 
 " A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game." 
 This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle, (now with 
 God,) who, next to her devotions, loved a good game at whist. 
 She was none of your lilkewarm gamesters, your half and 
 half players, who have no objection to take a hand, if you 
 want one to make up a rubber ; who affirm that they have no 
 pleasure in winning ; that they like to win one game, and 
 lose another ; that they can while away an hour very agree- 
 ably at a card table, but are indifferent whether they play or 
 no ; and will desire an adversary, who has slipped a wrong card, 
 to take it up and play another. These insufferable triflers 
 are the curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole 
 pot. Of such it may be said, that they do not play at cards, 
 but only play at playing at them. 
 
 Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, 
 as I do, from her heart and soul ; and would not, save upon 
 a striking emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table 
 with them. She loved a thorough-paced partner, a determined 
 enemy. She took, and gave, no concessions. She hated 
 favours. She never made a revoke, nor ever passed it over 
 in her adversary without exacting the utmost forfeiture. She 
 fought a good fight cut and thrust. She held not her good 
 sword (her cards) " like a dancer." She sat bolt upright ; 
 and neither showed you her cards, nor desired to see yours. 
 All people have their blind side — their superstitions ; and I 
 have heard her declare, under the rose, that hearts was her 
 favourite suit. 
 
 I never in my life — and I knew Sarah Battle many of the 
 best years of it — saw her take out her snuil'box when it was 
 her turn to play ; or snuff a candle in the middle of a game ; 
 or ring for a servant, till it was fairly over. She never intro- 
 duced, or connived at, miscellaneous conversation during its 
 process. As she emphatically observed, cards were cards ; 
 and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her line last-century 
 countenance, it was at the airs of a young gentleman of a 
 literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take 
 a hand ; and who, in his excess of candour, declared, that he 
 thought there was no harm in unbending the mind nuw and 
 then, after serious studies, in recreations of that kind ! She 
 could not bear to have her noble occupation, to which she 

 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 47 
 
 wound up her faculties, considered in that ' i ulit . It was her 
 business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do — 
 and she did it. .She unbent her mind afterward — over a 
 book. 
 
 Pope was her favourite author : his Rape of the Lock, her 
 favourite work. She once did me the favour to play over 
 with me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in 
 that poem ; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and 
 in what points it would be found to differ, from, tradrille. Her 
 illustrations were apposite and poignant ; and 1 had the pleas- 
 ure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles : hut I 
 suppose they came too late to be inserted among his inge- 
 nious notes upon that author. 
 
 Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love ; but 
 whist had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she 
 said, was showy and specious, and likely to allure young per- 
 sons. The uncertainty and quick shifting of partners — a 
 thing which the constancy of whist abhors ; the dazzling su- 
 premacy and regal investiture of Spadille — absurd, as she 
 justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where his 
 crown and garter give him no proper power above his brother 
 nobility of the Aces ; the giddy vanity, so taking to the inex- 
 perienced, of playing alone ; above all, the overpowering at- 
 tractions of a Sans Prendre Vole — to the triumph of which 
 there is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the con- 
 tingencies of whist : all these, she would say, make quadrille 
 a <:ame of captivation to the young and enthusiastic. But 
 whist was the solider game : that was her word. It was a 
 long meal ; not, like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or 
 two rubbers might co-extend in duration with an evening. 
 They gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate steady 
 enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and 
 ever-fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of 
 quadrille, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral 
 embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machia- 
 vel ; perpetually changing postures and connections ; bitter 
 foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow ; kissing and scratch- 
 ing in a breath ; but the wars of whist were comparable to 
 the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational antipathies of the great 
 French and English nations. 
 
 A sjrave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her 
 favourite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the abb 
 in crihbage — nothing superfluous. No flush/ s — that most ir- 
 rational of all pleas that a reasonable being can set up; that 
 any one should claim four by virtue of holding cards of the 
 same mark and colour, without reference to the playing of
 
 48 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 the game, or the individual worth or pretensions of the cards 
 themselves! She held this to be a solecism ; as pitiful an 
 ambition at cards as alliteration is in authorship. She de- 
 spised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of 
 things. Suits were soldiers, she would say, and must have a 
 uniformity of array to distinguish them : but what should we 
 say to a foolish squire, who should claim a merit from dress- 
 ing up his tenantry in red jackets, that never were to be mar- 
 shalled — never to take the field 1 She even wished that 
 whist were more simple than it is ; and, in my mind, would 
 have stripped it of some appendages, which, in the state of 
 human frailty, may be venially, and even commendably al- 
 lowed of. She saw no reason for the deciding of the trump 
 by the turn of the card. Why not one suit always trumps ? 
 Why two colours, when the mark of the suits would have 
 sufficiently distinguished them without it ? 
 
 " But the eye, my dear madam, is agreeably refreshed with 
 the variety. Man is not a creature of pure reason — he must 
 have his senses delightfully appealed to. We see in it Ro- 
 man Catholic countries, where the music and the paintings 
 draw in many to worship, whom your Quaker spirit of unsen- 
 sualizing would have kept out. You yourself have a pretty 
 collection of paintings — but confess to me, whether, walking 
 in your gallery at Sandham, among those clear Vandykes, or 
 among the Paul Potters in the anteroom, you ever felt your 
 bosom glow with an elegant delight, at all comparable to that 
 you have it in your power to experience most evenings over 
 a well-arranged assortment of the court cards ? — the pretty 
 antic habits, like heralds in a procession — the gay, triumph- 
 assuring scarlets — the contrasting, deadly-killing sables — the 
 ' hoary majesty of spades' — Pam in all his glory ! 
 
 " All these might be dispensed with ; and, with their naked 
 names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very 
 well, pictureless. But the beauty of cards would be extin- 
 guished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, 
 they must degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine a dull 
 deal board, or drumhead, to spread them on, instead of that 
 nice verdant carpet, (next to nature's,) fittest arena for those 
 rourtly combatants to play their gallant jousts and tourneys in ! 
 Exchange those delicately turned, ivory markers — (work of 
 Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol — or as profanely 
 flighting their true application as the arrantest Ephesian jour- 
 neyman that turned out those little shrines for the goddess) — 
 exchange them for little bits of leather (our ancestors' money) 
 or chalk and a slate !" 
 
 The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 49 
 
 logic ; and to her approbation of my arguments on her fa- 
 vourite topic that evening, I have always fancied myself in- 
 debted for the legacy of a curious cribbage board, made of 
 the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old 
 Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought 
 with him from Florence : this, and a trifle of five hundred 
 pounds, came to me at her death. 
 
 The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have 
 kept with religious care ; though she herself, to confess a 
 truth, was never greatly taken with cribbage. It was an 
 essentially vulgar game, I heard her say — disputing with her 
 uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never heartily 
 bring her mouth to pronounce "go" — or "that's ago." She 
 called it an ungrammatical game. The pegging teased her. 
 I once knew her to forfeit a rubber, (a five-dollar stake,) be- 
 cause she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, 
 which would have given it her, but which she must have 
 claimed by the disgraceful tenure of declaring " two for his 
 heels." There is something extremely genteel in this sort of 
 sell-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman born. 
 
 Piquet she held the best game at cards for two persons, 
 though she would ridicule the pedantry of the terms — such as 
 pique — repique — the capot — they savoured (she thought) of 
 affectation. But games for two, or even three, she never 
 greatly cared for. She loved the quadrate, or square. She 
 would argue thus : Cards are warfare ; the ends are gain, 
 with glory. But cards are war, in disguise of a sport : when 
 single adversaries encounter, the ends proposed are too palp- 
 able. By themselves, it is too close a fight ; with spectators, 
 it is not much bettered. No looker-on can be interested, ex- 
 cept for a bet, and then it is a mere affair of money ; he cares 
 not for your luck sympathetically, or for your play. Three 
 are still worse ; a mere naked war of every man against every 
 man, as in cribbage, without league or alliance ; or a rotation 
 of petty and contradictory interests, a succession of heartless 
 leagues, and not much more hearty infractions of them, as in 
 tradrille. But in square games (she meant whist) all that is 
 possible to be attained in cardplaying is accomplished. There 
 are the incentives of profit with honour, common to every 
 species — though the latter can be but very imperfectly enjoyed 
 in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a 
 participator. But the parties in whist are spectators and 
 principals too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a 
 looker-on is not wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, 
 and an impertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interests 
 beyond its sphere. You glory in some surprising stroke of 
 5 C
 
 50 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 skill or fortune, not because a cold — or even an interested — 
 bystander witnesses it, but because your partner sympathizes 
 in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph for two. 
 Two are exalted. Two again are mortified ; which divides 
 their disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by taking off the 
 invidiousness) your glories. Two losing to two are better 
 reconciled than one to one in that close butchery. The 
 hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying the channels. 
 War becomes a civil game. By such reasonings as these 
 the old lady was accustomed to defend her favourite pastime. 
 No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any 
 game, where chance entered into the composition, for nothing. 
 Chance, she would argue — and here, again, admire the sub- 
 tlety of her conclusion ! — chance is nothing, but where some- 
 thing else depends upon it. It is obvious, that cannot be 
 glory. What rational cause of exultation could it give to a 
 man to turn up size ace a hundred times together by himself, 
 or before spectators, where no stake was depending ? Make 
 a lottery of a hundred thousand tickets with but one fortunate 
 number — and what possible principle of our nature, except 
 stupid wonderment, could it gratify to gain that number as 
 many times successively, without a prize 1 — therefore she 
 disliked the mixture of chance in backgammon, where it was 
 not played for money. She called it foolish, and those people 
 idiots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such circum- 
 stances. Games of pure skill were as little to her fancy. 
 Played for a stake, they were a mere system of overreaching. 
 Played for glory, they were a mere setting of one man's wit 
 — his memory, or combination faculty rather — against an- 
 other's ; like a mock engagement at a review, bloodless and 
 profitless. She could not conceive a game wanting the 
 sprightly infusion of chance — the handsome excuses of good 
 fortune. Two people playing at chess in a corner of a room, 
 while whist was stirring in the centre, would inspire her 
 with insufferable horror and ennui. Those well-cut simili- 
 tudes of castles and knights, the imagery of the board, she 
 would argue, (and I think in this case justly,) were entirely 
 misplaced and senseless. Those hard-headed contests can 
 in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject form and 
 colour. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were the 
 proper arena for such combatants. 
 
 To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad 
 passions, she would retort, that men is a gaming animal. He 
 must be always trying to get the better in something or 
 other: that this passion can scarcely be more safely expended 
 than upon a game at cards : that cards are a temporary
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 51 
 
 illusion ; in truth, a mere drama ; for we do but play at being 
 mightily concerned, where a few idle shillings are at stake, 
 yet during the illusion, we an as mightily concerned as those 
 whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. They arc; a sort of 
 dream fighting; much ado, great, buttling, and little blood- 
 shed ; mighty means for disproportioned ends ; quite as di- 
 verting, and a great deal more innoxious, than many of those 
 more serious games of life, which men play, without esteem- 
 ing them to be such. 
 
 With great deference to the old lady's judgment on these 
 matters, 1 think I have experienced some moments in my life, 
 when playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable. 
 When I am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes 
 call lor the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my 
 Cousin Bridget — Bridget Elia. 
 
 I grant there is something sneaking in it ; but with a tooth- 
 ache, or a sprained ankle — when you are subdued and hum 
 ble — you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of action. 
 
 There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick 
 whist. 
 
 1 grant it is not the highest style of man — I deprecate the 
 manes of Sarah Battle — she lives not, alas ! to whom I should 
 apologize. 
 
 At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, 
 come in as something admissible. I love to get a tierce or a 
 quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an in- 
 ferior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me. 
 
 That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capoted her 
 — dare I tell thee, how foolish I am ?) — I wished it might 
 have lasted for ever, though we gained nothing and lost no- 
 thing, though it was a mere shade of play ; I would be con- 
 tent to go on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should 
 be ever boiling that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to 
 my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game 
 was over ; and as I do not much relish appliances, there it 
 should ever bubble. Bridget and I should be ever playing. 
 
 A CHAPTER ON EARS. 
 
 I have no ear. 
 
 Mistake me not, reader — nor imagine that I am by nature 
 dostitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging orna- 
 
 C2
 
 52 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 merits, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the 
 human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. I am, 
 I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those 
 conduits ; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his 
 plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious 
 labyrinthine inlets — those indispensable side intelligencers. 
 
 Neither have I incurred, or done anything to incur, with 
 Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to 
 draw upon assurance to feel " quite unabashed," and at ease 
 upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pil- 
 lory ; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of 
 my destiny that I ever should be. 
 
 When, therefore, I say that I have no ear, you will under- 
 stand me to mean — -for music. To say that this heart never 
 melted at the concourse of sweet sounds, would be a foul self- 
 libel. " Water parted from the Sea" never fails to move it 
 strangely. So does " In Infancy.'''' But they were used to be 
 sung at her harpsichord (the oldfashioned instrument in vogue 
 in those days) by a gentlewoman — the gentlest, sure, that 
 ever merited the appellation — the sweetest — why should I 
 
 hesitate to name Mrs. S , once the blooming Fanny 
 
 Wetheral of the Temple — who had power to thrill the sold 
 of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats ; and to 
 make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that not 
 faintly indicated the dayspring of that absorbing sentiment, 
 which was afterward destined to overwhelm and subdue his 
 nature quite, for Alice W n. 
 
 I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmonv. 
 But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been prac- 
 tising " God save the King'" all my life ; whistling and hum- 
 ming it over to myself in solitary corners ; and am not yet 
 arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath 
 the loyalty of Elia never been impeached. 
 
 I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped 
 faculty of music within me. For, thrumming, in my wild 
 way, on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he 
 was engaged in an adjoining parlour — on his return he was 
 pleased to say " he thought it could not be the maid .'" On 
 his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an 
 airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions 
 had lighted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched from a superior 
 refinement, soon convinced him that some being — technically 
 perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle com- 
 mon to all the fine arts — had swayed the keys to a mood 
 which Jenny, with all her (less cultivated) enthusiasm, could 
 never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof ol
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 53 
 
 my friend's penetration, and not with any view of disparaging 
 Jenny. 
 
 Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have 
 I taken some pains) what a note in music is; or how one 
 note should differ from another. .Much less in voices can I 
 distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the 
 thorough base I contrive to guess at, from its being super- 
 eminently harsh and disagreeable. I tremble, however, for 
 my misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I dis- 
 claim. \V bile I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to 
 say I am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sos- 
 tenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me ; 
 and sol, fa, mi, re, is as conjuring as Baraliplon. 
 
 It is hard to stand alone — in an age like this — (constituted 
 to the quick and critical perception of all harmonious combi- 
 nations, I verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Ju- 
 bal stumbled upon the gamut) — to remain, as it were, singly 
 unimpressible to the magic influences of an art, which is said 
 to have such an especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and re- 
 fining the passions. Yet rather than break the candid current 
 of my confessions, I must avow to you, that I have received 
 a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up 
 faculty. 
 
 I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's 
 hammer, ID a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than 
 midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds, 
 are nothing to the measured malice of music. The ear is 
 passive to those single strokes ; willingly enduring stripes, 
 while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive. 
 It will strive — mine at least will, 'spite of its inaptitude — to 
 thrid the maze ; like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon 
 hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian opera, till, for 
 sheer pain and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into 
 the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself 
 with sounds which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of 
 the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention ! 
 I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest com- 
 mon-life sounds ; and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician 
 becomes my paradise. 
 
 I have sat at an oratorio (that profanation of the purposes 
 of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory 
 in the pit, (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience,) 
 immoveable, or affecting some taint emotion — till (as some 
 have said, that our occupations in the next world will be but 
 a shadow of what delighted us in ihis) 1 have imagined my- 
 self in some cold theatre in Hades, where some of the forms 
 5*
 
 54 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 of the earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoy- 
 ment ; or like that — 
 
 " Party in a parlour, 
 All silent, and all damned !" 
 
 Above all, those insufferable concertos and pieces of music, 
 as they are called, do plague and imbitter my apprehension. 
 Words are something ; but to be exposed to an endless bat- 
 tery of mere sounds ; to be long a dying ; to lie stretched 
 upon a rack of roses ; to keep up languor by unintermitted 
 effort ; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to 
 an interminable tedious sweetness ; to fill up sound with feel- 
 ing, and strain ideas to keep pace with it ; to gaze on empty 
 frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to 
 read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal 
 matter ; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague 
 gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime — these are faint 
 shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest- 
 executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. 
 
 I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have expe- 
 rienced something vastly lulling and agreeable — afterward 
 followeth the languor and the oppression. Like that disap- 
 pointing book in Patmos ; or, like the comings-on of melan- 
 choly described by Burton, doth music make her first insinu- 
 ating approaches : " Most pleasant is it to such as are mel- 
 ancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove, between 
 wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon 
 some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him 
 most, amabilis insania and mentis gratissimus error. A most 
 incomparable delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling 
 to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they 
 suppose and strongly imagine they act, or that they see done. 
 So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole 
 days and nights without sleep, even whole years, in such con- 
 templations and fantastical meditations, which are like so 
 many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them — winding 
 and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleas- 
 ing their humours, until at last the scene turns upon a sud- 
 den, and they, being now habited to such meditations and sol- 
 itary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing 
 but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, 
 subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of life, 
 surprise them on a sudden, and they can tbink of nothing 
 else: continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, 
 but this infernal plague of melancholy scizeth on them, and
 
 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 55 
 
 terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their 
 minds : which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions 
 they can avoid, they cannot be rid of, they cannot resist." 
 
 Something like this " scexe-turxixg" I have experienced 
 at the evening parties at the house of my good Catholic friend 
 
 Nov ; who, by the aid of a capital organ, himself the 
 
 most finished of players, converts his drawing room into a 
 chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into 
 minor heavens.* 
 
 When my friend commences upon one of those solemn an- 
 thems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear 
 rambling in the side aisles of the dim abbey, some iive-and- 
 thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of 
 old religion into my young apprehension — (whether it be that, 
 in which the psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, 
 wisheth to himself doves' wings — or that other, which, with 
 a like measure of sobriety and pathos, iuquireth by what 
 means the young man shall best cleanse his mind) — a holy 
 calm pervadeth me. I am for the time 
 
 " Rapt above earth, 
 And possess joys not promised at my birth." 
 
 But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid 
 a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss 
 than lies in her capacity to receive — impatient to overcome 
 her " earthly" with his " heavenly" — still pouring in, for pro- 
 tracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, 
 or from that inexhausted German ocean, above which, in tri- 
 umphant progress, dolphin seated, ride those Arions, Haydn 
 and Mozart, with their attendant Tritons, Bach, Beethoven, 
 and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would 
 but plunge me again in the deeps — I stagger under the weight 
 of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wit's end ; clouds, as of 
 frankincense, oppress me — priests, altars, censers, dazzle 
 before me — the genius of his religion hath me in her toils — a 
 shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so 
 naked, so ingenuous — he is pope, and by him sits, like as in 
 the anomaly of dreams, a she pope too — tri-coroneted like 
 himself! I am converted, and yet a Protestant ; at once 
 malleus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch : or three 
 heresies centre in my person : I am Marcion, Ebion, and 
 Cerinthus — Gog and Magog — what not? — till the coming in 
 of the friendly supper tray dissipates the figment, and a draught 
 
 * 1 have been there, and still would go ; 
 'Tis like a little heaven below. 
 
 Dr. Watts.
 
 56 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows him- 
 self no bioot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a 
 purer faith: and restores to me the genuine unterrifying as- 
 pects of my pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. 
 
 ALL FOOLS' DAY. 
 
 The compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and 
 a merry first of April to us all ! 
 
 Many happy returns of this day to you — and you — and you, 
 sir — nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the mat- 
 ter. Do not we know one another ? what need of ceremony 
 among friends ? we have all a touch of that same — you under- 
 stand me — a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who 
 on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to 
 stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the 
 corporation, and care not who knows it. He that meets me 
 in the forest to day, shall meet with no wiseacre, I can tell 
 him. Stuhus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning 
 of it to yourself for your pains. What, man, we have four 
 quarters of the globe on our side, at the least computation. 
 
 Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry — we will drink 
 no wise, melancholy, politic port on this day — and let us troll 
 the catch of Amiens — due ad me — due ad me — how goes it 1 
 
 " Here shall he see 
 Gross fools as he." 
 
 Now would I give a trifle to know, historically and authen- 
 tically, who was the greatest fool that ever lived. I would 
 certainly give him in a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I 
 think I could without much difficulty name you the party. 
 
 Remove your cap a little farther, if you please ; it hides 
 my bawble. And now each man bestride his hobby, and dust 
 away his bells to what tune he pleases. I will give you for 
 my part, 
 
 " The crazy old church clock, 
 And the bewildered chimes." 
 
 Good master Empedocles, you are welcome. It is long 
 since you went a salamander gathering down iEtna. Worse 
 than samphire-picking by some odds. 'Tis a mercy your 
 worship did not singe your mustaches.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 57 
 
 Ha ! Clcombrottis ! and what salads in faith did you light 
 upon at the bottom of the Mediterranean I You were founder 
 1 take it, of the disinterested sect of the Oalenturists. 
 
 Ge.bir, my old freemason, and prince of plasterers at, Babel 
 bring in your trowel, must Am nut Grand ! You have a claim 
 to a seat here at my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. 
 You left your work, if I remember Herodotus correctly, at 
 eight hundred million toises, or thereabout, above the level 
 of the sea. Bless us, what a long bell you must have polled 
 to call your top workmen to their nunchiou on the low grounds 
 of Sennaar. Or did you send up your garlic and onions by a 
 rocket 1 I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to show you our 
 Monument on Fish-street Hill, after your altitudes. Yet we 
 think it somewhat. 
 
 What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears ? cry, baby, put 
 iis finger, in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as an 
 orange, pretty moppet ! 
 
 Mister Adams — 'odso, I honour your coat — pray do us the 
 favour to read us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress 
 Slipsop — the twenty-and-second in your portmanteau there — 
 on Female Incontinence — the same — it will come in most ir- 
 relevantly and impertinently seasonable to the time of the day. 
 
 Good Master Raymond Lully, you look wise. Pray cor- 
 rect that error. 
 
 Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, 
 or a paradox. We will have nothing said or done syllogistic- 
 ally this day. Remove those logical forms, waiter, that no 
 gentleman break the tender shins of his apprehension stum- 
 bling across them. 
 
 Master Stephen, you are late. Ha! Cokes, is it you? 
 Aguecheek, my dear knight, let me pay my devoir to you. 
 Master Shallow, your worship's poor servant to command. 
 Master Silence, I will use Pew words with you. Slender, it 
 shall go hard if I edge not you in somewhere. You six will 
 engross all the poor wit of the company to-day. 1 know it, 
 1 know it. 
 
 Ha ! honest R , my fine old librarian of Ludgate, 
 
 time out of mind, art thou here again ? Bless thy doublet, it 
 is not overnevv, threadbare as thy stories : what dost thou 
 flitting about the world at this rate ? Thy customers are ex- 
 tinct, defunct, bedrid, have ceased to read long ago. Thou 
 goest still among them, seeing if, prradventure, thou canst 
 hawk a volume or two. Good Granville S , thy last pa- 
 tron, is down. 
 
 " Kin? Patvlion he is dr.iil, 
 All thy friends arc bpp'd in lead.*' 
 C 3
 
 58 ESSAYS OF ELIA.. 
 
 Nevertheless, noble R , come in, and take your seat 
 
 here, between Armado and Quisada ; for in true courtesy, in 
 gravity, in fantastic smiling to thyself, in courteous smiling 
 upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-apparelled speech, 
 and the commendation of wise sentences, thou art nothing in- 
 ferior to those accomplished dons of Spain. The spirit of 
 chivalry forsake me for ever, when I forget thy singing the 
 song of Macheath, which declares that he might be happy 
 with either, situated between those two ancient spinsters — 
 when I forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst 
 make, turning now to the one, and now to the other, with that 
 Malvolian smile — as if Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for 
 his hero ; and as if thousands of periods must revolve, be- 
 fore the mirror of courtesy could have given his invidious 
 preference between a pair of so goodly-propertied and meri- 
 torious-equal damsels. 
 
 To descend from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fools' 
 Banquet beyond its appropriate day — for I fear the second of 
 April is not many hours distant — in sober verity I will confess 
 a truth to thee, reader. I love a fool — as naturally as if [ 
 were a kith and kin to him. When a child, with childlike 
 apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, 
 I read those parables — not guessing at their involved wisdom 
 — I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that 
 built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more 
 cautious neighbour ; I grudged at the hard censure pronounced 
 upon the quiet soul that kept his talent ; and — prizing their 
 simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehen- 
 sion, somewhat unfeminme wariness of their competitors — I 
 felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a tendre, for those 
 five thoughtless virgins. I have never made an acquaintance 
 since that lasted, or a friendship that answered, with any 
 that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. 
 I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more 
 laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the 
 more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overrent h 
 you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination war- 
 rants ; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And 
 take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if 
 you please, that he who hath not, a drachm of lollv in his mix- 
 ture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. 
 It is observed, " that the foolisher the fowl or fish — wood- 
 cocks, dotterels, codsheads, &c, the finer the flesh thereof," 
 and what are commonly the world's received fools, but such 
 whereof the world 13 not worthy ? and what have been some
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 59 
 
 of the kindliest patterns of our species, but so many darlings 
 of absurdity, minions of the goddess, and her white boys 1 
 Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, 
 it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool. 
 
 A QUAKER MEETING. 
 
 stillborn silence! thou that art 
 
 Floodgate of the deeper heart ! 
 
 Offspring of a heavenly kind ! 
 
 Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind ! 
 
 Secrecy's confidant, and he 
 
 Who makes religion mystery ! 
 
 Admiration's speaking'st tongue \ 
 
 Leave, thy desert shades among, 
 
 Reverend hermit's hallowed cells, 
 
 Where retired devotion dwells ! 
 
 With thy enthusiasms come, 
 
 Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb !* 
 
 Reader, wouldst thou know what true peace and quiet 
 mean ; wouldst thou find a refuge from the noises and clam- 
 ours of the multitude ; wouldst thou enjoy at once solitude 
 and society ; wouldst thou possess the depth of thine own 
 spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consol- 
 atory faces of thy species ; wouldst thou be alone, and yet 
 accompanied ; solitary, yet not desolate ; singular, yet not 
 without some to keep thee in countenance ; a unit in aggre- 
 gate ; a simple in composite : come with me into a Quaker 
 meeting. 
 
 Dost thou love silence deep as that " before the winds were 
 made," go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the 
 profundities of the earth ; shut not up thy casements ; nor 
 pour wax into the little cells of thine ears, with little-faithed, 
 srlf-mistrusting Ulysses. Retire with me into a Quaker 
 meeting. 
 
 For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold 
 his peace, it is commendable ; but for a multitude, it is great 
 mastery. 
 
 What is the slillm >s ofthe desert compared with this place ? 
 what the uncotamuriicating muteness of fishes ! here the god- 
 dess refgjas and revels. " Boreas, and Cecias, and Argestcs 
 loud," do not with tin ir intern founding uproars more sag 
 
 * Froca * Poems of ail Sorts," by Richard Flcckno, 1653.
 
 GO ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 ment the brawl — nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their 
 clubbed sounds — than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) 
 is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and 
 by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. 
 Negation itself hath a positive more and less ! and closed 
 eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. 
 
 There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. 
 By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoy eth by himself. 
 The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, 
 but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quaker meeting. Those 
 first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when they 
 retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to 
 enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian 
 is bound to his brethren by his agreeing spirit of uncommuni- 
 cativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be 
 reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend 
 sitting by — say a wife — he, or she, too, (if that be probable,) ' 
 reading another, without interruption, or oral communication? 
 can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words ? away 
 with this inhuman, shy, single, shade and cavern haunting 
 solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmerman, a symphathetic 
 solitude. 
 
 To pace alone in the cloisters or side aisles of some ca- 
 thedral, time stricken — 
 
 " Or under hanging mountains, 
 Or by the fall of fountains" — 
 
 is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy 
 who come together for the purposes of more complete, ab- 
 stracted solitude. This is the loneliness " to be felt." The 
 Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so 
 spirit, soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quaker 
 meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions — 
 
 " Sands, ignoble things 
 Dropped from the ruined sides of kings" — 
 
 but here is something which throws Antiquity herself into 
 the foreground — Silence — eldest of things — -language of old 
 ISight — primitive discourser— to which the insolent decays of 
 mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent and, as we 
 may say, unnatural progression . 
 
 " How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, 
 Looking tranquillity !'' 
 
 Nothing-plotting, naught-caballing, unmischievous synod ! 
 convocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! 
 what a lesson dost thou read to council and to consistory ! if
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 61 
 
 my pen treat of you lightly — as haply it will wander — yet my 
 spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when sit- 
 ting among you in deepest peace, which some outwelling 
 tears would rather confirm than disturb; I have reverted to the 
 times of your beginnings, and the sowings of the seed by 
 Fox and Dewsbury. 1 have witnessed that which brought 
 before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, indexible to the rude 
 jests and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican 
 or royalist, sent to molest you — for ye sat between the fires 
 of two persecutions, the outcast and oilscouring of church and 
 presbytery. I have seen the reeling sea ruffian, who had 
 wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed intention of 
 disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive 
 in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a 
 lamb amid lambs. And I remember Penn before his accu- 
 sers, and Fox in the bail dock, where he was lifted up in 
 spirit-, as he tells us, and "the judge and the jury became as 
 dead men under his feet." 
 
 Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recom- 
 mend to you, above all church narratives, to read "Se well's 
 History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of 
 the journals of Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far more 
 edifying and affecting than anything you will read of Wesley 
 and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger vuu, nothing 
 to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg 
 of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the 
 true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man, (who, perhaps, 
 hath been a byword in your mouth,) James Naylor : what 
 dreadful sufferings with what patience he endured, even to the 
 boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons without a 
 murmur ; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion 
 lie had fallen into, which they stigmatized for blasphemy, had 
 given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in 
 a strain of the beaulifullesthunnlitv, yet keep his first grounds, 
 and be a Quaker still ! — so different from the practice of your 
 common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they aposta- 
 tize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough 
 from the society of their former errors, even to the renuncia- 
 tion of some saving truths, with which they had been min- 
 gleck, not implicated. 
 
 Get the writings of John Woolman by heart j and love the 
 early Quakers. 
 
 How far the followers of these good men in our days have 
 kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have 
 substituted formality for it, the Judge of spirits can alone de- 
 termine. I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which 
 6
 
 62 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 the dove sat visibly brooding. Others again I have -watched, 
 when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which 
 I could possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet 
 was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence 
 of the fierce controversial workings. If the spiritual preten- 
 sions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few 
 pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not in their preach- 
 ing. It is seldom indeed that you shall see one get up among 
 them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling female, 
 generally ancient, voice is heard — you cannot guess from 
 Avhat part of the meeting it proceeds — with a low, buzzing, 
 musical sound, laying out a few words which " she thought 
 might suit the condition of some present," with a quaking dif- 
 fidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that any- 
 thing of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were 
 so full of tenderness and a restraining modesty. The men, 
 for what I have observed, speak seldomer. 
 
 Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a 
 sample of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant 
 stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced, 
 " from head to foot equipped in iron mail." His frame was 
 of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over 
 with the spirit — I dare not say, of delusion. The strivings of 
 the outer man were unutterable — he seemed not to speak, 
 but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and 
 his knees to fail — his joints all seemed loosening — it was a 
 figure to off set against Paul preaching — the words he uttered 
 were few, and sound — he was evidently resisting his will — 
 keeping down his own word wisdom with more mighty effort 
 than the world's orators strain for theirs. " He had been a 
 wit in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober re- 
 morse. And it was not till long after the impression had 
 begun to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like 
 a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confession — 
 understanding the term in its worldly acceptation — with the 
 frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow 
 would have scared away the levities — the Jocos Risus-que 
 — faster than the Loves lied the face of Dis at Enna. By 
 wit, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood some- 
 thing far within the limits of an allowable liberty.. 
 
 More frequently the meeting is broken up without a word 
 having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go 
 away with a sermon not made with hands. You have been 
 in the milder caverns of Trophonius ; or as in some den, 
 where that fiercest and savagost, of all wild creatures, tin- 
 ToNGUt, that unruly member, has strangely lain lied up and
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. C3 
 
 captive. You have bathed wiih stillness. Oh when the 
 spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings 
 and nonsense noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it 
 is to go and seat yourself, for a quiet half hour, upon some 
 undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers ! 
 
 Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, 
 tranquil and herdlike — as in the pasture — "forty feeding like 
 one." 
 
 The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiv- 
 ing a soil ; and cleanliness in them to be something more than 
 the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily : and 
 when they come up in bands to their Whitsun conferences, 
 whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts 
 of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the sinning 
 ones. 
 
 THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 
 
 My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethod- 
 ical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays and treatises, 
 have supplied me with most of my notions and ways of feel- 
 ing. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole 
 encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have 
 scarcely cut a figure among the Franklins, or country gentle- 
 men in King John's days. I know less geography than a 
 schoolboy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Or- 
 telius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know where- 
 about Africa merges into Asia; whether Ethiopia lie in one 
 or other of those great divisions ; nor can form the remotest 
 conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Die- 
 uicii's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very 
 dear friend in the first named of these two terra incognita?. 
 1 have no astronomv. I do not know where to look for tin? 
 Bear, or Charles's Wain ; the place of any star; or the name 
 of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her bright- 
 ness ; and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make 
 his first appearance in the west, I verily believe, that while 
 all the world were gasping in apprehension about me, I alone 
 should stand untt rritied. from sheer incuriosity and want of ob- 
 servation. Of history and chronology I possess dome vague 
 points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of 
 miscellaneous study ; but 1 never deliberately sat down to a
 
 64 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim appre- 
 hensions of the four great monarchies ; and sometimes the 
 Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my far cy. 
 I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her 
 shepherd kings. My friend 31., with great painstaking, got 
 me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but 
 gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unac- 
 quainted with the modern languages ; and, like a better man 
 than myself, have " small Latin and less Greek." I am a 
 stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, 
 herbs, flowers — not from the circumstance of my being town 
 born ; for I should have brought the same unobservant spirit 
 into the world with me, had I first seen it " on Devon's leafy 
 shores," and am no less at a loss among purely town objects, 
 tools, engines, mechanical processes. Not that I affect igno- 
 rance ; but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious ; 
 and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities 
 as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder how I 
 have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, 
 as I have done, upon so meager a stock. But the fact is, a 
 man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce 
 be found out, in mixed company ; everybody is so much 
 more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of 
 your acquisitions. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. 
 The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much 
 as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, 
 well-informed man, who does not know me. I lately got into 
 a dilemma of this sort. 
 
 In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shack- 
 lewell, the coach stopped to take up a staid-looking gentle- 
 man, about the wrong side of thirty, who was giving his part- 
 ing directions, (while the steps were adjusting,) in a tone of 
 mild authority, to a tall youth, who seemed to be neither his 
 clerk, his son, nor his servant, but something partaking of all 
 three. The youth was dismissed, and we drove on. As we 
 were the sole passengers, he naturally enough addressed his 
 conversation to me ; and we discussed the merits of the laic, 
 the civility and punctuality of the driver ; the circumstance 
 of an opposition coach having been lately set up, with the 
 probabilities of its success — to all which I was enabled to re- 
 turn pretty satisfactory answers, having been drilled into tins 
 kind of etiquette by some years' daily practice of riding to and 
 fro in tin: stage aforesaid, when he suddenly alarmed me by a 
 startling question, whether I had seen the show of prize cat- 
 tle that morning in Sinithlit dd. JNow as I had not seen it, 
 and do not greatly care for such sort of exhibitions, I was
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 65 
 
 obliged to return a cold negative. He seemed a little morti- 
 fied, as well as astonished, a! my declaration, as (it appeared) 
 be was just come fresh from the sight, and doubtless had 
 hoped to compare notes on the subject. However, he assured 
 me that I had lost a line treat, as it far exceeded the show of 
 last year. We were now approaching Norton Falgate, when 
 the sight of some shop goods ticketed freshened him up into 
 a dissertation upon the cheapness of cottons this spring. I 
 was now a little in heart, as the nature of my morning avoca- 
 tions' had brought me into some sort of familiarity with the 
 raw material ; and I was surprised to find how eloquent I was 
 becoming on the slate of tin- India market, when, presently* 
 he dashed mv incipient vanity to the earth at once, by inqui* 
 ring whether I had ever made any calculation as to the value 
 of the rental of all the retail shops in London. Had he asked 
 of me what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles 
 assumed when he hid himself among women. 1 might, with 
 Sir Thomas Browne, have hazarded a " wide solution."* 
 My companion saw my embarrassment, andthealmshousesbe- 
 yond Shoreditch just coming in view, with great good nature 
 and dexterity shifted his conversation to the subject of public 
 charities ; which led to the comparative merits of provision 
 for the poor in past and present times, with observations on 
 the old monastic institutions and charitable orders — but find- 
 ing me rather dimly impressed with some glimmering notions 
 from old poetic associations, than strongly fortified with any 
 speculations reducible to calculation on the subject, he gave 
 the matter up ; and the country beginning to open more and 
 more upon us as we approached the turnpike at Kingsland, 
 (the destined termination of his journey,) he put a home thrust 
 upon me, in the most unfortunate position he could have 
 chosen, by advancing some queries relative to the North Pole 
 Expedition. While 1 was muttering out something about the 
 panorama of those strange regions, (which 1 had actually seen,) 
 by way of parrying the question, the coach stopping relieved 
 me from any further apprehensions. My companion getting 
 out, left me in the comfortable possession of my ignorance ; 
 and I heard him, as he went off, putting questions to an out- 
 side passenger, who had alighted with him, regarding an epi- 
 demic disorder, that had been rife about Dalston ; and which, 
 my friend assured him, had gone through five or six schools 
 in that neighbourhood. The truth now Hashed upon me. that 
 my companion was a schoolmaster ; and that the youth, whom 
 he had parted from at our first acquaintance, must have been 
 
 * Urn Burial.
 
 66 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 one of the bigger boys, or the usher. He was evidently a 
 kind-hearted man, who did not seem so much desirous of 
 provoking discussion by the questions which he put, as of ob- 
 taining information at any rate. It did not appear that he 
 took any interest, either, in such kind of inquiries, for their 
 own sake ; but that he was in some way bound to seek for 
 knowledge. A greenish-coloured coat which he had on for- 
 bade me to surmise that he was a clergyman. The adventure 
 gave birth to some reflections on the difference between per- 
 sons of his profession in past and present times. 
 
 Rest to the souls of those fine old pedagogues — the breed, 
 long since extinct, of the Lilys and the Linacres — who, be- 
 lieving that all learning was contained in the languages which 
 they taught, and despising every other acquirement as super- 
 ficial and useless, came to their task as to a sport ! Passing 
 from infancy to age, they dreamed away all their days as in 
 a grammar school. Revolving in a perpetual cycle of declen- 
 sions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies ; renewing con- 
 stantly the occupations which had charmed their studious 
 childhood ; rehearsing continually the part of the past ; life 
 must have slipped from them at last like one day. They 
 were always in their first garden, reaping harvest of their 
 golden time, among their Flori and their Spicilegia ; in Arca- 
 dia still, but kings ; the ferule of their sway not much harsher, 
 but of like dignity with that mild sceptre attributed to King 
 Basileus ; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and 
 their Philoclea ; with the occasional duncery of some unto- 
 ward tyro, serving for the refreshing interlude of a Mopsa, or 
 a clown Damaetas ! 
 
 With what a savour doth the preface to Colet's, or (as it is 
 sometimes called) Paul's Accidence, set forth ! " To exhort 
 every man to the learning of grammar, that intendeth to at- 
 tain the understanding of the tongues, wherein is contained a 
 great treasury of wisdom and knowledge, it would seem but 
 vain and lost labour ; for so much as it is known, that nothing 
 can surely be ended, whose beginning is either feeble or 
 faulty ; and no building be perfect, whereof the foundation 
 ajad groundwork are ready to fall, and unable to uphold the 
 burden of the frame." How well doth this stately preamble 
 (comparable to those which Milton commendeth as " having 
 been the usage to prefix to some solemn law, then first pro- 
 mulgated by Solon or Lycurgus") correspond with and illus- 
 trate that pious zeal for conformity, expressed in a succeeding 
 • lausc, which would fence about grammar rules with the se- 
 verity of faith articles ! — " as for the diversity of grammars, it 
 is well profitably taken away by the king majesty's wisdom,
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 67 
 
 who, foreseeing the inconvenience, and favourably providing the 
 remedv, caused one kind of grammar by sundry learned men 
 to be diligently drawn, and so to be set out, only everywhere 
 to be taught lor the use of learners, and for the hurt in chang- 
 ing of schoolmasters." What a fVMo in that which follows ; 
 " wherein it is profitable that he (the pupil) can orderly de- 
 cline his noun and his verb." His noun ! 
 
 The fine dream is fading away fast ; and the least coacern 
 of a teacher in the present day is to inculcate grammar rules. 
 
 The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of 
 everything, because his pupil is required not to be entirely 
 ignorant of anything. He must be superficially, if I may so 
 say, omniscient. He is to know something of pneumatics ; 
 of chvmistry : of whatever is curious, or proper to excite the 
 attention of tlie youthful mind ; an insight into mechanics is 
 desirable, with a touch of statistics ; the quality of soils, <fcc, 
 botany, the constitution of his country, cum multis aliis. You 
 may get a notion of some part of his expected duties by con- 
 sulting the famous Tractate on Education, addressed to Mr. 
 Hartlib. 
 
 All these things — these, or the desire of them — he is ex- 
 pected to instil, not by set lessons from professors, which he 
 may charge in the bill, but at school intervals, as he walks 
 the streets, or saunters through green fields, (those natural 
 instructers,) with his pupils. The least part of what is ex- 
 pected from him, is to be done in school hours. He must 
 insinuate knowledge at the mollia tempora fandi. He must 
 seize every occasion — the season of the year ; the time of 
 the day ; a passing cloud ; a rainbow ; a wagon of hay ; a 
 regiment of soldiers going by — to inculcate something useful. 
 He can receive no pleasure from a casual glimpse of nature, 
 but must catch at it as an object of instruction. He must in- 
 terpret beauty into the picturesque. He cannot relish a beg- 
 gar man or a gipsy, for thinking of the suitable improvement. 
 Nothing comes to him not spoiled by the sophisticating 
 medium of moral uses. The universe — that great book, as 
 it has been called — is to him indeed, to all intents and pur- 
 poses, a book, out of which he is doomed to read tedious 
 homilies to distasting schoolhoys. Vacations themselves are 
 none to him, he is only rather worse off than before ; for 
 commonly he has some intrusive upper boy fastened upon 
 him at such times ; some cadet of a great family ; soiru neg- 
 lected lump of nobility or gentry, that he must drag alter him 
 to the plav, to the Panorama, to Mr. Hartley's Orrery, to the 
 Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's house, or his 
 favourite watering place. Wherever he goes, this uneasy
 
 68 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, 
 and in all his movements. He is boy rid, sick of perpetual 
 boy. 
 
 Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their 
 mates ; but they are unwholesome companions for grown 
 people. The restraint is felt no less on the one side than 
 on the other. E.ven a child, that " plaything for an hour," 
 tires always. The noises of children, playing their own 
 fancies — as I now hearken to them by fits, sporting on the 
 green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave 
 speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell — by 
 distance made more sweet — inexpressibly take from the labour 
 of my task. It is like writing to music. They seem to mod- 
 ulate my periods. They ought at least to do so — for in the 
 voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far unlike 
 the harsh prose accents of man's conversation. I should but 
 spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by 
 mingling in their pastime. 
 
 I would not be domesticated all my days, with a person of 
 very superior capacity to my own — not, if I know myself at 
 all, from any considerations of jealousy or self-comparison, for 
 the occasional communion with such minds has constituted 
 the fortune and felicity of my life ; but the habit of too con- 
 stant intercourse with spirits above you, instead of raising 
 you, keeps you down. Too frequent doses of original think- 
 ing from others, restrain what lesser portion of that faculty' 
 you may possess of your own. You get entangled in an- 
 other man's mind, even as you lose yourself in another man's 
 grounds. You are walking with a tall varlet, whose strides 
 outpace yours to lassitude. The constant operation of such 
 potent agency would reduce me, I am convinced, to imbecility. 
 You may derive thoughts from others ; your way of thinking, 
 the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your 
 own. Intellect may be imparted, but not each man's intel- 
 lectual frame. 
 
 As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged up- 
 ward, as little (or rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted 
 downward, by your associates. The trumpet does not more 
 stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its 
 provoking inaudibility. 
 
 Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a 
 schoolmaster 1 — because we are conscious that he is not quite 
 at his ease in ours. He is awkward and out of place in the so- 
 ciety of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his 
 little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding 
 to yours. He cannot meet you on the square. He wants a
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 09 
 
 point given him, like an indifferent whistplayer. He is so 
 used to teaching, that he wants to be teaching you. One of 
 these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches 
 of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable 
 to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the 
 method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were 
 taught to compose English themes. The jests of a school- 
 master are coarse, or thin. They do not fell out of school. 
 lie is under the restraint of a formal and didactive hypocrisy 
 in company, as a clergyman is under a moral one. He can 
 no more let his intellect loose in society, than the other can 
 his inclinations. He is forlorn among his coevals ; his juniors 
 cannot be his friends. 
 
 " I take blame to myself,'' said a sensible man of this pro- 
 fession, writing to a friend respecting a youth who had quitted 
 his school abruptly, " that your nephew was hot more attached 
 to me. But persons in my situation are more to be pitied 
 than can well be imagined. We are surrounded by young, 
 and, consequently, ardently affectionate hearts, but we can 
 never hope to share an atom of their affections. The relation 
 of master and scholar forbids this. How pleasing this must 
 be to you, how I envy your feelings, my friends will sometimes 
 say to me, when they see young men, whom I have educated, 
 return after some years absence from school, their eyes shi- 
 ning with pleasure, while they shake hands with their old 
 master, bringing a present of game to me, or a toy to my 
 wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms for my care of 
 their education. A holyday is begged for the boys, the house 
 is a scene of happiness. I, only, am sad at heart. This 
 fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, who fancies he repays 
 his master with gratitude for the care of his boyish years — 
 this young man, in the eight long years I watched over him 
 with a parent's anxiety, never could repay me with one look 
 of genuine feeling. He was proud when I praised ; he was 
 submissive when I reproved him ; but he did never love me — 
 and what he now mistakes for gratitude and kindness for me, 
 is but the pleasant sensation which all persons feel at revisit- 
 ing the scene of their boyish hopes and fears ; and the see- 
 ing on equal terms the man they were accustomed to look up 
 to with reverence. My wife, too," this interesting corre- 
 spondent goes on to say, " my once darling Anna, is the wife 
 of a schoolmaster. When I married her — knowing that the 
 wife of a schoolmaster ought to be a busy notable creature, 
 and fearing that mv gentle Anna would ill supply the loss of 
 my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who never sat still, 
 was in every part of the house in a moment, and whom I was
 
 70 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 obliged sometimes to threaten to fasten down in a chair, to 
 save her from fatiguing herself to death — 1 expressed my fears, 
 that I was bringing her into a way of life unsuitable to her ; 
 and she, who loved me tenderly, promised, for my sake, to 
 exert herself to perform the duties of her new situation. She 
 promised, and she has kept her word. What wonders will 
 not woman's love perform ? My house is managed with a 
 decorum unknown in other schools, my boys are well fed, 
 look healthy, and have every proper accommodation ; and all 
 this performed with a careful economy, that never descends 
 to meanness. But I have lost my gentle, helpless Anna ! 
 When we sit down to enjoy an hour of repose after the fatigue 
 of the day, I am compelled to listen to what have been her 
 useful (and they are really useful) employments through the 
 day, and what she proposes for her to-morrow's task. Her 
 heart and her features are changed by the duties of her situa- 
 tion. To the boys, she never appears other than the masters 
 wife, and she looks up to me as the boy's master ; to whom 
 all show of love and affection would be highly improper, and 
 unbecoming the dignity of her situation and mine. Yet this 
 my gratitude forbids me to hint, to her. For my sake she 
 submitted to be this altered creature, and can I reproach her 
 for it ?" For the communication of this letter, I am indebted 
 to my Cousin Bridget. 
 
 VALENTINE'S DAY. 
 
 Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great 
 is thy name in the rubric, thou venerable arch-flamen of Hy- 
 men ! Immortal go-between ! who and what manner of per- 
 son art thou ? Art thou but a name, typifying the restless 
 principle which impels poor humans to seek perfection in 
 union 1 or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, with thy tippet 
 and thy rochet, thy apron on, and decent lawn sleeves ? 
 Mysterious personage ! like unto thee, assuredly, there is no 
 other mitred father in the calendar ; not Jerome, nor Ambrose, 
 nor Cyril ; nor the consigner of undipped infants to eternal 
 torments, Austin, whom all mothers hate ; nor he who hated 
 all mothers, Origen ; nor Bishop Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, 
 nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with thousands and ten 
 thousands of little loves, and the air is 
 
 " Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings."
 
 EAYS OF ELI A. 71 
 
 Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors ; and in- 
 stead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee. 
 
 In other words, this is the day on which those charming 
 little missives, yclept Valentines, cross and intercross each 
 other at every street and turning. The weary and all for- 
 spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate em- 
 barrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what 
 an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving 
 town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment of 
 knockers and bell wires. In these little visual interpretations, 
 no emblem is so common as the heart — that little three-cor- 
 nered exponent of all our hopes and fears — the bestuck and 
 bleeding heart ; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories 
 and affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have 
 in history, or mythology, for placing the heatl-quarters and 
 metropolis of god Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than 
 in any other, is not very clear ; but we have got it, and it 
 will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily ima- 
 gine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for 
 anything which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover 
 addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, " Mad- 
 am, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal ;" or 
 putting a delicate question, " Amanda, have you a midriff to 
 bestow ?" But custom has settled these things, and awarded 
 the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less 
 fortunate neighbours wait at animal and anatomical distance. 
 
 Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all ru- 
 ral sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door. It "gives 
 a very echo to the throne where hope is seated." But its is- 
 sues seldom answer to this oracle within. It is so seldom 
 that just the person we want to see comes. But of all the 
 clamorous visitations, the welcomest in expectation is the 
 sound that ushers in, or seems to usher in, a Valentine. As 
 the raven himself was hoarse that announced the fatal en- 
 trance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on this day 
 is light, airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth good 
 tidings. It is less mechanical than on other days ; you will 
 say " that is not the post, I am sure." Visions of love, 
 of Cupids, of Hymens ! — delightful eternal commonplaces, 
 which " having been, will always be ;" which no schoolboy 
 nor schoolman can write away ; having your irreversible 
 throne in the fancy and affections — what are your transports. 
 when the happy maiden, opening with careful finger, careful 
 not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the sighl of 
 some well-designed allegory, some type, some youthful fancy, 
 not without verses —
 
 72 ESSAYS OF EL1A. 
 
 " Lovers all, 
 A madrigal," 
 
 or some such device, not over abundant in sense — young 
 Love disclaims it — and not quite silly — something between 
 wind and water, a chorus where the sheep might almost join 
 the shepherd, as they did, or as I apprehend they did, in 
 Arcadia. 
 
 All Valentines are not foolish ; and I shall not easily forget 
 thine, my kind friend (if I may have leave to call you so) 
 E. B. E. B. lived opposite a young maiden, whom he had 
 
 often seen, unseen, from his parlour window in C e-street. 
 
 She was all joyousness and innocence, and just of an age to 
 enjoy receiving a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the 
 disappointment of missing one with good humour. E. B. is 
 an artist of no common powers ; in the fancy parts of design- 
 ing, perhaps inferior to none ; his name is known at the bot- 
 tom of many a well-executed vignette in the way of his pro- 
 fession, but no further ; for E. B. is modest, and the world 
 meets nobody halfway. E. B. meditated how he could re- 
 pay this young maiden for many a favour which she had done 
 him unknown ; for when a kindly face greets us, though but 
 passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should 
 feel it as an obligation ; and E. B. did. This good artist set 
 himself at work to please the damsel. It was just before 
 Valentine's day, three years since. He wrought, unseen and 
 unsuspected, a wondrous work. We need not say it was on 
 the finest gilt paper with borders — full, not of common hearts 
 and heartless allegory, but all the prettiest stories of love from 
 Ovid, and older poets than Ovid — (for E. B. is a scholar.) 
 There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not 
 forgot, nor Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in 
 OaTster, with mottoes and fanciful devices, such as beseemed, 
 in short, a work of magic. Iris dipped the woof. This on Val- 
 entine's eve he commended to the all-swallowing indiscrimi- 
 rtateirig orifice — (oh ignoble trust!) — of the common post; 
 but the humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful 
 stand, the next morning, he saw the cheerful messenger 
 knock, and by-and-by the precious charge delivered. He 
 saw, unseen, the happy girl unfold the Valentine, dance about, 
 clap her hands, as one after one the pretty emblems unfolded 
 themselves. She danced about, not with light love, or foolish 
 expectations, for she had no lover ; or, if she had, none she 
 knew that could have created those bright images which de- 
 lighted her. It was more like some fairy present; a God- 
 send, as our familiarly pious ancestors termed a benefit re- 
 ceived, where the benefactor was unknown. It would do her
 
 ESSAY8 OF ELI A. 79 
 
 no harm. It would do her good for ever after. It is good to 
 love the unknown. I only give this as a specimen of E. B. 
 and his modest way of doing a concealed kindness. 
 
 Good-morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia ; and no 
 better wish, but with better auspices, we wish to all faithful 
 lovers, who are not too wise to despise old legends, but are 
 content to rank themselves humble diocesans of old Bishop 
 Valentine and his true church. 
 
 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 
 
 I am of a constitution so gf-neral, that it consorts and sympathizeth with 
 all tilings. I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in anything. Those 
 national repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with predjudice the 
 French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — Religio Medici. 
 
 That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the 
 airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and con- 
 jectural essences — in whose categories of being the possible 
 took the upper hand of the actual — should have overlooked 
 the impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as 
 mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to be won- 
 deied at, that in the genus of animals he should have conde- 
 scended to distinguish that species at all. For myself, earth- 
 bound and fettered to the scene of my activities, 
 
 " Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky," 
 
 I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national 
 or individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no in- 
 different eye upon tilings or persons. Whatever is, is to me 
 a matter of taste or distaste ; or when once it becomes indif- 
 ferent, it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, 
 a bundle of prejudices — made up of likings and dislikings — 
 the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, and antipathies. In 
 a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am a lover 
 of my species. I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot 
 feel towards all equally. The more purely English word that 
 expresses sympathy will better explain my meaning. I can 
 be a friend to a worthy man, who upon another account can- 
 not be my mate or fellow. 1 cannot like all people alike.* 
 
 * I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of imperfect sym- 
 pathies. To nations or classes of men there can be no direct antipathy. 
 
 7 D
 
 74 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am 
 obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They can- 
 not like me — and, in truth, I never knew one of that nation 
 who attempted to do it. There is something more plain and 
 ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know one an- 
 other at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects, 
 (under which mine must be content to rank,) which in its con- 
 stitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the 
 sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than 
 comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness 
 or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing 
 them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few 
 whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments and 
 scattered pieces of truth. She presents no full front to them 
 — a feature or a side face at the most. Hints and glimpses, 
 germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pre- 
 tend to. They beat up a little game peradventure — and leave 
 it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down. 
 The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but muta- 
 ble and shifting : waxing, and again waning. Their conversa- 
 tion is accordingly. They will throw out a random word in 
 or out of season, and be content to let it pass for what it is 
 worth. They cannot speak always as if they were upon their 
 oath — but must be understood, speaking or writing, with some 
 abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proposition, but 
 e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight to im- 
 part their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting 
 for their full development. They are no systematizers, and 
 would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said 
 before, are suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledo- 
 
 There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another indi- 
 vidual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my 
 moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting (who never 
 saw one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting. 
 
 "We by proof find there should be 
 'Tween man and man such an antipathy, 
 That though he can show no just reason why 
 For any former wrong or injury, 
 Can neither find a blemish in his fame, 
 iNor aught in face or feature justly blame, 
 Can challenge or accuse him of no evil, 
 Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil." 
 
 These lines are from old Heywood's " Hierarchie of Angels," and he sub 
 joins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who attempted to assassin 
 ate a King Ferdinand of Spain, and, being put to the rack, could give no other 
 reason for tho deed than an inveterate antipathy which he had taken to the first 
 eight of the king. 
 
 "The cause which to that act eompell'd him, 
 Was, ho ne'er loved him since he first beheld him."
 
 ESSAYS OF EUA. 75 
 
 nian (if I am not mistaken) is constituted upon quite a different 
 plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never ad- 
 mitted to see his ideas in their growth — if, indeed, they do 
 grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock- 
 work. You never catch his mind in an undress. He never 
 hints or suggests anything, but unlades las stock of ideas in 
 perfect order and completeness. He brings his total wealth 
 into company, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always 
 about him. He never stoops to catch a glittering something 
 in your presence, to share it with you, before he quite knows 
 whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry halves to 
 anything that he finds. He does not find, but bring. You 
 never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His under- 
 standing is always at its meridian — you never see the first 
 dawn, the early streaks. He has no falterings of self-suspi- 
 cion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half intuitions, semi- 
 consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo 
 conceptions, have no place in his brain or vocabulary. The 
 twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox — 
 he has no doubts. Is he an infidel — he has none either. 
 Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border 
 land with him. You cannot hover with him upon the con- 
 fines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. 
 He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions wiih 
 him — for he sets you right. His taste never fluctuates. His 
 morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand 
 middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. His 
 conversation is as a book. His affirmations have the sanctity 
 of an oath. You must speak upon tin; square with him. lie 
 stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's coun- 
 try. " A healthy book !" said one of his countrymen to me, who 
 had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle — '"did I 
 catch rightly what you said ! I have heard of a man in health, 
 and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that epi- 
 thet can be properly applied to a book." Above all, you must 
 beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an 
 extinguisher uponyour irony, if you are unhappily blessed with 
 a \c in of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a 
 print of a graceful female, after Leonardo da Vinci, which I 
 
 was showing off to Mr. -. After he had examined it 
 
 minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked my hk.utv — (a 
 foolish name it goes by among my friends) — when he very 
 gravely assured me, that "he had considerable respect for my 
 character and talents," (so he was pleased to say,) "but had 
 not given himself much though) about the degree of my per- 
 sonal pretensions." The misconception staggered me, but 
 D 2
 
 76 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 did not seem much to disconcert him. Persons of this na- 
 tion are particularly fond of affirming a truth — which nobody- 
 doubts. They do not so properly affirm, as annunciate it. 
 They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, 
 like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that, all truth becomes 
 equally valuable, whether the proposition that contains it be 
 new or old, disputed or such as is impossible to become a sub- 
 ject of disputation. I was present not long since at a party 
 of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected, and 
 happened to drop a silly expression, (in my South British way,) 
 that I wished it were the father instead of the son — when four 
 of them started up at once to inform me, that " that was im- 
 possible, because he was dead." An impracticable wish, it 
 seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has hit off 
 this part of their character, namely, their love of truth, in his 
 biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the 
 passage to the margin.* The tediousness of these people is 
 certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one another ! 
 In my early life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of 
 Burns. I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself 
 with his countrymen by expressing it. But I have always 
 found that a true Scot resents your admiration of his compa- 
 triot, even more than he would your contempt of him. The 
 latter he imputes to your " imperfect acquaintance with many 
 of the wordd which he uses ;" and the same objection makes 
 it a presumption in you to suppose you can admire him. 
 Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollet they have 
 neither forgotten nor forgiven, for his delineation of Rory and 
 his companion upon their first introduction into our metropolis. 
 Speak of Smollet as a great genius, and they will retort upon 
 you Hume's History compared with his continuation of it. 
 What if the historian had continued Humphrey Clinker ? 
 
 I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are 
 a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stone- 
 henge is in its nonage. They date beyond the pyramids. 
 But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse 
 with any of that nation. I confess that I have not the nerves 
 to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling about me. 
 I cannot shake oil' the story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries 
 
 ' There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit themselves, and 
 entertain their company, with relating facts of no consequence, not at all out 
 of the road of such common incidents as happen every day ; and this 1 have 
 observed more frequently among the Scotch than any other nation, who are 
 very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of time or place ; which 
 kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and 
 phrases, as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that country, would be 
 hardly tolerable. — Hints towards an Essay on Conversation.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 77 
 
 of injury, contempt, and hake, on the one side — of cloaked 
 revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our 
 and their fathers, must, and ought to, affect the blood of the 
 children. I cannot believe it can run clear and kindly vet ; 
 or that a few fine words, such as candour, liberality, the li»ht 
 of a nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so 
 deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. 
 He is least distasteful on /Change — for the mercantile spirit 
 levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. 1 boldly 
 confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and 
 Christian, which has become so fashionable'. The reciprocal 
 endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnat- 
 ural in them. I do not like to see the church and synagogue 
 kissing and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civil- 
 ity. If they are converted, why do they not come over to 
 us altogether \ Why keep up a form of separation, when 
 the life of it is fled ? if they can sit with us at table, why do 
 they kick at our cookery ? I do not understand these half con- 
 vertites. Jews Christianizing, Christians Judaizing, puzzle 
 me. 1 like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more con- 
 founding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit 
 
 of the synagogue is essentially separative. B would 
 
 have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of 
 his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which na- 
 ture meant to be of Christians. The Hebrew spirit is 
 
 strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot con- 
 quer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out when he sings, " The 
 Children of Israel passed through the Red Sea !" The audi- 
 tors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides 
 over our necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him. 
 
 B has a strong expression of sense in his countenance, 
 
 and it is confirmed by his singing. The foundation of his vo- 
 cal excellence is sense. He sings with understanding, as 
 Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the command- 
 ments, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition. 
 His nation, in general, have not over-sensible countenances. 
 How should they I — but you seldom see a silly expression 
 among them. Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's 
 visage. 1 never heard of an idiot being born among them. 
 Some admire the Jewish female physiognomy. I admire it 
 — but with trembling. Jael had those full, dark, inscrutable 
 eyes. 
 
 In the negro countenance you will often meet with strong 
 traits of benignity. 1 have fell yearnings of tenderness to- 
 wards some of these faces — or rather masks — that have 
 ooked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets 
 7*
 
 78 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 and highways. 1 love what Fuller beautifully calls — these 
 " images of God cut in ebony." But I should not like to as- 
 sociate with them, to share my meals and my good nights 
 with them — because they are black. 
 
 I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate the 
 Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day 
 when I meet any of their people in my path. When I am 
 milled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight or cpiiet 
 voice of a Quaker acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the 
 air, and taking off a load from the bosom. But 1 cannot like 
 the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) " to live with them." 
 I am all over sophisticated — with humours, fancies, craving 
 hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit- 
 chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim whams, 
 which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at 
 their primitive banquet. My appetites are too high for the 
 salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the 
 angel, my gusto too excited 
 
 " To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse." 
 
 The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to re- 
 turn to a question put to them may be explained, I think, 
 without the vulgar assumption, that they are more given to 
 evasion and equivocating than other people. They naturally 
 look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of 
 committing themselves. They have a peculiar character to 
 keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their 
 A r eracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an Oath. 
 The custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sancti- 
 fied as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be con- 
 fessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of 
 two kinds of truth — the one applicable to the solemn affairs 
 of justice, and the other to the common proceedings of daily 
 intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath 
 can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop 
 and the market place a latitude is expected and conceded 
 upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something 
 less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, 
 " You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." 
 Hence a f^rcat deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short 
 of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation ; and a kind 
 of secondarv or laic, truth is tolerated, where clergy truth — 
 oath truth, by tin; nature of circumstances — is not required. 
 A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirm- 
 ation being received, upon the most, sacred occasions, without 
 any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 79 
 
 to use upon the most indifferent topics of life. He looks to 
 them, naturally, with more severity. You can have of him 
 no more than his word. He knows, if he is caught tripping 
 in a casual expression, he forfeits, for himself at least, his 
 claim to the invidious exemption. He knows that his sylla- 
 bles are weighed — and how far a consciousness of this par- 
 ticular watchfulness, exerted against a person, lias a tendency 
 to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question 
 hy honest means, might be illustrated, and the practice justi- 
 fied, by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced 
 upon this occasion. The admirable presence of mind, which 
 is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be 
 traced to this imposed self-watchfulness — if it did not seem 
 rather an humble and secular scion of that old stock of reli- 
 gious constancy, which never bent or faltered in the primitive 
 friends, or gave way to the winds of persecution, to the vio- 
 lence of judge or accuser, under trials and racking examina- 
 tions. " You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering 
 your questions till midnight," said one of those upright jus- 
 tices to Penn, who had been putting law cases with a puzzling 
 subtlety. " Thereafter as the answers may be," retorted the 
 Quaker. The astonishing composure of this people is 
 sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instances. I was 
 travelling in a stage coach with three male Quakers, buttoned 
 up in the straightest nonconformity of their sect. We stopped 
 to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly 
 supper, was set before us. My friends confined themselves 
 to the tea table. I in my way took supper. When the land- 
 lady brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions dis- 
 covered that she had charged for both meals. This was re- 
 sisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and positive. 
 Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, 
 for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no 
 means a fit recipient. The guard came in with his usual 
 peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their money, 
 and formally tendered it — so much for tea ; I, in humble im- 
 itation, tendering mine for the supper which I had taken. 
 She would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly 
 put up their silver, as did myself, and marched out of the 
 room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself closing 
 up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the 
 example of such grave and warrantable personages. We got 
 in. The steps went up. The coach drove off. The mur- 
 murs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or ambiguously pro- 
 nounced, became, after a time, inaudible --rand now my con- 
 science, which the whimsical scene had for a while suspended,
 
 80 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 beginning to give some twitches, I waited in the hopes that 
 some justification would be offered by these serious persons 
 for the seeming injustice of their conduct. To my great sur- 
 prise, not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sat 
 as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke 
 silence, by inquiring of his next neighbour, " Hast thou 
 heard how indigoes go at the India House ?" and the question, 
 operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as far as Exeter. 
 
 WITCHES AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 
 
 We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in tne 
 gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they 
 seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the re- 
 lations of this visible world we find them to have been as ra- 
 tional, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. 
 But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, 
 and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures 
 of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion — of that 
 which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd — 
 could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission 
 of any particular testimony ? That maidens pined away, 
 wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a 
 fire — that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed — that whirlwinds 
 uptore in diabolical revelry the oaks of the forest — or that 
 spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about 
 some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring — were all 
 equally probable where no law of agency was understood. 
 That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the 
 flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege 
 to the weak fantasy of indigent eld — has neither likelihood 
 nor unlikelihood a priori to us, who have no measure to guess 
 at liis policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile 
 souls may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked 
 are expressly symbolized by a goat, was it to be wondered at 
 so much, that he should come sometimes in that body and as- 
 sert his metaphor. That the intercourse was opened at all 
 between both worlds was perhaps the mistake — but that once 
 assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story 
 of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. 
 There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a 
 dream may be criticised.
 
 ESSAYS OK ELIA. 81 
 
 I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in 
 the days of received witchcraft ; that I could not have slept 
 in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our an- 
 cestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amid the universal be- 
 lief that these wretclies were in league with the author of all 
 evil, holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple jus- 
 tice of the peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or sillv 
 Headborough serving, a warrant upon them — as if they should 
 subpoena Satan ! Prospero in his boat, with his books and 
 wand about, him, Buffers himself to be conveyed away at the 
 mercy of his enemies to an unknown island. lie mioht have 
 raised a storm or two, we think, on the passage. His acqui- 
 escence is in exact analogy to the non-resistance of witches 
 to the constituted powers. What stops the fiend in Spenser 
 from tearing Guyon to pieces — or who had made it a condi- 
 tion of his prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious 
 bait — we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that 
 country. 
 
 From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about 
 witches and witch stories. My maid, and more legendary 
 aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the 
 accident which directed my curiosity originally into this chan- 
 nel. In my father's book closet, the History of the Bible, by 
 Staekhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures 
 with which it abounds — one of the ark, in particular, and 
 another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity 
 of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the 
 spot — attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, 
 too, of the witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had 
 never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse 
 is in two huge tomes — and there was a pleasure in removing 
 folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was 
 as much as I could manage, from the situation which they oc- 
 cupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work 
 from that time to this, but I remember it consisted of Old 
 Testament stories, orderly set down with the objection appen- 
 daged to each story, and the solution of the objection regu- 
 larly tacked to that. The objection was a summary of what- 
 ever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility of the 
 history, by the shrewdness of ancient or modern infidelity, 
 drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candour. 
 The solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane 
 and antidote were both before you. To doubts so put, and so 
 quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon 
 lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe n> trample on. But 
 — like as was Bathe? feared than realized from that slain mon- 
 
 D 3
 
 82 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 ster in Spenser — from the womb of those crushed errors 
 young dragonets would creep, exceeding the prowess of so 
 tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. The habit of 
 expecting objections to every passage, set me upon starting- 
 more objections, for the glory of finding a solution of my own 
 for them. I became staggered and perplexed, a skeptic in 
 long coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or 
 heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of im- 
 pression, and were turned into so many historic or chronologic 
 theses to be defended against whatever impugners. I was 
 not to disbelieve them, but — the next thing to that — I was to 
 be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved 
 them. Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him 
 know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's 
 weakness, but the child's strength. Oh, how ugly sound 
 scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling ! 
 I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined 
 away, I think, with such unfit sustenance as these husks af- 
 forded, but for a fortunate piece of ill-fortune which about 
 this time befell me. Turning over the picture of the ark with 
 too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious 
 fabric — driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two 
 larger quadrupeds — the elephant and the camel — that stare 
 (as well they might) out of the two last windows next the- 
 steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. Stack- 
 house was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted 
 treasure. With the book, the objections and solutions grad- 
 ually cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned since 
 in any force to trouble me. But there was one impression 
 which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar 
 could shut out, and which was destined to try my childish 
 nerves rather more seriously. That detestable picture ! 
 
 I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The nighttime 
 solitude and the dark were my hell. The sufferings I en- 
 dured in this nature would justify the expression. I never 
 laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the 
 seventh or ejghth year of my life — so far as memory serves in 
 things so long ago — without an assurance, which realized its 
 own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old 
 Ntnekliouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture 
 of the Witch raising up Samuel (oh that old man covered 
 with a mantle!) I owe — not my midnight terrors, the hell 
 of my infancy — but the shape and manner of their visitation. 
 It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sat upon 
 
 my pillow -a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or maid was far 
 from me, All day long, while the book was permitted me, I
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 83 
 
 dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may 
 use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the 
 vision true. I durst not, even in the daylight, once enter the 
 chamber where I slept, without my fac< turned to the window, 
 aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. 
 Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender 
 bains alone to go to sleep in the dark. 'I 'he feeling about 
 for a friendly arm — the hoping for a familiar voice — when 
 they wake screaming — and find none to sooth them — what 
 a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves ! The keeping 
 them up till midnight, through candlelight and the unwhole- 
 some hours, as they are called, would, I am satisfied, in a 
 medical point of view, prove the better caution. That detest- 
 able picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams — 
 if dreams they were — for the scene of them was invariably 
 the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, 
 the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or 
 otluer — 
 
 " Headless bear, black man, or ape" — 
 
 but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. It is not book 
 or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create 
 these terrors in children. They can at most but give them 
 a direction. Dear tittle T. H. — who of all children has been 
 brffaght up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint 
 of superstition, who was never allowed to hear of goblin or 
 apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or 
 hear of any distressing story — finds all this world of fear, from 
 which he has been so rigidly excluded, ab extra, in his own 
 " thick-coming fancies ;" and from his little midnight pillow, 
 this nurse child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed 
 of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned 
 murderer are tranquillity. 
 
 Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras — dire stories of Ce- 
 10 and the harpies — may reproduce themselves in the 
 brain of superstition — but they were there before. They are 
 transcripts, types — the archetypes are in us, and eternal. 
 How else should the recital of that, which we know in a 
 waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all ! — or 
 
 " Names, whose sense we see not, 
 Fray us with things that be D 
 
 Is it that we naturally conceive terror from stub objects, con- 
 sidered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bod- 
 ih injury! Oh. least of all! These terrors are of older 
 standing: They date beyond body — or, without the body,
 
 84 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, 
 defined devils in Dante — tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, 
 scorching demons — are they one half so fearful to the spirit 
 of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unimbodied following 
 him — 
 
 *' Like one that in a lonesome road 
 
 Doth walk in fear and dread, 
 
 And having once turn'd round, walks on, 
 
 And turns no more his head; 
 
 Because he knows a frightful fiend 
 
 Doth close behind him tread ?"* 
 
 That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual — 
 that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth — 
 that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy — are dif- 
 ficulties, the solution of which might afford some probable in- 
 sight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least 
 into the shadow land of pre-existence. 
 
 My night fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I con- 
 fess an occasional nightmare ; but I do not, as in early youth, 
 keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished 
 taper, will come and look at me ; but I know them for mock- 
 eries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I light 
 and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I 
 am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams 
 are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. 
 They are of architecture and of buildings— cities abroad, 
 which I have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I 
 have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, 
 Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon — their churches, palaces, squares, 
 market places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible 
 sense of delight — a maplike distinctness of trace — and a day- 
 light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. [ 
 have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells — my 
 highest Alps — but they are objects too mighty for the gra^) 
 of my dreaming recognition ; and I have again and again 
 awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out 
 a shape, in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I 
 was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The pov- 
 erty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at Lis 
 will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure houses for Kubla 
 Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abora, and caverns, 
 
 " Where Alph, the sacred river, runs," 
 
 to solace his night solitudes — when I cannot muster a fiddle. 
 Barry Cornwall has his Tritons and his Nereids gambolling 
 
 * Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 85 
 
 before him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to 
 Neptune — when my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, 
 in the night season, raise up the ghofct of a fish wife. To 
 set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light, it was after 
 reading the njble Dream of this poet that my fancy ran 
 strong upon these marine spectra ; and the poor plastic power, 
 such as it is within me, set to work to humour my folly in a sort 
 of dream that very night. Methought. I was upon the ocean 
 billows at some sea nuptials, ruling and mounted high, with 
 the customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I 
 myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily we 
 went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea 
 should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white em- 
 brace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea rough- 
 ness to a sea calm, and thence to a river motion, and that 
 river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no 
 other than the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the waft- 
 ure of a placid wave or two, alone, safe, and inglorious, some- 
 where at the foot of Lambeth palace. 
 
 The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish 
 no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty re- 
 sident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend 
 of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion so far, that 
 when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of 
 becoming a poet, his lirst question would be — " Young man, 
 what sort of dreams have you ?" I have so much faith in my 
 old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein returning 
 upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, 
 remembering those eluding Nereids, and that inauspicious in- 
 land landing. 
 
 MY RELATIONS. 
 
 I am arrived at that point of life, at which a man may ac- 
 count it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of 
 his parents surviving. I have not that felicity; and some- 
 times think feelingly of a passage in Brown's Christian Morals, 
 where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy 
 years in the world. "In such a compass of time," he save, 
 '• a man may have a close apprehension what it is to be for- 
 gotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember 
 his father, or scarcely the friends of his vouth, and may sen- 
 8
 
 86 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 sibly see with what a face, in no long time, Oblivion will 
 look upon himself." 
 
 I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom 
 single blessedness had soured to the world. She often used 
 to say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved ; and, 
 when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with 
 mother's tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason 
 cannot altogether approve. She was from morning till night 
 poring over good books and devotional exercises. Her fa- 
 vourite volumes were Thomas a Kempis, in Stanhope's trans- 
 lation ; and a Roman Catholic prayer book, with the matins 
 and complines regularly set down — terms which I was at that 
 time too young to understand. She persisted in reading them, 
 although admonished daily concerning their Papistical ten- 
 dency ; and went to church every Sabbath, as a good Prot- 
 estant should do. These were the only books she studied ; 
 though, I think, at one period of her life, she told me she 
 had read with great satisfaction the Adventures of an Unfor- 
 tunate Young Nobleman. Finding the door of the chapel in 
 Essex-street open one day— it was in the infancy of that 
 heresy — she went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of 
 Avorship, and frequented it at intervals for some time after. 
 She came not for doctrinal points, and never missed them. 
 With some little asperities in her constitution, which I have 
 above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine 
 old Christian. She was a woman of strong sense, and a 
 shrewd mind — extraordinary at a repartee; one of the few 
 occasions of her breaking silence — else she did not much 
 value wit. The only secular employment I remember to have 
 seen her engaged in, was the splitting of French beans, and 
 dropping them into a China basin of fair water. The odour 
 of those tender vegetables to this day comes back upon my 
 sense, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it is the 
 most delicate of culinary operations. 
 
 Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none — to* re- 
 member. By the uncle's side, I may be said to have been 
 born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I never had any — to know 
 them. A sister, T think, that should have been -Elizabeth, 
 died in both our infancies. What a comfort, or what a care, 
 may I not have missed in her! But I have cousins sprinkled 
 about in Hertfordshire — besides two, with whom 1 have been 
 all my life in habits pf-the closest intimacy, and whom I may 
 term cousins par excellence. These are James and Bridget 
 Elia. They are older thaji myself by tweLvej and ten years ; 
 and neither of them seems disposed, in matters of advire u\)i\ 
 guidance, to waive any of the prerogatives which primogeni-
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 87 
 
 ture confers. May they continue still in tho same mind ; and 
 when they shall be seventy-live, and seventy-three years old, 
 (I cannot spare them sooner,) persist in treating nve in mv 
 grand climateric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother ! 
 
 Janus is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, 
 which not every critic can penetrate j or, if we feel, we eaU- 
 not explain them. The pen of Yorick, and of none since his, 
 could have drawn J. E. entire — those fine Shandian lights 
 and shades which make up his story. I must limp after in 
 my poor antithetical manner, as the fates have given me 
 grace and talent. J. E. then — to the eye of a common ob- 
 server at least — seemeth made up of contradictory principles. 
 The genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosopher of pru- 
 dence — the phlegm of my cousin's doctrine is invariably at 
 war with his temperament, which is high sanguine. With 
 always some fire-new project in his brain, J. E. is the syste- 
 matic opponent of innovation, and crier down of everything 
 that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With a 
 hundred fine notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy-, 
 he is startled at the least approach to the romantic in others ; 
 and, determined by his own sense in everything, commends 
 you to the guidance of common sense on ali occasions. With 
 a touch of the eccentric in all which he does or says, he is' 
 only anxious that you should not commit yourself by doing 
 anything absurd or singular. On my once letting slip at tahle. 
 that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, he begged me 
 at. any rate not to say so — for the world would think me mad. 
 He disguises a passionate fondness for works of high art, 
 (whereof he hath amassed a choice collection,) under the 
 pretext of buying only to sell again — that his enthusiasm m ,v 
 give no encouragement to yours. Vet, if it were so, why 
 does that piece of tender, pastoral Dominichino hang still by 
 his wall ? — is the ball of his sight much more dear to him .' — 
 or what picture dealer can talk like him ' 
 
 Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their 
 speculative conclusions to the bent of their individual humours, 
 his theories are sure to be in diametrical opposition to his 
 constitution. He is courageous as Charles of Sweden, upon 
 instinct ; chary of his person, upon principle, as a travelling 
 Quaker. He has been preaching up to me. all my life, the 
 doctrine of bowing to the great — the necessity of forms ai d 
 manners to a man's getting on in the world. He himseli 
 aims at either, that 1 can discover — and has a spirit that would 
 stand upright in the presence of the Cham of Tartary. It is 
 pleasant to hear him discourse of patienc< — extolling 
 the trues: wisdom — and to :u' him durins the las
 
 88 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 minutes that his dinner is getting ready. Nature never ran 
 up in her haste a more restless piece of workmanship than 
 when she moulded this impetuous cousin — and Art never 
 turned out a more elaborate orator than he can display him- 
 sell to be, upon his favourite topic of the advantages of quiet 
 and contentedness in the state, whatever it be, that we are 
 placed in. He is triumphant on this theme, when he has 
 you safe in one of those short stages that ply for the western 
 road, in a very obstructing manner, at the foot of John Mur- 
 ray's street — where you get in when it is empty, and are ex- 
 pected to wait till the vehicle hath completed her just freight 
 — a trying three quarters of an hour to some people. He 
 wonders at your fidgetyness — " where could we be better than 
 we are, thus sitting, thus consulting?" — "prefers, for his part, a 
 state of rest to locomotion" — with an eye all the while upon 
 the coachman — till at length, waxing out of all patience, at 
 your want of it, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance at 
 the fellow for detaining us so long over the time which he 
 had professed, and declares peremptorily, that " the gentle- 
 man in the coach is determined to get out, if he does not drive 
 on that instant." 
 
 Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophis- 
 try, he is incapable of attending you in any chain of arguing. 
 Indeed, he makes wild work with logic ; and seems to jump 
 at most admirable conclusions by some process, not at all akin 
 to it. Consonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to 
 deny, upon certain occasions, that there exists such a faculty 
 at all in man as reason ; and wondereth how man came first 
 to have a conceit of it — enforcing his negation with all the 
 might of reasoning he is master of. He has some speculative 
 notions against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is 
 not natural to him — when peradventure the next moment his 
 lungs shall crow like Chanticleer. He says some of the best 
 things in the world — and declareth that wit is his aversion. 
 It was he who said, upon seeing the Eaton boys at play in 
 their grounds, What a pity to think, that these fine ingenuous 
 lads in a few years will all he changed into frivolous members 
 of parliament ! 
 
 His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous — and in age he 
 discovereth no symptom of cooling. This is that which I 
 admire in him. I hate people who meet Time halfway. I 
 ;iih lor no compromise with that inevitable spoiler. While he 
 lives, J. E. will take his swing. It does me good as I walk 
 towards the street of my daily avocation, on some line May 
 morning, to meet him marching in a quite opposite direction, 
 with a jolly handsome presence, and shining sanguine face,
 
 BSSAYS OF ELIA. 89 
 
 that indicates some purchase in his eye — a Claude — or a 
 Hobbima — for much of his enviable leisure is consumed at 
 Christie's and Phillips's — or where not, to pick up pictures, 
 and such gauds. On tin fee occasions he mostly stoppeth me, 
 to read a short lecture on the advantage a person like me 
 possesses above himself, in having his time occupied with 
 business which he must do — assureth me that he often feels 
 it hang heavy on his hands — wishes he had fewer holydays 
 — and goes off — Westward Ho ! — chanting a tune, to Pall 
 Mall — perfectly convinced that he has convinced me — while 
 1 proceed ill my opposite direction tuneless. 
 
 It is pleasant again to see this professor of indifference 
 doing the honours of his new purchase, when he has fairly 
 housed it. You must view it in every light, till he has found 
 the best — placing it at this distance, and at that, but always 
 suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at 
 it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective — though 
 you assure him that to you the landscape shows much more 
 agreeable without that artifice. AYo be to the luckless wight 
 who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who should 
 drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one of his an- 
 terior bargains to the present ! The last is always his best 
 hit — his ; ' Cynthia of the minute." Alas ! how many a mild 
 Madonna have I known to come in — a Raphael ! keep its as- 
 cendancy for a few brief moons — then after certain interme- 
 dial degradations, from the front drawing room to the back 
 gallery, thence to the dark parlour — adopted in turn by each 
 of the Carracci, under successive lowering ascriptions of filia- 
 tion, mildly breaking its fall — consigned to the oblivious lum- 
 ber room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain Carlo Ma- 
 ratti ! — which things when I beheld, musing upon the chances 
 and mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to reflect upon 
 the altered condition of great personages, or that woful queen 
 of Richard the Second — 
 
 " Set forth in pomp, 
 She came adorned hither like sweet May, 
 Sent back like Hollowmass or shortest day." 
 
 With great love for you, J. E. hath but a limited sympathy 
 •with what you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, 
 and makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind. He 
 never pierces the marrow of your habits. He will tell an old-es- 
 tablished playgoer, that Mr. Sueh-a-one of So-and-so. (naming 
 one of the theatres.) is a very lively comedian — as a piece <u 
 news ! He advertised me but the oilier day of some pleasant 
 green lanes which he had found out for me, knowing //it to be 
 a great walker, in my own immediate vicinity — who have 
 8*
 
 90 ESSAYS OF EL1A. 
 
 haunted the identical spot any time these twenty years ! 
 He has not much respect for that class of feelings which 
 goes by the name of sentimental. He applies the definition 
 of real evil to bodily sufferings exclusively — and rejecteth all 
 others as imaginary. He is affected by the sight, or the 
 bare supposition of a creature in pain, to a degree which I 
 have never witnessed out of womankind. A constitutional 
 acuteness to this class of sufferings may in part account foi 
 this. The animal tribe in particular he taketh under his es- 
 pecial protection. A broken-winded or spur-galled horse is 
 sure to find an advocate in him. An overloaded ass his 
 client for ever. He is the apostle to the brute kind — the never- 
 failing friend of those who have none to care for them. 
 The contemplation of a lobster boiled, or eels skinned alive, 
 will wring him so, that " all for pity he could die." It will 
 take the savour from his palate, and the rest from his pillow, 
 for days and nights. With the intense feeling of Thomas 
 Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and unity 
 of purpose, of that " true yokefellow with time," to have ef- 
 fected as much for the animal as he hath done for the negro 
 creation. But my uncontrollable cousin is but imperfectly 
 formed for purposes which demand co-operation. He cannot 
 wait. His amelioration plans must be ripened in a day. For 
 this reason he has cut but an equivocal figure in benevolent 
 societies, and combinations for the alleviation of human suf- 
 ferings. His zeal constantly makes him to outrun, and put 
 diit his coadjutors. He thinks of relieving — while they think 
 of debating. He was blackballed out of a society for the 
 relief of , because the fervour of his humanity toiled be- 
 yond the formal apprehension and creeping processes of his 
 associates. I shall always consider this distinction as a pat- 
 ent of nobility in the Elia family ! 
 
 Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, or 
 upbraid, my unique cousin ? Marry, Heaven, and all good man- 
 ners and the understanding that should be between kinsfolk, 
 forbid ! with all the strangenesses of this strangest of the Elias, 
 I would not have him in one jot or tittle other than he is ; neither 
 would I barter or exchange my wild kinsman for the most 
 exact, regular, and every way consistent kinsman breathing. 
 
 In my next, reader, I may perhaps give you some account 
 of my Cousin Bridget — if you are not already surfeited with 
 cousins — and take you by the hand, if you are willing to go 
 with us, on an excursion which we made a summer or two 
 since, in search of more cousins, 
 
 " Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire."
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 91 
 
 MACKERY END, 
 
 IN HERTFORDSHIRE. 
 
 Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long 
 year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the 
 period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and 
 maid, in a sort of double singleness ; with such tolerable com- 
 fort, upon the whole, that I, lor one, find in myself no sort of 
 disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's 
 offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in 
 our tastes and habits — yet so, as " with a difference." We 
 are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings, as it 
 should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather 
 understood than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling 
 a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst 
 into tears, and complained that I was altered. We are both 
 great readers in different directions. While I am hanging 
 over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or 
 one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some 
 modern tale or adventure, whereof our common reading table 
 is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teases 
 me. 1 have little concern in the progress of events. She 
 must have a story — well, ill, or indifferently told — so there be 
 life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The 
 fluctuations of fortune in fiction — and almost in real life — 
 have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out- 
 of-the-way humours and opinions — heads with some diverting 
 twist in them — the oddities of authorship please me most. 
 My cousin has a native disrelish of anything that sounds odd 
 or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her that is quaint, irreg- 
 ular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She " holds 
 nature more clever." I can pardon her blindness to the beau- 
 tiful obliquities of the Religio Medici ; but she must apologize 
 to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has 
 been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals 
 of a dear favourite of mine, of the last century but one— the 
 thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous — but again somewhat fail- 
 tastical, and original-brained, generous Margaret Newcastle. 
 
 It has been the lot of my cousin, often er perhaps than I 
 could have wished, to have had tor her associates ami mine, 
 freethinkers — leaders and di$cipjes of novel philosophies and
 
 92 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 systems; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts, their 
 opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when 
 a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never 
 juggles or plays tricks with her understanding. 
 
 We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive ; and 
 I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uni- 
 formly this — that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, 
 it turns out that I was in the right, and my cousin in the 
 wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points ; 
 upon something proper to be done, or let alone ; whatever 
 heat of opposition or steadiness of conviction I set out with, I 
 am sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her 
 way of thinking. 
 
 I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a 
 gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. 
 She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading 
 in company : at which times she will answer yes or no to a 
 question, without fully understanding its purport — which is 
 provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity 
 of the putter of the said question. Her presence of mind is 
 equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes 
 desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose requires 
 it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly ; but 
 in matters which are not stuff of the conscience, she hath been 
 known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably. 
 
 Her education in youth was not much attended to ; and she 
 happily missed all that train of female garniture, which pass- 
 eth by the name of accomplishments. She was tumbled early, 
 by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old 
 English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and 
 browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had 
 I twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in this fash- 
 ion. I know not whether their chance in wedlock might not 
 be diminished by it, but I can answer for it, that it makes (if 
 the worst come to the worst) most incomparable old maids. 
 
 In a season of distress, she is the truest comforter ; but in 
 the teasing accidents, and minor perplexities, which do not 
 call out the will to meet them, she sometimes maketh matters 
 worse by an excess of participation. If she does not always 
 divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions of life she 
 is sure always to treble your satisfaction. She is excellent to 
 be at play with, or upon a visit ; but best when she goes a 
 journey with you. 
 
 We made an excursion together, a few summers since, into 
 Hertfordshire, to beat up the quarters of some of our less- 
 known relations in that line corn country.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 93 
 
 The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End, or Mackerel 
 End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps 
 of Hertfordshire ; a Farmhouse — delightfully situated within a 
 gentle walk from WJieaihampstead. I can just remember 
 having been there, on a visit to a great aunt, when I was 
 child, under the care of Bridget ; who, as I have said, is older 
 than myself by some ten years. I wish 1 could throw into a 
 heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might 
 share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The 
 house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeo- 
 man, who had married my grandmother's sister. His name 
 was Gladman. My grandmother was a Bruton, married to a 
 Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in 
 that part of the county, but the Fields are almost extinct. 
 More than forty years had elapsed since the visit I speak of; 
 and, for the greater portion of that period, we had lost sight 
 of the other two branches also. Who or what sort of per- 
 sons inherited Mackery End — kindred or strange folk — we 
 were afraid almost to conjecture, but determined some day to 
 explore. 
 
 By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at 
 Luton in our way from St. Alban's, we arrived at the spot of 
 our anxious curiosity about noon. The sight of the old farm- 
 house, though every trace of it was effaced from my recollec- 
 tion, affected me with a pleasure which I had not experienced 
 for many a year. For though /had forgotten it, we had never 
 forgotten being there together, and we had been talking 
 about Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my part be- 
 came mocked with a phantom of itself, and 1 thought 1 knew 
 the aspect of a place which, when present, oh how unlike it 
 was to that which I had conjured up so many times instead 
 of it! 
 
 Stdl the air breathed balmily about it ; the season was in 
 the " heart of June," and 1 could say with the poet, 
 
 " But thou, that didst appear so fair 
 To fond imagination, 
 Dost rival m the light of day 
 Her delicate creation !" 
 
 Bridget's was more a waking bliss than mine, for she easily 
 remembered her old acquaintance again — some altered fea- 
 tures, of course, a little grudged at. At first, indeed, she was 
 ready to disbelieve for joy ; but the scene soon reconfirmed 
 itself in her affections — and she traversed every outpost ol 
 the old mansion, to the woodhouse, the orchard, the place 
 where the pigeon house had stood, (house and birds were
 
 94 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 alike flown,) with a breathless impatience of recognition, 
 which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the 
 age of fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her 
 years. 
 
 The only thing left was to get into the house — and that 
 was a difficulty which to me singly would have been insur- 
 mountable ; for I am terribly shy in making myself known to 
 strangers and out of date kinsfolk. Love, stronger than 
 scruple, winged my cousin in without me ; but she soon re- 
 turned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for 
 the image of Welcome. It was the youngest of the Glad- 
 mans ; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had become mistress 
 of the old mansion. A comely brood are the Brutons. Six 
 of them, females, were noted as the handsomest young wo- 
 men in the county. But this adopted Bruton, in my mind, 
 was better than they all — more comely. She was born too 
 late to have remembered me. She just recollected in early 
 life to have had her Cousin Bridget once pointed out to her, 
 climbing a stile. But the name of kindred, and of cousinship, 
 was enough. Those slender ties, that prove slight as gossa- 
 mer in the rending atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as 
 we found it, in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire. In five 
 minutes we were as thoroughly acquainted as if we had been 
 born and bred up together ; were familiar even to the calling 
 each other by our Christian names. So Christians should 
 call one another. To have seen Bridget, and her — it was 
 like the meeting of the two scriptural cousins ! There was 
 a grace and dignity, an amplitude of form and stature, answer- 
 ing to her mind, in this farmer's wife, which would have 
 shined in a palace — or so we thought it. We were made 
 welcome by husband and wife equally — we, and our friend 
 that was with us. I had almost forgotten him — but B. F. 
 will not so soon forget that meeting, if peradventure he shall 
 read this on the far distant shores where the kangaroo haunts. 
 The fatted calf was made ready, or rather was already so, as 
 if in anticipation of our coming ; and, after an appropriate 
 glass of native wine, never let me forget with what honest 
 pride this hospitable cousin made us proceed to Wcathamp- 
 stead, to introduce us (as some new-found rarity) to her mo- 
 ther and sister Cladmans, who did indeed know something 
 more of us, at a time when she almost knew nothing. With 
 what corresponding kindness we were received by them also 
 — how Bridget's memory, exalted by the occasion, warmed 
 into a thousand half-obliterated recollections of things and 
 persons, to my utter astonishment, and her own — and to the 
 astoundment of B. F., who sat by, almost the only thing that
 
 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 95 
 
 was not a cousin there — old effaced images of more than half- 
 forgotten names and circumstances siill crowding back upon 
 her, as words written in lemon cume out, upon exposure to a 
 friendly warmth — when I forget nil this, then may my country 
 cousins forget me ; and Bridget no more remember, that in 
 the days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge — as I 
 have been her care in foolish manhood since — in those pretty 
 pastoral walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertford- 
 shire. 
 
 MODERN GALLANTRY. 
 
 Iv comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased 
 to compliment ourselves upon the point of gallantry, a certain 
 obsequiousness, or deferential respect, which we are supposed 
 to pay to females, as females. 
 
 I shall believe that this principle actuates our conduct, 
 when I can forget, that in the nineteenth century of the era 
 from which we date our civility, we are but just beginning to 
 leave off the very frequent practice of whipping females in 
 public, in common with the coarsest male offenders. 
 
 I shall believe it to be influential, when I can shut my eyes 
 to the fact, that in England women are still occasionally — 
 hanged. 
 
 I shall believe ivi it, when actresses are no longer subject 
 to be hissed off a stage by gentlemen. 
 
 I shall believe in it, when Dorimant hands a fish wife 
 across the kennel ; or assists the apple woman to pick up her 
 wandering fruit, which some unlucky dray has just dissi- 
 pated. 
 
 I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humbler life, 
 who would be thought in their way notable adepts in this re- 
 finement, shall act upon it in places where they are not known, 
 or think themselves not observed — when I shall see the trav- 
 eller for some rich tradesman part with his admired box- 
 coat, to spread it over the defenceless shoulders of the poor 
 woman, who is passing to her parish on the roof of the same 
 stage coach with him, drenched in the rain — when I shall no 
 longer, see a woman standing up in the pit of a London the- 
 atre, till she is sick and faint with the exertion, with men 
 about her, seated at their ease, and jeering at her distress; 
 till one that seems to have more manners or conscience than
 
 98 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 the rest, significantly declares " she should be welcome to his 
 seat, if she were a little younger and handsomer." Place 
 this dapper warehouseman, or that rider, in a circle of their 
 own female acquaintance, and you shall confess you have not 
 seen a politer bred man in Lothbury. 
 
 Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such 
 principle influencing our conduct, when more than one half 
 the drudgery and coarse servitude of the world shall cease to 
 be performed by women. 
 
 Until that day comes, I shall never believe this boasted 
 point to be anything more than a conventional fiction : a pa- 
 geant got up between the sexes, in a certain rank, and at a 
 certain time of life, in which both find their account equally. 
 I shall be even disposed to rank it among the salutary fic- 
 tions of life, when in polite circles I shall see the same atten- 
 tions paid to age as to youth, to homely features as to hand- 
 some, to coarse complexions as to clear; to the woman, as she 
 is a woman, not as she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title. 
 
 I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when 
 a well-dressed gentleman in a well-dressed company can ad- 
 vert to the topic of female old age without exciting, and in- 
 tending to excite, a sneer — when the phrases " antiquated 
 virginity," and such a one has " overstood her market," pro- 
 nounced in good company, shall raise immediate offence in 
 man, or woman, that shall hear them spoken. 
 
 Joseph Paice, of Bread-street hill, merchant, and one of 
 the directors of the South-Sea Company — the same to whom 
 Edwards, the Shakspeare commentator, has addressed a fine 
 sonnet — was the only pattern of consistent gallantry I have 
 met with. He took me under his shelter at an early age, 
 and bestowed some pains upon me. I owe to his precepts 
 and example whatever there is of the man of business (and 
 that is not much) in my composition. It was not his fault 
 that I did not profit more. Though bred a Presbyterian, and 
 brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his 
 time. He had not one system of attention to females in the 
 drawing room, and another in the shop, or at the stall. I do 
 not mean that he made no distinction. But he never lost 
 sight of sex, or overlooked it in the casualties of a disadvan- 
 tageous situation. I have seen him stand bareheaded — smile 
 it' you please, to a poor servant girl, while she has been in- 
 quiring of him the way to some street — in such a posture of 
 unforced civility, as neither to embarrass her in the accept- 
 ance, nor himself in the offer, of it. He was no dangler, in 
 the common acceptation of the word, after women : but he 
 reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came before
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 07 
 
 him, womanhood. I have seen him — nay, smile not — tenderly 
 escorting a market woman, whom he had encountered in a 
 shower, exalting his umbrella over her poor basket of fruit, 
 that it might receive no damage, with as much carefulness as 
 if she had been a countess. To the reverend form of female 
 eld he would yield the wall, (though it were to an ancient 
 beggar woman,) with more ceremony than we can afford to 
 show our grandams. He was the Preux Chevalier of A;." ; 
 the Sir Calidore, or Sir Tristan, to those who have no Caii- 
 dores or Tristans to defend them. The roses, that had long 
 faded thence, still bloomed for him in those withered and vcl- 
 low cheeks. 
 
 He was never married, but in his youth he paid his ad- 
 dresses to the beautiful Susan Winstanley, old Winstanley's 
 daughter, of Clapton, who, dying in the early days of their 
 courtship, confirmed in liim the resolution of perpetual bache- 
 lorship. It was during their short courtship, he told me, that 
 he had been one day treating his mistress with a profusion 
 of civil speeches — the common gallantries, to which kind of 
 thing she had hitherto manifested no repugnance — but in this 
 instance with no effect, lie could not obtain from her a 
 decent acknowledgment in return. She rather seemed to 
 resent his compliments. lie could not set it down to caprice, 
 for the lady had always shown herself above that littleness. 
 When he ventured on the following day, finding her a little 
 better humoured, to expostulate with her on her coldness of 
 yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that she 
 had no sort of dislike to his attentions ; that she could even 
 endure some highflown compliments ; that a young woman 
 placed in her situation had a right to expect all sorts of civil 
 things said to her ; that she hoped she could digest a dose 
 of adulation, short of insincerity, with as little injury to her 
 humility as most young women ; but that, a little before he 
 had commenced his compliments, she had overheard him by 
 accident, in rather rough language, rating a young woman 
 who had not brought home his cravats quite to the appointed 
 time, and she thought to herself, "As I am Miss Susan Win- 
 stanley, and a young lady, a reputed beauty, and known to be 
 a fortune, I can have my choice of the finest speeches from 
 the mouth of this very line gentleman who is courting me ; 
 but if 1 had been pOOI Mary Such-a-one, (naming (he milliner,) 
 and had failed of bringing home the cravats to the appointed 
 hour, though perhaps I had set up half the night to forward 
 them, what sort of compliments should 1 have received then 
 And my woman's pride came to my assistance ; and I thought, 
 that if it were only to do mc honour, a female, like myself, 
 9 E
 
 98 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 might have received handsomer usage ; and I was deter- 
 mined not to accept any fine speeches, to the compromise of 
 that sex, the belonging to which was after all my strongest 
 claim and title to them." 
 
 I think the lady discovered both generosity and a just way 
 of thinking, in this rebuke which she gave her lover ; and 
 I have sometimes imagined, that the uncommon strain of 
 courtesy, which through life regulated the actions and be- 
 haviour of my friend towards all of woman kind indiscrimi- 
 nately, owed its happy origin to this seasonable lesson from 
 the lips of his lamented mistress. 
 
 I wish the whole female world would entertain the same 
 notion of these things that Miss Winstanley showed. Then 
 we should see something of the spirit of consistent gallantry ; 
 and no longer witness the anomaly of the same man — a pat- 
 tern of true politeness to a wife — of cold contempt, or rude- 
 ness, to a sister — the idolater of his female mistress — the dis- 
 parager and despiser of his no less female aunt, or unfortunate 
 — still female — maiden cousin. Just so much respect as a 
 woman derogates from her own sex, in whatever condition 
 placed, her handmaid or dependant, she deserves to have 
 diminished from herself on that score ; and probably will feel 
 the diminution, when youth, and beauty, and advantages, not 
 inseparable from sex, shall lose of their attraction. What a 
 woman should demand of a man in courtship, or after it, is — 
 first, respect for her as she is a woman ; and next to that, to 
 be respected by him above all other women. But let her 
 stand upon her female character as upon a foundation ; and 
 let the attentions incident to individual preference, be so many 
 pretty additaments and ornaments, as many and as fanciful as 
 you please, to that main structure. Let her first lesson be, 
 with sweet Susan Winstanley, to reverence her sex. 
 
 THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 
 
 I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in 
 the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, 
 its river, I had almost said — for in those young years, what was 
 this king of rivers to me but a stream tbat watered our pleas- 
 ant places ? — these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat, 
 to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kind-
 
 ESSAYS OF EUA. 99 
 
 Her emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this 
 spot. 
 
 " There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, 
 The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, 
 Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, 
 There whylome wont the Templar knights to bide, 
 Till they decayed through pride." 
 
 Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What 
 a transition for a countryman visiting London for tin* first time 
 — the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet-street, by 
 unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its 
 classic green recesses ! What a cheerful, liberal look, hath 
 that portion of it which, from three sides, overlooks the greater 
 garden : that goodly pile 
 
 " Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight," 
 
 confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fan- 
 tastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful 
 Crown-office Row, (place of my kindly engendure,) right op- 
 posite the stately stream, which washes the garden foot with 
 her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just 
 weaned from her Twickenham Naiades ! a man would give 
 something to have been born in such places What a colle- 
 giate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the foun- 
 tain plays, which I have made to rise and fall how many 
 times ! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contem- 
 poraries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite ma- 
 chinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as 
 magic ! What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun 
 dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that 
 time which they measured, and to take their revelations of 
 its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence 
 with the fountain of light! How would the dark line steal 
 imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to 
 detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent 
 cloud, or the first arrests of sleep ! 
 
 " Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial hand 
 Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived !" 
 
 What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowel- 
 ments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of com- 
 munication, compared with the simple altarlike structure, and 
 silent heart language of the old dial ! It stood as the garden 
 god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere van- 
 ished ? If its business use be superseded, by more elaborate 
 inventions, its moral uses, its beautv, might have pleaded for 
 
 E2
 
 100 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 its continuance. It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures 
 not protracted after sunset, of temperance, and good hours. 
 It was the primitive clock, the horologue of the first world. 
 Adam could scarce have missed it in paradise. It was the 
 measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, 
 for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks 
 to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd " carved 
 it out quaintly in the sun ;" and turning philosopher by the 
 very occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than 
 tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded 
 by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a 
 dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses a lit- 
 tle higher up, for they are full, as all his serious poetry was, 
 of a witty delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, I 
 hope, in a talk of fountains and sun dials. He is speaking of 
 sweet garden scenes. 
 
 " What wondrous life is this I lead ! 
 Ripe apples drop about my head. 
 The luscious clusters of the vine 
 Upon my jnouth do crash their wine. 
 The nectarine, and curious peach, 
 Into my hands themselves do reach. 
 Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 
 Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. 
 Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less 
 Withdraws into its happiness. 
 The mind, that ocean, where each kind 
 Does straight its own resemblance find ; 
 Yet it creates, transcending these, 
 Far other worlds and other seas ; 
 Annihilating all that's made 
 To a green thought in a green shade. 
 Here at the fountain's sliding foot, 
 Or at some fruit tree's mossy root, 
 Casting the body's vest aside, 
 My soul into the boughs does glide ; 
 There, like a bird, it sits and sings. 
 Then wets and claps its silver wings ; 
 And, till prepared lor longer flight, 
 Waves in its plumes the various light. 
 How well the skilful gardener drew, 
 Of flowers ami herds, this dial new ! 
 Where, from above, the milder sun 
 I iocs through a fragrant zodiac run : 
 And, as it works, the industrious bee 
 Computes lis tune as well as we. 
 How could such sweet and wholesome hours 
 Be reckon'd, but with herbs and flowers V* 
 
 The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like manner, 
 fast vanishing. Most of them are dried up, or bricked over. 
 Yet, where one is left, as in that little green nook behind the 
 
 * From atopy of verses entitled " The Garden."
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 101 
 
 South-Sea House, what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile ! 
 Four little winged marble boys used to play their virgin fan- 
 cies, spouting out ever-fresh streams from their innocent n an- 
 ion lips, in the square of Lincoln's Inn, when 1 was no bigger 
 than they were figured. They are gone and the spring choked 
 up. The fashion, they tell me, is gone by, and these things are 
 esteemed childish. Why not then gratify children, by letting 
 them stand ? Lawyers, 1 suppose, were children once. They 
 are awakening images to them at least. Why must every 
 tiling smack of man and be mannish ? Is the world all grown 
 up? Is childhood dead ? Or is there not in the bosoms ot 
 the wisest and best some of the child's heart left, to respond 
 to its earliest enchantments ? The figures were grotesque. 
 Are the stiff-wigged living figures, that still (litter and chatter 
 about that area, less Gothic in appearance ? or is the splutter 
 of their hot rhetoric one half so refreshing and innocent as 
 the little cool playful streams those exploded cherubs uttered 1 
 
 They have lately (.jothicizod the entrance to the Inner Tem- 
 ple hall, and the library front, to assimilate them, I suppose, 
 to the body of the hall, which they do not at all resemble. 
 What is become of the winged horse that stood over the 
 former ? a stately arms ! and who has removed those frescoes 
 of the virtues, which Italianized the end of the Paper Build- 
 ings ? my first hint of allegory ! They must account to me 
 for these things which I miss so greatly. 
 
 The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the pa- 
 rade : but the traces are past away of the footsteps which 
 made its pavement awful ! It is become common and profane. 
 The old benchers had it almost sacred to themselves, in the 
 fore part of the day at least. They might not be sided or 
 jostled. Their air and dress asserted the parade. You left 
 wide spaces between you, when you passed them. We walk 
 on even terms with their successors. The roguish eye of 
 J — 11. ever ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a 
 stranger to vie a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar 
 durst have mated Thomas Coventry 1 whose person was a 
 quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his face square as 
 the lion's, his gait peremptory and pathkeeping, indivertible 
 from his way as a moving column, the scarecrow of his infe- 
 iors, the browbeater of equals and superiors, who made a sol- 
 itude of children wherever he came, for they fled his insuffer- 
 able presence, as they would have shunned an Eiisha bear. 
 His growl was as thunder in their ears, whether be spake to 
 them in mirth or in rebuke; bis invitatory notes being, indeed, 
 of all, the most repulsive and horrid. Clouds 6f snutf, aggra- 
 vating the natural terrors of his speech, broke from eat h ma- 
 9* 
 
 3TXN1. . 
 
 QAXTT
 
 102 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 jestic nostril, darkening the air. He took it, not by pinches, 
 but a palmful at once, diving for it under the mighty flaps of 
 his oldfashioned waistcoat pocket ; his waistcoat red and an- 
 gry ; his coat dark rapee, tinctured by die original, and by ad- 
 juncts, with buttons of obsolete gold. And so he paced the 
 terrace. 
 
 By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen ; the 
 pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and 
 had nothing but that and their benchership in common. In 
 politics Salt was a whig, and Coventry a stanch tory. Many 
 a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out — for Coventry had a 
 rough spinous humour — at the political confederates of his as- 
 sociate, which rebounded from the gentle bosom of the latter 
 like cannon balls from wool. You could not ruffle Samuel Salt. 
 
 S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, and ot 
 excellent discernment in the chamber practice of the law. I 
 suspect his knowledge did not amount to much. When a 
 case of difficult disposition of money, testamentary or other- 
 wise, came before him, he ordinarily handed it over with a 
 few instructions to his man Lovel, who was a quick little fel- 
 low, and would despatch it out of hand by the light of natural 
 understanding, of which he had an uncommon share. It was 
 incredible what repute for talents S. enjoyed by the mere trick 
 of gravity. He was a shy man ; a child might pose him in a 
 minute — indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet 
 men would give him credit for vast application in spite of 
 himself. He was not to be trusted with himself with impu- 
 nity. He never dressed for a dinner party but he forgot his 
 sword — they wore swords then — or some other necessary 
 part of his equipage. Lovel had his eye upon him on all 
 these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his cue. If there 
 was anything which he could speak unseasonably, he was 
 sure to do it. He was to dine at a relative's of the unfortunate 
 Miss Blandyon the day of her execution; and L., who had a 
 wary foresight of his probable hallucinations, before he set out, 
 schooled him with great anxiety not in anv possible manner 
 to allude to her story that day. S. promised faithfully to ob- 
 serve the injunction. He had not been seated in the parlour, 
 where the company was expecting the dinner summons, four 
 minutes, when, a pause in the conversation ensuing, he got 
 up. looked out of the window, and pulling down his ruffles — an 
 ordinary motion with him — observed, " it was a gloomy day," 
 and added, " Miss Hlandy must be hanged by this time, I sup- 
 pose." Instances of this sort won; perpetual. Yet S. was 
 thought by some of the greatest men of his time a fit person 
 to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the law>
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 103 
 
 but in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments of conduct 
 from force of manner entirely. He never laughed. He had 
 the same good fortune among the female world — was a known 
 toast with the ladies, and one or two are said to have died 
 for love of him — I suppose, because he never trifled or talked 
 gallantry with them, or paid them, indeed, hardly common 
 attentions. He had a fine face and person, but wanted, me- 
 thought, the spirit that should have shown them off wilh ad- 
 vantage to the women. His eye lacked lustre. Not so, 
 
 thought Susan P ; who, at the advanced age of sixty, was 
 
 seen, in the cold evening time, unaccompanied, wetting the 
 
 pavement of B d Row, with tears that fell in drops which 
 
 might be heard, because her friend had died that day — he, 
 whom she had pursued with a hopeless passion for the last 
 forty years — a passion, which years could not extinguish or 
 abate ; nor the long-resolved, yet gently-enforced, puttings 
 off of unrelenting bachelorhood dissuade from its cherished 
 purpose. Mild Susan P — — , thou hast now thy friend in 
 heaven! 
 
 Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of that 
 name. He passed his youth in contracted circumstances, 
 which gave him early those parsimonious habits which in 
 after life never forsook him ; so that, with one windfall or 
 another, about the time I knew him he was master of four or 
 five hundred thousand pounds ; nor did he look, or walk, 
 worth a moidore less. He lived in a gloomy house opposite 
 the pump in Sergeant's Inn, Fleet-street. J., the counsel, is 
 doing self-imposed penance in it, for what reason I divine not, 
 at this day. C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where 
 he seldom spent above a day or two at a time in the summer ; 
 but preferred, during the hot months, standing at his window 
 in this damp, close, well-like mansion, to watch, as he said, 
 " the maids drawing water all day long." I suspect he had 
 his within-door reasons for the preference. Hie currus et 
 ar ma fuer c. He might think his treasures more safe. His 
 house had the aspect of a strong box. C. was a close hunks 
 — a hoarder rather than a miser — or, if a miser, none of the 
 mad Elwes breed, who have brought discredit upon a charac- 
 ter, which cannot exist without certain admirable points of 
 steadiness and unity of purpose. One may hate a true miser, 
 but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By taking care 
 of the pence he is often enabled to part with the pounds, upon 
 a scale that leaves us careless, generous fellows halting at an 
 immeasurable distance behind. C. gave away 30,000/. at 
 once in his lifetime to a blind charity. His housekeeping 
 was severely looked after, but he kept the table of a gentle-
 
 104 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 man. lie would know who came in and -who went out of 
 his house, but bis kitchen chimney was never suffered to 
 freeze. 
 
 Salt was lils opposite in this, as in all — never knew what 
 he was worth in the world ; and having but a competency for 
 his rank, which his indolent habits were but little calculated 
 to improve, might have suffered severely if he had not had 
 honest people about him. Lovel took care of everything. 
 He was at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his 
 friend, his " flapper," his guide, stop watch, auditor, treasurer 
 He did nothing without consulting Lovel, or failed in anythin.- 
 without expecting and fearing his admonishing. He put. him 
 self almost too much in his hands, had they not been the 
 purest in the world. He resigned his title almost to respect 
 as a master, if L. could ever have forgotten for a moment that 
 he was a servant. 
 
 I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and 
 losing honesty. A good fellow withal, and " would strike.' 
 In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities 
 or calculated the number of his opponents. He once wrested 
 a sword out of the hand of a man of quality that had drawn 
 upon him, and pommelled him severely with the hilt of it. 
 The swordsman had offered insult to a female — an occasion 
 upon which no odds against him could have prevented the 
 interference of Lovel. He would stand next day bareheaded 
 to the same person, modestly to excuse his interference— for 
 L. never forgot rank, where something better was not con- 
 cerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a 
 face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was skid greatly to resem- 
 ble, (I have a portrait of him which confirms it.,) possessed a 
 fine turn for humorous poetry — next to Swift and Prior — 
 moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by 
 the dint of natural genius merely : turned cribbage boards, 
 and such small cabinet toys, to perfection ; took a hand at 
 quadrille or bowls with equal facility ; made punch better than 
 any man of his degree in England ; had the merriest quips 
 and conceits, and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and 
 inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the 
 angler, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest compan- 
 ion as Mr. lzaak Walton would have chosen to go a fishing 
 with. I saw him in his old age and the decay of his faculties, 
 palsy smitten, in the last sad stage of human weakness — " a 
 remnant most forlorn of what he was •" yet even then his 
 eye would light up on the mention of his favourite Garrick. 
 He was greatest, he would say, in Bayes — " was upon the 
 stage nearly throughout the whole performance, and as busy
 
 BSSATfl ••! i;i.ia. 103 
 
 as a bee." At intervals, too, he would speak of his former 
 
 life, and how lit- came up ;i Little Spy from Lincoln to go to 
 •service, and how his mother cried at parting with him, and 
 how he returned, after some few fears' absence, in his smart 
 new livery to see her, and she blessed herself at the change 
 and could hardly be brought to believe thru it was " her own 
 bairn.'' And then, the excitement subsiding, lie would weep- 
 till I have wished that sad second childhood might have 9 
 mother still to lay its head upon her lap, Hut the common 
 mother of us all m no long time after received him gently 
 into hers. 
 
 With Coventry and with Salt, in their walks upon the ter- 
 race, most commonly Peter Pierson would join, to make up v 
 third. They did not walk linked arm in arm in those days — 
 ''as now our stout triumvirs sweep the streets" — but generally 
 with both hands folded behind them for state, or with one al 
 least behind, the other carrying a cane. P. was a benevolent 
 but not a prepossessing man. lie had that in his face which 
 you could not term unhappiness ; it rather implied an incapa- 
 city of being happy. His cheeks were colourless, even to 
 whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling (but without 
 his sourness) that of our great philanthropist. I know that he 
 did good acts, but I could never make out what he was. 
 Contemporary with these, but subordinate, was Daines Har- 
 rington — another oddity — he walked burly and square — in 
 imitation, I think, of Coventry — howbeit he attained not to 
 the dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he did pretty well, 
 upon the strength of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having 
 a brother a bishop. When the account of his year's treasure- 
 ship came to be audited, the following singular charge was 
 unanimously disallowed by the bench : M Item, disbursed Mr. 
 Allen, the gardener, twenty shillings, tor stuff to poison the 
 sparrows, by my orders." Next to him was old Harton — a 
 jolly negation, who took upon him the ordering of the bills ol 
 fare for the parliament chamber, where the benchers dine — 
 answering to the combination rooms at college — much to the 
 easement of his less epicurean brethren. 1 know nothing 
 more of hiin. Then Read, and Twopenny — Head, good hu- 
 moured and personable — Twopeunv. good humoured, but thin, 
 and felicitous in jests upon his own figure. If T. was thin. 
 V.'harry was attenuated and fleeting. .Many must remember 
 hiin (for he was rather ef later date) and his singular gait, 
 which was performed by three steps and a jump rqgularly 
 succeeding. The steps were little efforts, like thai of a child 
 beginning to walk; the jump comparatively vigorous, as a loot 
 to an inch. Where he learned mis figure, or what occasioned 
 
 i: 3
 
 106 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 
 
 it, I could never discover. It was neither graceful in itself, 
 nor seemed to answer the purpose any better than common 
 walking. The extreme tenuity of his frame, I suspect, set 
 him upon it. It was a trial of poising. Twopenny would 
 often rally him upon his leanness, and hail him as Brother 
 Lusty ; but W. had no relish of a joke. His features were 
 spiteful. I have heard that he would pinch his cat's ears ex- 
 tremely, when anything had offended him. Jackson — the 
 omniscient Jackson he was called — was of this period. He 
 had the reputation of possessing more multifarious knowledge 
 than any man of his time. He was the Friar Bacon of the 
 less literate portion of the temple. I remember a pleasant 
 passage, of the cook applying to him, with much formality of 
 apology, for instructions how to write down edge bone of beef 
 in his bill of commons. He was supposed to know, if any 
 man in the world did. He decided the orthography to be — 
 as I have given it — fortifying his authority with such anatom- 
 ical reasons as dismissed the manciple (for the time) learned 
 and happy. Some do spell it yet perversely aitch bone, from 
 a fanciful resemblance between its shape, and that of the 
 aspirate so denominated. I had almost forgotten Mingay 
 with the iron hand — but he was somewhat later. He had 
 lost his right hand by some accident, and supplied it with a 
 grappling hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. 
 I detected the substitute, before I was old enough to reason 
 whether it were artificial or not. I remember the astonish- 
 ment it raised in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking per- 
 son ; and I reconciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an em- 
 blem of power somewhat like the horns in the forehead of 
 Michael Angelo's Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or 
 did till very lately) in the costume of the reign of George 
 the Second, closes my imperfect recollections of the old 
 benchers of the Inner Temple. 
 
 Fantastic forms, wither are ye fled ? Or, if the like of you 
 exist, why exist they no more for me ? Ye inexplicable, 
 half-understood appearances, why comes in reason to tear 
 away the preternatural mist, bright or gloomy, that enshrouded 
 you? Why make ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who 
 made up to me — to my childish eyes — the mythology of the 
 Temple ? In those days I saw gods, as " old men covered 
 with a mantle," walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of 
 classic idolatry perish — extinct be the farie3 and fairy trum- 
 pery of legendary fabling — in the heart of childhood there 
 will for ever spring up a well of innocent or wholesome su- 
 perstition—the seeds of exaggeration will lie busy there, and 
 vital — from everyday forms educing the unknown and the un-
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 107 
 
 common. In that little Goshen there will be light, when the 
 grown world flounders about irrthe darkness of sense and 
 materiality. While childhood, and while dreams, reducing 
 childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her 
 holy wings totally to fly the earth. 
 
 P. S. I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel 
 Salt. See what it is to trust to imperfect memory, and the 
 erring notices of childhood ! Yet 1 protest I always thought 
 that he had been a bachelor ! This gentleman, R. N. informs 
 me, married young, and losing his lady in childbed, within 
 the first year of their union, fell into a deep melancholy, from 
 the effects of which, probably, he never thoroughly recovered. 
 In what a new light does this place his rejection (oh call it 
 
 by a gentler name!) of mild Susan P , unravelling into 
 
 beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring char- 
 acter ! Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia 
 for true records ! They are, in truth, but shadows of fact — 
 verisimilitudes, not verities — or sitting but upon the remote 
 edges and outskirts of history. He is no such honest chron- 
 icler as R. N., and would have done better perhaps to have 
 consulted that gentleman, before he sent these incondite rem- 
 iniscences to press. But the worthy sub-treasurer — who 
 respects his old and his new masters — would but have been 
 puzzled at the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man 
 wots not, peradventure, of the license which magazines have 
 arrived at in this plain-speaking age, or hardly dreams of 
 their existence beyond the Gentleman 's — his farthest monthly 
 excursions in this nature having been long confined to the 
 holy ground of honest Urban's obituary. May it be long 
 before his own name shall help to swell those columns of un- 
 iiivicd flattery! Meantime, oil ye new benchers of the 
 Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is himself the kind- 
 liest of human creatures. Should infirmities overtake him — 
 he is yet in green and vigorous senility — make allowances 
 lor them, remembering that ,4 ye yourselves are old." So 
 may the winged horse, your ancient badge and cognizance, 
 still flourish! so may future Hookers and Seldens illustrate 
 your church and chambers ! so may the sparrows, in default 
 of more melodious choristers, unpoisoned hop about your 
 walks', so may the fresh-coloured and cleanly nursery maul, 
 who, by leave, airs her playful charge in your stately gardens, 
 drop her prettiest blushing courtesy as ye pass, reductive of 
 juvenescent emotion ! so may the younkers of this generation 
 «ve you, pacing voiir stalely let rue. with the same supersti- 
 tious veneration with which tie child Elia gazed on the old 
 worthies that solemnized the parade before you !
 
 108 ESSAYS OF ELIA, 
 
 GRACE BEFORE MEAT. 
 
 The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its 
 origin in the early times of the world, and the hunter state of 
 man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal 
 was something more than a common blessing ; when a belly- 
 ful was a windfall, and looked like a special providence. In 
 the shouts and triumphal songs with which, after a season of 
 sharp abstinence, a lucky booty of deer's or goat's flesh 
 would naturally be ushered home, existed, perhaps, the germe 
 of the modern grace. It is not otherwise easy to be under- 
 stood why the blessing of food — the act of eating — should 
 have had a particular expression of thanksgiving annexed to 
 it, distinct from that implied and silent gratitude with which 
 we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many 
 other various gifts and good things of existence. 
 
 I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other 
 occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I 
 want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moon- 
 light ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem 
 AVhy have we none for books, those spiritual repasts — a grace 
 before Milton — a grace before Shakspeare — a devotional ex- 
 ercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen I — but 
 the received ritual having prescribed these forms to the soli- 
 tary ceremony of manducation, I shall confine my observa- 
 tions to the experience which 1 have had of the grace, prop- 
 erly so called ; commending mv new scheme for extension 
 to a niche in the grand philosophical, poetical, and perchance 
 in part heretical liturgy, now compiling by my friend Homo 
 Humanus, for the use of a certain snug congregation of Uto- 
 pian Rabelaesian Christians, no matter where assembled. 
 
 The form, then, of the benediction before eating has its 
 beauty at a poor man's table, oratthesimpletlieunprovocaiiv 
 repasts of children. It is here that the grace becomes ex- 
 ceedingly graceful. The indigent man, who hardly knows, 
 whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down 
 to his fare with a present sense of the blessingj which can 
 be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the cone ; 
 tion of wanting a dinner could never, but by some extreme 
 theory, have entered. The proper end of food, the anim a I 
 sustenance, is barely contemplated by them. The poor man's
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 109 
 
 bread is his daily bread, literally his bread for the day. Their 
 courses are perennial. 
 
 Again, the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded by 
 the grace. That which is Least stimulative to appetite, leaves 
 the mind most free for foreign considerations, A man may 
 feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of plain mutton 
 with turnips, and have leisure to reflect upon the ordinance 
 and institution of eating ; when he shall confeu a perturba- 
 tion of mind, inconsistent with the purposes of the grace, at 
 the presence of venison or turtle. When I have sat a runm 
 kosjHes) at rich men's tables, with the savoury soup and messes 
 steaming up the nostrils, and moistening the lips of the guests 
 with desire and a distracted choice, I have- felt the introduc- 
 tion of that ceremony to be unseasonable. With the rawn- 
 ous orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent (o interpose a re- 
 IjgOus sentiment. It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out 
 praises from a mouth that waters. The heats of epicurism 
 put out the gentle flame of devotion. The incense whi< h 
 rises round is pagan, and the belly god intercepts it for his 
 own. The very excess of the provision beyond the needs 
 takes away all sense of proportion between the end and 
 means. The Giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled 
 at the injustice of returning thanks — for what? for having too 
 much, while so many starve. It is to praise the gods amiss. 
 
 I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce consciously 
 perhaps, by the good man who says the grace. I have seej) 
 it in clergymen and others — a sort of shame — a sense of the 
 copresence of circumstances which unhallow the blessing. 
 After a devotional tone put on for a few seconds, how rapidlv 
 the speaker will fall into his- common voice, helping hirnsi If 
 or his neighbour, as if to get rid of some uneasy sensation of 
 hypocrisy. Not that the good man' was a hypocrite, or was 
 not most conscientious in the discharge of the duty ; but he 
 
 lei; in his inmost mind the incompatibility of the scene and 
 the viands before him with the exercise of a calm and rational 
 gratitude. 
 
 I hear somebody exclaim, Would you have Christians sit 
 down at table, like hogs to their troughs, without remembering 
 the Giver ? no — I would have them sit down as Christians, re- 
 membering the Giver, and less like hogs. Or if their appe- 
 tites must run riot, and they must pamper themselves w.ilij 
 d( licaeies for which sasl and west are ransacked, 1 would 
 have them postpone their benedietion to a filter season, when 
 appetite is laid ; when the still small voice i an be heard, and 
 the reason of the grace returns — with temp. Tale diet and re- 
 stricted dishes. Gluttony and surfeiting are 
 10
 
 110 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 sions for thanksgiving. When Jeshurun waxed fat, we read 
 that he kicked. Virgil knew the harpy nature better, when 
 he put into the mouth of Cetano anything but a blessing. 
 We may be gratefully sensible of the deliciousness of some 
 kinds of food beyond others, though that is a meaner and in- 
 ferior gratitude : but the proper object of the grace is suste- 
 nance, not relishes ; daily bread, not delicacies ; the means 
 of life, and not the means of pampering the carcass. With 
 what frame of composure, I wonder, can a city chaplain pro- 
 nounce his benediction at some great hall feast, when he 
 knows that his last concluding pious word — and that, in all 
 probability, the sacred name which he preaches — is but the 
 signal for so many impatient harpies to commence their foul 
 orgies, with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is tem- 
 perance) as those Virgilian fowl ! It is well if the good man 
 himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those 
 foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure 
 altar sacrifice. 
 
 The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the 
 oanquet which Satan, in the Paradise Regained, provides for 
 i temptation in the wilderness : — 
 
 " A table richly spread in regal mode, 
 With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort 
 And savour; beasts of chace, or fowl of game, 
 In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, 
 Gris-amber steamed ; all fish from sea or shore, 
 Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained 
 Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast." 
 
 The tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go 
 nvn without the recommendatory preface of a benediction, 
 hey are like to be short graces where the devil plays the 
 host. I am afraid the poet wants his usual decorum in this 
 place. Was he thinking of the old Roman luxury, or of <j 
 gaudy day at Cambridge ? This was a temptation fitter for 
 Heliogabalus. The whole banquet is too civic and culinary, 
 and the accompaniments altogether a profanation of that deep, 
 abstracted, holy scene. The mighty artillery of sauces, 
 which the cook fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to the 
 simple wants and plain hunger of the guest. He that dis- 
 turbed him in his dreams, from his dreams might have been 
 taught better. To the temperate fantasies of the famished 
 Son of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves ? Ho 
 dreamed indeed, 
 
 " As appetite is wont to dream, 
 Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment uwcet."
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 1 1 1 
 
 But what meats ? — 
 
 " Him thought, he by the brook of Clierith stood, 
 And saw the ravens with their horny beaks 
 Food to Elijah bringing, even and morn ; 
 Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought . 
 He saw the prophet also how he lied 
 Into the desert, and how there he slept 
 Under a juniper ; then how awaked 
 He found his supper on the coals prepared, 
 And by the angel was bid rise and eat, 
 And ate the second time alter repose. 
 The strength whereof sufficed him forty days : 
 Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook, 
 Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse." 
 
 Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate 
 dreams of the divine hungerer. To which of these two vis- 
 ionary banquets, think you, would the introduction of what 
 is called the grace have been most fitting and pertinent 1 
 
 Theoretically I am no enemy to graces ; but practically I 
 own that (before meat especially) they seem to involve some- 
 thing awkward and unseasonable. Our appetites, of one or 
 another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which might 
 otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving 
 and continuing the species. They are fit blessings to be 
 contemplated at a distance with a becoming gratitude ; but 
 the moment of appetite (the judicious reader will apprehend 
 me) is, perhaps, the least fit season for that exercise. The 
 Quakers, who go about their business, of every description, 
 with more calmness than we, have more title to the use of 
 these benedictory prefaces. I have always admired their si- 
 lent grace, and the more because I have observed their ap- 
 plications to the meat and drink following to be less passionate 
 and sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons nor wine- 
 bibbers as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopped 
 hay, with indifference, calmness, and cleanly circumstances. 
 They neither grease nor slop themselves. When I see a 
 citizen in his bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice. 
 
 I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent 
 to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh 
 were not made to be received with dispassionate services. I 
 hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he 
 is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink 
 instinctively from one who professes to like mi need \ '<■ il. 
 There is a physiognomical character in the tastes lor food. 
 
 C holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses 
 
 apple dumplings. 1 am not certain but he is right. With the 
 deca\ of rh) lirM innocence, 1 confess a less ami less relish 
 fatly for those innocuous cates The whole vegetable iHbe
 
 112 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 have lost their gust with me. Only I stick to asparagus, 
 which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. I am impatient 
 and querulous under culinary disappointments ; as, to come 
 home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some savoury 
 mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter 
 ill melted — that commonest of kitchen failures — puts me be- 
 side my tenour. The author of the Rambler used to make 
 inarticulate animal noises over a favourite food. Was this 
 the music quite proper to be preceded by the grace 1 or would 
 the pious man have done better to postpone his devotions to a 
 season when, the blessing might be contemplated with less 
 perturbation ? I quarrel with no man's tastes, nor would set 
 my thin face against those excellent things, in their way, jol- 
 lity and feasting. But as these exercises, however laudable, 
 have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man should be 
 sure, before he ventures so to grace them, that while he is 
 pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing 
 his hand to some great fish — his Dagon — with a special con- 
 secration of no ark but the fat tureen before him. Graces are 
 the sweet preluding strains to the banquets of angels and 
 children ; to the roots and severer repasts of the Chartreuse ; 
 to the slender, but not slenderly acknowledged, refection of 
 the poor and humble man : but at the heaped-up boards of 
 the pampered and the luxurious, they become of dissonant 
 mood, less timid and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than 
 the noise of those better befitting organs would be, which 
 children hear tales of, at Hog's Norton. We sit too long at 
 our meals, or are too curious in the study of them, or too 
 disordered in our application to them, or engross too great a 
 portion of those good things (which should be common) to 
 our share, to be able with any grace to say grace. To be 
 thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to 
 add hypocrisy to injustice. A lurking sense of this truth is 
 what makes the performance of this duty so cold and spirit- 
 less a service at most tables. In houses where the grace is 
 as indispensable as the napkin, who has not seen that never- 
 settled question arise, as to who shall say it ; while the good 
 man of the house and the visiter clergyman, or some other 
 guest be like of next authority from years or gravity, shall 
 he bandying about the office between them as a matter of 
 compliment, each of them not unwilling to shift the awkward 
 burdtin of! an equivocal duty from his own shoulders. 
 
 I once drunk tea in company with two Methodist divines 
 of different persuasions, whom it was my fortune to introduce 
 to each oilier for the first, time thai evening. Before tin; first 
 cun was handed round, one of these reverend gentlemen put
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 113 
 
 it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether he chose to 
 say anything. It seems it is the custom with some sectaries 
 to put up a .short prayer before tins meal also. II is reverend 
 brother did not at first quite apprehend him ; hut upon an ex- 
 planation, with little less importance lit; made answer, that 
 it was not a custom known in his church : in Which courteous 
 evasion the other aCqutescing lor good manners 1 sake, or in 
 compliance with a weak brother, the supplementary or tea 
 grace was waived altogether. With what spirit night not 
 Lucian have painted two priests, of his religion, playing into 
 ei'-h other's hands the compliment of performing or omitting 
 a sacrifice — the hungry god meantime, doubtful of his in- 
 cense-, with expectant nostrils hovering over the two flamens, 
 and (as between" two stools) going away in the end without 
 his supper. 
 
 A short form upon these occasions is felt to want reverence ; 
 a long one. 1 am afraid, cannot escape the charge of imper- 
 tinence. 1 do not quite approve of the epigrammatic concise- 
 ness with which that equivocal wag, (but my pleasant school- 
 fellow,) C. V. L., when importuned for a grace, used to in- 
 quire, first slyly leering down the table, " Is there no clergy- 
 man here?" — significantly adding, " thank G — d." Nor do I 
 think our old '"iin at school quite pertinent, where we were 
 used to preface our bald, bread and cheese suppers with a 
 preamble, connecting with that humble blessing a recognition 
 of benefits the most awful and overwhelming to the imagina- 
 tion which religion has to offer. Non tunc tilts erat locus. I 
 remember we were put to it to reconcile the phrase " good 
 creatures," upon which the blessing rested, with the fare set 
 before us, wilfully understanding that expression in a low and 
 animal sense — till some one recalled a legend, which told 
 how in the golden days of Christ's, the young hospitallers 
 were wont to have smoking joints of roast meat upon their 
 nigfatly boards, till some pious benefactor, commiserating the 
 decencies, rather than the palates, of the children, commuted 
 our flesh for garments, and gave us — horresco refcrens — trou- 
 sers instead of mutton. 
 10*
 
 114 ESSAYS OF ELTA. 
 
 MY FIRST PLAY. 
 
 At the north end of Cross Court there yet stands a portai, 
 of some architectural pretensions, though reduced to humble 
 use — serving at present for an entrance to a printing office. 
 This old doorway, if you are young, reader, you may not 
 know was the identical pit entrance to Old Drury — Garrick's 
 Drury — all of it that is left. I never pass it without shaking 
 some forty years from oft' my shoulders, recurring to the eve- 
 ning when I passed through it to see my first play. The after- 
 noon had been wet, and the condition of our going (the elder 
 folks and myself) was, that the rain should cease. With what 
 a beating heart did I watch from the window the puddles, from 
 the stillness of which I was taught to prognosticate the de- 
 sired cessation ! I seem to remember the last spirt, and the 
 glee with which I ran to announce it. 
 
 We went with orders, which my godfather F. had sent us. 
 He kept the oil shop (now Davies') at the corner of Feather- 
 stone Building, in Holborn. F. was a tall grave person, lofty 
 in speech, and had pretensions above his rank. He associ- 
 ated in those days with John Palmer, the comedian, whose 
 gait and bearing he seemed to copy ; if John (which is quite 
 as likely) did not rather borrow somewhat of his manner from 
 my godfather. He was also known to, and visited by Sheri- 
 dan. It was to his house in Holborn that young Brinsley 
 brought his first wife on her elopement with him from a board- 
 ing school at Bath — the beautiful Maria Linley. My parents 
 were present (over a quadrille table) when he arrived in the 
 evening with his harmonious charge. From either of these 
 connections, it may be inferred, that my godfather could com- 
 mand an order for the then Drury Lane Theatre at pleasure — 
 and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, in 
 Brinsley's easy autograph, I have heard him say was the sole 
 remuneration which he had received for many years' nightly 
 illumination of the orchestra, and various avenues of that 
 theatre— and he was content it should be so. The honour 
 of Sheridan's familiarity — or supposed familiarity — was bet- 
 ter to my godfather than money. 
 
 F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen ; grandiloquent yet 
 courteous. His delivery of the commonest matters of fact 
 was Ciceronian. He had two Latin words almost constantly 
 in his mouth, (how odd sounds Latin from an oilman's lips \)
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 1 15 
 
 which my better knowledge since has enabled me to correct. 
 In strict pronunciation, they should have been sounded vice 
 versa ; but in those young years they impressed me with 
 more awe than they would now do, read aright from Seneca 
 or Varro — in his own peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically 
 elaborated, or Anglicized, into something like verse verse. By 
 an imposing manner, and the help of these distorted syllables, 
 he climbed (but that was little) to the highest parochial hon- 
 ours which St. Andrew's has to bestow. 
 
 He is dead — and thus much I thought due to his memory, 
 both for my first orders, (little wondrous talismans ! — slight 
 keys, and insignificant to outward sight, but opening to me 
 more than Arabian paradises !) and, moreover, that by his 
 testamentary beneficence I came into possession of the only 
 landed property which I could ever call my own — situate near 
 the roadway village of pleasant Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire. 
 When I journeyed down to take possession, and planted foot 
 on my own ground, the stately habits of the donor descended 
 upon me, and I strode (shall 1 confess the vanity ?) with larger 
 paces over my allotment of three quarters of an acre, with its 
 commodious mansion in the midst, with the feeling of an Eng- 
 lish freeholder, that all between sky and centre was my own. 
 The estate has passed into more prudent hands, and nothing 
 but an agrarian can restore it. 
 
 In those days were pit orders — beshrew the uncomfortable 
 manager who abolished them ! — with one of these we went. 
 I remember the waiting at the door — not that which is left — 
 but between that and an inner door in shelter — oh, when shall 
 I be such an expectant again ! — with the cry of nonpareils, 
 an indispensable playhouse accompaniment in those days. 
 As near as I can recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of 
 the theatrical fruiteresses then was, " Chase some oranges, 
 chase some numparels, chase a bill of the play ;" — chase pro 
 choose. But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain 
 that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon tj 
 be disclosed — the breathless anticipations I endured ! I had 
 seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and 
 Cressida, in Rowe's Shakspeare — the tent scene with Dio- 
 mede — and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a 
 measure the feeling of that evening. The boxes at that time, 
 full of well-dressed women of quality, projected over the pit ; 
 and the pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glister- 
 ing substance (I know not what) under glass, (as it seemed,) 
 resembling — a homely fancy — but I judged it to be sugaj 
 randv— vet, to my raised imagination, divested of its homeliei 
 qualities, it appeared a glorified candy ! The orchestra lights
 
 116 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 at length arose, those " fair Auroras !" Once the bell sounded. 
 It was to ring out yet once again — and, incapable of the anti- 
 cipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon 
 the maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew 
 up — I was not past six years old — and the play was Artaxerxes ! 
 
 I had dabbled a little in the Universal History — the ancient 
 part of it — and here was the court of Persia. It was being 
 admitted to a sight of the past. I took no proper interest in 
 the action going on, for 1 understood not its import — but I 
 heard the word Darius, and I was in the midst of Daniel. 
 All feeling was absorbed in vision. Gorgeous vests, gardens, 
 palaces, princesses, passed before me. I knew not players. 
 I was in Persepolis for the time ; and the burning idol of their 
 devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. I was awe- 
 struck, and believed those significations to be something more 
 than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream 
 No such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams. Harle- 
 quin's Invasion followed ; where, I remember, the transforma- 
 tion of the magistrates into reverend beldams seemed to me 
 a piece of grave historic justice, and the tailor carrying his 
 own head to be as sober a verity as the legend of St. Denys. 
 
 The next play to which I was taken was the Lady of the 
 Manor, of which, with the exception of some scenery, very 
 faint traces are left in my memory. It was. followed by a 
 pantomime, called Lun's Ghost— a satiric touch, I apprehend, 
 upon Rich, not long since dead — but, to my apprehension, 
 (too sincere for satire,) Lun was as remote a piece of antiquity 
 as Lud — the father of a line of harlequins — transmitting his 
 dagger of lath (the wooden sceptre) through countless ages. 
 I saw the primeval Motley come from his silent tomb in a 
 ghastly vest of white patchwork, like the apparition of a dead 
 rainbow. So harlequins (thought I) look when they are dead. 
 
 My third play followed in quick succession. It was the 
 Way of the World. 1 think I must have sat at it as grave as 
 a judge ; for, I remember, the hysteric affectations of good 
 Lady Wishfort affected me like some solemn tragic passion. 
 Robinson Crusoe followed ; in which Crusoe, man Friday, 
 and the parrot, were as good and authentic as in the story. 
 The clownery and pantaloonery of these pantomimes have 
 clean passed out of my head. I believe I no more laughed at 
 l hem than at the same aye I should have been disposed to 
 laugh at the grotesque Gothic heads (seeming to me then 
 replete with devout meaning) that gape and grin, in stone, 
 around the inside of the Old Round Church (my church) of 
 the Templars. 
 
 I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was from
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 117 
 
 six to seven years old. After the intervention of six or seven 
 other years, (for at school all playgoing was inhibited,) 1 
 again entered the doors of a theatre. That old Artaxerxes 
 evening had never done ringing in mv fancy. 1 expected the 
 same feelings to come again with the same occasion. But we 
 differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter 
 does from six. In that interval what had I not lost ! At the 
 first period I knew nothing, understood nothing, discriminated 
 nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all — 
 
 "Was nourished I could not tell how" — 
 
 I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. 
 The same things were there materially ; but the emblem, the 
 reference, was gone ! The green curtain was no longer a 
 veil drawn between two worlds, the unfolding of which was 
 to bring back past ages, to present " a royal ghost," but a 
 certain quantity of green baize, which was to separate the 
 audience for a given time from certain of their fellow-men 
 who were to come forward and pretend those parts. The 
 lights — the orchestra lights — came up a clumsy machinery. 
 The first ring, and the second ring, was now but a trick of 
 the prompter's bell — which had been, like the note of the 
 cuckoo, a phantom of a voice, no hand seen or guessed at 
 which ministered to its warning. The actors were men and 
 women painted. I thought the fault was in them ; but it was 
 in myself, and the alteration which those many centuries — 
 of six short twelvemonths — had wrought in me. Perhaps it 
 was fortunate for me that the play of the evening was but an 
 indifferent comedy, as it gave me time to crop some unrea- 
 sonable expectations, which might have interfered with the 
 genuine emotions with which I was soon after enabled to 
 enter upon the first appearance to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isa- 
 bella. Comparison and retrospection soon yielded to the pres- 
 ent attraction of the scene ; and the theatre became to me, 
 upon a new stock, the most delightful of recreation.
 
 118 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 DREAM CHILDREN. 
 
 A REVERY. 
 
 Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when 
 they were children ; to stretch their imaginations to the con- 
 ception of a traditionary great uncle or grandam whom 
 they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones crept 
 about me the other evening to hear about their Great-grand- 
 mother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hun- 
 dred times bigger than that in which they and papa lived) 
 which had been the scene — so at least it was generally be- 
 lieved in that part of the country — of the tragic incidents 
 which they had lately become familiar with from the ballad 
 of the Children in the Wood. Certain it. is that the whole 
 story of the children and their cruel uncle was to be seen 
 fairly carved out in wood upon the chimneypiece of the 
 great hall, the whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts, till 
 a foolish rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of 
 modern invention in its etead, with no story upon it. Here 
 Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender to be 
 called upbraiding. 
 
 Then I went on to say how religious and how good their 
 great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by 
 everybody, though she was not indeed the mistress of this great 
 house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects 
 she might be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her 
 by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and more fash- 
 ionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the 
 adjoining county ; but still she lived in it in a manner as if 
 it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great 
 house in a sort while she lived, which afterward came to de- 
 cay, and was nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments 
 stripped and carried away to the owner's other house, where 
 they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some one were 
 to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, 
 and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry guilt drawing room. 
 Here John smiled, as much as to say, " That would be foolish 
 indeed." 
 
 And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral 
 was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the 
 gentry too, of the neighbourhood for many miles round, to 
 bIiow their respect for her memory, because she had been
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 1 19 
 
 such a good and religious woman ; so good, indeed, that she 
 knew all the Psalter by heart — ay, and a great part of the 
 Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her bands. 
 
 Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great- 
 grandmother Field once was ; and how in her youth she was 
 esteemed the best dancer — here Alice's little right foot played 
 an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it de- 
 sisted — the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a 
 cruel disease, called a cancer, came and bowed her down 
 with pain ; but it could never bend her good spirits, or make 
 them stoop, but they were still upright, because she was so 
 good and religious. 
 
 Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in alone 
 chamber of the great lone house ; and how she believed that 
 an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight gli- 
 ding up and down the great staircase near where she slept) 
 but she said " those innocents would do her no harm ;" and 
 how frightened I used to be, though in those days I had my 
 maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or 
 religious as she — and yet I never saw the infants. Here 
 John expanded all his eyebrows and tried to look courageous. 
 
 Then I told how good she was to all her grandchildren, 
 having us to the great house in the holydays, where I in par- 
 ticular used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon 
 the old busts of the Twelve Csssars, that had been emperors 
 of Rome, till the old marble heads would seem to live again, 
 or I to be turned into marble with them ; how I never could 
 be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast 
 empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestrv, 
 and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out 
 — sometimes in the spacious oldfashioned gardens, which I 
 had almost to myself, unless when now and then a solitary 
 gardening man would cross me — and how the nectarines and 
 peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever offering to 
 pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now 
 and then — and because I had more pleasure in strolling about 
 among the old melancholy-looking yew trees, or the firs, and 
 picking up the red berries and the fir apples, which were 
 good for nothing but to look at — or in lying about upon the 
 fresh grass, with all the fine garden smells around me — or 
 basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripen- 
 ing too along with the oranges and the limes in that grateful 
 warmth — or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the 
 fish pond, at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a 
 great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent 
 state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings — 1 had
 
 120 ESSAYS OF ELIA 
 
 more pleasure in these busy idle diversions than in all the 
 sweet flavours of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such like 
 common baits of children. Here John slyly deposited back 
 upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, not unobserved by 
 Alice, he had meditated dividing with her, and both seemed 
 willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. 
 
 Then in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, 
 though their great-grandmother Field loved all her grand- 
 children, yet in an especial manner she might be said to love 
 
 their uncle, John L , because he was so handsome and 
 
 spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us ; and, instead of 
 moping about in solitary corners, like some of us, he would 
 mount the most mettlesome horse he could get, when but an 
 imp no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half 
 over the county in a morning, and join the hunters when 
 there were any out — and yet he loved the old great house and 
 gardens too, but had too much spirit to be always pent up 
 within their boundaries — and how their uncle grew up to 
 man's estate, as brave as he was handsome, to the admiration 
 of everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field most espe- 
 cially ; and how he used to carry me upon his back when I 
 was a lame-footed boy — for he was a good bit older than me 
 —many a mile when I could not walk for pain ; and how 
 in after life he became lame footed too, and I did not always 
 (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was im- 
 patient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how con- 
 siderate he had been to me when I was lame footed ; and 
 how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it 
 seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance 
 there is between life and death ; and how I bore his death as 
 I thought pretty well at first, but afterward it haunted and 
 haunted me ; and though I did not cry o-r take it to heart as 
 some do, and as I think he would have done if I had died, yet 
 I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much 
 I had loved him. I missed his kindness, and I missed his 
 crossness, and wished him to be alive again, to be quarrelling 
 with him, (for we quarrelled sometimes,) rather than not have 
 him again, and was as uneasy without him, as he their poor 
 uncle must have been when the doctor took off his limb. 
 Here the children fell a crying, and asked if their little mourn- 
 ing which they had on was not for Uncle John, and they looked 
 up, and prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell 
 them some stories about their pretty dead mother. 
 
 Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, 
 and sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the 
 fair Alice W n ; and, as much as children could under-
 
 ESSAYS OF EL1A. 121 
 
 stand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and 
 denial meant in maidens — when suddenly turning to Alice, 
 the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a 
 reality of represrittment, that I became in doubt which of 
 them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was ; 
 and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew 
 fainter to my view, receding, and still receding, till nothing at 
 last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost 
 distance, which, without, speech, strangely impressed upon 
 me the effects of speech : " We are not of Alice, nor of thee, 
 nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call 
 Bartrum father. We are nothing ; less than nothing ; and 
 dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait 
 upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we 
 have existence, and a name." And immediately awaking, I 
 found myself quietly seated in my bachelor armchair, where 
 I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by 
 my side — but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever 
 
 DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. 
 
 IN A LETTER TO B. F. ESQ., AT SVDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES. 
 
 My dear F. — When I think how welcome the sight of a 
 letter from the world where you were born must be to you in 
 that strange one to which you have been transplanted, I feel 
 some compunctious visitings at my long silence. But, indeed, 
 it is no easy effort to set about a correspondence at our dis- 
 tance. The weary world of waters between us oppresses the 
 imagination. It is difficult to conceive how a scrawl of mine 
 should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption to 
 expect that one's thoughts should live so far. It is like wri- 
 ting for posterity ; and reminds me of one of Mrs. Rowe's 
 superscriptions, " Alcander to Strephon, in the shades." Cow- 
 ley's Post Angel is no more than would be expedient in such 
 an intercourse. One drops a package at Lombard-street, and 
 in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets it as fresh 
 as if it came in ice. It is only like whispering through a long 
 trumpet. But suppose a tube let down from the moon, with 
 yourself at one end and the man at the other ; it would be 
 some balk to the spirit of conversation, if you knew that the 
 dialogue exchanged with that interesting theosophist would 
 11 F
 
 122 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 take two or three revolutions of a higher luminary in its pas- 
 sage. Yet for aught I know, you may be some parasangs 
 nigher than primitive idea — Plato's man — than we in England 
 here have the honour to reckon ourselves. 
 
 Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics ; news, 
 sentiment, and puns. In the latter, I include all non-seriou3 
 subjects ; or subjects serious in themselves, but treated after 
 my fashion, non-seriously. And first, for news. In them the 
 most desirable circumstance, I suppose, is that they shall be 
 true. But what security can I have that what I now send 
 you for truth, shall not before you get it unaccountably turn 
 into a lie 1 For instance, our mutual friend P. is at this pres- 
 ent writing — my Now — in good health, and enjoys a fair share 
 of worldly reputation. You are glad to hear it. This is 
 natural and friendly. But at this present reading — your Now 
 —he may possibly be in the Bench, or going to be hanged, 
 which in reason ought to abate something of your transport, 
 (i. e. at hearing he was well, &c.,) or at least considerably to 
 modify it. I am going to the play this evening, to have a 
 laugh with Munden. You have no theatre, I think you told 
 me, in your land of d — d realities. You naturally lick your 
 lips, and envy me my felicity. Think but a moment, and you 
 will correct the hateful emotion. Why, it is Sunday morn- 
 ing with you, and 1823. This confusion of tenses, this grand 
 solecism of two presents, is in a degree common to all postage. 
 But if I sent you word to Bath, or the Devises, that I was 
 expecting the aforesaid treat this evening, though at the mo- 
 ment you received the intelligence my full feast of fun would 
 he over ; yet there would be for a day or two after, as you 
 would well know, a smack, a relish left upon my mental 
 palate, which would give rational encouragement for you to 
 foster a portion at least of the disagreeable passion, which it 
 was in part my intention to produce. But ten months hence 
 your envy or your sympathy would be as useless as a passion 
 spent upon the dead. Not only does truth, in these long in- 
 tervals, unessence herself, but (what is harder) one cannot 
 venture a crude fiction for the fear that it may ripen into a 
 truth upon the voyage. What a wild improbable banter I put 
 upon you some three years since — of Will Wetherall having 
 married a servant maid ! I remember gravely consulting you 
 how we were to receive her — for Will's wife was in no case 
 to be rejected — and your no less serious replication in the 
 matter ; how tenderly you advised an abstemious introduction 
 of literary topics before the lady, with a caution not to be too 
 forward in bringing upon the carpet matters more within the 
 sphere of her intelligence ; your deliberate judgment, or rather
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 123 
 
 wise suspension of sentence, how far jacks, and spits, and 
 mops could with propriety be introduced as subjects ; whether 
 the conscious avoiding of all such matters in discourse would 
 not have a worse look than the taking of them casually in our 
 way ; in what manner we should carry ourselves to our maid 
 Becky, Mrs. William A Vet he rail being by ; whether we should 
 show more delicacy, and a truer sense of respect for Will's 
 wife, by treating Becky with our customary chiding before 
 her, or by an unusual deferential civility paid to Becky as to a 
 person of great worth, but thrown by the caprice of fate into an 
 humble station. There were difficulties, 1 remember, on both 
 sides, which you did me the favour to state with the precision 
 of a lawyer, united to the tenderness of a friend. I laughed 
 in my sleeve at your solemn pleadings, when lo ! while I was 
 valuing myself upon this flam put upon you in New South 
 Wales, the devil in England, jealous possibly of any lie chil- 
 dren not his own, or working after my copy, has actually insti- 
 gated our friend (not three days since) to the commission of a 
 matrimony, which 1 had only conjured up for your diversion. 
 William Wetherall has married Mrs. Cotterel's maid. But to 
 take it in its truest sense, you will see, my dear F., that news 
 from me must become history to you ; which I neither pro- 
 fess to write, nor indeed care much for reading. No person, 
 under a diviner, can with any prospect of veracity conduct a 
 correspondence at such an arm's length. Two prophets, in- 
 deed, might thus interchange intelligence with effect ; the 
 epoch of the writer ( Habakkuk) falling in with the true present 
 time of the receiver (Daniel) — but then we are no prophets. 
 
 Then as to sentiment. It fares little better with that. This 
 Kind of dish, above all, requires to be served up hot ; or sent 
 off in water plates, that your friend may have it almost as 
 warm as yourself. If it have time to cool, it is the most taste- 
 less of all cold meats. I have often smiled at a conceit of 
 the late Lord C. It seems that travelling somewhere about 
 Geneva, he came to some pretty green spot, or nook, where 
 a willow, or something, hung so fantastically and invitingly 
 over a stream — was it ? — or a rock 1 — no matter — but the still- 
 ness and the repose, after a weary journey, 'tis likely, in a 
 languid moment of his lordship's hot restless life, so took his 
 fancy, that he could imagine no place so proper, in the event 
 of his death, to lay his bones in. This was all very natural 
 and excusable as a sentiment, and shows his character in a 
 very pleasing light. But when from a passing sentiment it 
 came to be an act ; and when, by a positive testamentary dis- 
 posal, his remains were actually carried all that way from 
 England ; who was there, some desperate sentimentalists ex- 
 
 F2
 
 124 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 cepted, that did not ask the question, Why could not his lord- 
 ship have found a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree 
 as green and pendant, with a stream as emblematic to his 
 purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset, or in Devon ? Conceive the 
 sentiment boarded up, freighted, entered at the custom house, 
 (startling the tidewaiters with the novelty,) hoisted into a 
 ship. Conceive it pawed about and handled between the 
 rude jests of tarpawling ruffians — a thing of its delicate texture 
 — the salt bilge wetting it till it became as vapid as a damaged 
 lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some 
 superstition about sentiments) of being tossed over in a fresh 
 gale to some propitiatory shark, (spirit of St. Gothard, save 
 us from a quietus so foreign to the deviser's purpose !) but it 
 has happily evaded a fishy consummation. Trace it then to 
 its lucky landing — at Lyons shall we say ? — I have not the 
 map before me — jostled upon four men's shoulders — baiting 
 at this town — stopping to refresh at t'other village — waiting 
 a passport here ; a license there ; the sanction of the magis- 
 tracy in this district ; the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in 
 that canton ; till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out 
 and jaded, from a brisk sentiment, into a feature of silly pride 
 or tawdry senseless affectation. How few sentiments, my 
 dear F., I am afraid we can set down, in the sailor's phrase, 
 as quite seaworthy. 
 
 Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which, though con- 
 temptible in bulk, are the twinkling corpuscula which should 
 irradiate a right friendly epistle — your puns and small jests 
 are, I apprehend, extremely circumscribed in their sphere of 
 action. They are so far from a capacity of being packed up 
 and sent beyond sea, they will scarce endure to be trans- 
 ported by hand from this room to the next. Their vigour is 
 as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment for their brief 
 existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the bystanders : 
 or this last, is the fine slime of Nilus — the melior lutus — 
 whose maternal recipiency is as necessary as the sol pater to 
 their equivocal generation. A pun hath a hearty kind of pres- 
 ent ear-kissing smack with it ; you can no more transmit it 
 in its pristine flavour, than you can send a kiss. Have you 
 not tried in some instances to palm off a yesterday's pun upon 
 a gentleman, and has it answered ? Not but it was new to 
 his hearing, but it did not seem to come new from you. It 
 did not hitch in. It was like picking up at a village alehouse 
 a two days' old newspaper. You have not seenjt before, but 
 you resent the stale thing as an affront. 
 
 This sort of merchandise above all requires a quick return 
 A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must, be coinstantaneous. The
 
 ESSAYS OF ELI A 125 
 
 one is the brisk lightning, tlie other the fierce thunder.. A 
 moment's interval, and the link is snapped. A pun is reflected 
 (iota a friend's face as from a minor. Who would consult his 
 sweet visnomy, if the polished surface were two or three 
 minutes (not to speak of twelve months, my dear F.) in giving 
 back its copy ? 
 
 I cannot image to myself whereabout you are. When I 
 try to fix it, Peter Wilkius's island comes across me. Some- 
 times you seem to be in the Hades of Thieves. I see Diog- 
 enes prying among you with his perpetual fruitless lantern. 
 What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight 
 of an honest man ! You must almost have forgotten how we 
 look. And tell me, what your Svdneyites do ? are they 
 th**v*ng all day long? Merciful Heaven! what property 
 can stand against such a depredation ! The kangaroos — 
 your aborigines — do they keep their primitive simplicity un- 
 Europe tainted, with those little short fore puds, looking like 
 a lesson framed by nature to the pickpocket ! Marry, for 
 diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided a priori ; but 
 if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair 
 of hind shifters as the expertest locomoter in the colony. We 
 hear the most improbable tales at this distance. Pray, is -it 
 true that the young Spartans among you are born with six 
 fingers, which spoils their scanning ! It must look very odd ; 
 but use reconciles. For their scansion, it is less to be re- 
 gretted, for if they take it into their heads to be poets, it is 
 odds but they turn out, the greater part of them, vile plagia- 
 rists. Is there much difference to see, too, between the son 
 of a th**f, and the grandson ? or where does the taint stop ? 
 Do you bleach in three or in four generations ? I have many 
 questions to put, but ten Delphic voyages can be made in 
 shorter time than it will take to satisfy my scruples. Do you 
 grow your own hemp ? What is your staple trade, exclusive 
 of the national profession, I mean? Your locksmiths, I take 
 it, are some of your great capitalists. 
 
 I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarly as when we 
 used to exchange good-morrows out of our old contiguous 
 windows, in pump-famed Harecourt in the temple. Why did 
 you ever leave that quiet corner ? Why did 1 ? — with its 
 complement of four poor elms, from whose smoke-died barks, 
 the theme ,of jesting ruralists, I picked my first ladybirds ! 
 My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a 
 thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us ; 
 a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of 
 our English letters before they can reach you. But while I 
 11*
 
 126 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 talk, I think you hear me — thoughts dallying with vain sur- 
 mise — 
 
 " Ay me ! while thee the seas and sounding shores 
 Hold far away." 
 
 Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as 
 <ou shall hardly know me. Come, before Bridget walks on 
 crutches. Girls whom you left children have become sage 
 matrons, while you are tarrying there. The blooming Miss 
 tf r (you remember Sally VV r) called upon us yes- 
 terday, an aged crone. Folks, whom you knew, die off every 
 year. Formerly, I thought that death was wearing out — I 
 stood ramparted about with so many healthy friends. The 
 departure or J. W., two springs back, corrected my delusion. 
 Since then the old divorcer has been busy. If you do not 
 make haste to return, there will be little left to greet you, of 
 me, or mine. 
 
 THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY SWEEPERS. 
 
 I like to meet a sweep — understand me — not a grown 
 sweeper — old chimney sweepers are by no means attractive 
 ■ — but one of those tender novices, blooming through their 
 first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced from 
 the cheek — such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat 
 earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the 
 peep peep of a young sparrow ; or iiker to the matin lark should 
 I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom anticipa- 
 ting the sunrise 1 
 
 I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks — poor 
 blots — innocent blacknesses — 
 
 I reverence these young Africans of our own growth — these 
 almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption ; 
 and from their little pulpits, (the tops of chimneys,) in the 
 nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of pa- 
 tience to mankind. 
 
 When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to wit- 
 ness their operation ! to see a chit no bigger than one's self 
 enter, one knew not by what process, into what seemed the 
 fauces Averni — to pursue him in imagination, as he went 
 sounding on through so many dark stilling caverns, horrid 
 shades ! to shudder with the idea that " now, surely he must
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 127 
 
 be lost fur ever !" — to revive at hearing his feeble shout of dis- 
 covered daylight — and then (oh fulness of delight) running 
 out of doors, to come just in time to see the sable phenome- 
 non emerge in safety, the brandished weapon of his art vic- 
 torious like some flag waved over a conquered citadel ! I 
 seem to remember having been told, that a bad sweep was 
 once left in a stack, with his brush, to indicate which way the 
 wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly ! not much 
 unlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the " Ap- 
 parition of a child crowned with a tree in his hand rises." 
 
 Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy 
 early rambles, it is good to give him a penny. It is better to 
 give him twopence. If it be starving weather, and to the 
 proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed heels 
 (no unusual accompaniment) be superadded, the demand on 
 thy humanity will surely rise to a tester. 
 
 There is a composition, the groundwork of which I have 
 understood to be the sweet wood yclept sassafras. This 
 wood, boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an in- 
 fusion of milk and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy be- 
 yond the China luxury. I know not how thy palcte may rel 
 ish it ; for myself, with every deference to the judicious Mr. 
 Read, who hath time out of mind kept open a shop (the only 
 one, he avers, in London) for the vending of this " wholesome 
 and pleasant beverage," on the south side of Fleet-street, as 
 thou approachest Bridge-street — the only Salopian house — I 
 have never yet adventured to dip my own particular lip in a 
 basin of his commended ingredients — a cautious premonition to 
 the olfactories constantly whispering to me that my stomach 
 must infallibly, with all due courtesy, decline it. Yet I have 
 seen palates, otherwise not uninstructed in dietetical elegan- 
 ces, sup it up with avidity. 
 
 I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it 
 happens, but I have always found that this composition is 
 surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney 
 sweeper — whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly 
 oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, 
 which are sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to the 
 roof of the mouth in these unfledged practitioners ; or whether 
 Nature, sensible that she had mingled too much of bitter wood 
 in the lot of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the 
 earth her sassafras for a sweet lenitive — but so it is, that no 
 possible taste or odour to the senses of a young chimney 
 sweeper can convey a delicate excitement comparable to this 
 mixture. Being penniless, they will yet hang their black 
 heads over the ascending steam, to gratify one sense if pos-
 
 128 ESSAYS OF EL1A. 
 
 Bible, seemingly no less pleased than those domestic animals 
 — ca t s — when they purr over a new-found sprig of valerian. 
 There is something more in these sympathies than philosophy 
 can inculcate. 
 
 Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not without reason, that his 
 is the only Salopian house, yet be it known to thee, reader— if 
 thou art one who keepest what are called good hours, thou art 
 haply ignorant of the fact— he hath a race of industrious im- 
 itators, who from stalls, and under open sky, dispense the 
 same savoury mess to humbler customers, at that dead time 
 of the dawn, when (as extremes meet) the rake, reeling home 
 from his midnight cups, and the hard-handed artisan, leaving 
 his bed to resume the premature labours of the day, jostle, 
 not unfrequently to the manifest disconcerting of the former, 
 for the honours of the pavement. It is the time when, in 
 summer, between the expired and the not yet relumined 
 kitchen fires, the kennels of our fair metropolis give forth 
 their least satisfactory odours. The rake, who wisheth to dis- 
 sipate his over-night vapours in more grateful coffee, curses 
 the ungenial fume as he passeth ; but the astisan stops to 
 taste, and blesses the fragrant breakfast. 
 
 This is Saloop — the precocious herb woman's darling — the 
 delight of the early gardener, who transports his smoking 
 cabbages by break of day from Hammersmith to Covent Gar- 
 den's famed piazzas — the delight, and, oh I fear, too often the 
 envy of the unpennied sweep. Him shouldst thou haply 
 encounter, with his dim visage pendent over the grateful 
 steam, regale him with a sumptuous basin (it will cost thee 
 but three halfpennies) and a slice of delicate bread and but- 
 ter (an added halfpenny) — so may thy culinary fires, eased 
 of the overcharged secretions from thy worse-placed hospital- 
 ities, curl up a lighter volume to the welkin — so may the de- 
 scending soot never taint thy costly well-ingredienced soups 
 — nor the odious cry, quick reaching from street to street, **.. 
 the fired chimney, invite the rattling engines from ten adjacen' 
 parishes, to disturb for a casual scintillation thy peace and 
 pocket ! 
 
 I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts ; the 
 jeers and taunts of the populace ; the low-bred triumph they 
 display over the casual trip, or splashed stocking of a gentle- 
 man. Yet can I endure the jocularity of a young sweep 
 with something more than forgiveness. In the last wintei 
 but one, pacing along Cheapside with my accustomed pre- 
 cipitation when I walk westward, a treacherous slide brought 
 me upon my back in an instant. I scrambled up with pain 
 and shame enough — yet outwardly trying to face it down, as
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 129 
 
 if nothing hail happened — when the roguish grin of one of 
 these young wits encountered me. There he stood, pointing 
 me out with his dusky linger to the mob, and to a poor woman 
 (I suppose his mother) in particular, till the tears for the ex- 
 quisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked themselves 
 out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a pre- 
 vious weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling through all 
 with such a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth — 
 hut Hogarth has got him already (how could he miss him '.) 
 in the March to Finchley, grinning at the pieman — there he 
 stood, as he stands in the picture, irremoveable, as if the jest 
 was to last for ever — with such a maximum of glee, and min- 
 imum of mischief, in his mirth — for the grin of a genuine 
 sweep hath absolutely no malice in it — that I could have been 
 content, if the honour of a gentleman might endure it, to have 
 remained his butt and his mockery till midnight. 
 
 I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are 
 called a fine set of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies 
 must pardon me) is a casket, presumably holding such jewels ; 
 but, methinks, they should take leave to " air" them as fru- 
 gally as possible. The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who 
 show me their teeth, show me bones. Yet must I confess, 
 that from the mouth of a true sweep a display (even to osten- 
 tation) of those white and shining ossifications, strikes me as 
 an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of 
 foppery. It is as when 
 
 " A sable cloud 
 Turns forth her silver lining on the night." 
 
 It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct ; a badge 
 of better days ; a hint of nobility : and doubtless, under the 
 obscuring darkness and double night of their forlorn disguise- 
 ment, oftentimes lurketh good blood and gentle conditions, 
 derived from lost ancestry and a lapsed pedigree. The 
 premature apprenticements of these tender victims give but 
 too much encouragement, I fear, to clandestine, and almost 
 infantile abductions ; the seeds of civility and true courtesy, 
 so often discernible in these young grafts, (not otherwise to be 
 accounted for,) plainly hint at some forced adoptions ; many 
 noble Rachels mourning for their children, even in our davs, 
 countenance the fact ; the tales of fairy spiriting may shadow 
 a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the young Montagu 
 be but a solitary instance of good fortune, out of many irre- 
 parable and hopeless dejiliations. 
 
 In one of the state beds at Arundel Castle, a Tew years 
 since — under a ducal canopy — (that seat of the Howards is 
 
 F 3
 
 130 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 an object of curiosity to visiters, chiefly for its beds, in which 
 the late duke was especially a connoisseur) — encircled with 
 curtains of delicatest crimson, with starry coronets inwoven 
 — folded between a pair of sheets whiter and softer than 
 the lap where Venus lulled Ascanius — was discovered by 
 chance, after all methods of search had failed, at noonday, 
 fast asleep, a lost chimney sweeper. The little creature, 
 having somehow confounded his passage among the intrica- 
 cies of those lordly chimneys, by some unknown aperture had 
 alighted upon this magnificent chamber ; and tired with his 
 tedious explorations, was unable to resist the delicious invite- 
 ment to repose which he there saw exhibited ; so, creeping 
 between the sheets very quietly, he laid his black head upon 
 the pillow, and slept like a young Howard. 
 
 Such is the account given to the visiters at the castle. 
 But I cannot help seeming to perceive a confirmation of what 
 I have just hinted at in this story. A high instinct was at 
 work in the case, or I am mistaken. Is it probable that a poor 
 child of that description, with whatever weariness he might 
 be visited, would have ventured, under such a penalty as he 
 would be taught to expect, to uncover the sheets of a duke's 
 bed, and deliberately to lay himself down between them, 
 when the rug, or the carpet, presented an obvious couch, still 
 far above his pretensions — is this probable, I would ask, if 
 the great power of nature, which I contend for, had not been 
 manifested within him, prompting to the adventure 1 Doubt- 
 less this young nobleman (for such my mind misgives me that 
 he must be) was allured by some memory, not amounting to 
 full consciousness of his condition in infancy, when he was 
 used tobe lapped by his mother, or his nurse, in just such sheets 
 as he there found, into which he was now but creeping back 
 as into his proper incunabula and resting-place. By no other 
 theory, than by this sentiment of a pre-existent state, (as I 
 may call it,) can I explain a deed so venturous, and, indeed, 
 upon any other system, so indecorous, in this tender but un- 
 seasonable sleeper. 
 
 My pleasant friend Jem White was so impressed with the 
 belief of metamorphoses like this frequently taking place, 
 that in some sort to reverse the wrongs of fortune in these 
 poor changelings, he instituted an annual feast of chimney 
 sweepers, at which it was his pleasure to officiate as host and 
 waiter. It was a solemn supper held in Smithfield, upon the 
 yearly return of the fair of St. Bartholomew. Cards were 
 issued a week before to the master sweeps in and about the 
 metropolis, confining the invitation to their younger fry. Now 
 and then an elderly stripling would got in among us, and be
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 131 
 
 good-naturedly winked at ; but our main body were infantry. 
 One unfortunate wight, indeed, who, relying upon his dusky 
 6uit, had intruded himself into our party, but by tokens was 
 providentially discovered, in time, to be no chimney sweeper, 
 (all is not soot which looks so,) was quoited out of the pres- 
 ence with universal indignation, as not having on the wedding 
 garment ; but in general the greatest harmony prevailed. 
 The place chosen was a convenient spot among the pens, at 
 the north side of the fair, not so far distant as to be imper- 
 vious f the agreeable hubbub of that vanity ; but remote 
 enough not to be obvious to the interruption of every gaping 
 spectator in it. The guests assembled about seven. In those 
 little temporary parlours three tables were spread with napery, 
 not so fine as substantial, and at every board a comely hostess 
 presided with her pan of hissing sausages. The nostrils of 
 the young rogues dilated at the savour. James White, as 
 head waiter, had charge of the first table ; and myself, with 
 our trusty companion Bigod, ordinarily ministered to the other 
 two. There was clambering and jostling, you may be sure, 
 who should get at the first table — for Rochester in his mad- 
 dest days could not have done the humours of the scene with 
 more spirit than my friend. After some general expression ui 
 thanks for the honour the company had done him, his inaug- 
 ural ceremony was to clasp the greasy waist of old Dame Ur- 
 sula, (the fattest of the three,) that stood frying and fretting, 
 half blessing, half cursing " the gentleman," and imprint upon 
 her chaste lips a tender salute, whereat the universal host 
 woidd set up a shout that tore the conclave, while hundreds 
 of grinning teeth startled the night with their brightness. Oh 
 it was a pleasure to see the sable younkers lick in the unctu- 
 ous meat, with his more unctuous sayings — how he would lit 
 the titbits to the puny mouths, reserving the lengthier links 
 for the seniors — how he would intercept a morsel even in the 
 jaws of some young desperado, declaring it " must to the pan 
 again to be browned, for it was not fit for a gentleman's eat- 
 ing" — how he would recommend this slice of white bread, or 
 that piece of kissing crust, to a tender juvenile, advising them 
 all to have a care of cracking their teeth, which were their 
 best patrimony — how genteelly he would deal about the small 
 ale, as if it were wine, naming the brewer, and protesting, if 
 it were not good, he should lose their custom ; with a special 
 recommendation to wipe the lip before drinking. Then we 
 had our toasts — " The King" — The Cloth" — which, whether 
 they understood or not, was equally diverting and Battering ; 
 ana for a crowning sentiment, which never tailed, a May the 
 Brush supersede the Laurel." All these, and fifty other fan-
 
 132 ESSAVS OK ELIA. 
 
 cies, which were rather felt than comprehended by his guests, 
 would he utter, standing upon tables, and prefacing every sen- 
 timent with a " Gentlemen, give me leave to propose so and 
 so," which was a prodigious comfort to those young orphans ; 
 every now and then stuffing into his mouth (for it did not do 
 to be squeamish on these occasions) indiscriminate pieces ol 
 those reeking sausages, which pleased them mightily, and was 
 the savouriest part, you may believe, of the entertainment. 
 
 " Golden lads and lasses must, 
 As chimney sweepers, come to dust." 
 
 James White is extinct, and with him these suppers have 
 long ceased. He carried away with him half the fun of the 
 world when he died — of my world at least. His old clients 
 look for him among the pens ; and, missing him, reproach the 
 altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and the glory of Smithrield 
 departed for ever. 
 
 A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS U 
 THE METROPOLIS. 
 
 The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation — your 
 only modern Alcides' club to rid the time of its abuses — is 
 uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering 
 tatters of the bugbear Mendicity from the metropolis. Scrips, 
 wallets, bags — staves, dogs, and crutches — the whole mendi- 
 cant fraternity with all their baggage are fast posting out of 
 the purlieus of this eleventh persecution. From the crowded 
 crossing, from the corners of streets and turning of alleys, 
 the parting Genius of Beggary is " with sighing sent." 
 
 1 do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this im- 
 pertinent crusado, or helium ad exterminalionem, proclaimed 
 against a species. Much good might be sucked from these 
 beggars. 
 
 They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauper- 
 ism. Their appeals were to our common nature ; less re- 
 volting to an ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the 
 particular humours or caprice of any fellow-creature, or set 
 of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian. Theirs were 
 the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the as- 
 sessment. 
 
 There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 133 
 
 desolation ; as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the be- 
 ing a man than to go in livei v. 
 
 The greatest spirits have i'elt this in their reverses ; and 
 when Dionysius from king turned schoolmaster, do we ftel 
 anything towards him but contempt I Could Vandyke have 
 made a picture of him, swaying a ferula for a sceptre, width 
 would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the 
 same compassionate admiration, with which we regard Ids 
 Brlisarius begging for an uboluml Would the moral have. 
 beep more graceful, more pathetic 1 
 
 The blind beggar in the legend — the father of pretty Bessy 
 — whose story doggerel rhymes and alehouse signs cannot so 
 degrade or attenuate, but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit 
 will shine through the disguisements — this noble Earl of Corn- 
 wall, (as indeed he was,) and memorable sport of fortune, flee- 
 in »■ from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stripped of all, 
 and seated on the flowering green of Bethnal, with his more 
 fresh and springing daughter by his side, illumining his rags 
 and his beggary — would the child and parent have cut a better 
 figure doing the honours of a counter, or expiating their fallen 
 condition upon the three-foot eminence of some sempstering 
 shop-board I 
 
 In tale or history your beggar is ever the just antipode to 
 your king. The poets and romancical writers, (as dear Mar- 
 garet Newcastle would call them,) when they would most 
 sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, never stop 
 till they have brought down their hero in good earnest to rags 
 and the wallet. The depth of the descent illustrates the 
 height he falls from. There is no medium which can be pre- 
 sented to the imagination without offence. There is no 
 breaking the fall. Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest 
 him of his garments, till he answer " mere nature ;" and 
 Cresseid, fallen from a prince's love, must extend her pale 
 arms, pale with Other whiteness than of beauty, supplicating 
 lazar alms with bell and clapdish. 
 
 The Lucian wits knew this very well ; and, with a con- 
 verse policy, when they would express scorn of greatness 
 without the pity, they show us an Alexander in the shades 
 cobbling shoes, or a SSemiramis getting up foul linen. 
 
 How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had 
 declined his affections upon the daughter* of a baker ! yet do 
 we feel the imagination at all violated when we read the 
 '• true ballad," where King Cophetua woos the beggar maid ? 
 
 Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but 
 pity alloyed with contempt. No one properly contemns a 
 beggar. Bovertv is a comparative thing, and each degree of 
 12
 
 134 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 it is mocked by its " neighbour grice." Its poor-rents and 
 comings-in are soon summed up and told. Its pretences to 
 property are almost ludicrous. Its pitiful attempts to save 
 excite a smile. Every scornful companion can weigh his 
 trifle bigger purse against it. Poor man reproaches poor man 
 in the streets with impolitic mention of his condition, his own 
 being a shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both. 
 No rascally comparative insults a beggar, or thinks of weigh- 
 ing purses with him. He is not in the scale of comparison. 
 He is not under the measure of property. He confessedly 
 hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twitteth 
 him with ostentation above his means. No one accuses him 
 of pride, or upbraideth him with mock humility. None justle 
 with him for the wall, or pick quarrels for precedency. No 
 wealthy neighbour seeketh to eject him from his tenement. 
 No man sues him. No man goes to law with him. If I were 
 not the independent gentleman that I am, rather than I would 
 be a retainer to the great, a led captain, or a poor relation, I 
 would choose, out of the delicacy and true greatness of my 
 mind, to be a beggar. 
 
 Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the beggar's 
 robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his 
 full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself 
 in public. He is never out of the fashion, or limpeth awk- 
 wardly behind it. He is not required to put on court mourn- 
 ing. He weareth all colours, fearing none. His costume 
 hath undergone less change than the Quaker's. He is the 
 only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appear- 
 ances. The ups and downs of the world concern him no 
 longer. He alone continueth in one stay. The price of stock 
 or land affecteth him not. The fluctuations of agricultural or 
 commercial prosperity touch him not, or at worst but change 
 his customers. He is not expected to become bail or surety 
 for any one. No man troubleth him with questioning his re- 
 ligion or politics. He is the only free man in the universe. 
 
 The mendicants of this great city were so many of her 
 sights, her lions. 1 can no more spare them than I could the 
 cries of London. No corner of a street is complete without 
 them. They are as indispensable as the ballad-singer ; and 
 in their picturesque attire as ornamental as the signs of old 
 London. They were the standing morals, emblems, memen- 
 toes, dial-mottoes, the spittal sermons, the books for children, 
 the salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of 
 greasy citizenry — 
 
 " Look 
 Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there."
 
 LSSAYS OF ELI A. 135 
 
 Above all, those old blind Tobits that used to line the wall of 
 LincolnVInn Garden, before modern fastidiousness had ex- 
 pelled them, casting up their ruined orbs to catch a ray of pity, 
 and (if possible) of light, with their faithful dog-guide at their 
 feet — whither are they fled I or into what corners, blind as 
 themselves, have they been driven, out of the wholesome air 
 and sun-warmth ? immersed between four walls, in what with- 
 ering poor-house do they endure the penalty of double dark- 
 ness, where the chink of the dropped halfpenny no more con- 
 soles their forlorn bereavement, far from the sound of the 
 cheerful and hope-stirring tread of the passenger ? Where 
 hang their useless staves 1 and who will farm their dogs 1 
 
 Have the overseers of St. L caused them to be shot ? or 
 
 were they tied up in sacks, and dropped into the Thames, at 
 
 the suggestion of B , the mild Rector of- — — 1 
 
 Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne, most 
 classical, and at the same time most English, of the Latiuists! 
 who has treated of this human and quadrupedal alliance, this 
 dog and man friendship, in the sweetest of his poems, the 
 Epitaphium in Canem, or Dog's Epitaph. Reader, peruse it ; 
 and say, if customary sights, which could call up such gentle 
 poetry as this, were of a nature to do more harm or good to 
 the moral sense of the passengers through the daily thorough- 
 fares of a vast and busy metropolis 
 
 " Pauperis hie Iri requiesco Lyciscus, herilis, 
 Dum vixi, tutela vigil columenque senectae, 
 Dux eaeco fidus; nee, me ducente, solebat, 
 Praetenso nine atque hinc baculo, per miqua locorum 
 Incertam explorare viam ; sed fila secutus, 
 Quae dubios regerent passiis, vestigia t>it:i 
 Pizit inoffenso gressu ; gelidumque sedile 
 In nudo nactus saxo, qua praetereuntimn 
 Uada frequens confluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras 
 Lamentis, noctemque oculis ploravit obortam. 
 Ploravit nee frustra ; obolum dedit alter et alter. 
 Quels corda et inentem indiderat natura benignain. 
 Ad latus intereajacui ^oiuttis henle, 
 Vel mediis vigil in somms ; ad herilia jussa 
 Auresque atque animum arrectus, sen frnstula amice 
 Porrexit sociasque dapes, seu longa djei 
 Tsdia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat. 
 Hi mores haec vita fuit, dum fata sinebant, 
 Dum neque languebam mortis, nee inerte senectu; 
 Quae tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite caecum 
 Orbavit dominum : prisci sed gratia facti 
 Ne tota intereat, longos deleta per annos, 
 Exiguum hunc Irus tumulum de cespite fecit, 
 Etsi inopsis, non ingratae munuscula dextrae ; 
 Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque canemque 
 Quod memoret ridumque canem dominumque benignum." 
 
 "Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie, 
 That wont to tend my old blind master's steps,
 
 136 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 His guide and guard : nor, while my service lasted, 
 
 Had he occasion for that staff, with which 
 
 He now goes picking out his path in fear 
 
 Over the highways and crossings ; but would plant, 
 
 Safe in the conduct of my friendly string, 
 
 A firm foot forward still, till he had reach'd 
 
 His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide 
 
 Of passers-by in thickest confluence flow'd : 
 
 To whom with loud and passionate laments 
 
 From morn to eve his dark estate he wail'd. 
 
 Nor wail'd to all in vain : some here and there, 
 
 The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave. 
 
 I meantime at his feet obsequious slept ; 
 
 Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear 
 
 Prick'd up at his least motion ; to receive 
 
 At his kind hand my customary crumbs, 
 
 And common portion in his feast of scraps ; 
 
 Or when night warn'd us homeward, tired and spent 
 
 With our long day and tedious beggary. 
 
 These were my manners, this my way of life, 
 Till age and slow disease me overtook, 
 And sever'd from my sightless master's side. 
 But lest the grace of so good deeds should die, 
 Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost, 
 This slender tomb of turf hath lrus reared, 
 Cheap monument of no ungrudging hand, 
 And with short verse inscribed it, to attest, 
 In long and lasting union to attest, 
 The virtues of the beggar and his dog." 
 
 These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past 
 a well-known figure, or part of the figure, of a man who used 
 to glide his comely upper half over the pavements of London, 
 wheeling along with most ingenious celerity upon a machine 
 of wood, a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and to children. 
 He was of a robust make, with a florid, sailor-like complexion, 
 and his head was bare to the storm and sunshine. He was a 
 natural curiosity, a speculation to the scientific, a prodigy to 
 the simple. The infant would stare at the mighty man brought 
 down to his own level. The common cripple would despise 
 his own pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness and hearty 
 heart o.f this half-limbed giant. Few but must have noticed 
 him ; for the accident which brought him low took place du- 
 ring the riots of 1780, and he has been a groundling so long. 
 He seemed earthborn, an Antaeus, and to suck in fresh vig- 
 our from the soil which he neighboured. He was a grand 
 fragment ; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature which 
 should have recruited his reft legs and thighs was not lost, 
 but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Her- 
 cules. I heard a tremendous voice thundering and growling, 
 as before an earthquake, atid casting down my eyes, it was 
 this mandrake reviling a steed that had started at his porten- 
 tous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature to 
 have rent the offending quadruped in shivers. He was as the
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 137 
 
 man-part of a centaur, from which the horse-half had been 
 cloven in some dire Lapithan controversy. He moved on, as 
 if be could have made shift with yt-t half of the body-portion 
 which was left him. The os sublime was opt wanting ; and 
 he threw out yet a jolly countenance upon the heavens. 
 Forty-and-two years had he driven this out-of-door trade, and 
 now that his hair is grizzled in the service, but his good spirits 
 no way impaired, because he is not content to exchange his 
 free-air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he is 
 expiating las contumacy in one of those houses (ironically 
 christened) of correction. 
 
 Was a daily spectacle like this to be deemed a nuisance, 
 which called for legal interference to remove ? or not rather a 
 salutary and a touching object to the passers-by in a great 
 city ? Among her shows, her museums, and supplies for ever- 
 gaping curiosity, (and what else but an accumulation of sights 
 — endless sights — is a great city ; or for what else is it desira- 
 ble ?) was there not room for one lusus (not ?iaturai, indeed, 
 but) accidenlium 1 What if, in forty-and-two years' going 
 about, the man had scraped together enough to give a portion 
 to his child (as the rumour ran) of a few hundreds — whom 
 had he injured? whom had he imposed upon ? The contrib- 
 utors had enjoyed their sight for their pennies. What if, after 
 being exposed all dav to the heats, the rains, and the frosts of 
 heaven — shuffling his ungainly trunk along in an elaborate and 
 painful motion — he was enabled to retire at night to enjoy him- 
 self at a club of his fellow-cripples over a dish of hot meat 
 and vegetables, as the charge was gravely brought against him 
 by a clergyman deposing before a house of commons' commit- 
 tee — was this, or was his truly paternal consideration, which 
 (if a fact) deserved a statue rather than a whipping-post, and 
 is inconsistent at least with the exaggeration of nocturnal or- 
 gies which he has been slandered with — a reason that he 
 should be deprived of his chosen, harmless, nay, edifying way 
 of life, and be committed in hoary age for a sturdy vaga- 
 bond ? 
 
 There was a Yorick once, whom it would not have shamed 
 to have sat down at the cripples' feast, and to have thrown in 
 his benediction, ay, and his mite too, for a companionable 
 symbol. " Age, thou hast lost thy breed." 
 
 Half of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by 
 begging are (I verily believe) misers' calumnies. One was 
 touch talked of in the public papers some time since, and the 
 usual charitable inferences deduced. A clerk in the bank 
 was surprised with the announcement of a live hundred pound 
 legacy left him by a person whose name he was a stranger to, 
 12*
 
 13S ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 It seems that in his daily morning walks from Peckham, (or 
 some village thereabouts,) where he lived, to his office, it had 
 been his practice for the last twenty years to drop his half- 
 penny duly into the hat of some blind Bartimeus, that sat beg- 
 ging alms by the wayside in the borough. The good old beg- 
 gar recognised his daily benefactor by the voice only ; and, 
 when he died, left all the amassings of hisalms (that had been 
 half a century, perhaps, in the accumulating) to his old bank 
 friend. Was this a story to purse up people's hearts and pen- 
 nies against giving an alms to the blind ? or not rather a beau- 
 tiful moral of well-directed charity on the one part, and noble 
 gratitude on the other? 
 
 1 sometimes wish 1 had been that bank clerk. 
 
 I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creature, 
 blinking, and looking up with his no eyes in the sun — 
 
 Is it possible I could have steeled my purse against him ? 
 
 Perhaps I had no small change. 
 
 Reader, do not be frightened at the hard words, imposition, 
 imposture — give, and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon 
 the waters. Some have unawares (like this bank clerk) en- 
 tertained angels. 
 
 Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. 
 Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly 
 and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire 
 whether the " seven small children," in whose name he im- 
 plores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not 
 into the bowels of unwelcome truth to save a halfpenny. It 
 is good to believe him. If- he be not all that he pretendeth, 
 give, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou 
 pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When 
 they come with their counterfeit looks and mumping tones, 
 think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian 
 feign these things, which, concerning these poor people, thou 
 canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not. 
 
 A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 
 
 Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. 
 was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first 
 seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it 
 from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. 
 This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confu-
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 139 
 
 cius, in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where 
 he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fung, lit- 
 erally the cook's holyday. 
 
 The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or 
 rather broiling, (which I take to be the elder brother,) was 
 accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swine- 
 herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as 
 his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage 
 in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who, 
 being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age com- 
 monly arc, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, 
 which, kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every 
 part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. To- 
 gether with the cottage, (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a 
 building, you may think it,) what was of much more impor- 
 tance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in 
 number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury 
 all over the East from the remotest periods we read of. Bo-bo 
 was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so 
 much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he 
 could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the 
 labour of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the 
 pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his 
 father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants ot 
 one of those untimely sufferers, an odour assailed his nostrils 
 unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What 
 could it proceed from ? — not from the burnt cottage — he had 
 smelt that smell before — indeed, this was by no means the 
 first accident of the kind which had occurred through the 
 negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did 
 it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A pre- 
 monitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether 
 lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to 
 feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt 
 his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby 
 fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched 
 skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in 
 his life (in the world's life indeed, for before him no man had 
 known it) he tasted — crackling ! Again he felt and fumbled 
 at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked 
 ins fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke 
 into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, 
 and the pig that tasted so delicious ; and, surrendering him- 
 self up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole 
 handfuls of the scorched skin with the tlesh next it, and was 
 cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his
 
 140 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory 
 cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon 
 the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail-stones, which 
 Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The 
 tickling pleasure which he experienced in his lower regions, 
 had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might 
 feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but 
 he could not beat him from his pig till he had fairly made an 
 end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situa- 
 tion, something like the following dialogue ensued. 
 
 " You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring ? 
 Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses 
 with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you, but you must 
 be eating fire, and I know not what — what have you got there, 
 1 say ?" 
 
 " Oh, father, the pig, the pig, do come and taste how nice 
 the burnt pig eats." 
 
 The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, 
 and he cursed himself, that ever he should beget a son that 
 should eat burnt pig. 
 
 Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morn- 
 ing, soon raked out another pig, and, fairly rending it asunder, 
 thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still 
 shouting out, " Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste — 
 oh Lord," — with such-like barbarous ejaculations, cramming 
 all the while as if he would choke. 
 
 Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abominable 
 thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death 
 for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling scorch- 
 ing his fingers, as it had done his son's, and applying the 
 same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavour, 
 which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved 
 not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion, (for the 
 manuscript here is a little tedious,) both father and son fairly 
 sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had de- 
 spatched all that remained of the litter. 
 
 Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, 
 for the neighbours would certairdy have stoned them for a 
 couple of abominable wretches, who could think of improving 
 upon the good meat which God had sent them. Neverthe- 
 less, strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti's 
 cottage was burnt down now more frequently than ever. No- 
 thing but fires from this time forward. Some would break 
 out in broad day, others in the night-time. As often as the 
 sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze ; 
 and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 141 
 
 of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him 
 than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery 
 
 discovered, and father and son summoried to take their trial 
 at Peking, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was 
 given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court,' and verdict 
 about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged 
 that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, 
 might be handed into the box. lie handled it. and thev all 
 handled it, and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his lather 
 had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them 
 the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the 
 clearest charge which judge had ever given — to the surprise 
 of the whole court, townsfolk, Bttfengers, reporters, and all 
 present — without leaving the box, or any manner of consul- 
 tation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not 
 Guilty. 
 
 The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the mani- 
 fest iniquity of the decision ; and, when the court was dis- 
 missed, went privately, and bought up all the pigs that could 
 be had for love or money. In a few days his lordship's town- 
 house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and 
 now- there was nothing to be seen but fires in every direction. 
 Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. 
 The ensurance-orhces one and all shut up shop. People built 
 slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the 
 very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to 
 the world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till, 
 in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our 
 Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh of swine, or in- 
 deed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt as they called 
 it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress 
 it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting 
 by the string, or spit, came in a century or two later, I forget 
 in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the 
 manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvi- 
 ous arts, make their way among mankind. 
 
 Without placing too implicit faith in the account above 
 given, it must be agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dan- 
 gerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in 
 these days) could be assigned in favour of any culinary object, 
 that pretext and excuse might be found in roast fio. 
 
 Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibitis, I will 
 maintain it to be the most delicate — prince.ps obsoniorum. 
 
 I speak not of your grown porkers — things between pig 
 and pork — those hobbydehoys — but a young and tender suck- 
 ling — under a moon old — guiltless as yet of the sty^-with no
 
 142 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 original speck of the amor immunditw, the hereditary failing 
 of the first parent yet manifest — his voice as yet not broken, 
 but something between a childish treble and a grumble — the 
 mild forerunner, or praludium, of a grunt. 
 
 He must he roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors 
 ale them seethed, or boiled — but what a sacrifice of the ex- 
 terior tegument ! 
 
 There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of 
 the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, 
 as it is well called — the very teeth are invited to their share 
 of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle 
 resistance — with the adhesive oleaginous — oh call it not fat 
 ■ — but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it — the tender 
 blossoming of fat — fat cropped in the bud — taken in the shoot 
 — in the first innocence — the cream and quintessence of the 
 child-pig's yet pure food — the lean, no lean, but a kind of 
 animal manna — or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so 
 blended and running into each other, that both together make 
 but one ambrosial result, or common substance. 
 
 Behold him while he is doing — it seemeth rather a refresh- 
 ing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. 
 How equably he twirleth round the string ! Now he is just 
 done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age, he 
 hath wept out his pretty eyes — radiant jellies — shooting stars. 
 
 See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth ! 
 — wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness 
 and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood 1 
 Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an ob- 
 stinate, disagreeable animal — wallowing in all manner of 
 filthy conversation — from these sins he is happily snatched 
 away — 
 
 " Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade, 
 Death came with timely care" — 
 
 his memory is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while his stom- 
 ach half rejecteth, the rank bacon — no coal-heaver bolteth 
 him in reeking sausages — he hath a fair sepulchre in the 
 grateful stomach of the judicious epicure — and for such a tomb 
 might be content to die. 
 
 He is the best of sapors. Pineapple is great. She is 
 indeed almost too transcendent — a delight, if not sinful, yet so 
 like to sinning, that really a tender-conscienced person would 
 do well to pause — too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth 
 and excoriateth the lips that approach her — like lovers' kisses, 
 she biteth — she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the 
 fierceness and insanity of her relish — but she stoppeth at the
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 143 
 
 palate — she meddleth not with the appetite — and the coarsest 
 hunger might barter her consistently lor a mutton-chop. 
 
 Pig — let me speak his praise — is no less provocative of the 
 appetite than he is satisfactory to the criticaluess of the cen- 
 sorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the 
 weakling refuseth not his mild juices'. 
 
 Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues 
 and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled 
 without hazard, he is — good throughout. No part of him is 
 better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little 
 means extend, all around, lie is the least envious of banquets. 
 He is all neighbours' fare. 
 
 1 am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart a 
 share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few 
 as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great 
 an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper 
 satisfactions, as in mine own. " Presents," I often say, " en- 
 dear absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn- 
 door chickens, (those " tame villatic fowl,") capons, plovers 
 brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive 
 them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of 
 my friend. But a slop must be put somewhere. One would 
 not, like Lear, " give everything." I make my stand upor 
 pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good 
 llavours to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house, slight? 
 jngjy, (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what,) a 
 blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, 1 may say, to my 
 individual palate — it argues an insensibility. 
 
 I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. 
 My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a 
 holyday without stuffing a sweetmeat or some, nice thing into 
 my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum- 
 cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school fit was over 
 London bridge) a gray-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no 
 doubt at this time of day that he was a counterfeit). I had no 
 pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, 
 and the very coxcombry of charity, schoolboy-like, I made him 
 a present of— the whole cake ! I walked on a little, buoyed 
 up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self- 
 satisfaction ; but before I had got to the end of the bridge 
 my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking 
 how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her 
 good gift away to a stranger that I had never seen before, 
 and who might be a bad man for aught I knew ; and then I 
 thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking 
 that I — I myself, and not another — would eat her nice cake
 
 144 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 — and what should I say to her the next time I saw her — 
 how naughty I was to part with her pretty present — and the 
 odour of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, 
 and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her 
 make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how dis- 
 appointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in 
 my mouth at last — and I blamed my impertinent spirit of 
 almsgiving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness, and 
 above all I wished never to see the face again of that insid- 
 ious, good-for-nothing, old, gray impostor. 
 
 Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing 
 these tender victims. We read of pigs whipped to death with 
 something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete cus- 
 tom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curi- 
 ous to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect 
 this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a 
 substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young 
 pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cau- 
 tious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure 
 the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto. 
 
 I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young stu- 
 dents when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much 
 learning and pleasantry on both sides, " Whether, supposing 
 that the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by whipping 
 (per flagellationem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon 
 the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering 
 we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that 
 method of putting the animal to death?" I forget the decision. 
 
 His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread 
 crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild 
 sage. But bamish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole 
 onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep 
 them in shalots, stuff them out with the plantations of the rank 
 and guilty garlic : you cannot poison them, or make them 
 stronger than they are — but consider, he is a weakling — a 
 flower.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 145 
 
 A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHA- 
 VIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. 
 
 As a single man, I have spout a <;ood deal of my time in 
 noting down the inlirmith \s of married people, to console my- 
 self for those superior pleasures which they tell me I have 
 lost by remaining as I am. 
 
 I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their wives ever 
 made any great impression upon me, or had much tendency 
 to strengthen me in those anti-social resolutions, which I took 
 up long ago upon more substantial considerations. What 
 oftenest offends me at the houses of married persons where I 
 visit, is an error of quite a different description ; it is that 
 they arc too loving. 
 
 Not too loving neither : that does not explain my meaning. 
 Besides, why should that offend me? The very act of sep- 
 arating themselves from the rest of the world, to have the 
 fuller enjoyment of each other's society, implies that they 
 prefer one another to all the world. 
 
 But what I complain of is, that they carry this preference 
 so undisguiscilly, they perk it up in the faces of us single 
 people so shamelessly, you cannot be in their company a mo- 
 ment without being made to feel, by some indirect hint or 
 open avowal, that you are not the object of this preference. 
 Now there are some things which give no offence, while im- 
 plied or taken for granted merely ; but, expressed, there is 
 much offence in them. If a man wen: to accost the first 
 homely-featured or plain-dressed young woman of his ac- 
 quaintance, and tell her bluntly that she was not handsome 
 ur rich enough for him, and he could not marry her, he would 
 deserve to be kicked for his ill manners ; yet no less is im- 
 plied in the Pact", that, having access and opportunity of putting 
 the question to her, he has never yet thought fit to do it. The 
 young woman understands this as clearly as if it were put 
 into words ; but no reasonable young woman would think of 
 making this the ground of a quarrel. Just as little right have 
 a married couple to tell me by speeches, and looks that are 
 scarce less plain than speeches, that I am not the happy man 
 — the lady's choice. It is enough that 1 know I am not : I 
 do not want this perpetual reminding. 
 
 The display of superior knowledge or riches may be made 
 sufficiently mortifyipg ; but these admit of a palliative. The 
 13 ' G
 
 146 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 knowledge which is brought out to insult me, may acciden- 
 tally improve me ; and in the rich man's houses and pictures, 
 his parks and gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least. 
 But the display of married happiness has none of these pal- 
 liatives : it is throughout pure, unrecompensed, unqualified 
 insult. 
 
 Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the 
 least invidious sort. It is the cunning of most possessors of 
 any exclusive privilege to keep their advantage as much out 
 of sight as possible, that their less-favoured neighbours, see- 
 ing little of the benefit, may the less be disposed to question 
 the right. But these married monopolists thrust the most ob- 
 noxious part of their patent into our faces. 
 
 Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire compla- 
 cency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a 
 new-married couple — in that of the lady particularly ; it tells 
 you, that her lot is disposed of in this world ; that you can 
 have no hopes of her. It is true, I have none ; nor wishes 
 either perhaps ; but this is one of those truths which ought, 
 as I said before, to be taken for granted, not expressed. 
 
 The excessive airs which those people give themselves, 
 founded on the ignorance of us unmarried people, would be 
 more offensive if they were less irrational. We will allow 
 them to understand the mysteries belonging to their own craft 
 better than we who have not had the happiness to be made 
 free of the company : but their arrogance is not. content within 
 these limits. If a single person presume to offer his opinion 
 in their presence, though upon the most indifferent subject, 
 he is immediately silenced as an incompetent person. Nay, 
 a young married lady of my acquaintance, who, the best of 
 the jest was, had not changed her condition above a fortnight 
 before, in a question on which I had the misfortune to differ 
 from her, respecting the properest mode of breeding oysters 
 for the London market, had the assurance to ask with a 
 sneer how such an old bachelor as I could pretend to know 
 anything about such matters. 
 
 But what I have spoken of hitherto is nothing to the airs 
 which these creatures give themselves when they come, as 
 they generally do, to have children. When I consider how 
 little of a rarity children are — that every street and blind al- 
 ley swarms with them — that the poorest people commonly 
 have them in most abundance — that there are few marriages 
 that are not blessed with at least one of these bargains — how 
 often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their pa- 
 rents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, dis- 
 grace, the gallows, &c, I cannot for my life tell what cause
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 1 17 
 
 for pride there can possibly be in having them. If they were 
 young phenixes, indeed, that were bom but one in a year, 
 there might be a pretext. Hut when they are so common — 
 
 I do not advert to the insolent merit which they assume 
 with their husbands on these occasions. Let them look, to 
 that. But why ire, who are not their natural-born subjects, 
 should be expected to bring our spices, myrrh, and incense — 
 our tribute and homage of admiration — I do not see. 
 
 " Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are 
 the young children :" so says the excellent office in our 
 Prayer-book appointed for the churching of women. " Hap- 
 py is the man that hath his quiver full of them :" so say 1 ; 
 but then don't let him discharge his quiver upon us that are 
 weaponless ; let them be arrows, but not to gall and stick 
 us. I have generally observed that these arrows are double- 
 headed ; they have two forks, to be sure to hit with one or 
 the other. As, for instance, where you come into a house 
 which is full of children, if you happen to take no notice of 
 them (you are thinking of something else, perhaps, and turn 
 a deaf ear to their innocent caresses) you are set down as 
 untractable, morose, a hater of children. On the other hand, 
 if you find them more than usually engaging — if you are taken 
 with their pretty manners, and set about in earnest to romp' 
 and play with them, some pretext or other is sure to be found 
 for sending them out of the room ; they are too noisy or 
 
 boisterous, or Mr. does not like children. With one or 
 
 other of these forks the arrow is sure to hit you. 
 
 I could forgive their jealousy, and dispense with toying 
 with their brats, if it gives them any pain; but I think it un- 
 reasonable to be called upon to love them, where I see no oc- 
 casion — to love a whole family, perhaps eight, nine, or ten, 
 indiscriminately — to love all the pretty dears, because chil- 
 dren are so engaging. 
 
 1 know there is a proverb, " Love me, love my dog ;" that 
 is not always so very practicable, particularly if the dog be 
 set upon you to tease you or snap at you in sport. But a dog 
 or a lesser thing — any inanimate substance, as a keepsake, a 
 watch, or a ring, a tree, or the place where we last parted when 
 m\ friend went away upon a long absence, I can make shift to 
 love, because I love him, and anything that reminds me of 
 him ; provided it be in its nature indifferent, and apt to re- 
 ceive whatever hue fancy can give it. But children have a 
 real character and an essential heitiii of themselves : they 
 are amiable or unamiable per se ; I must love or hate them as 
 1 see cause for either in their qualities. A child's nature is 
 too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere 
 
 G 2
 
 148 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 appendage to another being, and to be loved or hated accord- 
 ingly : they stand with me upon their own stock, as much as 
 men and women do. Oh ! but you will say, sure it is an at- 
 tractive age — there is something in the tender years of infan- 
 cy that of itself charms us. That is the very reason why I 
 am more nice about them. I know that a sweet child is the 
 sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate 
 creatures which bear them ; but the prettier the kind of a 
 thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its 
 kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory ; but 
 a violet should look and smell the daintiest. I was always 
 rather squeamish in my women and children. 
 
 But this is not the worst : one must be admitted into their 
 familiarity at least, before they can complain of inattention. 
 It implies visits, and some kind of intercourse. But if the 
 husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly 
 footing before marriage — if you did not come in on the wife's 
 side — if you did not sneak into the house in her train, but 
 were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their court- 
 ship was so much as thought on — look about you — your ten- 
 ure is precarious — before a twelvemonth shall roll over your 
 head you shall rind your old friend gradually grow cool and 
 altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking 
 with you. I have scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, 
 upon whose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship did not 
 commence after the period of his marriage. With some limi- 
 tations they can endure that ; but that the good man should 
 have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in 
 which they were not consulted, though it happened before 
 they knew him — before they that are now man and wife ever 
 met — this is intolerable to them. Every long friendship, 
 every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office 
 to be new stamped with their currency, as a sovereign prince 
 calls in the good old money that was coined in some reign 
 before he was born or thought of, to be new marked and 
 minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it 
 pass current in the world. You may guess what luck gener- 
 ally befalls such a rusty piece of metal as I am in these new 
 mintings. 
 
 Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and 
 worm you out of their husband's confidence. Laughing at all 
 you say with a kind of wonder, as if you were a queer kind 
 of fellow that said good things, but an oddity, is one of the 
 ways: they have a particular kind of stare lor the purpose 
 — till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, 
 and would pass over some excrescences of understanding and
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. M9 
 
 manner for the sake of*a general vein of observation (not 
 quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begin to suspect 
 whether you are not altogether a humourist — a fellow well 
 enough to have consorted with in his bachelor daws, but not 
 quite so proper to be introduced to ladies. This may be called 
 the staring way ; and is that which has oftenest been put in 
 practice against me. Then there is the exaggerating way, or 
 the way of irony : that is, where they find you an object of 
 especial regard with their husband, who is not so easily to be 
 shaken from the lasting attachment founded on esteem which 
 he has conceived towards you, by never-qualified exaggera- 
 tions to cry up all that you say or do, till the good man, who 
 understands well enough that it is all done in compliment to 
 him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is due to so 
 much candour, and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking 
 down a peg or two in his enthusiasm, sinks at length to the 
 kindly level of moderate esteem — that "decent affection and 
 complacent kindness" towards you, where she herself can 
 join in sympathy with him without much stretch and violence 
 to her sincerity. 
 
 Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so de- 
 sirable a purpose are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent sim- 
 plicity, continually to mistake what it was which first made 
 their husband fond of you. If an esteem for something excel- 
 lent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain 
 which she is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a 
 want of poignancy in your conversation, she will cry, " I 
 
 thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. , as a 
 
 great wit." If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed 
 charm in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and 
 w r as content for this to overlook some trifling irregularities in 
 your moral deportment, upon the first notice of any of these 
 she as readily exclaims, " This, my dear, is your good Mr. 
 ." One good lady whom I took the liberty of expostula- 
 ting with for not showing me quite so much respect as I thought 
 due to her husband's old friend, had the candour to confess ta 
 
 me that she had often heard Mr. speak of me before mat 
 
 riage, and that she had conceived a great desire to be au 
 quainted with me, but that the sight of me had very much Ji* 
 appointed her expectations ; for from her husband's rep. f.dOu 
 tations of me, she had formed B notion that she was to see , 
 line, tall, officer-like looking man, (I use her very vosde,) the 
 \ery reverse of which proved to be the truth 'I hi* was 
 candid; and I had the civility not to ask her, in .e'.urn, how 
 she came to pitch upon a standard of pei^on^ accomplish- 
 ments for her husband's friends which differed so much from 
 13*
 
 150 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 his own ; for my friend's dimensions as near as possible ap- 
 proximate to mine ; he standing five feet five in his shoes, in 
 which I have the advantage of him by about half an inch ; 
 and he, no more than myself, exhibiting any indications of a 
 martial character in his air or countenance. 
 
 These are some of the mortifications which I have en- 
 countered in the absurd attempt to visit at their houses. To 
 enumerate them all would be a vain endeavour : I shall there- 
 fore just glance at the very common impropriety of which 
 married ladies are guilty, of treating us as if we were their 
 husbands, and vice versa. I mean, when they use us with 
 familiarity, and their husbands with ceremony. Testacea, 
 for instance, kept me the other night two or three hours be- 
 yond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because 
 
 Mr. did not come home till the oysters were all spoiled, 
 
 rather than she would be guilty of the impoliteness of touch- 
 ing one in his absence. This was reversing the point of 
 good manners : for ceremony is an invention to take off 
 the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves 
 to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature 
 than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by su- 
 perior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference 
 which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept 
 the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband's impor- 
 tunities to go to supper, she would have acted according to 
 the strict rules of propriety. I know no ceremony that ladies 
 are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond the point of 
 a modest behaviour and decorum : therefore I must protest 
 against the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her own 
 table sent away a dish of Morellas, which I was applying to 
 with great good-will, to her husband at the other end of the 
 table, and recommended a plate of less extraordinary goose- 
 berries to my unwedded palate in their stead. Neither can I 
 excuse the wanton affront of . 
 
 But I am weary of stringing up all my married acquaintance 
 by Roman denominations. Let them amend and change 
 their manners, or I promise to record the full-length English 
 of their names, to the terror of all such desperate offenders in 
 future.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 151 
 
 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 
 
 The casual sight of an old play-hill, which I picked up 
 the other day — I know not by what chance it was preserved 
 so long — tempts me to call to mind a few of the players who 
 make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast of parts 
 in the Twelfth Night, at the old Drury-Lane Theatre, two-and- 
 thirty years ago. There is something very touching in these 
 old remembrances. They make us think how we once used 
 to read a play-bill — not, as now, peradventure, singling out 
 a favourite performer, and casting a negligent eye over the 
 rest; but spelling out every name, down to the very mutes 
 and servants of the scene ; when it was a matter of no small 
 moment to us whether Whitfield or Packer took the part of 
 Fabian; when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore — names 
 of small account — had an importance beyond what we can be 
 content to attribute now to the time's best actors. " Orsino, 
 by Mr. Barrymore." What a full Shakspearian sound it car- 
 ries ! how fresh to memory arise the image and the manner 
 of the gentle actor ! 
 
 Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten 
 or fifteen years, can have no adequate notion of her perform- 
 ance of such parts as Ophelia; Helena, in All's Well that 
 Ends Well ; and Viola in this play. Her voice had latterly 
 acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her 
 Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady 
 melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts — in which her 
 memory now chiefly lives — in her youth were outdone by her 
 plaintive ones. There is no giving an account how she de- 
 livered the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no 
 set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it into an 
 harmonious period, line necessarily following line, to make 
 up the music — yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather read, 
 not without its grace and beauty — but, when she had declared 
 her sister's history to be a " blank," and that she " never told 
 her love," there was a pause, as if the story had ended — and 
 then the image of the " worm in the bud" came up as a new 
 suggestion — and the heightened image of" Patience" still fol- 
 lowed after that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) 
 process, thought springing up after thought, I would almost 
 say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine 
 lines —
 
 152 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 " Write royal cantos of contemned love — 
 Hallow your name to the reverberate hills — " 
 
 there was no preparation made in the foregoing image lor 
 that which was to follow. She used no rhetoric in her pas- 
 sion-; or it was nature's own rhetoric, most legitimate then, 
 when it seemed altogether without rule or law. 
 
 Mrs. Powel, (now Mrs. Renard,) then in the pride of her 
 beauty, made an admirable Olivia. She was particularly ex- 
 cellent in her unbending ^scenes in conversation with the 
 clown. I have seen some Olivias — and those very sensible 
 actresses too — who in th?se interlocutions have seemed to 
 set their wits at the jester, and to vie conceits with him in 
 downright emulation. But she used him for her sport, like 
 what he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, and then 
 to be dismissed, and she to be the great lady still. She 
 touched the imperious fantastic humour of the character with 
 nicety. Her fine spacious person filled the scene. 
 
 The part of Malvolio has in my judgment been so often 
 misunderstood, and the general merits of the actor who then 
 played it so unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon 
 if I am a little prolix upon these points. 
 
 Of all the actors who flourished in my time — a melancholy 
 phrase if taken aright, reader — Bensley had most of the swell 
 of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, 
 the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea 
 to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm — the 
 rarest faculty among players. None that I remember pos- 
 sessed even a portion of that fine madness which he threw 
 out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, or the transports of 
 the Venetian incendiary at the vision of the fired city. His 
 voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect, 
 of the trumpet. His gait was uncouth and stiff, but no way 
 embarrassed by affectation ; and the thorough-bred gentleman 
 was uppermost in every movement. He seized the moment 
 of passion with the greatest truth ; like a faithful clock, never 
 striking before the time ; never anticipating, or leading you to 
 anticipate. He was totally destitute of trick and artifice. 
 He seemed come upon the stage to do the poet's message 
 simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncio: 
 in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the pas 
 sion or the sentiment do its own work without prop or bol 
 stering. He would have scorned to mountebank it ; and be 
 trayed none of that cleverness which is the bane of serious 
 acting. For this reason, his Iago was the only endurable one 
 which I remember to have seen. No spectator from his 
 action could divine more of his artifice than Othello was sup-
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 153 
 
 posed to Jo. His confessions in soliloquy alone put you in 
 possession of the mystery. There were no bv-iniimations to 
 make the audience fancy their own discernment so mucb 
 greater than that of the .Moor — who commonly stands like 
 a great helpless mark set up lor mine ancient and a quantity 
 of barren spectators to shoot their holts at. The lago of 
 Bensley did not go to work so grossly. There was a trium 
 pliant tone about the character, natural to a general con- 
 sciousness of power : but none of that petty vanity whi< h 
 chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any little successful 
 stroke of its knavery — as is common with vour small villains 
 and green probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow 
 before its time. It was not a man setting his wits at a child, 
 and winking all the while at other children who are mightily 
 pleased at being let into the secret ; but a consummate villain 
 entrapping a noble nature into toils, against which no discern- 
 ment was available, where the manner was as fathomless as 
 the purpose seemed dark, and without motive. The part of 
 Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed by Bensley 
 with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some 
 recent castings of that character) the very tradition must be 
 worn out from the stage. No manager in those days would 
 have dreamed of giving it to Mr. Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons : 
 when Bensley was occasionally absent from the theatre, John 
 Keinhle thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Mal- 
 yolio is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by 
 accident. He is cold, austere, repelling ; but dignified, consist- 
 ent, and, for what appears, rather of an overstretched moral- 
 ity. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan ; and he might 
 have worn his gold chain with honour in one of our old round- 
 head families, in the service of a Lambert or a Lady Fairfax. 
 But his morality and his manners are misplaced in Illyria. 
 He is opposed to the proper levities of the piece, and falls in 
 the unequal contest. Still his pride, or his gravity, (call it 
 which you will,) is inherent, and native to the man, not mock 
 or affected, which latter only are the fit objects to excite 
 laughter. His quality is at the best unlovely, but neither buf- 
 foon nor contemptible. His bearing is lofty, a little above Ins 
 station, but probably not much above his deserts. We see 
 no reason why he should not have been brave, honourable, 
 accomplished. His careless committal of the ring to the 
 ground (which he was commissioned to restore to Cesario) 
 bespeaks a generosity of birth and feeling. His dialect on all 
 occasions is that of a gentleman, and a man of education. 
 We must not confound him with the eternal old, low steward 
 of comedy. He is master of the household to a great prm-
 
 154 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 cess ; a dignity probably conferred upon him for other re- 
 spects than age or length of service. Olivia, at the first indi- 
 cation of his supposed madness, declares that she " would 
 not have him miscarry for half of her dowry." Does this look 
 as if the character was meant to appear little or insignificant ? 
 Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face — of what 1 — of 
 being " sick of self-love," — but with a gentleness and con- 
 siderateness which could not have been, if she had not 
 thought that this particular infirmity shaded some virtues. 
 His rebuke to the knight and his sottish revellers is sensible 
 and spirited ; and when we take into consideration the unpro- 
 tected condition of his mistress, and the strict regard with 
 which her state of real or dissembled mourning would draw 
 the eyes of the world upon her house-affairs, Malvolio might 
 feel the honour of the family in some sort in his keeping ; as 
 it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers or kinsmen 
 to look to it — for Sir Toby had dropped all such nice respects 
 at the buttery-hatch. That Malvolio was meant to be repre- 
 sented as possessing estimable qualities, the expression of the 
 duke, in his anxiety to have him reconciled, almost infers. 
 " Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace." Even in his 
 abused state of chains and darkness, a sort of greatness 
 seems never to desert him. He argues highly and well with 
 the supposed Sir Topas, and philosophizes gallantly upon his 
 straw.* There must have been some shadow of worth about 
 the man ; he must have been something more than a mere 
 vapour — a thing of straw, or Jack in office — before Fabian 
 and Maria could have ventured sending him upon a courting 
 errand to Olivia. There was some consonancy (as he would 
 say) in the undertaking, or the jest would have been too bold 
 even for that house of misrule. 
 
 Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish 
 loftiness. He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. 
 He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of 
 pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth. There was 
 something in it beyond the coxcomb. It was big and swel- 
 ling, but you could not be sure that it was hollow. You 
 might wish to see it taken down, but you felt that it was upon 
 an elevation. He was magnificent from the outset ; but when 
 the decent sobrieties of the character began to give way, and 
 the poison of self-love, in his conceit of the countess's affec- 
 tion, gradually to work, you would have thought that the hero 
 
 * Clown. What is the opinion of Pylliapor.is concerning wild fowl - ' 
 
 Mai. That the soul of our grandah 'lit haply inhabit a I'ird. 
 
 Clown. What tliiukrst tlion o( his opinion ' 
 
 Mai I think riohly of the soul, and no way approve "I Ins opinion.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 155 
 
 of La Mancha in person stood before you. How he went 
 smiling to himself! with what ineffable careh ->mh at would 
 he twirl his gold chain ! what ;i dream it was! you were in- 
 fected with the illusion, and did not wish that it should be 
 removed ! vou had do room for laughter! if an unseasonable 
 reflection of morality obtruded itself, it was a deep sense of 
 the pitiable infirmity of man's nature, that can lav him open 
 to such phrensies : but, in truth, you rather admired than pitied 
 the lunacv while it lasted — you felt that an hour of such mis- 
 take was worth an age with the eyes open. Who would not 
 wish to live but for a day in the conceit of such a ladv's love 
 as Olivia ? Why, the duke would have given his principali- 
 ty but for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to have 
 been so deluded. The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste 
 manna, to walk with his head in the clouds,. to mate Hype- 
 rion. Oh ! shake not the castles of his pride — endure yet 
 for a season, bright moments of confidence — " stand still, ye 
 watchers of the element, 13 that Mai vol io may be still in fancy 
 fair Olivia's lord — but fate and retribution say no — I hear the 
 mischievous titter of Maria — the witty taunts of Sir Toby — 
 the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight — the 
 counterfeit Sir Tepas is unmasked, and "thus the whirligig 
 of time," as the true clown hath it, " brings in his revenges." 
 I confess that I never saw the catastrophe of this character, 
 while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic interest. 
 There was good foolerv too. Few now remember Dodd. 
 What an Aguecheek the stage lost in him ! Lovegrove, who 
 came nearest to the old actors, revived the character some 
 few seasons ago, and made it sufficiently grotesque, but Dodd 
 was it, as it came out of nature's hands. It might be said to 
 remain in puris luititrahbus. In expressing slowness of ap- 
 prehension this actor surpassed all others. You could see 
 the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly orer his counte- 
 nance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful process, 
 till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a twilight concep- 
 tion — its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his in- 
 tellect, as some have had the power to retard their pulsation. 
 The balloon takes less time in filling, than it took to cover 
 the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters 
 with expression. A glimmer of understanding would appear 
 in a corner of his eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A 
 part of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be 
 a long time in communicating it to the remainder. 
 
 1 am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than live-and- 
 twentv years ago that, walking in the gardens of Gray's Inn 
 — they were then far liner than thev are now — the accursed
 
 156 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 Verulam Buildings had not encroached upon all the east side 
 of them, cutting out delicate green crankles, and shouldering 
 away one of two of the stately alcoves of the terrace — the 
 surviver stands gaping and relationless as if it remembered 
 its brother — they are still the best gardens of any of the Inns 
 of Court, my beloved Temple not forgotten — have the gravest 
 character, their aspect being altogether reverend and law- 
 breathing — Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their 
 gravel-walks — taking my afternoon solace on a summer day 
 upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely sad personage came to- 
 wards me, whom, from his grave air and deportment, I judged 
 to be one of the old Benchers of the Inn. He had a serious, 
 thoughtful forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of mor- 
 tality. As I have an instinctive awe of old Benchers, I was 
 passing him with that sort of subindicative token of respect 
 which one is apt to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger, 
 and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him than any 
 positive motion of the body to that effect — a species of hu- 
 mility and will-worship which I observe, nine times out of ten, 
 rather puzzles than pleases the person it is offered to — when 
 the face turning full upon me strangely identified itself with 
 that of Dodd. Upon close inspection I was not mistaken. 
 But could this sad thoughtful countenance be the same vacant 
 face of folly which I had hailed so often under circumstances 
 of gayety ; which I had never seen without a smile, or recog- 
 nised but as the usher of mirth ; that looked out so formally 
 flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so impotently 
 busy in Backbite ; so blankly divested of all meaning, or res- 
 olutely expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thou- 
 sand agreeable impertinences? Was this the face — full }f 
 thought and carefulness — that had so often divested itself at 
 will of every trace of either to give me diverson, to clear my 
 cloudy face for two or three hours at least of its furrows ? 
 Was this the face — manly, sober, intelligent — which I had so 
 often despised, made mocks at, made merry with? The re- 
 membrance of the freedoms which I had taken with it came 
 updo me with a reproach of insult. I could have asked it 
 pardon. I thought it looked upon me with a sense of injury. 
 There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actors — 
 your pleasant fellows particularly — subjected to and suffering 
 the common lot— their fortunes, their casualties, their deaths, 
 seem to belong to the scene, their actions to be amenable to 
 poetic justice only. We can hardly connect them with more 
 awful responsibilities. The death <>f this line actor took 
 place shortly after this meeting, lie had quitted the stage 
 koine months ; and, as 1 learned afterward, had been in the
 
 ESSAVS OF ElAX. 157 
 
 habit of resorting daily to these gardens almost to the day of 
 Ids decease. In these serious walks probably he was divest- 
 ing himself of many scenic and some reaj vanities — weaning 
 himself from the frivolities <>f the lesser and the greater ili> - 
 aire — doing gentle penance for a life of no very reprehensi- 
 ble" fooleries — takin» oil' by degrees the buffoon mask which 
 he might feel he had worn too long — and rehearsing for a more 
 soli inn cast of part. Dying, he -'put on the weeds of Dom- 
 inic."* 
 
 If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily 
 forgct the pleasant creature; who in those days enacted the 
 part of the clown to Dodd't) Sir Andrew. Richard, or rather 
 Dicky Snett — lor so in his lifetime he delighted to be called, 
 and time hath ratified the appellation — lieth buried on the 
 north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service 
 his nonage and tender years were dedicated. There are who 
 do yet remember him at that period — las pipe clear and har- 
 monious. He Would often speak of his chorister days, when 
 he was "cherub Dickv." 
 
 What clipped his wings, or made it expedient, that he, 
 should exchange the holy for the profane state ; whether he 
 had lost his good voice (his best recommendation to that of- 
 fice), like Sir John, " with hallooing and singing of anthems ;" 
 or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those 
 early years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupatiou 
 which professeth to "commerce with the skies" — 1 could 
 never rightly learn ; but we find him, after tin; probation of a 
 twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and be- 
 come one of us. 
 
 I think he was not altogether of that timber out of which 
 cathedral-seats and sounding-boards are hewed. But if a 
 glad heart — kind, and therefore glad — be any part of sanctity, 
 then might the robe of .Motley, with which he invested him- 
 self with so much humility after his deprivation, and which 
 he wore so long with so much blameless satisfaction to him- 
 self and to the public, be accepted for a surplice — his white 
 Stole, and albe. 
 
 The first fruits of his secularization was an encasement 
 
 * Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice collection of 
 old Knslish literature. I should judge him to have-bees' a man of wK: I know 
 one iaataace Of an impromptu whiph no length of study could have Letteoed. 
 My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening in Aguecheek, and 
 recognising Dodd the next day in Fleet-street", was irresistibly impelled to 
 take ofl bis hat and salute him as the identical knight of the preceding evolv- 
 ing with a " Save you. Sir Andf&v. 1 ' Dodd, not at all disconcerted at tins 
 unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous, half-rebuking wave of the 
 hand, put him oil with an " Awtf) . fool." 
 
 14
 
 158 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, 
 as I have been told, with adopting the maimer of Parsons in 
 old men's characters. At the period in which most of us 
 knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any 
 true sense himself imitable. 
 
 He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came 
 in to trouble all things with a welcome perplexity, himself no 
 whit troubled for the matter. He was known, like Puck, by 
 his note — Ha — ha — ha ! — sometimes deepening to Ho — ho — • 
 ho ! with an irresistible accession, derived, perhaps, remotely 
 from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype of 
 — Oh la! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling 
 Oh la ! of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance 
 by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews' mimicry. 
 The " force of nature could no further go." He drolled upon 
 the stock of these two syllables richer than the cuckoo. 
 
 Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his com- 
 position. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he 
 could never have supported himself upon those two spiders' 
 strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed 
 existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him 
 totter, a sigh have puffed him down ; the weight of a frown 
 had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. 
 But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with 
 Robin Good-Fellow, " through brake, through brier," reckless 
 of a scratched face or a torn doublet. 
 
 Shakspeare foresaw him when he framed his fools and jest- 
 ers. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and sham- 
 bling gait, a slippery tongue, this last, the ready midwife to a 
 without-pain-delivered jest ; in words, light as air, venting 
 truths deep as the centre ; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit 
 when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby 
 at the buttery-hatch. 
 
 Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of per- 
 sonal favourites with the town than any actors before or after. 
 The difference, I take it, was this : Jack was more beloved 
 for his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was 
 more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. 
 Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister's performance 
 of Walter in the Children in the Wood — but Dicky seemed 
 like a thing, as Shakspeare says of love, too young to know 
 what conscience is. He put us into Vesta's days. Evil fled 
 before him — not as from Jack, as from an antagonist — but 
 because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball 
 a fly. He was delivered from the burden of that death ; and, 
 when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky,
 
 ESSAYS OF EI.IA. 159 
 
 it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched 
 his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither" varying his 
 accustomed tranquillity nor tune, with the simple exclamation, 
 worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph — Ok! la! Ok 
 la! Bobby! 
 
 The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) commonly 
 
 played Sir Toby in those days ; hut there is a solidity of wit 
 in the jests of that half-Falstalf which he did not quite fill 
 out. He was as much too showy as Moodv (who sometimes 
 took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there 
 was an air of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He 
 was a genth inan with a slight ^illusion of tkc footman. His 
 brother Bob, (of recenter memory,) who was his shadow in 
 < \ -en-thing while he lived, and dwindled into less than a 
 shadow afterward — was a gentleman with a little stronger 
 infusion of the latter ingredient'; that was all. It is amazing 
 how a little of the more or less makes a difference in these 
 things. When you saw Hobby m the duke's servant,* you 
 said, What a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant. 
 When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought 
 vou could trace his promotion to some lady of qualify who 
 fancied the handsome fellow in his topknot, and had bought 
 him a commission. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was in- 
 superable. 
 
 Jack had two voices — both plausible, hypocritical, and in- 
 sinuating ; but his secondary or supplemental voice still more 
 decisively histrionic than his common one. It was reserved 
 for the spectator ; and the dramatis persona were supposed to 
 know nothing at all about it. The lies of Young Wilding, 
 and the sentiments in Joseph Surface, were thus marked out 
 in a sort of italics to the audience. This secret correspond- 
 ence with the company before the curtain (which is the bane 
 and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some 
 kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of 
 Congreve or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense 
 of reality (so indispensable to scenes of interest) is not re- 
 quired, Or would rather interfere to diminish your pleasure. 
 The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface 
 — the villain of artificial comedy — even while you read or 
 see them. If you did, they would shock and not divert you. 
 Winn Hen, in Love for Love, returns from sea, the following 
 exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with his lather: — 
 
 • Sn Sampson. Thon hast been many a weary league, Ben, aince I saw thro. 
 •' Bern F.v, ey, been ! Been far enough, an' that be all. Well, father, and 
 
 how do all at home ! how does brother Dick, ami brother Val '. 
 
 * High Lite Below Stairs.
 
 160 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 " Sir Sampson. Dick ! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. I 
 writ you. word when you were at Leghorn. 
 
 " Ben. Mess, that's true; marry, I had forgot. Dick's dead, as you say — 
 Well, and how ? I have a many questions to ask you" — 
 
 Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would 
 be revolting, or rather in real life could not have coexisted 
 with the warm-hearted temperament of the character. But 
 when you read it in the spirit with which such playful selec- 
 tions and specious combinations rather than strict metaphrases 
 of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play 
 it, it neither did nor does wound the moral sense at all. Far 
 what is Ben — the pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us — 
 but a piece of satire — a creation of Congreve's fancy — a 
 dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's charac- 
 ter — his contempt of money — his credulity to women — with 
 that necessary estrangement from home which it is just with- 
 in the verge of credibility to suppose might produce such a 
 hallucination as is here described. We never think the worse 
 of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character. But 
 when an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom 
 — the creature dear to half-belief — which Bannister exhibited 
 ■ — displays before our eyes a downright concretion of a Wrap- 
 ping sailor — a jolly, warm-hearted Jack Tar — and nothing else 
 • — when, instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness 
 of the head, and a veering, undirected goodness of purpose — 
 he gives to it a downright daylight understanding, and a full 
 consciousness of its actions : thrusting forward the sensibili- 
 ties of the character with a pretence as if it stood upon noth- 
 ing else, and was to be judged by them alone — we feel the 
 discord of the thing ; the scene is disturbed ; a real man has 
 got in among the dramatis persona, and puts them out. We 
 want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not 
 behind the curtain, but in the first or second gallery. 
 
 ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST 
 CENTURY. 
 
 The artificial comedy, or comedy of manners, is quite ex- 
 tinct on our stage. Congrcve and Farquhar show their heads 
 once in seven years only, to be exploded and put down in- 
 stantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild 
 speeches, an occasional license of dialogue? I think not al-
 
 ESSAYS OF LLIA. 1 (j 1 
 
 together. The business of their dramatic characters will nut 
 stand the mural test. \\ '■• scnu everything op to tliat. Idle 
 gallantly m a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an 
 evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indica- 
 tions of profligacy in a son 0t ward in real life should startle 
 a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as 
 dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his 
 loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no alter conse- 
 quence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices, with 
 their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a 
 plot or intrigue, (not reducible in life to the point of strict mo- 
 rality,) and take it all for truth. We .substitute a real for a 
 dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try him in 
 our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis per-' 
 , his peers. "We have been spoiled with — not sentimen- 
 tal comedy — but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures 
 which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring 
 drama of common life ; where the moral point is everything ; 
 where, instead of the fictitious, half-believed personages of the 
 stage, (the phantoms of old comedy,) we recognise ourselves, 
 our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies — the 
 same as in life — with an interest in what is going on so hearty 
 and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in 
 its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber 
 for a moment. What is there transacting, by no modification 
 is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events 
 or characters would do in our relationships of life. W e 
 carry our fireside concerns to the theatre with us. We do 
 not go thither, like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure 
 of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it ; to 
 make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must 
 live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful 
 privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All 
 that neutral ground of character winch stood between vice 
 and virtue, or which, in fact, was indifferent to neither, where 
 neither properly was called in question ; that happy breath- 
 iqg-place from the burden of a perpetual moral questioning — 
 the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry — is bro- 
 ken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of so- 
 ciety. The privileges erf the place are taken away by law. 
 We dare not dally with images or names of wrong. We 
 bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from 
 the -scenic representations of disorder, and fear a painted 
 pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, 
 we wrap it up in a great blanket surlout of precaution against 
 the breeze and sunshine. 
 14*
 
 162 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to 
 answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the 
 diocess of the strict conscience — not to live always in the pre- 
 cincts of the law-courts — but now and then, for a dream- 
 while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions 
 — to get into recesses whither the hunter cannot follow me — 
 
 " Secret shades 
 Of woody Ida's inmost grove, 
 While yet there was no fear of Jove" — 
 
 I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and 
 more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for 
 having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do 
 not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always 
 for the perusal of one of Congreve's — nay, why should I not 
 add even of Wycherley's comedies. I am the gayer at least 
 for it ; and I could never connect those sports of a witty 
 fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to 
 imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves al- 
 most as much as fairy land. Take one of their characters, 
 male or female, (with few exceptions they are alike,) and 
 place it n a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall 
 rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of 
 the pit could desire ; because in a modern play I am to judge 
 of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the 
 measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it, 
 it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it 
 has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong : as 
 dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Swedenborgian 
 bad spirit that has wandered unawares into the sphere of one 
 of his good men, or angels. But in its own world do we 
 feel the creature is so very bad ? The Fainalls and the Mi- 
 rabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own 
 sphere, do not offend my moral sense ; in fact, they do not 
 appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper ele- 
 ment. They break through no laws, or conscientious re- 
 straints. They know of none. They have got out of Chris- 
 tendom into the land — what shall I call it ? — of cuckoldry — 
 the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the man- 
 ners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of 
 things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is 
 No good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because 
 no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every 
 character in these plays — the few exceptions are only mistakes 
 — is alike essentially vain and worthless. The great art of 
 Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely ex- 
 cluded from his scenes — some little generosities in the part
 
 Uss.VYS OF ELIA. 103 
 
 of Angelica perhaps ^excepted — not only anything like a 
 faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good 
 feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly or 
 instinctively, the effect is as happy as the design (if design) 
 was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which 
 his Way of the World in particular possesses of interesting 
 you all along in the pursuit of characters, for whom you ab- 
 solutely care nothing — for you neither hate nor love his 
 personages — and I think it is owing to this very indiffer- 
 ence for any, that you endure the whole, lie has spread a 
 privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly 
 name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shad- 
 ows Hit before you without distinction or preference. Had 
 he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feel- 
 ing, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual du- 
 ties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the 
 discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we 
 think them none. 
 
 Translated into real life, the characters of his and his 
 friend Wycherley's dramas are profligates and strumpets — 
 the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of 
 lawless gallantry. No other spring of action or possible 
 motive of conduct is recognised ; principles which, universal- 
 ly acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. 
 But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such ef- 
 fects are produced in their world. When we are among 
 them we are among a chaotic people. We are uot to judge 
 them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted 
 by their proceedings — for they have none among them. No 
 peace of families is violated — for no family ties exist among 
 them. No purity of the marriage-bed is stained — for none is 
 supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted 
 — DO holv wedlock bands are snapped asunder — for affection's 
 depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. 
 There is neither right nor wrong — gratitude or its opposite — 
 claim or duty — paternity or sonship. Of what consequence 
 is it to virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether 
 Sir Simon or Dapperwit steal away Miss Martha ; or who is 
 the lather of Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's children ? 
 
 The whole is a passing pageant, win re we should sit as 
 unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the 
 frogs and mice. But, like Don Quixote, we take part against 
 the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare not con- 
 template an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our COXCOmbical 
 moral sense is for a little transitory case excluded. We 
 have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which
 
 1 G 4 ESSAYS OF JELIA. 
 
 there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the 
 painful necessities of shame and blame. We would endict 
 our very dreams. 
 
 Amid the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing 
 old, it is something to have seen the School for Scandal in its 
 glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, 
 but gathered some allays of the sentimental comedy which 
 followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted, 
 though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the 
 bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph 
 Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful, 
 solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice 
 — to express it in a word — the downright acted villany of the 
 part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wick- 
 edness — the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, which made 
 Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs 
 conclude the present generation of play-goers more virtuous 
 than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided 
 the palm with me with his better brother ; that, in fact, I liked 
 him quite as well. Not but there are passages — like that, 
 for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a 
 poor relation — incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon 
 by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental com- 
 edy, either of which must destroy the other — but over these 
 obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a re- 
 fusal from him no more shocked you than the easy compli- 
 ance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure : you got 
 over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back 
 into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. 
 The highly artificial manners of Palmer in this character 
 counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might 
 have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between 
 the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the 
 same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter 
 was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical 
 foil to it. The comedy, 1 have said, is incongruous, a mix- 
 ture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities: the 
 gayety, upon the whole, is buoyant ; but it required the con- 
 summate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements. 
 
 A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not 
 dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinct- 
 ively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and 
 so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue 
 from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good 
 man as rigidly opposed to each other as the deathbeds of 
 those geniuses arc contrasted in the prints, which, I am sorry
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. ] |j5 
 
 to say, have disappeared from the windows of my old friend 
 Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Churchyard memory — (an 
 
 exhibition as venerable aa the adjacent cathedral, and almost 
 coeval) ol the bad and good man al the hoar of death ; where 
 the ghastly apprehensions of the former— and truly the grim 
 phantom, with his reality of a toasting-fork, is not to lie de- 
 spised — so finely contrast v ith the meek complacent kissing of 
 the rod — taking it in like honey and nutter — with which the 
 latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who 
 wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular 
 yonng ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would not 
 covet to meet half way the stroke of such a delicate mower? 
 John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He 
 was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon 
 Sir Peter and his lady. You had the fust intimation of a 
 sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered voice was 
 meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co- 
 ilutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. What 
 was it to you if that half-reality, the husband, was over- 
 reached by the puppetry — or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's 
 reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory I The 
 fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. 
 Poor Jack has passed from the stage in good time, that he 
 did not live to'thrs our age of seriousness. The pleasant old 
 Teazle King, too, is gone in good time. His manner would 
 scarce have passed current in our day. W r e must love or 
 hate — acquit or condemn — censure or pity — exert our detest- 
 able coxcombry of moral judgment upon everything. Joseph 
 Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting vil- 
 lain — no compromise — his first appearance must shock and 
 give horror — his specious plausibilities, which the pleasu- 
 rable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearlv greet- 
 ings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, 
 or was meant to come of them, must inspire a cold and kill- 
 ing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene 
 — for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, 
 but his brother's professions of a good heart centre in down- 
 right self-satisfaction) must be loved and Joseph hated. To 
 balance one disagreeable reality with another. Sir Peter 
 Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old 
 bachelor bridegroom, whose teasing (while King acted it) 
 were evidently as much played off at you as they were meant 
 to concern anybody on the stage — he must be a real person, 
 capable in law of sustaining an injury — a person towards 
 whom duties are to be acknowledged — the genuine trim. con. 
 antagonist of the villanous seducer Joseph. To realize him
 
 166 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 more, his sufferings Under his unfortunate match must have 
 the downright pungency of life — must (or should) make you, 
 not mirthful, but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament 
 would move you in a neighbour or old friend. The delicious 
 scenes which give the play its name and zest must affect you 
 in the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of 
 a dear female friend attacked in your real presence. Crab- 
 tree and Sir Benjamin — those poor snakes that live but in 
 the sunshine of your mirth — must be ripened by this hot-bed 
 process of realization into asps or amphisbaenas, and Mrs. 
 Candour — oh ! frightful ! — become a hooded serpent. Oh, 
 who that remembers Parsons and Dodd — the wasp and butter- 
 fly of the School for Scandal — in those two characters ; and 
 charming, natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentlewoman as dis- 
 tinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in this latter part — 
 would forego the true scenic delight — the escape from life — 
 the oblivion of consequences — the holyday barring out of the 
 pedant reflection — those saturnalia of two or three brief hours, 
 well won from the world — to sit instead at one of our modern 
 plays — to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not 
 be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals — 
 dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must 
 be — and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional 
 justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectator's 
 risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author nothing? 
 
 No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its 
 parts as this manager's comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded 
 to x\lrs. Abington in Lady Teazle ; and Smith, the original 
 Charles, had retired when I first saw it. The rest of the 
 characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remem- 
 ber it was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who 
 took the part of Charles after Smith ; but, I thought, very un- 
 justly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with 
 a certain gayety of person. He brought with him no sombre 
 recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate, the fault of 
 having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no 
 sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His failure in 
 these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a 
 tendency. Hut, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of 
 Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to 
 answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped 
 and dulcified in good-humour. He made his defects a grace. 
 His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served 
 to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It 
 seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of 
 his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 167 
 
 he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort im- 
 agine how any of them could be altered for the better. No 
 man could deliver brilliant dialogue — the dialogue of < !ongreve 
 or of Wveherlev — because none understood it — half so well 
 as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to 
 my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the in- 
 tervals of tragic passion. He would slumber over the level 
 parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known 
 to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive 
 to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of tra- 
 gedy have not been touched by any since him — the playful, 
 court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in 
 Hamlet — the sportive relief which he threw into the darker 
 shades of Richard — disappeared with him. He had his slug- 
 gish moods, his torpors — but they were the halting-stones and 
 resting-places of his tragedy — politic savings, and fetches of 
 the breath — husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed 
 him to be an economist — rather, I think, than errors of the 
 judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the eter- 
 nal, tormenting, unappeasable vigilance, the " lidless dragon 
 eyes," of present fashionable tragedy 
 
 ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. 
 
 Not many nights ago I "had come home from seeing this 
 extraordinary performer in Cockletop ; and when I retired to 
 my pillow, his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a man- 
 ner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of 
 it, by conjuring up the most opposite associations. I resolved 
 to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life ; private 
 misery, public calamity. All would not do — 
 
 " There the antic sate 
 Mucking our slate" — 
 
 his queer visnomy — his bewildering costume — all the strange 
 things which he had raked together — his serpentine rod swag- 
 gin g about in his pocket — Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his 
 relics — O'Keefe's wild farce and his wilder commentary — till 
 the passion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by 
 its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance 
 it had driven away.
 
 1G8 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall 
 into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, 
 assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but 
 five hundred, were dancing before me, like the faces which, 
 whether you will or no, come when you have been taking 
 opium — all the strange combinations which this strangest of 
 all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, 
 from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of 
 the town for the loss of the now almost-forgotten Edwin. 
 Oh for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when I 
 awoke! A season or two since there was exhibited a Ho- 
 garth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a Mun- 
 den gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall 
 far short of the former. 
 
 There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but 
 what a one it is !) of Liston ; but Munden has none that you 
 can properly pin down, and call Ms. When you think he has 
 exhausted his battery of looks in unaccountable warfare with 
 your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of 
 features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not so 
 much a comedian as a company. If his name could be 
 multiplied like his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, 
 and he alone, literally makes faces ; applied to any other per- 
 son, the phrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifica- 
 tions of the human countenance. Out of some invisible ward- 
 robe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used for wigs, and 
 fetches them out as easily. I should not be surprised to see 
 him some day put out the head of a river-horse ; or come 
 forth a pewet, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis. 
 
 I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry — in 
 Old Dornton — diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made 
 the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man ; 
 when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the 
 moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches 
 to this sort of excellence in other players. But in the grand 
 grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and unaccom- 
 panied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no follow- 
 ers. The school of Munden began and must end with him- 
 self. 
 
 Can any man wonder like him? can any man see ghosts 
 like him ? or fight with his own shadow — " skssa" — as he does 
 in that strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Preston — 
 where his alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifies, and 
 from the Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spec- 
 tator in as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were be- 
 ing acted before him? AVho like him can throw, or ever at-
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 1G9 
 
 tempted to throw, a preternatural interest over the commonest 
 daily-life objects '. A table, or a joint-stool, in his concep- 
 tion, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It 
 is invested with eonsteUatory importance. You could not 
 speak of it with more deference, if it were mounted into the 
 firmament. A. beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says 
 Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. 80 the gusto of Mun- 
 den antiquales and ennobles what it touches. His pots and 
 his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and 
 hooks seen in an old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, con- 
 templated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He under- 
 stands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, 
 amid the commonplace materials of life, like primeval man 
 with the sun and stars about him. 
 
 BLAKESMOOR IN II SHIRE. 
 
 I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will 
 over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion 
 The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion 
 than envy ; and contemplations on the great and good, whom 
 we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave 
 for us illusions incompatible with the bustle of modern occu- 
 pancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same 
 difference of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an 
 empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance but 
 some present human frailty — an act of inattention on the part 
 of some of the auditory — or a trait of affectation, or, worse, 
 vainglory, on that of the preacher — puts us by our best 
 thoughts, disharmonizing the place and the occasion. Rut 
 wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness ? — go alone on some 
 weekday, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse 
 the cool aisles of some country church ; think of the piety 
 that has kneeled there — the congregations, old and young, that 
 have found consolation there — the meek pastor — the docile 
 parishioner With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting 
 comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou 
 thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies 
 that kneel and weep around thee. 
 
 Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some 
 few miles out of my road to look upon the remains of an old 
 great house with which I had been impressed in this way in 
 15 H
 
 170 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 infancy. I was apprized that the owner of it had lately pulled 
 it down ; still I had a vague notion that it could not all have 
 perished, that so much solidity with magnificence could not 
 have been crushed all at once into the mere dust and rubbish 
 which I found it. 
 
 The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, 
 and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to — an 
 antiquity. 
 
 1 was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where 
 had stood the great gates ? What bounded the courtyard ? 
 Whereabout did the outhouses commence ? a few bricks only 
 lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so 
 spacious. 
 
 Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. 
 The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion. 
 
 Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process 
 of destruction, at the plucking of every panel I should have 
 felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them 
 to spare a plank at least out of the cheerful storeroom, in 
 whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with 
 the grdssplot before, and the hum and flappings of that one 
 solitary wasp that ever haunted it about me — it is in mine ears 
 now, as oft as summer returns ; or a panel of the yellow 
 room. 
 
 Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had 
 magic in it The tapestried bedrooms — tapestry so much 
 better than painting — not adorning merely, but peopling the 
 wainscots — at which childhood ever and anon would steal a 
 look, shifting its coverlet (replaced as quickly) to exercise its 
 tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern 
 bright visages, staring reciprocally — all Ovid on the walls, in 
 colours vivider than his descriptions. Action in mid sprout, 
 with the unappeasable prudery of Diana ; and the still more 
 provoking and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel- 
 fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas. 
 
 Then, that haunted room — in which old Mrs. Battle died — 
 whereinto I have crept, but always in the daytime, with a 
 passion of fear, and a sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold 
 communication with the past. How shall they build it vp 
 again ? 
 
 It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but 
 that traces of the splendour of past inmates were every- 
 where apparent. Its furniture was still standing — even to the 
 tarnished gilt leather battledoors, and crumbling feathers of 
 shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once 
 played there But I was a lonely child, and had the range at
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 17 J 
 
 will of every apartment, knew every nook and corner, won 
 dered and worshipped everywhere. 
 
 The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of 
 thought as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration. 
 So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years, 
 that, though there lay — I shame to say how few roods distant 
 from the mansion — half hid by trees, what I judged some ro- 
 mantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, 
 and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper pre- 
 cincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me ; and not 
 till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, 
 to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the 
 Lacim Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive 
 prospects — and those at no great distance from the house — I 
 was told of such — what were they to me, being out of the 
 boundaries of my Eden ? So far from a wish to roam, I would 
 have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen 
 prison ; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture 
 of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with 
 that garden-loving poet — 
 
 " Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines ; 
 Curl me about, ye gadding vines ; » 
 
 And oh so close your circles lace, 
 That I may never leave this place; 
 But, lest your fetters prove too weak, 
 Kre I your silken bondage bre;ik, 
 Do you, oh brambles, chain me too, * 
 And, courteous briers, nail me through. 
 
 I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides — the 
 low-built roof — parlours ten feet by ten — frugal boards, and all 
 the homeliness of home — these were the condition of my 
 birth — the wholesome soil which I was planted in. Yet, 
 without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry 
 to have had glances of something beyond ; and to have taken, 
 if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting accidents of a 
 great fortune. 
 
 To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have 
 been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on 
 cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of 
 ancestors ; and the coatless antiquary in his unembl&zoned 
 cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray's or De Clifford's 
 pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as 
 gay a vanity as those who do inherit them. The claims of 
 birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to slnp 
 me 6f an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords! can it be 
 hacked off as a spur can? or lorn away like a tarnished 
 
 garter? 
 
 6 H 3
 
 172 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 What, else, were the families of the great to us? wha. 
 pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their 
 capitulatory brass monuments ? What to us the uninterrupted 
 current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to 
 a cognate and correspondent elevation 1 
 
 Or wherefore, else, oh tattered and diminished 'scutcheon 
 that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, 
 Blakesmoor ! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon 
 thy mystic characters — thy emblematic supporters, with their 
 prophetic " Resurgam" — till, every dreg of peasantry purging 
 off, I received into myself very gentility ? Thou wert first 
 in my morning eyes ; and of nights hast detained my steps 
 from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to 
 dreaming on thee. 
 
 This is the only true gentry by adoption ; the veritable 
 change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by trans- 
 fusion. 
 
 Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, 
 I know not, I inquire not ; but its fading rags, and colours 
 cobweb-stained, told that its subject was of two centuries 
 back. 
 
 And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damcetas 
 — feeding ilocks not his own upon the hills of Lincoln — did 
 I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of 
 this once proud y£gon ? — repaying by a backward triumph 
 the insults he might possibly have heaped in his lifetime up- 
 on my poor pastoral progenitor. 
 
 If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners 
 of the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long 
 forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle ; and 
 1 was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick 
 up, to raise my fancy, or to sooth my vanity. 
 
 I was the true descendant of those old W s ; and not 
 
 the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste 
 places. 
 
 Mine, was that gallery of good old family portraits, which, 
 as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my own family 
 name, one — and then another — would seem to smile, reach- 
 ing forward from the canvass, to recognise the new relation- 
 ship ; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacan- 
 cy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity. 
 
 That beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a 
 lamb — that hung next the great bay window — with the bright 
 
 yellow H shire hair, and eye of watchet hue — so like 
 
 my Alice ! — I am persuaded she was a true Elia — Mildred 
 Elia, I take it.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 173 
 
 Mine, too, Blakesmooh, was thy noble marble ball, with 
 its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Cesars — stately busts 
 in marble — ranged round : of whose countenances, young 
 reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Xero, I re- 
 member, had most of my wonder ; hut the mild Galba had my 
 love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet fresh- 
 ness of immortality. 
 
 .Mine, too, thy lofty justice hall, with its one chair of au- 
 thority, high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless 
 poacher or self-forgetful maiden — so common since, that bats 
 have roosted in it. 
 
 Mine, too — whose else ? — thy costly fruit-garden, with its 
 sun-baked southern wall ; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising 
 backward from the house in triple terraces, with llower-pots 
 now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved 
 from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been 
 gilt and glittering ; the verdant quarters backwarder still ; and, 
 stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, 
 the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood- 
 pigeon, with that antique image in the centre, god or goddess 
 I wist not ; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sin- 
 cerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, 
 than I to that fragmental mystery. 
 
 Was it for this that 1 kissed my childish hands too fervent- 
 ly in your idol worship, walks and windings of Blakesmoor ! 
 for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough passed over your 
 pleasant places ? I sometimes think that as men, when they 
 die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there 
 may be a hope — a germe to be revivified. 
 
 POOR RELATIONS. 
 
 A poor relation — is the most irrelevant thing in nature — a 
 piece of impertinent correspondency — an odious approxima- 
 tion — a haunting conscience — a preposterous shadow, length- 
 ening in the noontide of your prosperity — an unwelcome re- 
 membrancer — a perpetually-recurring mortification — a drain 
 on your purse — a more intolerable dun upon your pride — a 
 drawback upon success — a rebuke to your rising — a stain in 
 your blood — a blot on your scutcheon — a rent in your gar- 
 ment — a death's head at your banquet — Agathocles' pot — a 
 Mordecai in your gate — a Lazarus at your door — a lion in 
 15*
 
 174 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 your path — a frog in your chamber — a fly in your ointment — 
 a mote in your eye — a triumph to your enemy, an apology to 
 your friends — the one thing not needful — the hail in harvest 
 — the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet. 
 
 He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you " That 
 
 is Mr. ." A rap, between familiarity and respect ; that 
 
 demands, and, at the same time, seems to despair of, enter- 
 tainment. He entereth smiling, and — embarrassed. He 
 holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and — draweth it back 
 again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time — when the 
 table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have com- 
 pany — but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your 
 visiter's two children are accommodated at a side table. He 
 never cometh upon open days, when your wife says with 
 
 some complacency, " My dear, perhaps Mr. will drop in 
 
 to-day." He remembereth birthdays — and professeth he is 
 fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against 
 fish, the turbot being small — yet suffereth himself to be im- 
 portuned into a slice against his first resolution. He sticketh 
 by the port — yet will be prevailed upon to empty the remain- 
 der glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is a 
 puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequi- 
 ous, or not civil enough, to him. The guests think " they 
 have seen him before." Every one speculateth upon his con- 
 dition ; and the most part take him to be — a tide waiter. He 
 calleth you by your Christian name, to imply that his other is 
 the same with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you 
 wish he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity he 
 aiight pass for a casual dependant ; with more boldness he 
 would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is 
 too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state than be- 
 fits a client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, in- 
 asmuch as he bringeth up no rent — yet 'tis odds, from his 
 garb and demeanour, that your guests take him for one. He 
 is asked to make one at the whist-table ; refuseth on the score 
 of poverty, and — resents being left out. When the company 
 break up, he profi'ereth to go for a coach — and lets the ser- 
 vant go. He recollects your grandfather ; and will thrust in 
 some mean and quite unimportant anecdote of — the family. 
 He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as "he is blest 
 in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to institute 
 what he calleth — favourable comparisons. With a reflecting 
 sort of congratulation, he will inquire the price of your furni- 
 ture ; and insults you with a special commendation of your 
 window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more 
 elegant shape, but, after all, there was something more com-
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 175 
 
 fortable about the old teakettle — which you must remember. 
 He dare say you must find a great convenience in having ;i 
 carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not 
 so. lnquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet ; 
 and did not know, till lately, that such and such had been the 
 crest of the family. His memory is unreasonable ; his com- 
 pliments perverse ; his talk a trouble ; his stay pertinacious; 
 and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a corner, 
 as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two nui- 
 sances. 
 
 There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is — a female poor 
 relation. You may do something with the other ; you may 
 pass him off tolerably well ; but your indigent she-relative is 
 hopeless. "He is an old humourist," you may say, " and 
 affects to go threadbare. His circumstances are better than 
 folks would take them to be. You are fond of having a 
 character at your table, and truly he is one." But in the in- 
 dications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No 
 woman dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must 
 
 out without shuffling. " She is plainly related to the L s ; 
 
 or what does she at their house V She is, in all probability, 
 your wife's cousin. Nine limes out of ten, at least, this is the 
 case. Her garb is something between a gentlewoman and a 
 beggar, yet the former evidently predominates. She is most 
 provokingly humble, and ostentatiously sensible to her in- 
 feriority. He may require to be repressed sometimes — ali- 
 quando svfflaminandus crat — but there is no raising her. You 
 send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped — after the 
 
 gentlemen. Mr. requests the honour of taking wine with 
 
 her ; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, and chooses the 
 former — because he does. She calls the servant sir ; and 
 insists on not troubling him to hold her plate. The house- 
 keeper patronises her. The children's governess takes upon 
 her to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for a 
 harpsichord. 
 
 Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance 
 of the disadvantages to which this chimerical notion of 
 uflinity constituting a claim to acquaintance may subject the 
 spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is be- 
 tween him and a lady with a great estate. His stars are per- 
 petually crossed by the malignant maternity of an old woman, 
 who persists in calling him " her son Dick." But she has 
 wherewithal in the end to recompense his indignities, and float 
 him again upon the brilliant surface, under which it had been 
 her seeming business and pleasure all along to sink him. All 
 men, besides, are not of Dick's temperament. I knew an
 
 178 ESSAYS OF ELI A, 
 
 Amlct in real life, who, wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. 
 Poor W was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine clas- 
 sic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it was too 
 much pride ; but its quality was inoffensive ; it was not of 
 that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors 
 at a distance ; it only sought to ward off derogation from it- 
 self. It was the principle of self-respect carried as far as" it 
 could go, without infringing upon that respect, which he would 
 have every one else equally maintain for himself. He would 
 have you to think alike with him on this topic. Many a 
 quarrel have I had with him, when we were rather older boys, 
 and our tallness made us more obnoxious to observation in the 
 blue clothes, because I would not thread the alleys and blind 
 ways of the town with him to elude notice, when we have been 
 out together on a holyday in the streets of this sneering and 
 
 prying metropolis. W went, sore with these notions, to 
 
 Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness of a scholar's life, 
 meeting with the alloy of an humble introduction, wrought in 
 him a passionate devotion to the place, with a profound aver- 
 sion from the society. The servitor's gown (worse than his 
 school array) clung to him with Nessian venom. He thought 
 himself ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must have 
 Avalked erect ; and in which Hooker, in his young days, pos- 
 sibly flaunted in a vein of no discommendable vanity. In the 
 depth of college shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor 
 student shrunk from observation. He found shelter among 
 books, which insult not ; and studies, that ask no questions of 
 a youth's finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom 
 cared for looking out beyond his domains. The healing in- 
 fluence of studious pursuits was upon him, to sooth and to 
 abstract. He was almost a healthy man ; when the wayward- 
 ness of his fate broke out against him with a second and worse 
 
 maligr.ity. The father of W had hitherto exercised the 
 
 humble profession of house-painter at N , near Oxford. 
 
 A supposed interest with some of the heads of colleges had 
 now induced him to take up his abode in that city, with the 
 hope of being employed upon some public works which were 
 talked of. From that moment I read in the countenance of 
 the young man the determination which at. length tore him 
 from academical pursuits for ever. To a person unacquainted 
 with our universities, the distance between the gownsmen and 
 the townsmen, as they are called — the trading part of the lat- 
 ter especially — is carried to an excess that would appear harsh 
 and incredible. The temperament of W 's father was dia- 
 metrically the reverse of his own. Old W was a little, 
 
 busy, cringing trad-esman, who, with his son upon his arm,
 
 ESSAYS OF LUX. 177 
 
 would slant! bowing and scraping, cap in hand, to anything 
 that wore the semblance of a gown— insensible to the winks 
 and opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose cham- 
 ber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obse- 
 quiously and gratuitously ducking. .Such a state of things 
 
 could not last. ^V must change the air of Oxford or be 
 
 suffocated. He chose the former ; and let the sturdy moralist, 
 who strains the point of the filial duties as high as they can 
 Inar, censure the dereliction ; he cannot estimate the strug gl e. 
 
 1 stood with W ■, the last afternoon I ever saw him, under 
 
 the eaves of his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane 
 leading from the High-street to the back of **** college, 
 
 where W kept his rooms. He seemed thoughtful, and 
 
 more reconciled. I ventured to rally him — finding him in a 
 better mood — upon a representation of the artist evangelist, 
 which the old man, whose affairs were beginning to flourish, 
 had caused to be set up in a splendid sort of frame over his 
 really handsome shop, either as a token of prosperity, or 
 
 badge of gratitude to his saint. W looked up at the 
 
 Luke, and, like Satan, "knew his mounted sign — and fled." 
 A. letter on his father's table the next morning announced that 
 he had accepted a commission in a regiment about to embark 
 for Portugal. He was among the lirst who perished before 
 the walls of St. Sebastian. 
 
 1 do not know how, upon a subject which I began with 
 treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so 
 eminently painful ; but this theme of poor relationship is re- 
 plete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic asso- 
 ciations, that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without 
 blending. The earliest impressions which I received on this 
 matter are certainly not attended with anything painful or 
 my humiliating in the recalling. At my father's table (no 
 vrrv splendid one) was to be found, every Saturday, the mys- 
 terious figure of an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black, of 
 a sad yet comely appearance. His deportment was of the 
 essence of gravity ; his words few or none ; and I was not 
 to nmke a noise in his presence. I had little inclination to 
 do so — for my cue was to admire in silence. A particular 
 elbow-chair was appropriated to him, which was in no case 
 to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which 
 appeared on no other occasion, distinguished the days of his 
 coming. I used to think him a prodigiously rich man. All I 
 could make out of him was, that he and my father had been 
 schoolfellows a world ago at Lincoln, and that he came from 
 the Mint. The Mint I knew to be a place where all the 
 money was coined — and I thought he was the owner of all '.ha*
 
 j-g ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 money. Awful ideas of the Tower twined themselves about 
 his presence. He seemed above human infirmities and pas- 
 sions. A sort of melancholy grandeur invested him. From 
 some inexplicable doom I fancied him obliged to go about in 
 an eternal suit of mourning ; a captive — a stately being, let 
 out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have I wondered at 
 the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an habitual gen- 
 eral respect which we all in common manifested towards him, 
 would venture now and then to stand up against him in some 
 argument touching their youthful days. The houses of the 
 ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers 
 know) between the dwellers on the hill and in the valley. 
 This marked distinction formed an obvious division between 
 the boys who lived above (however brought together in a 
 common school) and the boys whose paternal residence was 
 ' on the plain ; a sufficient cause of hostility in the code of 
 these young Grotiuses. My father had been a leading moun- 
 taineer ; and would still maintain the general superiority, in 
 skill and hardihood, of the Above Boys (his own faction) over 
 the Below Boys, (so were they called,) of which party his con- 
 temporary had been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skir- 
 mishes on this topic — the only one upon which the old gen- 
 tleman was ever brought out — and bad blood bred ; even some- 
 times almost to the recommencement (so I expected) of ac- 
 tual hostilities. But my father, who scorned to insistupon 
 advantages, generally contrived to turn the conversation upon 
 some adroit by-commendation of the old minster ; in the 
 general preference of which, before all other cathedrals in the 
 island, the dweller on the hill and the plain-born could meet 
 on a conciliating level, and lay down their less important dif- 
 ferences. Once only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, 
 and I remembered with anguish the thought that came over 
 me : " Perhaps he will never come here again." He had been 
 pressed to take another plate of the viand, which I have al- 
 ready mentioned as the indispensable concomitant of his visits. 
 He had refused, with a resistance amounting to rigour — when 
 my aunt, an old Lincoluian, but who had something of this in 
 common with my cousin Bridget, that she would sometimes 
 press civility out of season — uttered the following memorable 
 application — " Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do 
 not get pudding every day." The old gentleman said nothing 
 at the time — but he took occasion in the course of the evening, 
 when some argument had intervened between them, to utter, 
 with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which 
 chills me now as I write it — " Woman, you arc superannuated." 
 John Billet did not survive long alter the digestin" of this
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 179 
 
 affront ; but he survived long enough to assure me that peace 
 was actually restored! and, if I remember aright, another 
 pudding was discreetly substituted in the place of tbat winch 
 had occasioned the offence, lie died at tbe Mint, (anno 1781,) 
 where he had long held what he accounted a comfortable in- 
 dependence ; and with five pounds fourteen shillings and a 
 penny, which were found in bis escrutoire after his decease, 
 left the world, blessing God that he had enough to bury him, 
 and that he had never been obliged to any man lor a sixpence. 
 This was — a poor relation. 
 
 STAGE ILLUSION. 
 
 A play is said to be well or ill acted in proportion to tho 
 scenical illusion produced. Whether such illusion can in any 
 case be perfect, is not the question. The nearest approach 
 to it, we are told, is when the actor appears wholly uncon- 
 scious of the presence of spectators. In tragedy — in all 
 which is to affect the feelings — this undivided attention to his 
 stage business seems indispensable. Yet it is, in fact, dis- 
 pensed with every day by our cleverest tragedians ; and while 
 these references to an audience, in the shape of rant or sen- 
 timent, are not too frequent or palpable, a sufficient quantity 
 of illusion for the purposes of dramatic interest may be said 
 to be produced in spite of them. But, tragedy apart, it may 
 be inquired whether, in certain characters in comedy, espe- 
 cially those which are a little extravagant, or which involve 
 some notion repugnant to the moral sense, it is not a proof of 
 the highest skill in the comedian when, without absolutely 
 appealing to an audience, he keeps up a tacit understanding 
 with them ; and makes them, unconsciously to themselves, a 
 party in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the 
 mode of doing this ; but we speak only of the great artists in 
 tbe profession. 
 
 The most mortifying infirmity in human nature to feel in 
 ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, coward- 
 ice. To see a coward done to the life upon a stage would 
 produce anything but mirth. Yet we most of us remember 
 Jack Bannister's cowards. Could anything be more agree- 
 able, more pleasant 1 AVe loved the rogues. How was this 
 effected but by the exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual 
 sub-iiismuation to us, the spectators, even in the extremity of
 
 180 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 the shaking-fit, that he was not half such a coward as we took 
 him for ? We saw all the common symptoms of the malady 
 upon him ; the quivering lip, the cowering knees, the teeth 
 chattering; and could have sworn "that man was frightened." 
 But we forgot all the while — or kept it almost a secret to our- 
 selves — that he never once lost his self-possession ; that he 
 let out by a thousand droll looks and gestures — meant at us, 
 and not at all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the 
 scene, that his confidence in his own resources had never 
 once deserted him. Was this a genuine picture of a coward? 
 or not rather a likeness, which the clever artist contrived to 
 palm upon us instead of an original ; while we secretly con- 
 nived at the delusion for the purpose of greater pleasure, than 
 a more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, 
 and utter self-desertion, which we know to be concomitants 
 of cowardice in real life, could have given us ? 
 
 Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable 
 on the stage, but because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub- 
 reference, rather than direct appeal to ns, disarms the char- 
 acter of a great deal of its odiousness, by seeming to engage 
 our compassion for the insecure tenure by which he holds his 
 money-bags and parchments ? By this subtle vent half of the 
 hatefulness of the character—the self-closeness with which 
 in real life it coils itself up from the sympathies of men — 
 evaporates. The miser becomes sympathetic ; i. c., is no gen- 
 uine miser. Here again a diverting likeness is substituted 
 for a very disagreeable reality. 
 
 Spleen, irritability — the pitiable infirmities of old men, 
 ■which produce only pain to behold in the realities, counter- 
 feited upon a stage, divert not altogether for the comic appen- 
 dages to them, but in part from an inner conviction that they 
 are being acted before us ; that a likeness only is going on, 
 and not the thing itself. They please by being done under the 
 life, or beside it ; not to the life. When Gatty acts an old 
 man, is he angry indeed? or only a pleasant counterfeit, just 
 enough of a likeness to recognise, without pressing upon us 
 the uneasy sense of reality ? 
 
 Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natu- 
 ral. It was the case with a late actor. Nothing could be 
 more earnest or true than the manner of Mr. Emery ; this 
 told excellently in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic cast. 
 But when he carried the same rigid exclusiveness of attention 
 to the stage business, and wilful blindness and oblivion of 
 everything before the curtain into his comedy, it produced a 
 harsh and dissonant effect. He was out of keeping with the 
 rest of the persona dramatis. There was as little link be-
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 1S1 
 
 tween him and them as between himself and th« audience 
 He was a third estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. 
 Individually considered, his execution was masterly. But 
 comedy is not this unbending thing ; for this reason, that the 
 same degree of credibility is not required of it as to serious 
 scenes. The degrees of credibility demanded to the two 
 things may be illustrated by the different sort of truth which 
 mc expect when a man tells us a mournful or a merry story. 
 If we suspect the former of falsehood in any one tittle, we re- 
 ject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a suspected 
 imposition. But the teller of a mirthful tale has latitude al- 
 lowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth. 
 'Tis the same with dramatic illusion. We confess we love 
 in comedy to see an audience naturalized behind the scenes, 
 taken in into the interest of the drama, welcomed as by- 
 standers, however. There is something ungracious in a 
 comic actor holding himself aloof from all participation or 
 concern with those who are come to be diverted by him. 
 Macbeth must see the dagger, and no ear but his own be told 
 of it ; but an old fool in farce may think he sees something, 
 and by conscious words and looks express it, as plainly as he 
 can speak, to pit, box, and gallery. When an impertinent in 
 tragedy, an Osric, for instance, breaks in upon .the serious 
 passions of the scene, we approve of the contempt witli 
 which he is treated. But when the pleasant impertinent of 
 comedy, in a piece purely meant to give delight, and raise 
 mirth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studious man 
 with taking up his leisure, or making his house his home, the 
 same sort of contempt expressed (however natural) would 
 destroy the balance of delight in the spectators. To make 
 the intrusion comic, the actor who plavs the annoyed man 
 must a little desert nature ; he must, in short, be thinking of 
 the audience, and express only so much dissatisfaction and 
 peevishness as is consistent with the pleasure of comedv. 
 In other words, his perplexity must seem half put on. If he 
 repel the intruder with the sober set face of a man in earnest, 
 and more especially if he deliver his expostulations in a tone 
 which in the world must necessarily provoke a duel, his real- 
 life manner will destroy the whimsical and purely dramatic 
 existence of the other character, (which, to render it comic, de- 
 mands an antagonist comicality on the part of the diameter 
 opposed to it,) and convert what was meant for mirth, ratber 
 than belief, into a downright piece of impertinence indee !, 
 which would raise no diversion in us, but rather stir pain, to 
 see indicted in earnest upon any unworthy person. A very 
 judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems to have fallen
 
 182 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 into an error of this sort in his playing with Mr. Wrench in 
 the farce of Free and Easy. 
 
 Many instances would be tedious ; these may suffice to 
 show that comic acting at least does not always demand from 
 the performer that strict abstraction from all reference to an 
 audience which is exacted of it ; but that in some cases a 
 sort of compromise may take place, and all the purposes of 
 dramatic delight be attained by a judicious understanding, not 
 too openly announced, between the ladies and gentlemen — on 
 both sides of the curtain. 
 
 TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 
 
 Joyousest of once imbodied spirits, whither at length hast 
 tbou flown ? to what genial region are we permitted to con- 
 jecture that thou hast flitted ? 
 
 Art thou sowing thy wild oats yet (the harvest-time was 
 still to come with thee) upon casual sands of Avernus ? or art 
 thou enacting Rover (as we would gladlier think) by wander- 
 ing Elysian streams ? 
 
 This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics 
 among us, was in truth anything but a prison to thee, as the 
 vain Platonist dreams of this body to be no better than a coun- 
 ty jail, forsooth, or some house of durance vile, whereof 
 the five senses are the fetters. Thou knewest better than to 
 be in a hurry to cast ofl' those gyves ; and had notice to quit, 
 I fear, before thou wert quite ready to abandon this fleshy 
 tenement. It was thy Pleasure-house, thy Palace of Dainty 
 Devices ; thy Louvre, or thy Whitehall. 
 
 What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant now ? or 
 when may we expect thy aerial house-warming. 
 
 Tartarus we know, and we have read of the blessed 
 shades ; now cannot I intelligibly fancy thee in either. 
 
 Is it too much to hazard a conjecture, that (as the school- 
 men admitted a receptacle apart for patriarchs and un-chrisom 
 babes) there may exist — not far, perchance, from that store- 
 house of all vanities, which Milton saw in visions — a limbo 
 somewhere for players ? and that 
 
 " Up thither like aerial vapours fly 
 Both all stage things, and all that in stage things 
 ISuilt their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame '! 
 All the unaccomplished works of authors' hands
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 183 
 
 Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mix'd, 
 
 Darnn'd upon earth, fleet thither — 
 
 Play, opera, farce, with all their trumpery." 
 
 There, by the neighbouring moon, (by some not improperly 
 uipposed thy regent planet upon earth,) mavst thou not still 
 oe acting thy managerial pranks, great disimbodied lessee ? 
 out lessee still, and still a manager. 
 
 In green-rooms, impervious to mortal eye, the muse beholds 
 thee wieldiug posthumous empire. 
 
 Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump on earth) circle 
 thee in endlessly, and still their song is, Fy on sinful fan- 
 tasy. 
 
 Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe of earth, 
 Kohert William Elllston ! for as yet we know not thy 
 new name in heaven. 
 
 It irks me to think, that, stripped of thy regalities, thou 
 shouldst ferry over, a poor forked shape, in crazy Stygian 
 wherry. Methinks I hear the old boatman, paddling by the 
 weedy wharf, with raucid voice, bawling "Sculls, sculls:" 
 to which, with waving hand and majestic action, thou deiyii- 
 est no reply, other than in two curt monosyllables, " No 
 
 OAKS." 
 
 Hut the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference be- 
 tween king and cobbler ; manager and call-boy ; and, if 
 haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly 
 taking vour passage, cheek by cheek, (oh ignoble levelling of 
 death,) with the shade of some recently-departed candle-snuffer. 
 
 But mercy ! what strippings, what tearing off of histrionic 
 robes and private vanities ! what denudations to the bone, 
 before the surly ferryman will admit you to set a foot with- 
 in his battered lighter. 
 
 Crowns, sceptres; shield, sword, and truncheon; thv own 
 coronation robes ; (for thou hast brought the whole property- 
 man's wardrobe with thee, enough to sink a navy ;) the judge's 
 ermine; the coxcomb's wig; the snuff-box a la FoppijigtfOi — 
 all must overboard, he positively swears — and that ancient 
 mariner brooks no denial ; for, since the tiresome monodrame 
 of the old Thracian harper, Charon, it is to be believed, hath 
 shown small taste for theatricals. 
 
 Ay, now 'tis done. You are just boat weight ; pura et 
 puta (i/uz/Hi. 
 
 But, bless me, how little you look ! 
 
 So shall we all look — kings and keysars — stripped for the 
 last voyage. 
 
 But the murkv rogue poshes off. Adieu, pleasant, and 
 thrice pleasant shade ! with my parting thanks for many a
 
 184 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 heavy hour of life lightened by thy harmless extravaganzas, 
 public or domestic. 
 
 Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, leaving 
 to his two brethren the heavy calendars — honest Rhadamanth, 
 always partial to players, weighing their party-coloured exist- 
 ence here upon earth — making account of the few foibles 
 that may have shaded thy real life, as we call it, (though, 
 substantially, scarcely less a vapour than thy idlest vagaries 
 upon the boards of Drury,) as but of so many echoes, natural 
 repercussions, and results to be expected from the assumed 
 extravagances of thy secondary or mock life, nightly upon a 
 stage — after a lenient castigation, with rods lighter than of 
 those Medusean ringlets, but just enough to " whip the offend- 
 ing Adam out of thee," shall courteously dismiss thee at the 
 right-hand gate — the o. r. side of Hades — that conducts to 
 masks and merry-makings in the Theatre Royal of Proser 
 pine. 
 
 PLAUDITO, ET VALETO. 
 
 ELLISTONIANA. 
 
 My acquaintance with the pleasant creature, whose loss 
 we all deplore, was but slight. 
 
 My first introduction to E., which afterward ripened into 
 an acquaintance a little on this side of intimacy, was over a 
 counter of the Leamington Spa Library, then newly entered 
 upon by a branch of his family. E., whom nothing misbe- 
 came — to auspicate, I suppose, the filial concern, and set it 
 a-going with a lustre — was serving in person two damsels fair, 
 who had come into the shop ostensibly to inquire for some 
 new publication, but in reality to have a sight of the illustri- 
 ous shopman, hoping some conference. With what an air did 
 he reach down the volume, dispassionately giving his opinion 
 upon the worth of the work in question, and launching out 
 into a dissertation on its comparative merits with those of 
 certain publications of a similar stamp, its rivals! his enchant- 
 ed customers fairly hanging on his lips, subdued to their au- 
 thoritative sentence. So have I seen a gentleman in comedy 
 acting the shopman. So Lovelace sold his gloves in King- 
 street. 1 admired the. histrionic art, by which he contrived 
 to carry clean away every notion of disgrace from the occu- 
 pation he had so generously submitted to ; and from that hour
 
 ESSAYS OF GLIA. 165 
 
 1 judged him, with no after repentance, to bo a person with 
 whom it would be a felicity to be more acquainted. 
 
 To descant upon bis merits as a comedian would be su- 
 perfluous. With bis blended private and professional habits 
 alone I have to do; that harnjonfaus fusion of the- manners of 
 the player into those of e very-day life, which brought the 
 stage-boards into streets and dming-pafloiirs, ami kept up 
 the play when the play was ended. t% I like Wrencb," a 
 friend was saying to him one day, "because he is the same 
 natural, easy creature on the stage, that he is off. r — "Mv 
 erase exactly," retorted Elliston, with a charming forgetfui- 
 ness, that the converse ol a proposition does not always lead 
 to the same conclusion — "I am the same person iff'the stage 
 that I am an* The inference, at first sight, seems identical; 
 but examine it a little, and it confesses only, that the one per- 
 former was never, and the other always, acting. 
 
 And in truth this was the charm of Elliston 's private de- 
 portment. You had a spirited performance always going on 
 before your eyes, with nothing to pay. As where a monarch 
 takes up his casual abode for a night, the poorest hovel which 
 he honours by his sleeping in it, becomes ipso facto for that 
 time a palace ; so wherever Elliston walked, sat, or stood 
 still, there was the theatre. He carried about with him his 
 pit, boxes, and galleries, and set up his portable playhouse at 
 corners of streets, and in the market-places. Upon flintiest 
 pavements he-trod the boards still ; and if his theme chanced 
 to be passionate, the green baize carpet of tragedy sponta- 
 neously rose beneath his feet. Now this was heartv, and 
 showed a love for his art. So Apelles always painted — in 
 thought. So G. D. always poetizes. I hate a lukewarm ar- 
 tist. I have known actors — and some of them of Elliston's 
 own stamp — who shall have agreeably been amusing you in 
 the part of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three 
 hours of their dramatic existence ; but no sooner does the 
 curtain fall with its leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems 
 to seize on all their faculties. They emerge sour, morose 
 persons, intolerable to their families, servants, &c. Another 
 shall have been expanding your heart with generous deeds 
 and sentiments, till it even beats with yearnings of universal 
 sympathy ; you absolutely long to go home, and do soma 
 good action. The play seems tedious, till you can get fairly 
 out of the house, and realize your laudable intentions. A» 
 length the final bell rings, and this cordial representative ol 
 all that is amiable in human breasts steps forth — a miser. 
 Elliston was more of a piece. Did he play Hanger? and did 
 Kanger fill the general bosom of the town with satisfaction 1 
 16*
 
 1S6 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 why should he not be Ranger, and diffuse the same cordial 
 satisfaction among his private circles? with hist temperament, 
 his animal spirits, his good-nature, his follies perchance, could 
 he do better than identify himself with his impersonation ? 
 Are we to like a pleasant rake or coxcomb on the stage, and 
 give ourselves airs of aversion for the identical character pre- 
 sented to us in actual life ? or what would the performer have 
 gained by divesting himself of the impersonation ? Could 
 the man Elliston have been essentially different from his part 
 even if he had avoided to reflect to us studiously, in private 
 circles, the airy briskness, the forwardness, and scape-goat 
 trickeries of his prototype 1 
 
 " But there is something not natural in this everlasting 
 acting ; we want the real man." 
 
 Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom 
 you cannot, or will not see, under some adventitious trappings, 
 which, nevertheless, sit not at all inconsistently upon him 1 
 What if it is the nature of some men to be highly artificial? 
 The fault is least reprehensible in players. Cibber was his 
 own Foppington, with almost as much wit as Vanburgh could 
 add to it. 
 
 " My conceit of his person" — it is Ben Jonson speaking of 
 Lord Bacon — " was never increased towards him by his place 
 or honours. But I have, and do reverence him for the great' 
 ness, that was only proper to himself; in that he seemed to 
 me ever one of the greatest men that had been in many ages. 
 In his adversity I ever prayed that Heaven would give him 
 strength ; for greatness he could not want." 
 
 The quality here commended was scarcely less conspic- 
 uous in the subject of these idle reminiscences, than in my 
 Lord Verulam. Those who have imagined that an unexpected 
 elevation to the direction of a great London theatre affected 
 the consequence of Elliston, or at all changed his nature, 
 knew not the essential greatness of the man whom they dis- 
 parage. It was my fortune to encounter him near St. Dun- 
 stan's Church (which, with its punctual giants, is now no 
 more than dust and a shadow) on the morning of his election 
 to that high office. Grasping my hand with a look of signifi- 
 cance, he only uttered — "Have you heard the news?" — then 
 with another look following up the blow, ho subjoined, "I am 
 the future manager of Drury Lane Theatre." Breathless as 
 he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation or reply, but 
 mutely stalked away, leaving me to chew upon his new-blown 
 dignities at leisure. In fact, nothing could be said to it. 
 Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was 
 in his great style.
 
 ESSAYS OF liLlA. 187 
 
 But was he less great, (be witness, oh ye powers of equa- 
 nimity, that supported m the ruins of Carthage the consular 
 exile, and more recently transmuted lor | more illustrious 
 exile the barren eonstableslup of l*'llia into an image of im- 
 perial France,) when, in melancholy after-years, again, much 
 near the same spot, I met him, when that sceptre had been 
 wrested from his hand, and his dominion was curtailed to the 
 petty managership, and part proprietorship, of the small 
 Olympic, his Elba ? He still played nightly upon the boards 
 of Drury, but in parts, alas! allotted to him, not magnificently 
 distributed by linn. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and 
 magnificently sinking the sense of fallen material grandeur in 
 the more liberal resentment of depreciations done to his more 
 lofty intellectual pretensions, " Have you heard" — his custom- 
 ary exordium — " have you heard," said he, " how they treat 
 me? they put me in comedy.'''' Thought I — but his finger on 
 his lips forbade any verbal interruption — " Where could they 
 have put you better ?" Then, after a pause — " Where I for- 
 merly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio," — and so again 
 he stalked away, neither staying nor caring for responses. 
 
 Oh, it was a rich scene — but Sir A C , the best 
 
 of story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative al- 
 most as well as he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to 
 it — that I was witness to, in the tarnished room (that had 
 once been green) of that same little Olympic. There, after 
 his deposition from imperial Drurv, he substituted a throne. 
 That Olympic Hill was his " highest heaven ;" himself " Jove 
 in his chair." There he sat in state, while before him, on 
 complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment — how shall 
 I describe her? — one of those little tawdry things that flirt 
 at the tails of choruses — a probationer for the town, in 
 either of its senses — the pertest little drab — a dirtv fringe 
 and appendage of the lamps' smoke — who, it seems, on some 
 disapprobation expressed by a " highly respectable" audience 
 — had precipitately quitted her station on the boards and 
 withdrawn her small talents in disgust. 
 
 " And how dare you," said her manager — assuming a cen- 
 sorial severity which would have crushed the confidence of a 
 Vestris, and disarmed that beautiful rebel herself of her pro- 
 fessional caprices — I verily believe, he thought her stand mg 
 before him — " how dare you, madam, withdraw yourself, 
 without a notice, from your theatrical duties!*' — "I was 
 hissed, sir." — "And you have the presumption to decide 
 upon the taste of the town?" — " I don't know that, sir; 
 but I will never stand to be hissed," was the subjoinder of 
 young Confidence — when, gathering up his features into one
 
 188 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 significant mass of wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation 
 —in a lesson never to have been lost upon a creature less for- 
 ward than she who stood before him — his words were these : 
 " They have hissed wie." 
 
 'Twas the identical argument a fortiori, which the son of 
 Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade 
 him to take his destiny with a good grace. " I too am mortal." 
 And it is to be believed that in both cases the rhetoric missed 
 of its application for want of a proper understanding with 
 the faculties of the respective recipients. 
 
 " Quite an opera pit," he said to me, as he was courteously 
 conducting me over the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the 
 last retreat and recess of his every-day waning grandeur. 
 
 Those who knew Elliston will know the manner in which 
 he pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about 
 to record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with 
 us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a preliminary 
 haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meager 
 banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I 
 made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing 
 that for my own part I never ate but one dish at dinner. " I 
 too never eat but one thing at dinner," was his reply — then, 
 after a pause — " reckoning fish as nothing." The manner 
 was all. It was as if by one peremptory sentence he had 
 decreed the annihilation of all the savoury esculents, which 
 the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving ocean pours forth upon 
 poor humans from her watery bosom. This was greatness, 
 tempered with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his 
 scanty but welcoming entertainer. 
 
 Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston ! and 
 not lessened in thy death, if report speak truly, which says 
 that thou didst direct that thy mortal remains should repose 
 under no inscription but one of pure Latinity. Classical 
 was thy bringing up ! and beautiful was the feeling on thy 
 last bed, which, connecting the man with the boy, took thee 
 back in thy latest exercise of imagination to the days when, 
 undreaming of theatres and managerships, thou wert a scholar, 
 and an early ripe one, under the roofs buildcd by the munifi- 
 cent and pious Colet. For thee the Pauline muses weep. 
 In elegies that shall silence this crude prose they shall cele- 
 brate thy praise.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 169 
 
 DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND 
 READING 
 
 "To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced 
 product of another man's l>r;iin. Now I think a in. in of quality and breeding 
 may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own." 
 
 Lord FopputLrlon in the Relapse. 
 
 An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck 
 with this bright sally of his lordship, that he has left, off 
 reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality. 
 At the hazard of losing some credit on his head, I must con- 
 fess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to 
 other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' 
 speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. 
 When I am not walking I am reading; I cannot sit and think. 
 Books think for me. 
 
 I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for 
 me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I 
 call a book. There are things in that shape which I cannot 
 allow for such. 
 
 In this catalogue of books which arc no books — biblla a-biblia 
 — I reckon court calendars, directories, pocket-books, draught- 
 boards, bound and lettered at the back, scientific treatises, al- 
 manacs, statutes at large : the works of Hume, Gibbon, Rob- 
 ertson, Beattie,Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes 
 which "no gentleman's library should be without :" the His- 
 tories of Flavius Josephus, (that learned Jew,) and Palcv's 
 Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I can read al- 
 most anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so 
 unexcluding. 
 
 I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in 
 books' clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers 
 of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the 
 legitimate occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance 
 of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted playbook, then, 
 opening what " seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a wither- 
 ing population essay. To expect a Steele or a Farquhar, and 
 find— Adam Smith. To view a well-arrange^ assortment bf 
 blockheaded Encyclopaedias (Anglicaftas or Metropolitanas) set 
 out in an array of Russia or Morocco, when a tithe of that 
 good leather would comfortably reclothe my shivering folios ; 
 would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymtuid
 
 190 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 Lully to look like himself again in the world. I never see 
 these impostors, but I long to strip them to warm my ragged 
 veterans in their spoils. 
 
 To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of 
 a volume. Magnificence comes after. This, when it can be 
 afforded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of books indis- 
 criminately. I would not dress a set of magazines, for in- 
 stance, in full suit. The dishabille, or half-binding, (with 
 Russia backs ever,) is our costume. A Shakspeare, or a 
 Milton, (unless the first editions,) it were mere foppery to 
 trick out in gay apparel. The possession of them confers no 
 distinction. The exterior of them, (the things themselves 
 being so common,) strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, 
 no tickling sense of property in the owner. Thomson's 
 Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and 
 dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are 
 the sullied leaves and worn-out appearance, nay, the very 
 odour, (beyond Russia,) if we would not forget kind feelings 
 in fastidiousness, of an old " Circulating Library" Tom Jones 
 or Vicar of Wakefield ! How they speak of the thousand 
 thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight ! — of 
 the lone seamstress whom they may have cheered (milliner, or 
 harder-working mantuamaker) after her long day's needle-toil, 
 running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill 
 spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, 
 in spelling out their enchanting contents ! Who would have 
 them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we de- 
 sire to see them in 1 
 
 In some respects, the better a book is, the less it demands 
 from binding. Fielding, Smollet, Sterne, and all that class of 
 perpetually self-reproductive volumes — great Nature's stereo- 
 types — we see them individually perish with less regret, be- 
 cause we know the copies of them to be " eterne." But 
 where a book is at once both good and rare — where, the indi- 
 vidual is almost the species, and when that perishes, 
 
 " We know not where is that Promethean torch 
 That can its light reluinine" — 
 
 such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke ol rView- 
 castlc, by his dulchess — no casket is rich enough, no casing 
 sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel. 
 
 Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem 
 hopeless ever to be reprinted, but old editions of writers, 
 such as Sir Philip Sidney, Bishop Taylor. Milton in his 
 prose-works, Fuller — of whom we have reprints, yet the books 
 themselves, though they go about, and are talked of here and
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 191 
 
 there, we know, have not endenizened themselves (nor pos- 
 sibly ever will) in the national heart, so as to become stock 
 books — it is good to possess these in durable and costly rov- 
 ers. I do not care for a first folio of Sbakspeare. I rather 
 prefer the common editions of Howe and Tonson, without 
 notes, and with plates, which, being so execrably bad, serve 
 as maps or modest remembrancers to the text ; and without 
 pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are so much 
 better than the Sbakspeare gallery engraving^ which did. I 
 have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his 
 plays, and I like those editions of him best which have been 
 oftenest tumbled about and handled. On the contrary, I can- 
 not read Beaumont and Fletcher but in folio. The octavo 
 editions are painful to look at. 1 have no sympathy with 
 them. If they were as much read as the current editions of 
 the other poet, I should prefer them in that shape to the older 
 one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint 
 of the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of un- 
 earthing the bones of that fantastic old great man to expose 
 them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern cen- 
 sure 1 what hapless stationer could dream of Burton's ever be- 
 coming popular ? The wretched M. alone could not do worse, 
 when he bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him 
 whitewash the painted effigy of old Sbakspeare, which stood 
 there, in rude but lively fashion depicted, to the very colour 
 of the cheek, the eye, the eyebrow, hair, the very dress he 
 used to wear — the only authentic testimony we had, however 
 imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels of him. They 
 
 covered him over with a coat of white paint. By , if I 
 
 had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire, I would have 
 clapped both commentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a 
 pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets. 
 
 I think I see them at their work — these sapient trouble- 
 tombs. 
 
 Shall I be thought fantastical if I confess that the names 
 of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to 
 the ear — to mine, at least — than that of Milton or of Shak- 
 speare ? It may be that the latter are more staled and rung 
 upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which 
 carry a perfume in the mention, are Kit Marlowe, Drayton, 
 Drummohd of Ilawthornden, and Cowley. 
 
 Much depends upon when and vohert you read a hook. In 
 the live or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite 
 ready, who would think of taking Dp tin* I'airv Queen for a 
 Btop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons? 
 
 Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be
 
 192 ESSAYS OF LLIA. 
 
 played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, 
 to which, who listens, had need biing docile thoughts and 
 purged ears. 
 
 Winter evenings — the world shui out — with less of cere- 
 mony the gentle Shakspeare enters. Ai such a season, the 
 Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale — 
 
 These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud — to your- 
 self, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More 
 than one — and it degenerates into an audience. 
 
 Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for 
 the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. 
 I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels 
 without extreme irksomeness. 
 
 A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the 
 bank offices it is the custom (to save so much individual 
 time) for one of the clerks — who is the best scholar — to com- 
 mence upon the Times or the Chronicle, and recite its entire 
 contents aloud pro bono publico. With every advantage of 
 lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In barbers' 
 shops and public houses a fellow will get up, and spell out 
 a paragraph, which he communicates as some discovery. 
 Another follows with his selection. So the entire journal 
 transpires at length by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow 
 readers, and without this expedient no one in the company 
 would probably ever travel through the contents of a whole 
 paper. 
 
 Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays 
 one down without a feeling of disappointment. 
 
 What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, 
 keeps the paper ! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling 
 out incessantly, " The Chronicle is in hand, sir." 
 
 Coming in to an inn at night — having ordered your supper 
 — what can be more delightful than to find lying in the win- 
 dow-seat, left there time out of mind by the carelessness of 
 some former guest — two or three numbers of the old Town 
 and Country Magazine, with its amusing tete-a-tcte pictures — 
 "The Royal Lover and Lady G ;" "The Melting Pla- 
 tonic and the old Beau" — and such like antiquated scandal? 
 Would you exchange it — at that time, and in that place — for 
 a better book? 
 
 Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so 
 much for the weightier kinds of reading — the Paradise Lost, 
 or Comus, he could have read to him — but he missed the 
 pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a magazine or 
 a light pamphlet.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 193 
 
 I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of 
 some cathedral alone, and reading Candida. 
 
 I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having 
 been once detected — by a familiar damsel — reclined at my 
 ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill, (her Cythera,) reading 
 — Pamela. There was nothing in the hook to make a man 
 seriously ashamed at the exposure ; but as she seated herself 
 down by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I 
 could have wished it had been — any other book. We read 
 on very sociably for a few pages ; and, not finding the author 
 much to her taste, she got up, and — went away. Gentle 
 casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture whether the blush 
 (for there was one between us) was the property of the nymph 
 or the swain in this dilemma. From me von shall never get 
 the secret. 
 
 I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot 
 settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who 
 was generally to be seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's- 
 street was not) between the hours of ten and eleven in the 
 morning, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have 
 been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to ad- 
 mire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts 
 An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot or a bread-basket 
 would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master 
 of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points. 
 There is a class of street-readers whom I can never con- 
 template without affection — the poor gentry, who, not having 
 wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the 
 open stalls — the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious 
 looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have 
 done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every 
 moment when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable 
 to deny themselves the gratification, they ''snatch a fearful 
 
 joy." Martin 15 , in this way, by daily fragments, got 
 
 through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper 
 damped his laudable ambition by asking him (it was in his 
 younger days) whether he meant to purchase the work. INI. 
 declares that under no circumstance of his life did he ever 
 peruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took in 
 those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has 
 moralized upon this subject in two very touching but homelj 
 stanzas. 
 
 " I saw a boy with eager eye 
 Open a book upon a stall, 
 And read, as he'd devour it all ; 
 Which when the stallman d*d espy, 
 17 I
 
 194 ESSAYS OF ELTA. 
 
 Soon to the boy I heard him call, 
 
 ' You, sir, you never buy a book, 
 
 Therefore in one you shall not look.' 
 
 The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh 
 
 He wish'd he never had been taught to read. 
 
 Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need. 
 
 " Of sufferings the poor have many, 
 Which never can the rich annoy : 
 [ soon perceived another boy, 
 Who look'd as if he'd not had any 
 Food, for that day at least — enjoy 
 The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. 
 This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder. 
 Thus hungry, longing, thus without, a penny, 
 Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat : 
 No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat." 
 
 THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 
 
 1 am fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said 
 so before) at one or other of the universities. Next to these 
 my choice would fix me at some woody spot, such as the neigh- 
 bourhood of Henley affords in abundance, on the banks of my 
 beloved Thames. But somehow or other my cousin contrives 
 to wheedle me once in three or four seasons to a watering- 
 place. Old attachments cling to her in spite of experience. 
 We have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller at Brigh- 
 ton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and are at this mo- 
 ment doing dreary penance at — Hastings ! — and all because 
 we were happy many years ago for a brief week at — Mar- 
 gate. That was our first sea-side experiment, and many cir- 
 cumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holyday 
 of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea. and we had 
 never been from home so long together in company. 
 
 Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather- 
 beaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough accommodations — ill 
 exchanged for the foppery and fresh-water niceness of the 
 modern steam-packet 1 To the winds and waves thou com- 
 mittedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic 
 fumes, and spells, and boiling caldrons. With the gales of 
 heaven thou wentest swimmingly, or, when it was their 
 pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-hive patience. Thy course 
 was natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed; nor didst thou go 
 poisoning^ the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke — a 
 great sea-chimera, chimneying and furnacirtg the deep; or 
 liker to that fire-god parching up Scamander.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 195 
 
 Can I forgot thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy, 
 reluctant responses (yet to the suppression of anything like 
 contempt) to the raw questions which we of (he sjreat city 
 would be ever mid ;iuou putting to them, as to the uses of this 
 or that strange naval implement I 'Specially can I forget thee, 
 thou happy medium, thou shade of refuge between us and 
 them, conciliating interpreter of their skill to our simplicity, 
 comfortable ambassador between sea and land ! — whose sailor- 
 trousers did not more convincingly assure thee to be an 
 adopted denizen of the former, than thy white rap, and whiter 
 apron over them, with thy neat-figured practice in thy culinary 
 vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland nurture hereto- 
 fore — a master cook of Eastcheap I How busily didst thou 
 ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, attendant, 
 chamberlain : here, there, like another Ariel, flaming at once 
 about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations — ■ 
 not to assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a kindred 
 sense of our infirmities, to sooth the qualms which that un- 
 tried motion might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. 
 And when the o'er-washing billows drove us below deck, (for 
 it was far gone in October, and we had stiff and blowing 
 weather,) how did thy officious ministering, still catering for 
 our comfort, with cards and cordials, and thy more cordial 
 conversation, alleviate the closeness and the confinement of 
 thy else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very inviting, 
 little cabin ! 
 
 With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow- 
 passenger, whose discourse in verity might have beguiled a 
 longer voyage than we meditated, and have made mirth and 
 wontler abound as far as the Azores. He was a dark, Span- 
 lsh-complexioned young man, remarkably handsome, with an 
 officer-Tike assurance, and an insuppressible volubility uf as- 
 sertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with 
 then, or since. He was none of your hesitating, half story- 
 tellers (a most painful description of mortals) who go on 
 sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as they 
 see you can swallow at a time — the nibbling pickpockets of 
 your patience — but one who committed downright, daylight 
 depredatidhs upon his neighbour's faith. He did not stand 
 shivering upon the brink, but was a hearty, thorough-paced 
 liar, and plunged at once into the depths of your credulity. 
 I partly believe he made pretty sure of his company. Mot 
 many rich, not many wise, or learned, composed at that time 
 the common stowage of a Margate packet. We were. I am 
 afraid, a set of as unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies 
 give it a worse name) as Aldermanbury or "VYatling-street at 
 
 12
 
 196 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 that time of day could have supplied. There might be an 
 exception or two among us, but 1 scorn to make any invidious 
 distinctions among such a jolly, companionable ship's com- 
 pany as those were whom I sailed with. Something, too, 
 must be conceded to the genius loci. Had the confident 
 fellow told us half the legends on land which he favoured us 
 with on the other element, I flatter myself the good sense of 
 most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new 
 world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and 
 place disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel 
 whatsoever. Time has obliterated from my memory much of 
 his wild fablings ; and the rest would appear but dull, as writ- 
 ten, and to be read on shore. He had been aid-de-camp 
 (among other rare accidents and fortunes) to a Persian prince, 
 and at one blow had stricken off the head of the King of 
 Carimania on horseback. He, of course, married the prince's 
 daughter. I forget what unlucky turn in the politics of that 
 court, combining with the loss of his consort, was the reason 
 of his quitting Persia ; but, with the rapidity of a magician, 
 he transported himself, along with his hearers, back to Eng- 
 land, where we still found him in the confidence of great la- 
 dies. There was some story of a princess — Elizabeth, if I 
 remember — having intrusted to his care an extraordinary cas- 
 ket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion — but, as I 
 am not certain of the name or circumstance at this distance 
 of time, I must leave it to the royal daughters of England to 
 settle the honour among themselves in private. I cannot call 
 to mind half his pleasant wonders ; but I perfectly remember, 
 that in the course of his travels he had seen a phenix ; and 
 he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar error that there is 
 but one of that species at a time, assuring us that they were 
 not uncommon in some parts of Upper Egypt. Hitherto he 
 had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming fancies 
 had transported us beyond the " ignorant present." But when 
 (still hardying more and more in his triumphs over our sim- 
 plicity) he went on to aflirm that he had actually sailed 
 through the legs of the Colossus at Rhodes, it really became 
 necessary to make a stand. And heir I must do justice to 
 the good sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a youth, 
 that had hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, 
 who, from his recent reading, made bold to assure the gentle- 
 man that there must be some mistake, ;is " the Colossus in 
 question had been destroyed long since ;" to whose opinion, 
 delivered with all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to 
 concede thus much, that " the figure was indeed a little dam- 
 aged." This was the only opposition he met with, and it
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 107 
 
 did not at all seem to stagger him, for he proceeded with his 
 fables, -which the same youth appeared to swallow with still 
 more complacency than ever — confirmed, as it were, by the 
 extreme candour of that concession. With these prodigies 
 he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, 
 which one of our own company (having been the voyage be- 
 fore) immediately recognising, and pointing out to us, was 
 considered by us as no ordinary seaman. 
 
 All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a different 
 character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, 
 and very patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile ; 
 and, if he caught now and then some snatches of these wild 
 legends, it was by accident, and they seemed not to concern 
 him. The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. 
 He was as one, being with us, but not of us. He heard the 
 bell of dinner ring without stirring ; and whe? some of us 
 pulled out our private stores — our cold meat and our salads 
 — he produced none, and seemed to want none. Only a sol- 
 itary biscuit he had laid in ; provision for the one or two days 
 and nights to which these vessels then were oftentimes 
 obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer acquaintance 
 with him, which he seemed neither to court nor decline, we 
 learned that he was going to Margate, with the hope of being 
 admitted into the infirmary there for sea-bathing. His dis- 
 ease was a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over 
 him. He expressed great hopes of a cure ; and when we 
 asked him whether he had any friends where he was going, 
 he replied, " he had no friends. " 
 
 These pleasant, and some mournful passages with the first 
 sight of the sea, co-operating with youth, and a sense of holy- 
 days, and out-of-door adventure, to me that had been pent up 
 in populous cities for many months before — have left upon my 
 mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing 
 nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to 
 chew upon. 
 
 Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwel- 
 come comparisons) if I endeavour to account for the dissatis- 
 faction which I have heard so many persons confess to have 
 felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion) at the sight 
 of the sea for the first time? I think the reason usually given 
 — referring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying 
 our preconceptions of them — scarcely goes deep enough into 
 the question. Let the same person see a lion, an elephant, a 
 mountain, for the first time in his lite, and he shall perhaps 
 feel himself a little mortified. The things do not fill up that 
 space which the idea of them seemed to take up in his mind. 
 17*
 
 198 . ESSAYS OF EL1A. 
 
 But they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in 
 time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar impres- 
 sion : enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon familiarity. 
 But the sea remains a disappointment. Is it not, that in the 
 latter we had expected to behold, (absurdly, I grant, but, I am 
 afraid, by the law of imagination unavoidably,) not a definite 
 object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain compassable by 
 the eye, but all the sea at once, the commensurate antago- 
 nist of the earth ! I do not say we tell ourselves so 
 much, but the craving of the mind is to be satisfied with 
 nothing less. I will suppose the case of a young person of 
 fifteen (as I then was) knowing nothing of the sea but from 
 description. He comes to it for the first time — all that he has 
 been reading of it all his life, and that the most enthusiastic 
 part of life — all he has gathered from narratives of wandering 
 seamen ; what he has gained from true voyages, and what he 
 cherishes as credulously from romance and poetry ; crowding 
 their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation. 
 He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down unto 
 it ; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes , 
 of its receiving the mighty Plate, or Orellana, into ks bosom, 
 without disturbance or sense of augmentation ; of Biscay 
 swells, and the mariner 
 
 " For many a day, and many a dreadful night, 
 Incessant labouring round the stormy cape ;" 
 
 of fatal rocks, and the " still-vexed Bermoothes ;" of great whirl- 
 pools, and the waterspout ; of sunken ships, and sumless 
 treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths ; of fishes 
 and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible on earth — 
 
 " Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal, 
 
 Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral ;" 
 
 of naked savages and Juan Fernandez ; of pearls and shells ; 
 of coral beds, and of enchanted isles ; of mermaids' grots — 
 
 I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown 
 all these wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a 
 mighty faculty, which haunts him with confused hints and 
 shadows of all these; and when the actual object opens first 
 upon him, seen (in tame weather, too, most likely) from our 
 unroinantic coasts — a speck, a slip of seawater, as it shows to 
 him — what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and even 
 diminutive entertainment? Or if In- has come tit it from the 
 mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening? 
 and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery 
 horizon about him, nothing comparable to the vast o'er-curtain- 
 ing sky, his familiar object, seen daily without dread or amaze-
 
 fiBSAYS OF EL1A. 199 
 
 ment? Who, in similar circumstances, has not been tempted 
 to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir — 
 
 " Is this the mighty ocean I is this all ?" 
 
 I love town or country ; but this detestable Cinque Port is 
 neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrustingout their starved 
 foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritions 
 rocks ; which the amateur calls " verdure to the edge of the 
 sea." I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. 
 I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant fur fresh streams and 
 inland murmurs. I cannot stand all day on the naked beach, 
 watching the capricious hues of the sea, shifting like the 
 colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the 
 windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into the 
 interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be 
 on it, over it, across it. It binds me in with chains, as of iron. 
 My thoughts are abroad. I should not so feel in Staffordshire. 
 There is no home for me here. There is no sense of home at 
 Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, a heterogeneous as- 
 semblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the 
 town, and misses that coquet with the ocean. If it were what it 
 was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a 
 fair honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something — with 
 a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered about, artless as its 
 cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were 
 something. I could abide to dwell with Meschek; to assort 
 with fisher-swains and smugglers. There are, or I dream 
 there are, many of this latter occupation here. Their faces 
 become the place. I like a smuggler. He is the only honest 
 thief. He robs nothing but the revenue — an abstraction I never 
 greatly cared about. 1 could go out with them in their mackerel 
 boats, or about their ostensible business, with some satisfac- 
 tion. I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, 
 who from day to day pace along the beach, in endless progress 
 and recurrence, to watch their illicit countrymen — townsfolk or 
 brethren perchance — whistling to the sheathing and unsheath- 
 ing of their cutlasses, (their only solace,) who under the mild 
 name of preventive service keep up a legitimated civil war- 
 fare in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their 
 detestation of run hollands, and zeal for old England. But it 
 is the visitants from town, that come here to sai/ that, they 
 have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond 
 perch or a dace might be supposed to have, that me my aver- 
 sion. I feel like a foolish dace in these regions, and have as 
 little toleration for myself here as for them. What can they 
 want here ? If they had a true relish of the ocean, why have
 
 200 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 tliey brought all this land-luggage with them ? or why pitcli 
 their civilized tents in the desert? What mean these scanty 
 book-rooms — marine libraries, as they entitle them — if the 
 sea were, as they would have us believe, a book " to read 
 strange matter in?'' what are their foolish concert-rooms, if 
 they come, as they would fain be thought to do, to listen to 
 the music of the waves 1 All is false and hollow pretension. 
 They come because it is the fashion, and to spoil the nature 
 of the place. They are mostly, as I have said, stockbrokers ; 
 but I have watched the better sort of them — now and then, an 
 honest citizen, (of the old stamp,) in the simplicity of his 
 heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters to taste the 
 sea-breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is 
 easy to see it in their countenance. A day or two they go wan- 
 dering on the shingles, picking up cockle-shells, and thinking 
 them great things ; but, in a poor week, imagination slackens: 
 they begin to discover that cockles produce no pearls, and 
 then — oh then ! — if I could interpret for the pretty creatures 
 (I know they have not the courage to confess it themselves) 
 how gladly would they exchange their seaside rambles for a 
 Sunday walk on the greensward of their accustomed Twick- 
 enham meadows ! 
 
 I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who 
 think they truely love the sea, with its wild usages, what 
 would their feelings be, if some of the unsophisticated abori- 
 gines of this place, encouraged by their courteous questionings 
 here, should venture, on the faith of such assured sympathy 
 between them, to return the visit, and come up to see — Lon- 
 don. I must imagine them with their fishing-tackle on their 
 back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a sensation 
 would it cause in Lothbury ? What vehement laughter would 
 it not excite among 
 
 " The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard-street." 
 
 I am sure that no town-bred or inland-born subjects can 
 feel their true and natural nourishment at these sea-places. 
 Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vaga- 
 bonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam seems to nourish 
 a spleen. 1 am not half so good-natured as by the milder 
 waters of my natural river. 1 would exchange these sea-gulls 
 for swans, and scud a swallow for ever about the banks of 
 Thamesis.
 
 ZSSaYS of elia. 201 
 
 THE CONVALESCE VI . 
 
 A pretty severe fit of indisposition which, under the name 
 of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks 
 past, and is but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an in- 
 capacity of reflecting upon any topic foreign to itself. Ex- 
 pect no r_2althy conclusions from me this month, reader ; 1 
 can oiler 7011 only sick men's dreams. 
 
 And tr-.-ly the whole state of sickness is such ; for what 
 else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie abed, and 
 draw daylight curtains about him ; and, shutting out the sun, 
 to induce a total oblivion of all the works which are going on 
 under it ? To become insensible to all the operations of life, 
 except the beatings of one feeble pulse ? 
 
 If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the pa- 
 tient lords it there ; what caprices he acts without control ! 
 how kinglike he sways his pillow — tumbling, and tossing, 
 and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and 
 moulding it to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing 
 temples. 
 
 He changes aides oftener than a politician. Now he lies 
 full length, then half length, obliquely, transversely, head and 
 feel quite across the bed ; and none accuses him of tergiver- 
 sation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are 
 his Mare Clausum. 
 
 How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to 
 himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfish- 
 ness is inculcated upon him as bis only duly. 'Tis the two 
 tables of the law to lum. He has nothing to think of but how 
 lo get well. What passes out of doors, or within them, so he 
 hear not the jarring of them, affects him not. 
 
 A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of 
 a lawsuit, which was to be the making or the marring of his 
 dearest friend. He was to be seen trudging about upon this 
 man's errand to fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this 
 witness, refreshing that solicitor. The cause was to come 
 on yesterday. He is absolutely as indifferent to the decision, 
 as if it were a question to be tried at Peking. Peradventun , 
 from some whispering going on about the house, not intended 
 for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him understand 
 that things went cross-grained in the court yesterday, and his 
 friend is ruined. But the word ••friend" and the word "ruin"
 
 202 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think 
 of anything but how to get better. 
 
 What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorb- 
 ing consideration ! 
 
 He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is wrapped 
 in the callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, 
 like some curious vintage, under trusly lock and key, for his 
 own use only. 
 
 He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; 
 he yearneth over himself; his bowels are even melted within 
 him, to think what he suffers ; he is not ashamed to weep 
 over himself. 
 
 He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself; 
 studying little stratagems and artificial alleviations. 
 
 He makes the most of himself ; dividing himself, by an al- 
 lowable fiction, into as many distinct individuals as he hath 
 sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates — as 
 of a thing apart from him — upon his poor aching head, and 
 that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past 
 night like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to be re- 
 moved without opening the very scull, as it seemed, to take it 
 thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated fingers. 
 He compassionates himself all over ; and his bed is a very 
 discipline of humanity and tender heart. 
 
 He is his own sympathizer ; and instinctively feels that 
 none can so well perforin that office for him. He cares for 
 tew spectators to his tragedy. Only that punctual face of the 
 old nurse pleases him, that announces his broths and his cor- 
 dials. He likes it because it is so unmoved, and because he 
 can pour forth his feverish ejaculations before it as unreserv- 
 edly as to his bedpost. 
 
 To the world's business he is dead. He understands not 
 what the callings and occupations of mortals are ; only he has 
 a glimmering conceit of some such thing, when the doctor 
 makes his daily call : and even in the lines of that busy face 
 he reads no multiplicity of patients, but solely conceives of 
 himself as the sick man. To what other uneasy couch the 
 good man is hastening, when he slips out of his chamber, 
 folding up his thin douceur so carefully for fear of rustling — 
 is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He thinks 
 only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the 
 same hour to-morrow. 
 
 Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, 
 indicative of life going on within the house, sooths him, 
 while he knows not distinctly what it is. lie is not to know 
 anything, not to think of anything. Servants gliding up or
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 203 
 
 down the distant staircase, treading as upon velvet, gently 
 keep his ear awake, so long as he troubles not himself further 
 than with some feeble ^ucss at their errands. Exacter knowl- 
 edge would be a burden to him : he can just endure the pres- 
 sure of conjecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke 
 of the milmed knocker, and closes it again without asking, 
 M Who was it?" He is flattered by a general notion that In- 
 quiries are making after him. but he cares not to know the 
 name of the inquirer. In the general stillness and awful 
 hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his sovereignty. 
 
 To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare 
 the silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, 
 with which he is served — with the careless demeanour, the 
 unceremonious goings in and out (slapping of doors, or leav- 
 ing them open) of the very same attendants, when he is get- 
 ting a little better — and you will confess, that from the bed of 
 sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the elbow-chair of 
 convalescence, is a fall from dignity, amounting to a deposi- 
 tion. 
 
 How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stat- 
 ure ! where is now the space which he occupied so lately, 
 in his own, in the family's eye ? 
 
 The scene of his regalities, his sick-room, which was his 
 presence-chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fan- 
 cies—how is it reduced to a common bedroom ! The trim- 
 ness of the very bed has something petty and unmeaning about 
 it. It is made every day. How unlike to that wavy, many-fur- 
 rowed, oceanic surface which it presented so short a time 
 since, when to make it was a service not to be thought of at 
 oftener than three or four day revolutions, when the patient was 
 with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to 
 submit to the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and de- 
 cencies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted 
 into it again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder 
 it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was an his- 
 torical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, 
 some seeking for a little ease ; and the shrunken skin scarce 
 told a truer story than the crumpled coverlet. 
 
 Hushed are those mysterious sighs — those groans — so much 
 more awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast 
 hidden suffering they proceeded* The Lernean pangs are 
 quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved-; and PhiloC' 
 tetes is become an ordinary personage. 
 
 Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness 
 survives in the still lingering visitations of the medical at- 
 tendant. But how is he too changed with everything else .
 
 204 ESSAYS OF ELiA. 
 
 Can this be he — this man of news — of chat-— of anecdote — 
 of everything but physic — can this be he, who so lately came 
 between the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn 
 embassy from Nature, erecting herself into a high mediating 
 party? Pshaw 1 'tis some old woman. 
 
 Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous — the 
 spell that hushed the household — the desert-like stillness 
 felt throughout its inmost chambers — the mute attendance — 
 the inquiry by looks — the still softer delicacies of self-atten- 
 tion — the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon 
 itself — world-thoughts excluded — the man a world unto him- 
 self — his own theatre — 
 
 " What a speck is he dwindled into !" 
 
 In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of 
 sickness, yet far enough from the terra firma of established 
 health, your note, dear editor, reached me, requesting— an 
 article. In Articulo Mortis, thought I ; but it is something hard 
 — and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me. The 
 summons, unseasonable as it appeared, seemed to link me on 
 again to the petty businesses of life, which I had lost sight 
 of; a gentle call to activity, however trivial; a wholesome 
 weaning from that preposterous dream of self-absorption — the 
 puffy state of sickness — in which I confess to have lain so 
 long, insensible to the magazines and monarchies of the 
 world alike ; to its laws, and to its literature. The hypo- 
 chondriac flatus is subsiding ; the acres which in imagina- 
 tion I had spread over — for the sick man swells in the sole 
 contemplation of his single sufferings, till he becomes a Ti- 
 tyus to himself — are wasting to a span ; and for the giant of 
 self-importance which I was so lately, you have me once 
 again in my natural pretensions — the lean and meager figure 
 of your insignificant essayist. 
 
 SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 
 
 So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or 
 genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary al- 
 liance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will 
 ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for 
 the mind to conceive of a mad Shak.speare. The greatness 
 of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be under-
 
 ESSAYS OF EUA. 205 
 
 stood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the 
 faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or ex- 
 cess of any one of them. " So strong a wit," says Cowley, 
 speaking of a poetical friend, 
 
 " Dili Nature to lnrn U ■■ 
 
 As all things but his judgment oven 
 
 His judgment like (be heavenlj inoim did show, 
 
 Tempering that mighty sea bel<>w." 
 
 The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the rap- 
 tures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation to which 
 they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the 
 spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a 
 state, of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet 
 dreams being awake, lie is not possessed bv his subject, 
 but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks 
 familiar as m his native paths. lie ascends the empyrean 
 heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl 
 without dismay ; he wins his flight without self-loss through 
 realms of chaos " and old night." Or if, abandoning himself 
 to that severer chaos of a " human mind untuned,"' he is con- 
 tent awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort 
 of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness nor tins 
 misanthropy so unchecked but that — never letting the reins 
 of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so — he has 
 his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good 
 servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or wit h the honest 
 steward Flavins recommending kindlier resolutions. Where 
 he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be found the 
 truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature if he summon 
 possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her 
 consistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign direct- 
 ress, even when he appears most to betray and desert her. 
 His ideal tribes submit to policy ; his very monsters are tamed 
 to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded bv Pro- 
 teus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh 
 and blood, till they wonder at themselves, like Indian island- 
 ers forced to submit to European vesture. Caliban, the 
 Witches, are as true to the laws of their own nature (ours 
 with a difference) as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein 
 the great and the little wits are difl'erenced ; that if the latter 
 wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they 
 lose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms are 
 lawless ; their visions nightmares. They do not en ate, 
 which implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations 
 are not active — for to be active is to call something into act 
 and form — but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the 
 18
 
 206 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 supernatural, or something superadded to what we know of 
 nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this 
 were all, and that these mental hallucinations were discover- 
 able only in the treatment of subjects out of nature, or trans- 
 cending it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned 
 if it. ran riot, and a little wantonized : but even in the de- 
 scribing of real and every-day life, that which is before their 
 eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature 
 — show more of that inconsequence, which has a natural al- 
 liance with phrensy — than a great genius in his " maddest 
 fits," as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to any 
 one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels 
 — as they existed some twenty or thirty years back--those 
 scanty intellectual viands of the whole female reading public, 
 till a happier genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutri- 
 tions phantoms — whether he has not found his brain more 
 " betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and 
 where more confounded, among the improbable events, the 
 incoherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no-char- 
 acters, of some third-rate love intrigue — where the persons 
 shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene 
 only alternate between Bath and Bond-street — a more bewil- 
 dering dreaminess induced upon him than he has felt wan- 
 dering" over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the produc- 
 tions we refer to, nothing but. names and places is familiar ; 
 the persons are neither of this world nor of any other con- 
 ceivable one; an endless string of activities without purpose, 
 of purposes destitute of motive : we meet phantoms in our 
 known walks ; fantasques only christened. In the poet we 
 have names which announce fiction ; and we have absolutely 
 no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen 
 prate not of their " whereabout." But in their inner nature, 
 and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home and 
 upon acquainted ground. The one turns life into a dream ; 
 the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every- 
 day occurrences. By what subtle art of tracing" the mental 
 processes it is effected, we are not philosophers enough to ex- 
 plain ; lint in that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, 
 in which the money-god appears first in the lowest form cf 
 a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of 
 all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition, 
 before whom all the world kneels for favours — with the Hes- 
 perian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his 
 hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream — that 
 we should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of 
 treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 207 
 
 and yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the 
 most rambling dream, and our judgment yet all the lime 
 awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy — is a 
 proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in bis 
 widest seeming-aberrations. 
 
 It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of 
 the mind's conceptions in sleep ; it is, in some sort — but what 
 a copy ! Let the most romantic of us, thai lias been enter- 
 tained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnifi- 
 cent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his wa- 
 king judgment. That which appeared so shifting and yet so 
 coherent while that faculty was passive, when it comes under 
 cool examination shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, 
 that we are ashamed to have been so deluded ; and to have 
 taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the tran- 
 sitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most 
 extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them. 
 
 CAPTAIN JACKSON. 
 
 Among the deaths in our obituary for this month, I observe 
 with concern " At his cottage on the Bath road, Captain Jack- 
 son." The name and attribution are common enough; but a 
 feeling like reproach persuades me that this could have been 
 no other, in fact, than my dear old friend, who some five-aml- 
 tvventy years ago rented a tenement, which he was pleased to 
 dignify with the appellation here used, about a mile from 
 Westboum Crcen. Alack, how good men, and the good turns 
 they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled but by the 
 surprise of some such sad memento as that which now lies 
 before us ! 
 
 He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with a wife 
 and two grown-up daughters, whom he maintained with the 
 port and notions of gentlewomen upon that slender professional 
 allowance. Comely girls they were too. 
 
 And was I in danger of forgetting this man? — his cheerful 
 suppers — the noble tone of hospitality, when firt! vou set 
 your foot in the cottage — the anxious ministerings about you, 
 where little or nothing (Cod knows) was to be ministered. 
 Althea's horn in a poor platter — the power of self enchant- 
 ment, by which, in his magnificent wishes to entertain you, 
 he multiplied his means to bounties.
 
 208 ESSAYS OF EUA. 
 
 You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare 
 scrag — cold savings from the foregone meal — remnant hardly 
 sufficient to send a mendicant from the door contented. But 
 in the copious will — the revelling imagination of your host — 
 the " mind, the mind, Master Shallow," whole beeves were 
 spread before you — hecatombs — no end appeared to the pro- 
 fusion. 
 
 It was the widow's cruise — the loaves and fishes ; carving 
 could not lessen nor helping diminish it — the stamina were 
 left — the elemental bone still flourished, divested of its acci- 
 dents. 
 
 " Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the open- 
 handed creature exclaim ; "while we have, let us not want," 
 "here is plenty left ;" "want for nothing" — with many more 
 such hospitable sayings, the spurs of appetite, and old con- 
 comitants of smoking boards and feast-oppressed chargers. 
 Then sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his 
 wife's plate, or the daughter's, he would convey the remanent 
 rind into his own, with a merry quirk of " the nearer the bone," 
 &c, and declaring that he universally preferred the outside. 
 For we had our table distinctions, you are to know, and some 
 of us in a manner sat above the salt. None but his guest or 
 guests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at night, the frag- 
 ments were vere hospitibus sacra. But of one thing or another 
 there was always enough, and leavings : only he would some- 
 times finish the remainder crust, to show that he wished no 
 savings. 
 
 Wine we had none ; nor, except on very rare occasions, 
 spirits ; but the sensation of wine was there. Some thin 
 kind of ale I remember — " British beverage," he would say. 
 " Push about, my boys ;" " Drink to your sweethearts, girls." 
 At every meager draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All 
 the forms of good liquor were there, with none of the effects 
 wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear a capacious 
 bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of gen- 
 erous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table 
 corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence ; tipsy 
 upon words ; and reeled under the potency of his unperform- 
 ing bacchanalian encouragements. 
 
 We had our songs — " Why, soldiers, why," and the " British 
 Grenadiers" — in which last we were; all obliged to bear chorus. 
 Both the daughters sang. Their proficiency was a nightly 
 theme — the masters he had given them — the " no-expense" 
 which he spared to accomplish theft in a science "so neces- 
 sary to young women." But then — they could not sing " with- 
 out the instrument."
 
 EaSYAS OF ELI.V. 209 
 
 Sacred, and, by mc, never to be violated, secrets of poverty ! 
 Should I disclose your honest anus at grandeur, your make- 
 shift efforts of magni licence '/ Sleep, sh-. p, with all thy broken 
 kevs, if one of the bunch be extant ; thrummed by a thousand 
 ancestral thumbs ; dear, (Stocked spinet ef dearer Louisa ! 
 Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin accompanier of 
 her thinner warble ! A veil be spread over the dear delighted 
 face of the well-deluded father, who now haply listening to 
 cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when slu 
 awakened thy lime-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings 
 of that slender image of a voice. 
 
 We were not without our literary talk either. It did not 
 extend far, but as far as it went it was good. It was bottomed 
 well ; had good grounds to go upon. In the cottage was a 
 room, which tradition authenticated to have been the same in 
 which Glover, in his occasional retirements, had penned the 
 greater part of his Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly 
 quoted, though none of the present inmates, that I could dis- 
 cover, appeared ever to have met with the poem in question. 
 But that was no matter. Glover had written there, and the 
 anecdote was pressed into the account of the family impor- 
 tance. It diffused a learned air through the apartment, the 
 little side casement of which, (the poet's study window,) open- 
 ing upon a superb view as far as the pretty spire of Harrow, 
 over domains and patrimonial acres, not a rood nor square 
 yard whereof our host could call his own, yet gave occasion 
 to an immoderate expansion of — vanity shall I call it I — in his 
 bosom, as he showed them in a glowing summer evening. It 
 was all his, he took it all in, and communicated rich portions 
 of it to his guests. It was a part of his largess, his hospital- 
 ity ; it was going over his grounds ; he was lord for the time 
 of showing them, and you the implicit lookers-up to his mag- 
 nificence. 
 
 He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes — you 
 had no time to detect his fallacies. He would say ib Hand me 
 the Sliver sugar-tongs ;" and before you could discover it was 
 a single spoon, and that pluh d, he would disturb and captivate 
 your imagination by a misnomer of "the urn"' for a teakettle ; 
 or by calling a homely bench a sofa. Rich men direct you 
 to their furniture, poor ones divert you from it ; he neither did 
 one nor the other, but by simply assuming that everything was 
 handsome about him, you were positively at a demur what you 
 did, or did not see, at the cottage. With nothing to live on, 
 he seemed to live on everything. He had a stock of wealth 
 in his mind ; not that which is properly termed content, for 
 18*
 
 210 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 in truth, he was not to be contained at all, but overflowed all 
 bounds by the force of a magnificent self-delusion. 
 
 Enthusiasm is catching ; and even his wife, a sober native 
 of North Britain, who generally saw things more as they were, 
 was not proof against the continual collision of his credulity. 
 Her daughters were rational and discreet young women ; in 
 the main, perhaps, not insensible to their true circumstances. 
 I have „seen them assume a thoughtful air at times. But 
 such was the preponderating opulence of his fancy, that I am 
 persuaded, not for any half hour together, did they ever look 
 their own prospects fairly in the face. There was no resist- 
 ing the vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination 
 conjured up handsome settlements before their eyes, which 
 kept them up in the eye of the world too, and seem at last to 
 have realized themselves ; for they both have married since, 
 I am told, more than respectably. 
 
 It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some sub- 
 jects, or I should wish to convey some notion of the manner 
 in which the pleasant creature described the circumstances 
 of his own wedding-day. I faintly remember something of a 
 chaise and four, in which he made his entry into Glasgow 
 on that morning to fetch the bride home, or carry her thither, 
 I forget which. It so completely made out the stanza of the 
 old ballad : — 
 
 " When we came down through Glasgow town, 
 We were a comely sight to see ; 
 My love was clad in black velvet, 
 And I myself in cramasie." 
 
 I suppose it was the only occasion upon which his own 
 actual splendour at all corresponded with the world's notions 
 on that subject. In homely cart, or travelling caravan, by 
 whatever humble vehicle they chanced to be transported in 
 less prosperous days, the ride through Glasgow came back 
 upon his fancy, not as a humiliating contrast, but as a fair oc- 
 casion for reverting to that one day's state. It seemed an 
 " equipage etern" from which no power of fate or fortune, 
 once mounted, had power thereafter to dislodge him. 
 
 There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indi- 
 gent circumstances. To bully and swagger away the sense 
 of them before strangers may not be always discommendable. 
 Tibbs and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our 
 admiration than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat 
 upon himself; to play the Bobadil at home ; and, steeped in 
 poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all the while chin- 
 ilccj) in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy, and a 
 mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend 
 Captain Jackson.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 211 
 
 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 
 
 " Sera tamen respexit 
 Libertas." 
 
 Virgil. 
 
 " A clerk I was in London gay." 
 
 O'Keefe. 
 
 If peradventure, reader, it has been thy lot to waste the 
 golden years of thy life — thy shining youth — in the irksome 
 confinement of an office ; to have thy prison days prolonged 
 through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, with- 
 out hope of release or respite ; to have lived to forget that 
 there are such things as holydays, or to remember them but as 
 the prerogatives of childhood ; then, and then only, will you 
 be able to appreciate my deliverance. 
 
 It is now six-and-thirty years since I took my seat at the 
 desk in Mincing-lane. Melancholy was the transition at four- 
 teen from the abundant playtime, and the frequently interve- 
 ning vacations of school-days, to the eight, nine, and some- 
 times ten hours' a day attendance at a counting-house. But 
 time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became 
 content — doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages. 
 
 It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, ad- 
 mirable as the institution of them is for purposes of worship, 
 are for that very reason the very worst adapted for days of un- 
 bending and recreation. In particular, there is a gloom for 
 me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss 
 the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-sing- 
 ers- — the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those 
 eternal bells depress me. The closed shops repel me. 
 Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of 
 knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of 
 tradesmen, which make a week-day saunter through the less 
 busy parts of the metropolis so delightful — are shut out. No 
 book-stalls deliriously to idle over — no busy faces to recre- 
 ate the idle man who contemplates them ever passing bv — 
 the very face of business a charm by contrast to his tempo- 
 rary relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen but unhappy 
 countenances — or half happy at best — of emancipated 'pfren- 
 tices and little tradesfolk's, with here and there a servant-maid 
 that has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, with
 
 212 ESSAYS OF EH A. 
 
 the habit has lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free hour ; 
 and livelily expressing the hollowness of a day's pleasuring. 
 The very strollers in the fields on that day look anything but 
 comfortable. 
 
 But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at 
 Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air my- 
 self in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a 
 great indulgence ; and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, 
 alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance 
 tolerable. But when the week came round, did the glitter- 
 ing phantom of the distance keep touch with me 1 or rather 
 was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless 
 pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how 
 to make the most of them ? Where was the quiet, where the 
 promised rest ? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. 
 I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious 
 weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would 
 come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of 
 an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. With- 
 out it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained my 
 thraldom. 
 
 Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever 
 been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of inca- 
 pacity for business. This, during my latter years, had increased 
 to such a degree, that it was visible in all the lines of my coun- 
 tenance. My health and my good spirits flagged. I had per- 
 petually a dread of some crisis, to which I should be found 
 unequal. Besides my daylight servitude, I served over again 
 all night in my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imagi- 
 nary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like. I 
 was fifty years of age, and no prospect of emancipation pre- 
 sented itself. I had grown to my desk, as it were ; and the 
 wood had entered into my soul. 
 
 My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me upon 
 the trouble legible in my countenance ; but I did not know that 
 it had raised the suspicions of any of my employers, when on 
 the 5th of last month, a day ever to be remembered by me, 
 
 L , the junior partner in the firm, calling me on one side, 
 
 directly taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly inquired the 
 cause of them. So taxed, I honestly made confession of my 
 infirmity, and added that I was afraid I should eventually be 
 obliged to resign his service. He spoke some words of 
 course to hearten me, and there the matter rested. A whole 
 week I remained labouring under the impression that I had 
 acted imprudently in my disclosure ; that I had foolishly 
 given a handle against myself, and had been anticipating my
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 213 
 
 own dismissal. A week passed in this manner, the most anx- 
 ious one, I verity believe, in my whole life, when, on the 
 evening of the 12th of April, just as I was about quitting my 
 desk to go home, (it might be about eight o'clock.) 1 received 
 an awful summons to attend the presence of the whole as- 
 sembled firm in the formidable back parlour. I thought, Now 
 my time is surely come, 1 have done for myself, I am going 
 
 to be told that they have no longer occasion for me. L , 
 
 I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was a little 
 
 relief to mc, when, to my utter astonishment, H , the eldest 
 
 partner, began a formal harangue to me on the length of my 
 services, my very meritorious conduct during the whole of 
 the time, (the deuse, thought I, how did he find out that? I 
 protest I never had the confidence to think as much.) lie 
 went on to descant on the expediency of retiring at a certain 
 time of life, (how my heart panted !) and asking me a few 
 questions as to the amount of my own property, of which 
 1 have a little, ended with a proposal, to which his three part- 
 ners nodded a grave assent, that I should accept from the 
 house, which 1 had served so well, a pension for life to the 
 amount of two thirds of my accustomed salary — a magnifi- 
 cent offer ! I do not know what I answered between surprise 
 and gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted their pro- 
 posal, and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave 
 their service. I stammered out a bow, and at just ten min- 
 utes after eight I went home — for ever. This noble benefit — 
 gratitude forbids me to conceal their names — I owe to the 
 kindness of the most munificent firm in the world — the house 
 of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, and Lacy. 
 
 Esto perpetua .' 
 
 For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I 
 could only apprehend my felicity ; I was too confused to taste 
 it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy, and 
 knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner 
 in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' con- 
 finement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was 
 like passing out of time into eternity — for it was a sort of 
 eternity for a man to have his time all to himself. It seemed 
 to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever 
 manage. From a poor man, poor in time, I was suddenly 
 lifted up into a vast revenue ; I could see no end of my pos- 
 sessions ; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to man- 
 age my estates in time for me. And here let me caution 
 persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without 
 weighing their own resources, to forego their customary em-
 
 214 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 ployment all at once, for there may be danger in it. I feel it 
 by myself, but I know that my resources are sufficient; and 
 now that, those first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a 
 quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my condition. I am 
 in no hurry. Having all holydays, I am as though I had 
 none. If time hung heavy upon me, I could walk it away ; 
 but I do not walk all day long, as I used to do in those old 
 transient holydays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of 
 them. If time were troublesome, I could read it away, but I 
 do not read in that violent measure with which, having no 
 time my own but candlelight time, I used to weary out my 
 head and eyesight in by-gone winters. I walk, read, or scrib- 
 ble (as now) just when the lit seizes me. I no longer hunt 
 after pleasure ; I let it come to me. I am like the man 
 
 "That's bom, and has his years come to him, 
 In some green desert." 
 
 " Years !" you will say ; " what is this superannuated sim- 
 pleton calculating upon 1 He has already told us he is past 
 fifty." 
 
 I have, indeed, lived nominally fifty years ; but deduct 
 out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, 
 and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fel- 
 low. For that is the only true time, which a man can 
 properly call his own, that which he has all to himself ; the 
 rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other 
 people's time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long 
 or short, is at least multiplied for me threefold. My ten next 
 years, if 1 stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty. 
 'Tis a fair rule-of-three sum. 
 
 Among the strange fantasies which beset me at the com- 
 mencement of my freedom, and of which all traces are not yet 
 gone, one was, that a vast tract of time had intervened since 
 I quitted the counting-house. I could not conceive of it as 
 an affair of yesterday. The partners, and the clerks with 
 whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours in each 
 day of the year, been closely associated — being suddenly re- 
 moved from them — they seemed as dead to me. There is a 
 line passage which may serve to illustrate this fancy in a 
 tragedy by Sir Robert Howard, speaking of a friend's death : — 
 
 " 'Twas but, just now lie went away ; 
 I have not since had time to shed a tear ; 
 And yet the distance does the same appear 
 As if he had been a thousand years from me. 
 Time takes no measure in eternity " 
 
 To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have been fain to go
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 215 
 
 among them once or twice since ; to visit my old desk-fellows 
 — my co-brethren of the quill— that I had left below in the 
 state militant. Not all the kindness with winch liny received 
 me could quite restore tome that pleasant familiarity which I 
 had heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked some of our 
 old jokes, but methought they weiuolfhut faintly. My old d< >k, 
 the peg where I hung my hat, were appropriated to another. 
 I knew it must be, but 1 could not take it kindly. D — 1 take 
 me, if I did not feel some remorse — beast, if 1 had not — at 
 quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners of my toils for 
 six-aiid-thirty years, that smoothed for me with their jokes 
 and conundrums the ruggedness of my professional road. 
 Had it been so rugged, then, after all ? or was 1 a coward sim- 
 ply ? Well, it is too late to repent ; and I also know that 
 these suggestions are a common fallacy of the mind on such 
 occasions. But my heart smote me. I had violently broken 
 the bands between us. It was at least not courteous. I shall 
 be some time before 1 get quite reconciled to the separation. 
 Farewell, old cronies, yet not for long, for again and again I 
 will come among ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell, 
 
 Ch , dry, sarcastic, and friendly! Do , mild, slow to 
 
 move, and gentlemanly ! PI , officious to do and to vol- 
 unteer good services ! — and thou, thou dreary pile, lit man- 
 sion for a Gresham or a Whittington of old, stately house of 
 merchants ; with thy labyrinthine passages, and light-exclu- 
 ding, pent-up offices, where candles for half the year supplied 
 the place of the sun's light ; unhealthy contributor to my 
 weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell ! In thee remain, 
 and not in the obscure collection of some wandering booksel- 
 ler, my " works !" There let them rest, as I do from my la- 
 bours, piled on thy massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than 
 ever Aquinas left, and full as useful ! My mantle I bequeath 
 among ye. 
 
 A fortnight has passed since the date of mv first communi- 
 cation. At that period 1 was approaching to tranquillity, but 
 had not reached it. I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was 
 comparative only. Something of the fust flutter was left ; an 
 unsettling sense of novelty ; the dazzle to weak eyes of un- 
 accustomed light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if 
 they had been some necessary part of mv apparel. I was a 
 poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline suddenly, by 
 some revolution, returned upon the world. I am now as if I 
 had never Been other than mv own master. It is natural to 
 me to go where I please, to do what I please. I find myself 
 at eleven o'clock in the day in Bond-street, and it seems to 
 me that I have been sauntering there at that very hour for
 
 216 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a book-stall. Me- 
 thinks I have been thirty years a collector. There is nothing 
 strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine picture in a 
 morning. Was it ever otherwise ? What is become of Fish- 
 street Hill? Where is Fenchurch-street ? Stones of old 
 Mincing-lane which I have worn with my daily pilgrim- 
 age for six-and-thirty years, to the footsteps of what toil-worn 
 clerk are your everlasting flints now vocal ? I indent the 
 gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is 'change time, and I am strangely 
 among the Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole when I ven- 
 tured to compare the change in my condition to a passing into an- 
 other world. Time stands still in a manner to me. I have lost 
 all distinction of season. I do not know the day of the week, 
 or of the month. Each day used to be individually felt by me 
 in its reference to the foreign post-days ; in its distance from, 
 or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday fe-el- 
 ings, my Saturday night's sensations. The genius of each day 
 was upon me distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my 
 appetite, spirits, &c. The phantom of the next day, with the 
 dreary five to follow, sat as a load upon my poor Sabbath 
 recreations. What charm has washed that Ethiop white ? 
 What is gone of black Monday? All days are the same. 
 Sunday itself — that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too 
 often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness and over- 
 care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it — is melted 
 down into a week-day. I can spare to go to church now, 
 without grudging the huge cantle which it used to seem to cut 
 out of the holyday. I have time for everything. I can visit 
 a sick friend. I can interrupt the man of much occupation 
 when he is busiest. I can insult over him with an invitation 
 to take a day's pleasure with me to Windsor this fine May 
 morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges 
 whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; 
 like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round — 
 and what is it all for? A man can never have too much time 
 to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would 
 christen him Nothing-to-do ; he should do nothing. Man, 1 
 verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is opera- 
 tive. I am altogether for the life contemplative. Will no 
 kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed cot- 
 ton-mills? Take me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl 
 it down 
 
 " As low as to the fiends.* 
 
 I am no longer ******, clerk to the firm of, &c. I am 
 Retired Leisure I am to be met with in trim gardens. I
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 217 
 
 nm already come to be known by my vacant face and careless 
 gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace, nor with any settled 
 purpose. I walk about ; not to and from. They tell me a 
 certain cum dignitatc air, that has been buried so long with my 
 other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my person. I 
 grow into gentility perceptibly. Winn I take up a newspaper, 
 it is to read the state of tbe opera. Opus oprratum est. I 
 have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked 
 task-work, and have the rest of the day to myself. 
 
 THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 
 
 It is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury and 
 Sir William Temple are models of the genteel style in wri- 
 ting. We should prefer saying — of the lordly and the gen- 
 tlemanly. Notbing can be more unlike than the inflated fini- 
 cle rhapsodies of Shaftesbury and the plain natural chitchat 
 of Temple. The man of rank is discernible in both writers; 
 but in the one it is only insinuated gracefully, in the other it 
 stands out offensively. The peer seems to have written with 
 his coronet on, and his earl's mantle before him ; the com- 
 moner in his elbow-chair and Undress. What can be more 
 pleasant than the way in which the retired statesman peeps 
 out in the essays, penned by the latter in his delightful retreat 
 atShene? They scent of Nimcguen and the Hague. Scarce 
 an authority is quoted under an ambassador. Don Francisco 
 de Melo, a " Portugal Envoy in England," tells him it was 
 frequent in his country for men, spent with age or other de- 
 cays, so as they could not hope for above a year or two of 
 life, to ship themselves away in a Brazil fleet, and after their 
 arrival there to go on a great length, sometimes of twenty or 
 thirty years, or more, by the force of that vigour they recov- 
 ered with that remove. "Whether such an effect (Temple 
 beautifully adds) might grow from the air, or the fruits of that 
 climate, or by approaching nearer the sun, which is the foun- 
 tain of light and heat, when their natural heat was so far de- 
 eived ; or whether the piecing out of an old man's life 
 wire worth the pains; I cannot tell: perhaps the play is not 
 wortli the candle." Monsieur Pompone, " French Ambassa- 
 dor in his (Sir William's) time at the Hague," certifies him, 
 that in his life he had never heard of any man in France that 
 arrived at a hundred years of age ; a limitation of life which 
 19 K
 
 218 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 the old gentleman imputes to the excellence of their climate, 
 giving them such a liveliness of temper and humour, as dis- 
 poses them to more pleasures of all kinds than in other coun- 
 tries ; and moralizes upon the matter very sensibly. The 
 "late Robert Earl of Leicester" furnishes him with a story of 
 a Countess of Desmond, married out of England in Edward 
 the Fourth's time, and who lived far in King James's reign. 
 The " same noble person" gives him an account, how such a 
 year, in the same reign, there went about the country a set of 
 morrice-dancers, composed of ten men who danced, a Maid 
 Marian, and a tabor and pipe ; and how these twelve, one 
 with another, made up twelve hundred years. " It was nol 
 so much (says Temple) that so many in one small county 
 (Herefordshire) should live to that age, as that they should be 
 in vigour and in humour to travel and to dance." Monsieur 
 Zulichem, one of his " colleagues at the Hague," informs 
 him of a cure for the gout ; which is confirmed by another 
 " envoy," Monsieur Serinchamps, in that town, who had tried 
 it. Old Prince Maurice of Nassau recommends to him the 
 tise of hammocks in that complaint ; having been allured to 
 sleep, while suffering under it himself, by the " constant mo- 
 tion or swinging of those airy beds." Count Egmont, and 
 the Rhinegrave who " was killed last summer before Maest- 
 richt," impart to him their experiences. 
 
 But the rank of the writer is never more innocently dis- 
 closed than where he takes for granted the compliments paid 
 by foreigners to his fruit-trees. For the taste and perfection 
 of what we esteem the best, he can truly sav, that the French, 
 who have eaten his peaches and grapes at Shene in no very 
 ill year, have generally concluded that the last are as good as 
 any they have eaten in France on this side Fontainbleau ; 
 and the first as good as any they have eaten in Gascony. Ital- 
 ians have agreed his while figs to be as good as any of that 
 sort in Italy, which is the earlier kind of white fig there ; for 
 in the later kind and the blue, we cannot come near the warm 
 climates, no more than in the Frontignac or Muscat grape. 
 His orange-trees, too, are as large as any he saw when he 
 was young in France, except those of Fontainbleau, or what 
 lie has seen since in the Low Countries ; except some very 
 old ones of the Prince of Orange's. Of grapes he had the 
 honour of bringing over four sorts into England, which he 
 enumerates, and supposes that they are all by this time pretty 
 common among some gardeners in his neighbourhood, as well 
 as several persons of quality ; for he ever thought all things 
 of this kind " the commoner they are made the better." The 
 ^ arden pedantry with which he asserts that 'tis to little pur-
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 219 
 
 ■ 
 
 pose to plant any of the best fruits, as peaches or grape?, 
 hardly, he doubts, beyond Northamptonshire at the farthest 
 northwards ; and praises the " Bishop of Minister at Cosevelt" 
 for attempting nothing beyond cherries in that cold climate, 
 is equally pleasant and in character. " I may, perhaps," (he 
 thus ends his sweet Garden Essay with a passage worthy of 
 Cowley,) "be allowed to know something of this trade, since 
 I have so long allowed myself to be good for nothing else, 
 which few men will do, or enjoy their gardens, without often 
 looking abroad to see how other matters play, what motions 
 in the state, and what invitations they may hope for into other 
 scenes. For my own part, as the country life, and this part 
 of it more particularly, were the inclination of my youth 
 itself, so they are the pleasure of my age ; and I can truly 
 say that, among many great employments that have fallen to 
 my share, I have never asked or sought for any of them, but 
 have often endeavoured to escape from them, into the case 
 and freedom of a private scene, where a man may go his own 
 way and his own pace, in the common paths and circles of life. 
 The measure of choosing well is whether a man likes what 
 he has chosen, which, 1 thank God, has befallen me ; and 
 though among the follies of my life building and planting 
 have not been the least, and have cost me more than I have 
 the confidence to own, yet they have been fully recompensed 
 by the sweetness and satisfaction of this retreat, where, since 
 my resolution taken of never entering again into any public 
 employments, I have passed five years without ever once go- 
 ing to town, though I am almost in sight of it, and have a 
 house there always ready to receive me. Nor has this been 
 any sort of affectation, as some have thought it, but a mere 
 want of desire or humour to make so small a remove ; for 
 when I am in this corner, I can truly say with Horace, Me 
 quotics rejicit, <Sfc. 
 
 " ' Me, when the cold Digentian stream revives, 
 What does my friend believe I think or ask 1 
 Let me yet less possess, so I may live, 
 Whate'er oflife remains, unto myself. 
 May I have books enough ; and one year's store, 
 Not to depend upon each doubtful hour: 
 This is enough of mighty Jove to pray, 
 Who, as he pleases, gives and takes away.' " 
 
 The writings of Temple are, in general, after this easy Copy. 
 On one occasion, indeed, his wit, which was mostly subordi- 
 nate to nature and tenderness, has seduced him into a string 
 of felicitous antitheses; which, it is obvious to remark, have 
 been a model to Addison and succeeding essayists. "Who 
 
 K2
 
 220 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 would not be. covetous, and with reason," he says, "if health 
 could be purchased with gold 1 who not ambitious, if it were 
 at the command of power, or restored by honour ? but, alas ! 
 a white staff will not help gouty feet to walk better than a 
 common cane ; nor a blue riband bind up a wound so well as 
 a fillet. The glitter of gold, or of diamonds, will but hurt 
 sore eyes instead of curing them ; and an aching head will be 
 no more eased by wearing a crown than a common nightcap." 
 In a far better style, and more accordant with his own hu- 
 mour of plainness, are the concluding sentences of his " Dis- 
 course upon Poetry." Temple took a part in the controversy 
 about the ancient and the modern learning ; and, with that 
 partiality so natural and so graceful in an old man, whose 
 state engagements had left him little leisure to look into mod- 
 ern productions, while his retirement gave him occasion to 
 look back upon the classic studies of his youth — decided in 
 favour of the latter. " Certain it is," he says, " that, wheth- 
 er the fierceness of the Gothic humours or noise of their per- 
 petual wars frighted it away, or that the unequal mixture of 
 the modern languages would not bear it — the great heights 
 and excellency both of poetry and music fell with the Roman 
 learning and empire, and have never since recovered the ad- 
 miration and applauses that before attended them. Yet, such 
 as they are among us, they must be confessed to be the soft- 
 est and sweetest, the most general and most innocent amuse- 
 ments of common time and fife. They still find room in the 
 courts of princes and the cottages of shepherds. They serve 
 to revive and animate the dead calm of poor and idle lives, 
 and to allay or divert the violent passions and perturbations of 
 the greatest and the busiest men. And both these effects are 
 of equal use to human life; for the mind of man is like the 
 sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager, 
 in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated 
 by gentle gales ; and so the mind, when moved by soft and 
 easy passions or affections. I know very well that many 
 who pretend to be wise by the forms of being grave are apt 
 to despise both poetry and music, as toys and trifles too light 
 for the use or entertainment of serious men. But whoever 
 find themselves wholly insensible to their charms would, I 
 think, do well to keep their own counsel, for fear of reproach- 
 ing their own temper, and bringing the goodness of their na- 
 tures, if not of their understandings, into question. While 
 this world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and request of 
 these two entertainments will do so too ; and happy those 
 that content themselves with these, or any other so easy and 
 so innocent, and do not trouble the world or other men, because
 
 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 221 
 
 they cannot be quiet themselves, though nobody hurts them." 
 " When all is done, (he concludes,) human life is at the 
 greatest and the best but like a fro ward child, that must be 
 played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet, till it 
 tails asleep, and then the care is over." 
 
 BARBARA S 
 
 Ox the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 4, I forget 
 
 which it was, just as the clock had struck one, Barbara S , 
 
 with her accustomed punctuality, ascended the long rambling 
 staircase, with awkward interposed landing-places, which led 
 to the office, or rather a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat 
 sat the then treasurer of (what few of our readers may remem- 
 ber) the Old Bath Theatre. All over the island it was the 
 custom, and remains so, I believe, to this day, for the players 
 to receive their weekly stipend on the Saturday. It was not 
 much that Barbara had to claim. 
 
 This little maid had just entered her eleventh year ; but 
 her important station at the theatre, as it seemed to her, with 
 the benefits which she felt to accrue from her pious applica- 
 tion of her small earnings, had given an air of womanhood to 
 her steps and to her behaviour. You would have taken her 
 to be at least five years older. 
 
 Till latterly she had merely been employed in choruses, or 
 where children were wanted to fill up the scene. But the 
 manager, observing a diligence and adroitness in her above 
 her age, had for some few months past intrusted to her the 
 performance of whole parts. You may guess the self-conse- 
 quence of the promoted Barbara. She had already drawn 
 tears in young Arthur; had rallied Richard with infantine 
 petulance in the Duke of York ; and in her turn had rebuked 
 that petulance when she was Prince of Wales. She would 
 have done the elder child in Morton's pathetic after-piece to 
 the life ; but as yet the " Children in the Wood" was not. 
 
 Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, I 
 have seen somo of these small parts, each making two or three 
 pages at most, copied out in the rudest hand of the then 
 prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little more carefully 
 and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of the establish- 
 ment. But such as they were, blotted and scrawled, as for a 
 child's use, she kept them all ; and in the zenith of her after 
 19*
 
 222 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 reputation it was a delightful sight to behold them bound up 
 in costliest Morocco, each single — each small part making a 
 book — with fine clasps, gilt-splashed, &c. She had conscien- 
 tiously kept them as they had been delivered to her ; not a 
 blot had been effaced or tampered with. They were precious 
 to her for their affecting remembrancings. They were her 
 principia, her rudiments ; the elementary atoms ; the little 
 steps by which she pressed forward to perfection. " What," 
 she would say, " could Indian rubber or a pumice stone have 
 done for these darlings V 
 
 I am in no hurry to begin my story — indeed, 1 have little or 
 none to tell — so I will just mention an observation of hers 
 connected with that interesting time. 
 
 Not long before she died I had been discoursing with her 
 on the quantity of real present emotion which a great tragic 
 performer experiences during acting. I ventured to think, 
 that though in the first instance such players must have pos- 
 sessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in 
 others, yet by frequent repetition those feelings must become 
 deadened in great measure, and the performer trust to the 
 memory of past emotion, rather than express a present one. 
 She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a truly great 
 tragedian the operation by which such effects were produced 
 upon an audience could ever degrade itself into what was 
 purely mechanical. With much delicacy avoiding to instance 
 in her ^//'-experience, she told me, that so long ago as when 
 she used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. Porter's 
 Isabella, (I think it was,) when that impressive actress has 
 been bending over her in some heart-rending colloquy, she 
 has felt real hot tears come trickling from her, which (to use 
 her powerful expression) have perfectly scalded her back. 
 
 I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs. Porter ; but it was 
 some great actress of that day. The name is indifferent ; 
 but the fact of the scalding tears I most distinctly remember. 
 
 I was always fond of the society of players, and am not sure 
 that an impediment in my speech, (which certainly kept me 
 out of the pulpit,) even more than certain personal disqualifi- 
 cations, which are often got over in that profession, did not 
 prevent me at one time of life from adopting it. I have had 
 the honour (I must ever call it) once to have been admitted 
 to the tea-table of .Miss Kelly. I have played at serious 
 whist with Mr. Liston. I have chatted with ever good-hu- 
 moured Mrs. Charles Knnble. 1 have conversed as friend 
 to friend with her accomplished husband. I have been in- 
 dulged with a classical conference with Macready ; and with 
 a sight of the player-picture gallery at Mr Mathews's, when
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 223 
 
 the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love of the old ac- 
 tors, (whom he loves so much,) went over it with me, supply- 
 ing to his capital collection what alone the artist could not 
 give them — voice, and their living motion. Old tones, half 
 faded, of Dodd, and Parsons, and Baddeley, have lived again 
 for me at his bidding. Only Edwin he could not restore to 
 me. 1 have supped with ; but I am growing a cox- 
 comb. 
 
 As I was about to say — at the desk of the then treasurer 
 of the Old Bath Theatre — not Diamond's — presented herself 
 the little Barbara S . 
 
 The parents of Barbara had been in reputable circumstances. 
 The father had practised, I believe, as an apothecary in the 
 town. But his practice, from causes which I feel my own in- 
 firmity too sensibly that way to arraign — or perhaps from that 
 pure infelicity which accompanies some people in their walk 
 through life, and which it is impossible to lay at the door ot 
 imprudence — was now reduced to nothing. They were, in 
 fact, in the very teeth of starvation, when the manager, who 
 knew and respected them in better days, took the little Bar- 
 bara into his company. 
 
 At the period I commenced with, her slcndei earnings were 
 the sole support of the family, including two younger sisters. 
 I must throw a veil over some mortifying circumstances. 
 Enough to say, that her Saturday's pittance was the only 
 chance of a Sunday's (generally their only) meal of meat. 
 
 One thing I will only mention, that in some child's part, 
 where in her theatrical character she was to sup ofT a roast 
 fowl, (oh joy to Barbara !) some comic actor, who was for the 
 night caterer for this dainty — in the misguided humour of his 
 part, threw over the dish such a quantity of salt, (oh grief and 
 pain of heart to Barbara!) that when she crammed a portion 
 of it into her mouth she was obliged sputteringly to reject it ; 
 and what with shame of her ill-acted part, and pain of real 
 appetite at missing such a dainty, her little heart sobbed al- 
 most to breaking, till a flood of tears, which the well-fed 
 spectators were totally unable to comprehend, mercifully re- 
 lieved her. 
 
 This was the little starved, meritorious maid, who stood 
 before old Ravenscroft, the treasurer, for her Saturday's pay- 
 ment. 
 
 Ravenscroft was a man, I have heard many old theatrical 
 people besides herself say, of all men least calculated for a 
 treasurer. He had no head for accounts, paid away at ran- 
 dom, kept scarce any books, and summing up at the week's
 
 224 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 end, if he found himself a pound or so deficient, blessed him- 
 self that it was no worse. 
 
 Now Barbara's weekly stipend was a bare half guinea. 
 By mistake he popped into her hand — a whole one. 
 
 Barbara tripped away. 
 
 She was entirely unconscious at first of the mistake : God 
 knows, Ravenscroft would never have discovered it. 
 
 But when she had got down to the first of those uncouth 
 landing-places, she became sensible of an unusual weight of 
 metal pressing her little hand. 
 
 Now mark the dilemma. 
 
 She was by nature a good girl. From her parents and 
 those about her she had imbibed no contrary influence. But 
 then they had taught her nothing. Poor men's smoky cabins 
 are not always porticoes of moral philosophy. This little 
 maid had no instinct to evil, but then she might be said to have 
 no fixed principle. She had heard honesty commended, but 
 never dreamed of its application to herself. She thought of 
 it as something which concerned grown-up people, men and 
 women. She had never known temptation, or thought of pre- 
 paring resistance against it. 
 
 Her first impulse was to go back to the old treasurer, and 
 explain to him his blunder. He was already so confused 
 with age, besides a natural want of punctuality, that she would 
 have had some difficulty in making him understand it. She 
 saw that in an instant. And then it was such a bit of money.' 
 and then the image of a larger allowance of butcher's meat on 
 their table next day came across her, till her little eyes glis- 
 tened and her mouth moistened. But then Mr. Ravenscroft 
 had always been so good-natured, had stood her friend behind 
 the scenes, and even recommended her promotion to some of 
 her little parts. But again the old man was reputed to be 
 worth a world of money. He was supposed to have fifty 
 pounds a year clear of the theatre. And then came staring 
 upon her the figures of her little stockingless and shoeless 
 sisters. And when she looked at her own neat white cotton 
 stockings, which her situation at the theatre had made it in- 
 dispensable for her mother to provide for her, with hard 
 straining and pinching from the family stock, and thought how 
 glad she should be to cover their poor feet with the same — 
 and how then they could accompany her to rehearsals, which 
 they had hitherto been precluded from doing by reason of 
 their unfashionable attire — in these thoughts she reached the 
 second landing-place — the second, I mean, from the top — for 
 there was still another left to traverse. 
 
 Now virtue support Barbara !
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 225 
 
 And that never-failing friend did step in — for.it that moment 
 a strength not her own, I have heard her say, was revealed to 
 her — a reason above n asoning — and without her own agency, 
 as it seemed, (for she never felt her feet to move,) she found 
 herself transported back to the individual desk she had just 
 quitted, and her hand in the old hand of Kavenseroft, who in 
 bilence took back the refunded treasure, and who had been 
 sitting (good man) insensible to the lapse of minutes, which 
 to her were anxious ages ; and from that moment a deep 
 peace fell upon her heart, and she knew the quality of honesty. 
 
 A year or two's unrepining application to her profession 
 brightened up the feet and the prospects of her little sisters, 
 set the whole family upon their legs again, and released her 
 from the difficulty of discussing moral dogmas upon a landing- 
 place. 
 
 1 have heard her say that it was a surprise, not much 
 short of mortification to her, to see the coolness with which the 
 old man pocketed the difference, which had caused her such 
 mortal throes. 
 
 This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, from the 
 mouth of the late Mrs. Crawford,* then sixty-seven years of 
 agj&i (she died soon after;) and to her struggles upon this 
 childish occasion I have sometimes ventured to think her in- 
 debted for that power of rending the heart in the representa- 
 tion of conflicting emotions, for which in after years she was 
 considered as little inferior (if at all so in the part of Lady 
 Kandolph) even to Mrs. JSiddons. 
 
 THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 
 
 IN A LETTER TO R S , ESQ. 
 
 Thoi'gh in some points of doctrine, and perhaps of disci- 
 pline, I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that church 
 which you have so worthily historified, yet may the ill time 
 never come to me when, with a chilled heart, or a portion of 
 irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-hal- 
 lowed edifices. Judge, then, of my mortification when, after 
 attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at West- 
 
 * The maiden name of this kni. - ti'wbichjsne changed, by succes- 
 
 sive marriages, for those of Dancer, Barry, and Crawford. She was .Mrs. 
 Crawford, and a thud lime a widow, when 1 knew her. 
 
 K 3
 
 226 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 minster, and being desirous of renewing my acquaintance, 
 after lapsed years, with the tombs and antiquities there, I 
 found myself excluded ; turned out like a dog, or some pro- 
 fane person, into the common street, with feelings not very 
 congenial to the place, or to the solemn service which 1 had 
 been listening to. It was a jar after that music. 
 
 You had your education at Westminster ; and doubtless 
 among those dim aisles and cloisters you must have gathered 
 much of that devotional feeling in those young years, on 
 which your purest mind feeds still — and may it feed ! The 
 antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and gracefully blending ever 
 with the religious, may have been sown in you among those 
 wrecks of splendid mortality. You owe it to the place of 
 your education ; you owe it to your learned fondness for the 
 architecture of your ancestors ; you owe it to the venerable- 
 ness of your ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily les- 
 sened and called in question through these practices — to speak 
 aloud your sense of them ; never to desist raising your voice 
 against them, till they be totally done away with and abolished ; 
 till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed 
 against the decent, though low-in-purse, enthusiast, or blame- 
 less devotee, who must commit an injury against his family 
 economy, if he would be indulged with a bare admission 
 within its walls. You owe it to the decencies which you 
 wish to see maintained in its impressive services, that our 
 cathedral be no longer an object of inspection to the poor at 
 those times only in which they must rob from their attendance 
 on the worship every minute which they can bestow upon the 
 fabric. In vain the public prints have taken up this subject, 
 in vain such poor nameless writers as myself express their 
 indignation. A word from you, sir — a hint in your journal — 
 would be sufficient to fling open the doors of the beautiful 
 temple again, as we can remember them when we were boys. 
 At that time of life, what would the imaginative faculty (such 
 as it is) in both of us have suffered, if the entrance to so 
 much reflection had been obstructed by the demand of so 
 much silver ! If we had scraped it up to gain an occasional 
 admission, (as we certainly should have done,) would the sight 
 of those old tombs have been as impressive to us (while we 
 had been weighing -anxiously prudence against sentiment) as 
 when the gates stood open, as those of the adjacent, park ; when 
 we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a 
 shorter or longer time, as that lasted ? Is the being shown 
 over a place the same as silently for ourselves detecting the 
 genius of it? In no part of our beloved abbey now can a 
 person find entrance (out of service-time) under the sum of
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 227 
 
 two 'shillings. The rich and the great will smile at the anti- 
 climax presumed to lie in these two short words. But you 
 can tell them, sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity 
 for enlarged feeling, how much taste and genius, may coexist, 
 especially in youth, with a purse incompetent to this demand. 
 A respected friend of ours, during his late visit to the me- 
 tropolis, presented himself for admission to St. Paul's. At 
 the same time a decently-clothed man, with as decent a wife 
 and child, were bargaining for the same indulgence. The 
 price was only twopence each person. The poor but de- 
 cent man hesitated, desirous to go in ; but there were three 
 of them, and he turned away reluctantly. Perhaps he wished 
 to have seen the tomb of Nelson. Perhaps the interior of the 
 cathedral was his object. But, in the state of his finances, 
 even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the 
 aristocracy of the country (no man can do it more impressive- 
 ly) ; instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces of 
 money, these minims to their sight, may be to their humbler 
 brethren. Shame these sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not 
 the suggestions of your better nature with the pretext that an 
 indiscriminate admission would expose the tombs to violation. 
 Remember your boy-days. Did you ever see or hear of a 
 mob in the Abbey while it was free to all? Do the rabble 
 come there, or trouble their heads about such speculations? 
 It is all that you can do to drive them into your churches ; 
 they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas ! 
 no passion for antiquities ; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or 
 poet. If they had, they would be no longer the rabble. 
 
 For forty years that I have known the fabric, the only well- 
 attested charge of violation adduced has been — a ridiculous 
 dismemberment committed upon the effigy of that amiable spy, 
 Major Andre. And is it for this, the wanton mischief of 
 some schoolboy, fired, perhaps, with raw notions of transat- 
 lantic freedom; or the remote possibility of such a mischief 
 occurring again, so easily to be prevented by stationing a con- 
 stable within the walls if the vergers are incompetent to the 
 duty ; is it upon such wretched pretences that the people of 
 England are made to pay a new Peter's Pence so long abro- 
 gated, or must content themselves with contemplating the 
 ragged exterior of their cathedral ? The mischief was done 
 about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know 
 anything about the unfortunate relic ?
 
 228 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 
 
 " Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep 
 Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas V 
 
 I do not know when I have experienced a stranger sensa- 
 tion than on seeing my old friend G. D., who had been paying 
 me a morning visit a few Sundays back at my cottage at Is- 
 lington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right- 
 hand path by which he had entered — with staff in hand, and 
 at noonday, deliberately march right forward into the midst 
 of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear. 
 
 A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling 
 enough ; but in the broad open daylight to witness such an un- 
 reserved motion towards self-destruction in a valued friend, 
 took from me all power of speculation. 
 
 How I found my feet, I know not. Consciousness was 
 quite gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot. 
 I remember nothing but the silvery apparition of a good white 
 head emerging ; nigh which a staff (the hand unseen that 
 wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies. In a 
 moment (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders, 
 and I — freighted with a load more precious than his who bore 
 Anchises. 
 
 And here I cannot but do justice to the officious zeal of 
 sundry passers-by, who, albeit arriving a little too late to par- 
 ticipate in the honours of the rescue, in philanthropic shoals 
 came thronging to communicate their advice as to the recov- 
 ery ; prescribing variously the application, or non-application, 
 of salt, &c, to the person of the patient. Life, meanwhile, 
 was ebbing fast away, amid the stifle of conflicting judgments, 
 when one, more sagacious than the rest, by a bright thought, 
 proposed sending for the doctor. Trite as the counsel was, 
 and impossible, as one should think, to be missed on — shall I 
 confess? — in this emergency, it was to me as if an angel had 
 spoken. Great previous exertions — and mine had not been 
 inconsiderable — are commonly followed by a debility of pur- 
 pose. This was a moment o( irresolution. 
 
 MpNoerjXTJS — for so, in default of catching his true name, I 
 choose to designate the medical gentleman who now appeared 
 — is a grave, middle-aged person, who, without having studied 
 at the college, or truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 229 
 
 employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental 
 processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in 
 whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem ex- 
 tinet and lost for ever. He omittetli no occasion of obtruding 
 his services, from a case of common surfe it-sufi'ocation to the 
 ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too wilful appli- 
 cation of the plant Cannabis outwardly. But though he de- 
 clinelh not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation 
 tendeth, for the most part, to water-practice ; for the conve- 
 nience of which he hath judiciously fixed his quarters near the 
 grand repository of the stream mentioned, where, day and 
 night ironi his little watch-tower, at the Middkton's Head, he 
 listeneth to detect the wrecks of drowned mortality — partly, 
 as he saith, to be upon the spot — and partly, because the li- 
 quids which he useth to prescribe to himself and his patients 
 on these distressing occasions, are ordinarily more conve- 
 niently to be found at these common hostelries than in the 
 shops and vials of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived 
 to such finesse by practice, that it is reported he can distin- 
 guish a plunge at a half furlong distance ; and can tell it' it 
 be casual or deliberate. He weareth a medal suspended over 
 a suit, originally of a sad brown, but which, by time and fre- 
 quency of nightly divings, has been dinged into a true profes- 
 sional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, and is re- 
 markable for wanting his left eye. His remedy, after a suf- 
 ficient application of warm blankets, friction, &-c, is a simple 
 tumbler, or more, of the purest cognac, with water, made as 
 hot as the convalescent can bear it. Where he iindeth, as in 
 the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he condescendeth 
 to be the taster; and showeth, by his own example, the innoc- 
 uous nature of the prescription. Nothing can be more kind 
 or encouraging than this procedure. It addeth confidence to 
 the patient, to see his medical adviser go hand in hand with 
 himself in the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his 
 own draught, what peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him 
 in the potion? In fine, Monoculus is a humane, sensible 
 man, who, for a slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, 
 is content to wear it out in the endeavour to save the lives of 
 others — his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty L 
 could press a crown upon him for the price of restoring the 
 existence of such an invaluable creature to societv as (;. I). 
 
 It was pleasant to observe the eflcct of the subsiding alarm 
 Uppq the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have 
 given a shako to memory, calling up notice after notice, of all 
 the providential deliverances he had experienced in the course 
 of his long and innocent life. Sitting up in mv couch — my 
 20
 
 230 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 couch which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, for the sal- 
 utary repose which it administered, shall be honoured with 
 costly valance, at some price, and henceforth be a state-bed 
 at Colebrook, — he discoursed of marvellous escapes — by care- 
 lessness of nurses — by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boil- 
 ing element, in infancy — by orchard pranks, and snapping 
 twigs, in schoolboy frolics — by descent of tiles at Trumping- 
 ton, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke — by studious watch- 
 ings, inducing frightful vigilance — by want, and the fear of 
 want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. Anon, 
 he would burst out into little fragments of chanting — of songs 
 long ago — ends of deliverance-hymns, not remembered before 
 since childhood, but coming up now, when his heart was 
 made tender as a child's — for the tremor cordis in the retros- 
 pect of a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending dan- 
 ger, acting upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tender- 
 ness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice ; and 
 Shakspeare, in the latter crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh 
 to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow 
 rivers. 
 
 Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton — what a spark you were 
 like to have extinguished for ever ! Your salubrious streams 
 to this city, for now near two centuries, would hardly have 
 atoned for what you were in a moment washing away. Mock- 
 ery of a river — liquid artifice — wretched conduit ! henceforth 
 rank with canals and sluggish aqueducts. Was it for this, 
 that, smit in boyhood with the explorations of that. Abyssinian 
 traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tribu- 
 tary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through 
 green Hertfordshire and cultured Enfield parks 1 Ye have 
 no swans — no naiads — no river-god — or did the benevolent 
 hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him in, that ye 
 also might have the tutelary genius of your waters 1 
 
 Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been some 
 consonancy in it ; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle 
 over his moist sepulture ? — or, having no name, besides that 
 unmeaning assumption of eternal novi/ij, did ye think to get 
 one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the 
 Stream Dyerian? 
 
 " And could such spacious virtue find a grave 
 Beneath the iin|>o.siliumrd bubble of a wave?" 
 
 I protest, George, you shall not venture out again — no, not 
 by daylight — without a sufficient pair of spectacles — in your 
 musing moods especially. Your absence of mind we have 
 borne, till your presence of body came to be called in ques-
 
 ESSAYS OF EUA. 231 
 
 tion by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with 
 Aristotle, if we can help it. Fy, man, to turn dipper at your 
 years, after your many tracts in favour of sprinkling only ! 
 
 I have nothing but water in my head o'nights since this 
 frightful accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence in his 
 dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and 
 crying out to his good brother Hopeful, (that is, to me,) " I 
 sink in deep waters ; the billows go over my head, all the 
 waves go over me. Selah." Then I have before me Pali- 
 nurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save. 
 Next follow — a mournful procession — suicidal faces, saved 
 against their wills from drowning ; dolefully trailing a length 
 of reluctant gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendent from locks 
 of watchet hue — constrained Lazari — Pluto's half-subjects — 
 stolen fees from the grave — bilking Charon of his fare. At 
 their head Arion — or is it G. D. ? — in his singing garments 
 marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which 
 Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to sus- 
 pend it to the stern god of sea. Then follow dismal streams 
 of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are constrained 
 to drown downright, by wharves where Ophelia twice acts her 
 muddy death. 
 
 And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, 
 when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to 
 their inexorable precincts. When a soul knocks once, twice, 
 at death's door, the sensation aroused within the palace must 
 be considerable ; anil the grim feature, by modern science so 
 often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time 
 to pity Tantalus. 
 
 A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian 
 shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was announced by no 
 equivocal indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose 
 the gentler and the graver ghosts — poet or historian — of 
 Grecian or of Koman lore — to crown with unfading chaplets 
 the half-finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. 
 Him Markland expected — him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter 
 — him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely 
 
 seen upon earth,* with newest airs prepared to greet ; 
 
 and, patron of the gentle ( 'hrist's boy — who should have been 
 his patron through life — the mild Askew, with longing aspi- 
 rations, leaned foremost from his venerable JEsculapian chair, 
 to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of 
 the man. whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon 
 earth had so prophetically fed and watered. 
 
 * Ckail'.m tkntwn vidit.
 
 232 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 
 
 Sidney's sonnets — I speak of the best of them — are among 
 the very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral 
 dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of self-ap- 
 proval of Milton, in his compositions of a similar structure. 
 They are, in truth, what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says 
 of that work, (to which they are a sort of after-tune or appli- 
 cation,) " vain and amatorious" enough, yet the things in their 
 kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be 
 " full of worth and wit." They savour of the courtier, it 
 must be allowed, and not of the commonwealths-man. But 
 Milton was a courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow 
 Castle, and still more a courtier when he composed the Ar- 
 cades. When the national struggle was to begin, he becom- 
 ingly cast these vanities behind him ; and if the order of time 
 had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the 
 revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted 
 the same part in that emergency, which has glorified the 
 name of a later Sydney. He did not want for plainness or 
 boldness of spirit. His letter on the French match may tes- 
 tify he coidd speak his mind freely to princes. The times 
 did not call him to the scaffold. 
 
 The sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton 
 were the compositions of his maturest years. Those of Syd- 
 ney, which I am about to produce, were written in the very 
 heyday of his blood. They are stuck full of amorous fan- 
 cies — far-fetched conceits, befitting his occupation ; for true 
 love thinks no labour to send out thoughts upon the vast, 
 and more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich pearls, out- 
 landish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in self-de- 
 preciating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the 
 beloved. We must be lovers — or at least the cooling touch 
 of time, the circum prcecordia frigus, must not have so damped 
 our faculties as to take away our recollection that we were once 
 so — before we can duly appreciate the glorious vanities and 
 graceful hyperboles of the passion. The images which lie 
 before our feet (though by some accounted the only natural) 
 are least natural for the high Sydnean love to express its fan- 
 cies by. They may serve for the loves of Tibullus, or the 
 dear author of the Schoolmistress ; for passions that creep 
 and whine in elegies ami pastoral ballads. I am sure Mil-
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 833 
 
 ton never loved at this rate. I am afraid some of his address- 
 es [ad Lconoram I mean) have rather erred on the farther side ; 
 and that the poet came not much short of a religious inde- 
 corum when he could thus apostrophize a singing-girl : — 
 
 " Angelus unicuique suus (sic, credite gentes) 
 
 Obtigit a'therms ales al> ordmibus. 
 Quid minim, Leonoia, tibi si gloria major, 
 
 Nam tua prx-sentem vox sonat ipsa Deum ! 
 Aut Deus, aut vacui certc mens tertia call 
 
 Per tua sccreto gultura serpit agens ; 
 Serpit agens, factusque docet mortalia corda 
 
 Sensim immoitali assuescere posse sono. 
 QtJOD m C0NCTJ itiiDEM Deus est, per cunctaqce pcms, 
 
 In te una loquitur, cetera mutus habet." 
 
 This is loving in a strange fashion ; and it requires some can- 
 dour of construction (hesides the slight darkening of a dead 
 language) to cast a veil over the ugly appearance of some- 
 thing very like hlasphemy in the last two verses. I think tin; 
 lover would have heen staggered if he had gone about to 
 express the same thought in English. 1 am sure Sydney 
 has no flights like this. His extravaganzas do not strike at 
 the sky, though he takes leave to adopt the pale Dian into a 
 fellowship with his mortal passions. 
 
 I. 
 
 " With how sad steps, oh moon, thou climb'st the skies ; 
 How silently ; and with how wan a face ' 
 What ! may it be, that even in heavenly place 
 That busy archer his sharp arrows tries ' 
 Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes 
 Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case ; 
 I read it in thy looks; thy languisht grace 
 To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. 
 Then, even of fellowship, oh moon, tell me, 
 Is constant love deem'd there but tant of wit .' 
 Are beauties there as proud as here they be ? 
 Do they above love to be loved, and yet 
 Those lovers scorn, whom that love doth possess? 
 Do they call virtue there — ungratefulness .'" 
 
 The last line of this poem is a little obscured by transpo- 
 sition. He means, Do they call ungratefulness there a virtue J 
 
 n. 
 
 " Come, Sleep, oh Sleep, the certain knot of peace, 
 The baiting-place of wit, the balm of wo. 
 The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's reli 
 The indifferent judge between the high and low ; 
 
 With shield of proof shield me from out the prease* 
 Of those tierce darts despair at me doth throw; 
 Oh make in me those civil wars to cease : 
 I will good tribute pay, if thou do so 
 
 ♦Press. 
 20*
 
 234 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 Take thou of me sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; 
 A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; 
 A rosy garland, and a weary head. 
 And if these things, as being thine by right, 
 Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me, 
 Livelier than elsewhere Stella's image see. 
 
 III. 
 
 The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness 
 Bewray itself in my long-settled eyes, 
 Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise, 
 With idle pains, and missing aim, do guess. 
 Some, that know how my spring I did address, 
 Deem that my muse some fruit of knowledge plies; 
 Others, because the prince my service tries, 
 Think that I think state errors to redress ; 
 But harder judges judge, ambition's rage, 
 Scourge of itself, still climbing slippery place, 
 Holds my young brain captived in golden cage. 
 Oh fools, or over- wise ! alas, the race 
 Of all my thoughts hath neither stop nor start, 
 But only Stella's eyes, and Stella's heart. 
 
 •« Because I oft in dark abstracted guise 
 Seem most alone in greatest company, 
 With dearth of words, or answers quite awry, 
 To them that would make speech of speech arise ; 
 They deem, and of their doom the rumour flies, 
 That poison foul of bubbling pride doth lie 
 So in my swelling breast, that only I 
 Fawn on myself, and others do despise ; 
 Yet pride, I think, doth not my soul possess, 
 Which looks too oft in his unflattering glass : 
 But one worse fault— ambition — I confess, 
 That makes me oft my best friends overpass, 
 Unseen, unheard — while thought to highest place 
 Bends all his Dowers, even unto Stella's grace. 
 
 " Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance, 
 Guided so well that I obtain 'd the prize, 
 Both by the judgment of the English eyes, 
 And of some sent from that sweet enemy — France ; 
 Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance ; 
 Townsfolk my strength ; a daintier judge applies 
 His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise; 
 Some lucky wits impute it but to chance ; 
 Others, because of both sides 1 do take 
 My blood from them, who did excel in this, 
 Think Nature me a man of arms did make. 
 How far they shot awry ! the true cause is, 
 Stella look'd on, and from her heavenly face 
 Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race. 
 
 VI. 
 
 " In martial sports I had my cunning tried, 
 And yet to break more staves did me address, 
 While with the people's shouts (I must confess) 
 Youth, luck, and praise, even fill'd my veins with pride— 

 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 235 
 
 When Cupid having me (his slave) descried 
 
 In Mars's livery, prancing in the press, 
 
 4 What now, Sir Fool ! said he : * 1 would no less : 
 
 Look here, I say.' I look'd, and Stella spied, 
 
 Who hard by made a window send forth light. 
 
 My heart thenquak'd, then dazzled were mine eyes; 
 
 One hand forgot to rule, th' other to fight ; 
 
 Nor trumpet's sound 1 heard, nor friendly cries. 
 
 My foe came on, and beat the air for me — 
 
 Till that her blush made me my shame to see. 
 
 " No more, my dear, no more these counsels try ; 
 Oh give my passions leave to run their race ; 
 Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace ; 
 Let folk o'ercharged with brain against me cry ; 
 Let clouds bedim my face, break m mine eye ; 
 Let me no steps, but of lost labour, trace ; 
 Let all the earth with scorn recount my case — 
 But do not will me from my love to fly. 
 I do not envy Aristotle's wit, 
 Nor do aspire to Cassar's bleeding fame ; 
 Nor aught do care, though some above me sit ; 
 Nor hope, nor wish, another course to frame, 
 But that which once may win thy cruel heart : 
 Thou art my wit, and thou my virtue art. 
 
 " Love still a boy, and oft a wanton, is, 
 School'd only by his mother's tender eye ; 
 What wonder, then, if he his lesson miss, 
 When for so soft a rod dear play he try ? 
 And yet my Star, because a sugar'd kiss 
 In sport I suck'd, while she asleep did lie, 
 Doth lour, nay, chide, nay, threat, for only this. 
 Sweet, it was saucy Love, not humble I. 
 But no 'scuse serves ; she makes her wrath appear 
 In beauty's throne — see now who dares come near 
 Those scarlet judges, threat'ning bloody pain ? 
 Oh heav'nly fool, thy most kiss worthy face 
 Anger invests with such a lovely grace, 
 That anger's self I needs must kiss again. 
 
 " I never drank of Aganippe well, 
 Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit, 
 And muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell ; 
 Poor layman I, for sacred rites unfit. 
 Some do I hear of poet's fury tell, 
 But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it ; 
 And this I swear by blackest brook of hell, 
 1 am no pick-purse of another's wit. 
 How falls it, then, that with so smooth an rase 
 My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow 
 In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please? 
 Guess me the cause — what, is it thus '. — fy, no. 
 Or so? — much less. How then ? sure thus it is, 
 My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella's kiss. 
 
 " Of all the kings that ever here did reign, 
 Edward, named Fourth, as first in praise I name,
 
 236 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 Not for his fair outside, nor well-lined brain — 
 Although less gifts imp feathers oft on Fame. 
 Nor that he could, young-wise, wise-valiant, frame 
 His sire's revenge, join'd with a kingdom's gain ; 
 And, gain'd by Mars could yet mad Mars so tame, 
 That balance weigh'd what sword did late obtain. 
 Nor that he made the Floure-de-luce so 'fraid, 
 Though strongly hedged of bloody lions' paws 
 That witty Lewis to him a tribute paid. 
 Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause — 
 But only, for this worthy knight durst prove 
 To lose his crown rather than fail his love. 
 
 1 Oh happy Thames, that didst my Stella bear, 
 I saw thyself, with many a smiling line 
 Upon thy cheerful face, joy's livery wear, 
 While those fair planets on thy streams did shine; 
 The boat for joy could not to dance forbear, 
 While wanton winds, with beauty so divine 
 Kavish'd, stay'd not, till in her golden hair 
 They did themselves (oh sweetest prison) twine. 
 And fain those ^Eol's youth there would their stay 
 Have made ; but, forced by nature still to fly, 
 First did with puffing kiss those locks display 
 She, so dishevell'd, blush'd ; from window I 
 With sight thereof cried out, ' Oh fair disgrace, 
 Let honour's self to thee grant highest place !' 
 
 " Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be ; 
 And that my muse, to some ears not unsweet, 
 Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet, 
 More soft than to a chamber melody ; 
 Now blessed you bear onward blessed me 
 To her, where 1 my heart safe left shall meet, 
 My Muse and I must you of duty greet 
 With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully, 
 Be you still fair, honour'd by public heed, 
 By no encroachment wrong'd, nor time forgot ; 
 Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed. 
 And that you know, I envy you no lot 
 Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss, 
 Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may kiss." 
 
 Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the last sonnet 
 are my favourites. But the general beauty of them all is, 
 nat they are so perfectly characteristical. The spirit of 
 "learning and of chivalry" — of which union Spenser has 
 entitled Sydney to have been the "president" — shines through 
 them. I confess I can see nothing of the "jejune" or " frigid" 
 in them; much less of the "stiff" and "cumbrous" — which 
 J have sometimes heard objected to the Arcadia. The verse 
 runs off swiftly and gallantly. It might have been tuned to 
 the trumpet ; or tempered (as himself expresses it) to " tramp 
 ling horses' feet." They abound in felicitous phrases —
 
 ESSAYS OF EL1A. 237 
 
 ; Oh heav'nly fool, thy most kiss-worthy face" — 
 
 "Sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; 
 A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; 
 A rosy garland, and a weary head." 
 
 " That sweet enemy — France" — 
 
 8th Sonnet. 
 
 2d Sonnet, 
 
 5th Sonnet. 
 
 But they are not rich in words only, in vague and unreal- 
 ized feelings — the failing too much of some poetry of the 
 present day — they are full, material, and circumstantiated. 
 Time and place appropriates every one of them. It is not a 
 fever of passion wasting itself upon a thin diet of dainty 
 words, but a transcendent passion pervading and illuminating 
 action, pursuits, studies, feats of arms, the opinions of con- 
 temporaries, and his judgment of them. An historical thread 
 runs through them, which almost affixes a date to them ; 
 marks the when and where they were written. 
 
 I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the merit of 
 these poems, because I have been hurt by the wantonness (I 
 wish I could treat it by a gentler name) with which W. II. 
 takes every occasion of insulting the memory of Sir Philip 
 Sydney. But the decisions of the author of Table-Talk, &c, 
 (most profound and subtle where they are, as for the most 
 part, just,) are more safely to be relied upon, on subjects and 
 authors he has a partiality for, than on such as he has con- 
 ceived an accidental prejudice against. Milton wrote son- 
 nets, and was a king-hater ; and it was congenial, perhaps, to 
 sacrifice a courtier to a patriot. But I was unwilling to lose 
 a fine idea from my mind. The noble images, passions, sen- 
 timents, and poetical delicacies of character scattered all 
 over the Arcadia, (spite of some stiffness and encumberment.) 
 justify to me the character which his contemporaries have 
 left us of the writer. I cannot think with the Critic, that Sir 
 Philip Sydney was that opprobrious th/mr which a foolish 
 nobleman in his insolent hostility chose to term him. I call 
 to mind the epitaph made on him, to guide me to juster 
 thoughts of him ; and I repose upon the beautiful lines in the 
 " Friend's Passion for his Astrophel," printed with the Elegies 
 of Spenser and others. 
 
 "You knew — who knew not Astrophel ? 
 
 (That I should live to say I knew, 
 
 And have not in possession still !) — 
 
 Things known permit me to renew - 
 
 Of him you know his merit such, 
 
 I cannot say — you hear — too much.
 
 238 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 "Within these woods of Arcady 
 He chief delight and pleasure took ; 
 And on the mountain Partheny, 
 Upon the crystal liquid brook, 
 The muses met him every day, 
 That taught him sing, to write, and say. 
 
 " When he descended down the mount, 
 
 His personage seem'd most divine ; 
 
 A thousand graces one might count 
 
 Upon his lovely cheerful eyne. 
 
 To hear him speak, and sweetly smile, 
 
 You were in paradise the while. 
 
 ''■ A sweet attractive kind of grace ; 
 A full assurance given by looks ; 
 Continual comfort in a face, 
 The lineaments of Gospel books — 
 I trow that count'nance cannot lie, 
 Whose thoughts are legible in the eye. 
 
 " Above all others this is he, 
 Which erst approved in his song, 
 That love and honour might agree, 
 And that pure love will do no wrong. 
 
 Sweet saints, it is no sin or blame 
 
 To love a man of virtuous name. 
 
 ' Did never love so sweetly breathe 
 In any mortal breast before : 
 Did never muse inspire beneath 
 A poet's brain with finer store. 
 
 He wrote of love with high conceit, 
 And beauty rear'd above her height." 
 
 Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running into 
 rage) in the poem — the last in the collection accompanying 
 the above — which from internal testimony I believe to be 
 Lord Brooke's — beginning with " Silence augmenteth grief" 
 — and then seriously ask himself, whether the subject of such 
 absorbing and confounding regrets could have been that thing 
 which Lord Oxford termed him. 
 
 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 
 
 Dan Stuart once told us, that he did not remember that 
 he ever deliberately walked into the exhibition at Somerset 
 House in his life. He might occasionally have escorted a 
 party of ladies across the way that were going in ; but he 
 never went in of his own head. Yet the office of the Morning
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 239 
 
 Post newspaper stood then just where it does now — we are 
 carrying you back, reader, some thirty years or more — with 
 its gilt-globe-topped front facing that emporium of our artists' 
 grand annual exposure. We sometimes wish that we had 
 observed the same abstinence with Daniel. 
 
 A word or two of I). S. He ever appeared to us one of the 
 finest tempered of editors. Perry of the Morning Chronicle 
 was equally pleasant, with a dash, no slight one either, of the 
 courtier. S. was frank, plain, and English all over. We have 
 worked for both these gentlemen. 
 
 It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges ; to 
 trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river ; 
 
 " With holy reverence to approach the rocks, 
 Whence glide the streams renown'd in ancient song." 
 
 Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian pilgrim's explora 
 tory ramblings after the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well re- 
 member on one fine summer holyday (a " whole day's leave" 
 we called it at Christ's Hospital) sallying forth at rise of sun 
 not very well provisioned either for such an undertaking, to 
 trace the current of the New River — Middletonian stream ! — 
 to its scaturient source, as we had read, in meadows by fair 
 A in well. Gallantly did we commence our solitary quest — for 
 it was essential to the dignity of a discovery, that no eye of 
 schoolboy, save our own, should beam on the detection. By 
 flowery spots and verdant lanes, skirting Hornsey, hope 
 trained us on in manyabafiling turn; endless, hopeless mean- 
 ders, as it seemed ; or as if the jealous waters had dodged us, 
 reluctant to have the humble spot of their nativity revealed ; 
 till spent, and nigh famished, before the set of the same sun, 
 we sat down somewhere by Bowes Farm, near Tottenham, 
 with a tithe of our proposed labours only yet accomplished ; 
 sorely convinced in spirit that that Brucian enterprise was aa 
 yet too arduous for our young shoulders. 
 
 Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller 
 is the tracing of some mighty waters up to their shallow font- 
 let, than it is to a pleased and candid reader to go back to the 
 inexperienced essays, the first callow flights in authorship, of 
 some established name in literature ; from the gnat which 
 preluded to the iEneid, to the duck which Samuel Johnson 
 trod on. 
 
 In those days every morning paper, as an essential retainer 
 to its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish 
 daily a quantum of witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke — and 
 it was thought pretty high too — was Dan Stuart's settled re- 
 muneration in these cases. The chat of the day, scandal, but,
 
 240 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 above all, dress, furnished the material. The length of no 
 paragraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, 
 but they must be poignant. 
 
 A fashion of flesh, or rather pink coloured hose for the ladies, 
 luckily coming up at the juncture when we were on our pro- 
 bation for the place of chief jester to S.'s paper, established 
 our reputation in that line. We were pronounced a " capital 
 hand." Oh the conceits which we varied upon red in all its 
 prismatic differences ! from the trite and obvious flower of 
 Cytherea. to the flaming costume of the lady that has her sit- 
 ting upon " many waters." Then there was the collateral 
 topic of ankles. What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, 
 like ourself, of touching that nice brink, and yet never tumb- 
 ling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something 
 " not quite proper ;" while, like a skilful posture-master, bal- 
 ancing between decorums and their opposites, he keeps the 
 line, from which a hair's breadth deviation is destruction ; 
 hovering in the confines of light and darkness, or where 
 " both seem either ;" a hazy, uncertain delicacy ; Autolycus- 
 like in the play, still putting off his expectant auditory with 
 " Whoop, do me no harm, good man !" But, above all, that 
 conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our mid- 
 riff to remember, where, allusively to the flight of Astrsea — - 
 ultima Ceelestiim terras reliquit — we ■ pronounced — in refer- 
 ence to the stockings still — that Modesty, taking her final 
 
 LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST BLUSH WAS VISIBLE IN HER 
 ASCENT TO THE HEAVENS BY THE TRACT OF THE GLOWING IN- 
 STEP. This might be called the crowning conceit ; and was 
 esteemed tolerable writing in those days. 
 
 But the fashion of jokes, wiih all other things, passes 
 away ; as did the transient, mode which had so favoured us. 
 The ankles of our fair friends in a few weeks began to reas- 
 sumc their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon. 
 Other female whims followed, but none, methought, so preg- 
 nant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single 
 meanings. 
 
 Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns daily, 
 consecutively for a fortnight, would surfeit the stoutest diges- 
 tion. But to have to furnish as many jokes daily, and that 
 not for a fortnight, but for a long twelvemonth, as we were 
 constrained to do, was a little harder exaction. "Man goeth 
 forth to his work until the evening" — from a reasonable hour 
 in the morning, we presume it was meant. Now, as our 
 main occupation took us up from eight till five every day in 
 the city ; and as our evening hours, at that time of life, had 
 generally to do witli anything rather than business, it follows,
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 211 
 
 that the only time we could spare for this manufactory of 
 jokes — our supplementary livelihood, that supplied us in every 
 want beyond mere bread and cheese — was exactly that part 
 of the day which (as we have heard of No Man's Land) may 
 be fitly denominated No Man's Time; that is, no time in 
 which a man ought to be up, and awake, in. To speak more 
 plainly 1 , it is that time, of an hour, or an hour and a half's du- 
 ration, in which a man, whose occasions call him up so pre- 
 posterously, has to wait for his breakfast. 
 
 Oh those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, or half 
 past five in summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, 
 we were compelled to rise, having been perhaps not above 
 four hours in bed — (for we were no go-to-beds with the lamb, 
 though we anticipated the lark ofttimes in her rising — we liked 
 a parting cup at midnight, as all young men did before these 
 effeminate times, and to have our friends about us — we were 
 not constellated under Aquarius, that watery sign, and there- 
 fore incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless — we were 
 none of your Basilian water-sponges, nor had taken our de- 
 grees at Mount Ague — we were right toping Capulets, jolly 
 companions, we and they) — but to have to get up, as we said 
 before, curtailed of half our fair sleep, fasting, with only a 
 dim vista of refreshing Bohea in the distance — to be neces- 
 sitated to rouse ourselves at the detested rap of an old hag of 
 a domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her 
 announcement that it was " time to rise ;" and whose chappy 
 knuckles we have often yearned to amputate, and string them 
 up at our chamber door, to be a terror to all such unseasona- 
 ble rest-breakers in future. 
 
 " Facil" and sweet, as Virgil sings n-id been the " descend- 
 ing" of the over-night, balmy the first sinking of the heavy 
 head upon the pillow ; but to get up as he goes on to say, 
 
 " Revocare grailus, superasque evadere ad auras" — 
 
 and to get up, moreover, to make jokes with malice prepended 
 — there was the "labour," there the "work." 
 
 No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, 
 our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for hall' 
 the tyranny which this necessity exercised upon us. Haifa 
 dozen jests m a day, (bating Sundays too,) why, it seems noth- 
 ing! We make twice the number every day in our lives as a 
 matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But 
 then they come into our head. But when the head has to go 
 out to them — when the mountain must go to Mohammed — 
 
 Reader, try it for once, onlv for one short twelvemonth. 
 21 L
 
 242 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings 
 came up ; but mostly, instead of it, some rugged, untractable 
 subject ; some topic impossible to be contorted into the risible ; 
 some feature, upon which no smile could play; some flint, 
 from which no process of ingenuity could procure a distilla- 
 tion. There they lay ; there your appointed tale of brick- 
 making was set before you, which you must finish, with or 
 without straw, as it happened. The craving dragon — the pub- 
 lic — like him in Bel's temple — must be fed ; it expected its 
 daily rations ; and Daniel and ourselves, to do us justice, did 
 the best we could on this side bursting him. 
 
 While we were wringing out coy sprightliness for the Post, 
 and writhing under the toil of what is called " easy writing," 
 Bob Allen, our quondam schoolfellow, was tapping his im- 
 practicable brains in a like service for the " Oracle." Not 
 that Robert troubled himself much about wit. If his para- 
 graphs had a sprightly air about them, it was sufficient. He 
 carried this nonchalance so far at last, that a matter of intelli- 
 gence, and that no very important one, was not seldom palmed 
 upon his employers for a good jest; for example's sake — 
 " Walking yesterday morning casually down Snow Hill, who 
 should we meet but Mr. Deputy Humphreys ! we rejoice to add, 
 that the worthy deputy appeared to enjoy a good state of health. 
 Wc do not remember ever to have seen him look better." This 
 gentleman, so surprisingly met upon Snow Hill, from some 
 peculiarities in gait or gesture, was a constant butt for mirth 
 to the small paragraph-mongers of the day ; and our friend 
 thought that he might have his fling at him with the rest. 
 We met A. in Holborn shortly after this extraordinary ren- 
 counter, which he told with tears of satisfaction in his eyes, 
 and chuckling at the anticipated effects of its announcement 
 next day in the paper. We did not quite comprehend where 
 the wit of it lay at the time ; nor was it easy to be detected 
 when the thing came out, advantaged by type and letter-press. 
 He had better have met anything that morning than a com- 
 mon council man. His services were shortly after dispensed 
 with, on the plea that his paragraphs of late had been defi- 
 cient in point. The one in question, it must be owned, had 
 un air, in the opening especially, proper to awaken curiosity; 
 and the sentiment, or moral, wears the aspect of humanity 
 and good neighbourly feeling. But somehow the conclusion 
 was not judged altogether to answer to the magnificent prom- 
 ise of the premises. We traced our friend's pen afterward in 
 the "True Briton," the "Star," the "Traveller" — from all 
 which he was successively dismissed, the proprietors having 
 "no further occasion for his services*" Nothing whs easier
 
 ESSAYS* OF ELIA. 213 
 
 than to detect him. When wit failed, or topics ran low, there 
 constantly appeared the following — " It is not generally known 
 thai the three blue hulls tit the pawnbrokers', shops are the 
 ancient arms of Lombardy. The Lombards were the first 
 money-brokers in Europe." Bob has dune more tu set the 
 public right on this important puint of blazonry than the 
 whole college of heralds. 
 
 The appointment uf a regular wit has lung ceased to be a 
 part o( the economy uf a morning paper. Editurs find their 
 own jukes, or do as well without them. Parson Ebte and 
 Tupham brought up the set custom of " witty paragrahs" first 
 in the "World." Beaden was a reigning paragraphist in his 
 day, and succeeded poor Allen in the Oracle. But, as we 
 said, the fashion of jukes passes away ; and it weuld be diffi- 
 cult to discover in the biographer uf Mrs. Siddons, any traces 
 of that vivacity and fancy which charmed the whole town at 
 the commencement of the present century. Even the prelu- 
 sive delicacies of the present writer — the curt " Astrsan al- 
 lusion" — would be thought pedantic and out of date in these 
 days. 
 
 From the office of the Morning Post, (for we may as well 
 exhaust our newspaper reminiscences at once,) by change of 
 property in the paper, we were transferred, mortifying ex- 
 change ! to the office of the Albiun Newspaper, late Raek- 
 strow's Museum, in Fleet-street. What a transition — from a 
 handsome apartment, from rosewood desks, and silver ink- 
 stands, tu an office — no office, but a Jen rather, but just re- 
 deemed from the occupation of dead monsters, of which it 
 seemed redolent — from the centre of loyalty and fashion to a 
 focus of vulgarity and sedition ! Here in murky closet, in- 
 adequate from its square contents to the receipt of the two 
 bodies uf editor and humble paragraph-maker together at one 
 time, sat, in the discharge of his new editorial functions, (the 
 "Bigod" of Elia,) the redoubted John Fenwick. 
 
 F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left not many 
 in the pockets of his friends whom he might command, had 
 purchased (on tick doubtless) the whole and sole editorship, 
 proprietorship, with all the rights and titles (such as they 
 were worth) of the Albion, from one Lovell ; of whom wo 
 know nothing, save that he had stood in the pillory for a libel 
 on the Prince of Wales. With this hopeless concern— for it 
 had been sinking ever since its commencement, and could 
 now reckon upon not more than a hundred subscribers — F. 
 resolutely determined upon pulling down the government in 
 the first, instance, and making both our fortunes by way of 
 corollary. For seven weeks and more did this infatuated 
 
 L2
 
 244 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 democrat go about borrowing seven-shilling pieces, and lesser 
 coin, to meet the daily demands of the stamp-office, which al- 
 lowed no credit to publications of that side in politics. An 
 outcast from politer bread, we attached our small talents to 
 the forlorn fortunes of our friend. Our occupation now was 
 to write treason. 
 
 Recollections of feelings — which were all that now remained 
 from our first boyish heats kindled by the French revolution, 
 when, if we were misled, we erred in the company of some 
 who are accounted very good men now — rather than any ten- 
 dency at this time to republican doctrines — assisted us in as- 
 suming a style of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant, 
 in no very under tone, to the right earnest fanaticism of F. 
 Our cue was now to insinuate, rather than recommend, possi- 
 ble abdications. Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribunals, were cov- 
 ered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis — as Mr. Bayes 
 says, never naming the thing directly — that the keen eye of 
 an attorney-general was insufficient to detect the lurking 
 snake among them. There were times, indeed, when we 
 sighed for our more gentleman-like occupation under Stuart. 
 But with change of masters it is ever change of service. Al- 
 ready one paragraph, and another, as we learned afterward 
 from a gentleman at the treasury, had begun to be marked at 
 that office, with a view of its being submitted at least to the 
 attention of the proper law-officers — when an unlucky, or ra- 
 ther lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J s M h, 
 
 who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits 
 of his apostacy, as F. pronounced it, (it is hardly worth par- 
 ticularizing,) happening to offend the nice sense of Lord, or, as 
 he then delighted to be called, Citizen Stanhope, deprived F. 
 at once of the last hopes of a guinea from the last patron that 
 had stuck by us ; and, breaking up our establishment, left us 
 to the safe, but somewhat mortifying, neglect of the crown 
 lawyers. It was about this time, or a little earlier, that Dan 
 Stuart made that curious confession to us, that he had " never 
 deliberately walked into an exhibition at Somerset House in 
 his life."
 
 ESSAVS UK ELI A. 845 
 
 BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY 
 IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 
 
 Hogarth excepted, can Ave produce any one painter within 
 the last fifty years, or since the humour of exhibiting began, 
 that has treated a story imaginatively ? By this we mean, upon 
 whom his subject has so acted, that it has seemed to direct him 
 — not to be arranged by him ? Any upon whom its leading or 
 collateral {joints have impressed themselves so tyrannically, that 
 he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a revela- 
 tion ? Any that has imparted to his compositions, not merely 
 so much truth as is enough to convey a story with clearness, 
 but that individualizing property which should keep the sub- 
 ject so treated distinct in feature from every other subject, 
 however similar, and to common apprehensions almost identi- 
 cal ; so as that we might say, This and this part could have found 
 an appropriate place in no other picture in the world but this ? 
 Is there anything in modern art — we will not demand that it 
 should be equal — but in anyway analogous to what Titian has 
 effected, in that wonderful bringing together of two times in 
 the " Ariadne," in the National Gallery? Precipitous, with 
 his reeling satyr rout about him, repeopling and redluming 
 suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond the 
 grape, Bacchus, bom in fire, firelike, flings himself at the 
 Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the 
 story — an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly 
 proud. Guido, in his harmonious version of it, saw no further. 
 But from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has re- 
 called past time, and laid it contributory with the present to 
 one simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with 
 the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the pres- 
 ence and new offers of a god — as if unconscious of Bacchus, 
 or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant 
 — her soul undistracted from Theseus — Ariadne is still pacing 
 the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the 
 same local solitude, with which she awoke at daybreak to 
 catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the 
 Athenian. 
 
 Here are two points miraculously co-uniting ; fierce so- 
 ciety, with the feeling of solitude still absolute ; noonday reve- 
 lations, with the accidents of the dull gray dawn unquenched 
 and lingering ; and the present Bacchus, with the past Ariadne ; 
 21*
 
 246 E3SAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 two stories, with double time ; separate, and harmonizing. 
 Had the artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to 
 the god ; still more, had she expressed a rapture at his ad- 
 vent, where would have been the story of the mighty desola- 
 tion of the heart previous ? merged in the insipid accident of 
 a flattering offer met with a welcome acceptance. The 
 broken heart for Theseus was not lightly to be pieced up by 
 a god. 
 
 We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by 
 Raphael in the Vatican. It is the presentation of the new- 
 born Eve to Adam by the Almighty. A fairer mother of man- 
 kind we might imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of men 
 since born. But these are matters subordinate to the concep- 
 tion of the situation, displayed in this extraordinary produc- 
 tion. A tolerably modern artist would have been satisfied 
 with tempering certain raptures of connubial anticipation, with 
 a suitable acknowledgment to the Giver of the blessing, in the 
 countenance of the first bridegroom ; something like the di- 
 vided attention of the child (Adam was here a child man) be- 
 tween the given toy, and the mother who had just blessed it with 
 the bawble. This is the obvious, the first-sight view, the su- 
 perficial. An artist of a higher grade, considering the awful 
 presence they were in, would have taken care to subtract 
 something from the expression of the more humane passion, 
 and to heighten the more spiritual one. This would be as 
 much as an exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset 
 House to last year's show, has been encouraged to look for. 
 It is obvious to hint at a lower expression yet, in a picture, 
 that, for respects of drawing and colouring, might be deemed 
 not wholly inadmissible within these art-fostering walls, in 
 which the raptures should be as ninety-nine, the gratitude as 
 one, or perhaps zero ! By neither the one passion nor the 
 other has Raphael expounded the situation of Adam. Singly 
 upon his brow sits the absorbing sense of wonder at the 
 created miracle. The moment is seized by the intuitive artist, 
 perhaps not self-conscious of his art, in which neither of the 
 conflicting emotions — a moment how abstracted — have had 
 time to spring up, or to battle for indecorous mastery. We 
 have seen a landscape of a justly admired neoteric, in which 
 he aimed at delineating a fiction, one of the most severely 
 beautiful in antiquity — the gardens of the Hespefides. Todo 
 Mr. justice, he had painted a laudable orchard, with fit- 
 ting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of which a I'olvpheme, 
 by Poussin, is somehow a fac-simile for the situation) look- 
 ing over into the world shut out backwards, so that none but a 
 "still-climbing Hercules" could hope to catch a peep at the
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 247 
 
 admired Ternary of recluses. No conventual porter could 
 keep his keys better than this custos with the " lidless eyes." 
 He not only sees that none Jo intrude into that privacy, but, 
 as clear as daylight, that none but Hercules nut Diabolus by 
 any manner of means can. So far all is well. We have ab- 
 solute solitude here or nowhere. Ab extra, the damsels are 
 snug enough. But here the artist's courage seems to have 
 failed him. He began to pity his pretty charge, and, to com- 
 fort the irksomeness, has peopled their solitude with a bevy 
 of fair attendants, maids of honour, or ladies of the bed- 
 chamber, according to the approved etiquette at a court of the 
 nineteenth century ; giving to the whole scene the air of a 
 fete champetrc, if we will but excuse the absence of the gen- 
 tlemen. This is well, and Watteauish. But what is become 
 of the solitary mystery — the 
 
 " Daughters three, 
 That sing around the golden tree?" 
 
 This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated 
 this subject. 
 
 The paintings, or rather the stupendous architectural de- 
 signs, of a modern artist, have been urged as objections to 
 the theory of our motto. They are of a character, we con- 
 fess, to stagger it. His towered structures are of the highest 
 order of the material sublime. Whether they were dreams, 
 or transcripts of some elder workmanship — Assyrian ruins 
 old — restored by this mighty artist, they satisfy our most* 
 stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of the an- 
 tique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled. On 
 that side the imagination of the artist halts, and appears de- 
 fective. Let us examine the point of the story in the " Bel- 
 shazzar's Feast." We will introduce it by an opposite anec- 
 dote. 
 
 The court historians of the day record, that at the first 
 dinner given by the late king (then prince regent) at the 
 Pavilion, the following characteristic frolic was played off. 
 The guests were select and admiring ; the banquet profuse 
 and admirable ; the lights lustrous and oriental ; the eye was 
 perfectly dazzled with the display of plate, among which the 
 great gold saltcellar, brought from the regalia in the Tower for 
 this especial purpose, itself a tower ! stood conspicuous for its 
 magnitude. And now the Rev. * * * *, the then admired 
 court chaplain, was proceeding with the grace, when, at a 
 signal given, the lights were suddenly overcast, and a hugo 
 transparency was discovered, in which glittered in gold let- 
 ters-'—
 
 248 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 " Brighton* — Earthquake — Svv allow-up-alive V 
 
 Imagine the confusion of the guests the Georges and gar- 
 ters, jewels, bracelets, moulted upon the occasion ! The fans 
 dropped, and picked up the next morning by the sly court 
 pages ! Mrs. Fitz-what's-her-nanie fainting, and the Countess 
 of * * * holding the smelling-bottle, till the good-humoured 
 prince caused harmony to be restored by calling in fresh 
 candles, and declaring that the whole was nothing but a pan- 
 lomime hoax, got up by the ingenious Mr. Farley of Covent 
 Garden, from hints which his royal highness himself had 
 furnished ! Then imagine the infinite applause that followed, 
 the mutual rallyings, the declarations that " they were not 
 much frightened," of the assembled galaxy. 
 
 The point of time in the picture exactly answers to the 
 appearance of the transparency in the anecdote. The hud- 
 dle, the flutter, the bustle, the escape, the alarm, and the mock 
 alarm ; the prettinesses heightened by consternation ; the 
 courtier's fear which was flattery, and the lady's which was 
 affectation ; all that we may conceive to have taken place in 
 a mob of Brighton courtiers, sympathizing with the well-acted 
 surprise of their sovereign ; all this, and no more, is exhibited 
 by the well-dressed lords and ladies in the Hall of Belus. 
 Just this sort of consternation we have seen among a flock 
 of disquieted wild geese at the report only of a gun having 
 gone off! 
 
 But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety for the 
 preservation of their persons — such as we have witnessed at 
 a theatre, when a slight alarm of fire has been given — an ad- 
 equate exponent of a supernatural terror ? the way in which 
 the finger of God, writing judgments, would have been met 
 by the withered conscience ? There is a human fear, and a 
 divine fear. The one is disturbed, restless, and bent upon 
 escape. The other is bowed down, effortless, passive. 
 When the spirit appeared before Eliphaz in the visions of the 
 night, and the hair of his flesh stood up, was it in the thoughts 
 of the Temanite to ring the bell of his chamber, or to call up 
 the servants? But let us see in the text what there is to jus- 
 tify all this huddle of vulgar consternation. 
 
 From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzar had 
 made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine 
 before the thousand. The golden and silver vessels are gor- 
 geously enumerated, with the princes, the king's concubines, 
 and his wives. Then follows — 
 
 * In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and 
 wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall
 
 LSSAVS OF ELLA. 249 
 
 of the king's palace ; and the king saw the part of the hand 
 that wrote. Then the king's countenance was changed, and 
 his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were 
 loosened, and his knees smote one against another." 
 
 This is the plain text. By no hint can it be otherwise 
 inferred, but that the appearance was solely confined to the 
 fancy of Belshazzar, that his single brain was troubled. Not 
 a word is spoken of its being seen by any else there present, 
 not even by the queen herself, who merely undertakes for the 
 interpretation of the phenomenon, as related to her, doubtless, 
 by her husband. The lords are simply said to be astonished ; 
 i. e., at the trouble and the change of countenance in their 
 sovereign. Even the prophet does not appear to have seen 
 the scroll, which the king saw. He recalls it only, as Joseph 
 did the dream to the King of Egypt. " Then was the part 
 of the hand sent from him, [the Lord,] and this writing was 
 written." He speaks of the phantasm as past. 
 
 Then what becomes of this needless multiplication of the 
 miracle ? this message to a royal conscience, singly ex- 
 pressed — for it was said, " thy kingdom is divided" — simul- 
 taneously impressed upon the fancies of a thousand courtiers, 
 who were implied in it neither directly nor grammatically ? 
 
 But admitting the artist's own version of the story, and that 
 the sight was seen also by the thousand courtiers — let it have 
 been visible to all Babylon — as the knees of Belshazzar were 
 shaken, and his countenance troubled, even so would the 
 knees of every man m Babylon, and their countenances, as 
 of an individual man, been troubled ; bowed, bent down, so 
 would they have remained, stupor-tixed, with no thought of 
 struggling with that inevitable judgment. 
 
 Not all that is optically possible to be seen is to be shown 
 in every picture. The eye delightedly dwells upon the brill- 
 iant individualities in a "Marriage at Cana," by Veronese or 
 Titian, to the very texture and colour of the wedding gar- 
 ments, the ring glittering upon the bride's fingers, the metal 
 and fashion of the wine-pots ; for at such seasons there is 
 leisure and luxury to be curious. But in a " day of judg- 
 ment,'' or in a " day of lesser horrors, yet divine," as at the 
 impious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the actual 
 eye of an agent or patient in the immediate scene would see, 
 only in musses and indistinclion. Not only the female attiro 
 ami jewellery exposed to the critical eye of fashion, as mi- 
 nutely as the dresses in a lady's magazine, in the criticised 
 picture — but perhaps the curiosities of anatomical science, 
 and studied diversities of posture in the falling angels and 
 L 3
 
 250 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 sinners of Michael Angelo — have no business in their great 
 subjects. There was no leisure for them. 
 
 By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got 
 at their true conclusions ; by not showing the actual appear- 
 ances, that is, all that was to be seen at any given moment 
 by an indifferent eye, but only what the eye might be sup- 
 posed to see in the doing or suffering of some portentous 
 action. Suppose the moment of the swallowing up of Pom- 
 peii. There they were to be seen — houses, columns, archi- 
 tectural proportions, differences of public and private build- 
 ings, men and women at their standing occupations, the diver- 
 sified thousand postures, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion 
 truly, but physically they were visible. But what eye saw 
 them at that eclipsing moment, which reduces confusion to a 
 kind of unity, and when the senses are upturned from their 
 proprieties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only ? A 
 thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure to contem- 
 plate the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at 
 his oven, and to turn over, with antiquarian coolness, the pots 
 and pans of Pompeii. 
 
 " Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the 
 valley of Ajalon." Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism, 
 in his conception, sees aught but the heroic son of Nun, with 
 the outstretched arm, and the greater and lesser light obsequi- 
 ous? Doubtless there were to be seen hill and dale, and 
 chariots and horsemen, on open plain, or winding by secret 
 defiles, and all the circumstances and stratagems of war. 
 But whose eyes would have been conscious of this array at 
 the interposition of the synchronic miracle ? Yet in the pic- 
 ture of this subject by the artist of the " Belshazzar's Feast" 
 — no ignoble work either — the marshalling and landscape of 
 the war are everything, the miracle sinks into an anecdote of 
 the day ; and the eye may " dart through rank and file tra- 
 verse" for some minutes, before it shall discover, among his 
 armed followers, which is Joshua ! Not modern art alone, but 
 ancient, where only it is to be found if anywhere, can be de- 
 tected erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. The 
 world has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, 
 transcending the figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, 
 in the great picture at Angerstein's. It seems a thing between 
 two beings. A ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly- 
 apprehending gratitude at second life bestowed. It cannot 
 forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a body. 
 It has to tell of the world of spirits. Was it from a feeling, 
 that the crowd of half-impassioned by-standers, and the stdl 
 more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a distance, who have
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 251 
 
 not heard, or but faintly have been told, of the passing miracle, 
 admirable as they are in design and line — for it is a glorified 
 work — do not respond adequately to the action — that the sin- 
 gle figure of the Lazarus lias been attributed to Michael An- 
 gelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly cobbed of the fame of 
 the greater half of the interest ? Now, that there were not in- 
 different passers-by within actual scope of the eyes of those 
 present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it had but faintly, 
 or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to deny ; hut 
 would they see them ? or can the mind in the conception of it 
 admit of such unconcerning objects ? can it think of them at 
 all '. or what associating league to the imagination can there 
 be between the seers, and the seers not, of a presentiai mir- 
 acle ? 
 
 "Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a dryad, 
 we will ask whether, in the present low state of expectation, 
 the patron would not, or ought not to be fully satisfied with a 
 beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks ? 
 Disseat those woods, and place the same figure among foun- 
 tains, and fall of pellucid water, and you have a — naiad ! 
 Not so in a rough print we have seen after Julio Romano, we 
 think — for it is long since — there, by no process, with mere 
 change of scene, could the figure have reciprocated characters. 
 Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beau- 
 tiful in convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural 
 tree, co-twisting with its limbs her own, till both seemed 
 either — these, animated branches ; those, disanimated mem- 
 bers — yet the animal and vegetable lives sufficiently kept dis- 
 tinct — his dryad lay — an approximation of two natures, which, 
 to conceive, it must be seen ; analogous to, not the same with, 
 the delicacies of Ovidian transformations. 
 
 To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial comprehension, 
 the most barren, the great masters gave loftiness and fruitful- 
 ness. The large eye of genius saw in the meanness of pres- 
 ent objects their capabilities of treatment from their relations 
 to some grand past or future. How has Raphael — we must 
 still linger about the Vatican — treated the humble craft of the 
 shipbuilder in jus " Building of the Ark ?" It is in that 
 scriptural series, to which we have referred, and which, 
 judging from some fine rough old graphic sketches of theft) 
 which we possess, seem to be of a higher and more poetic 
 grade than even the Cartoons. The dim of sight are the timid 
 and the shrinking. There is a cowardice in modern art. As 
 the Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge's friend made the prophetic 
 guess at Rome, from tin- beard and horns of the Moses of 
 Michael Angel'o collected no inferences beyond that of a he
 
 252 ESSAYS OF ELIA- 
 
 goat and a Cornuto , so from this subject, of mere mechanic 
 promise, it would instinctively turn away, as from one incapa- 
 ble of investiture with any grandeur. The dockyards at 
 Woolwich would object derogatory associations. The depot 
 at Chatham would be the mote and the beam in its intellectual 
 eye. But not to the nautical preparations in the shipyards 
 of Civita Vecchia did Raphael look for instructions, when he 
 imagined the building of the vessel that was to be conserva- 
 tory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. In 
 the intensity of the action, he keeps ever out of sight the 
 meanness of the operation. There is the patriarch, in calm 
 forethought, and with holy prescience, giving directions. 
 And there are his agents — the solitary but sufficient three — 
 hewing, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of 
 a Demiurgus ; under some instinctive rather than technical 
 guidance ; giant-muscled ; every one a Hercules, or liker 
 to those Vulcanian three, that in sounding caverns under 
 Mongibello wrought in fire — Brontes, and black Steropes, 
 and Pyracmon. So work the workmen that should repair a 
 world ! 
 
 Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with pictorial 
 subjects. In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly every- 
 thing, the unseen qualities as nothing. Othello's colour — the 
 infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaff — do they 
 haunt us perpetually in the reading? or are they obtruded 
 upon our conceptions one time for ninety-nine that we are lost 
 in admiration at the respective moral or intellectual attributes 
 of the character 1 But in a picture Othello is always a black- 
 moor ; and the other only plump Jack. Deeply corporeal- 
 ized, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of ex- 
 ternality, must be the mind, to which, in its better moments, 
 the image of the high-souled, high-intelligenced Quixote — the 
 errant star of knighthood, made more tender by eclipse — has 
 never presented itself, divested from the unhallowed accom- 
 paniment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Kosi- 
 nante. That man has read his book by halves ; he has laughed, 
 mistaking his author's purport, which was — tears. The artist 
 that pictures Quixote (and it is in this degrading point that he 
 is every season held up at our exhibitions) in the shallow hope 
 of exciting mirth, would have joined the rubble at the heels 
 of his starved steed. We wish not to see that counterfeited 
 which we would not have wished to see in the reality. Con- 
 scious of the heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, on hear- 
 ing that his withered person was passing, would have stepped 
 over his threshold to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, and 
 the " strange bedfellows which misery brings a man acquainted
 
 E33AVS OF KLIA. 203 
 
 with?" Shade of Cervantes ! who in thy second part could 
 put into the mouth of thy Quixote those high aspirations of a 
 superchivalrous gallantry, where he replies to one of the 
 shepherdesses, apprehensive that he would spoil their pretty 
 networks, and inviting him to be a guest with them, in accents 
 like these: "Truly, fairest lady, AcUvou was not more as- 
 toni&bed when he saw Diana bathing herself at the fountain, 
 than I have been in beholding your beauty : I commend the 
 manner of your pastime, and thank you for your kind oilers; 
 and, if 1 may serve you, so I may be sure you will be obeyed, 
 you may command me ; for my profession is this, to show 
 myself thankful, and a doer of good to all sorts of people, es- 
 pecially of the rank that your person shows you to be ; and if 
 those nets, as they take up but a little piece of ground, ,-diould 
 take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds to 
 pass through, rather than break them : and, (he adds,) that you 
 may give credit to this my exaggeration, behold at leasj he 
 that promiseth you this is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply 
 this name hath come to your hearing." Illustrious romancer ! 
 were the " line phrensies" which possessed the brain of thy 
 own Quixote a lit subject, as in this second part, to be ex- 
 posed to the jeers of duennas and serving-men I to be mon- 
 stered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men .' 
 AVas that pitiable infirmity, which in thy first part misleads 
 him, always from within, into half-ludicrous, but more than 
 half-compassionable and admirable errors, not lulliction enough 
 from Heaven, that men by studied artifices must devise and 
 practise upon the humour, to inflame where they should soolh 
 it ? Why, Goneril would have blushed to practise upon the 
 abdicated king at this rate, and the she-wolf Regan not have 
 endured to play the pranks upon his fled wits, which thou hast 
 made thy Quixote suffer in dutchesses' halls, and at the hands 
 ol that unworthy nobleman.* 
 
 In the fust adventures, even, it needed all the art of the 
 most consummate artist in the book way that the world hath 
 yet seen, to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic at- 
 tributes of the character without relaxing ; so as absolutely 
 that they shall suffer no alloy from the debasing fellowship 
 of the clown. If it ever obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are 
 we inclined to laugh; or not, rather, to indulge a contrary 
 emotion ' Cervantes, stung, perchance, by the relish with 
 which his reading public had received the fooleries of the 
 man, more to their palates than the generosities of the master, 
 in the. secpjcl let his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the bal- 
 
 * Yet from tins second part, our cned-up pictures are mostly selected , tho 
 waiting women with beards, &c. 
 
 23
 
 254 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 ance, and sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his contempo- 
 raries. We know that in the present day the knight has fewer 
 admirers than the squire. Anticipating, what did actually 
 happen to him — as afterward it did to his scarce inferior fol- 
 lower, the author of " Guzman de Alfarache" — that some less 
 knowing hand would prevent him by a spurious second part; 
 and judging that it would be easier for his competitor to out- 
 bid him in the comicalities, than in the romance, of his work, 
 he abandoned his knight, and has fairly set up the squire for 
 his hero. For what else has he unsealed the eyes of Sancho; 
 and instead of that twilight state of semi-insanity — the mad- 
 ness at second-hand — the contagion, caught from a stronger 
 mind infected — that war between native cunning and heredi- 
 tary deference, with which he has hitherto accompanied his 
 master — two for a pair almost — does he substitute a down- 
 right knave, with open eyes, for his own ends only following 
 a confessed madman; and offering at one time to lay, if not 
 actually laying, hands upon him ! From the moment that 
 Sancho loses his reverence, Don Quixote is become — a treat- 
 able lunatic. Our artists handle him accordingly. 
 
 REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF 
 
 AGE. 
 
 The Old Year being dead, and the New Year coming of 
 age, which he does, by calendar law, as soon as the breath is 
 out of the old gentleman's body, nothing would serve the young 
 spark but he must give a dinner upon the occasion, to which 
 all the Days in the year were invited. The Festivals, whom 
 he deputed as his stewards,were mightily taken with the notion. 
 They had been engaged time out of mind, they said, in pro- 
 viding mirth and good cheer for mortals below ; and it was 
 time they should have a taste of their own bounty. It was 
 si i Illy debated among them, whether the Fasts should he ad- 
 mitted. Some said the appearance of such lean, starved 
 guests, with their mortified faces, would pervert the ends of 
 tlic meeting. But the objection was overruled by Christmas 
 Day, who had a design upon Ash Wednesday, (as you shall 
 hear,) and a mighty desire to see how the old domine would 
 behave himself in his cups. Only the Vigils were re- 
 quested to come with their lanterns, to light the gentlefolks 
 home at night.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 255 
 
 All the Days came to their day. Covers were provided 
 for three hundred and sixty-five guests at the principal table ; 
 with an occasional knife and fork at the sideboard for the 
 Twenty-ninth of February. 
 
 I should have told you that cards of invitation had been 
 issued. The carriers were the Hours ; twelve little, merry, 
 whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire to see, thai went 
 all round, and found out the persons invited well enough, 
 with the exception of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a lew 
 such Moveables, who had lately shifted their quarters! 
 
 Well, they all met at last, foul Days, fine Days, all sorts of 
 Days, and a rare din they made of it. There was nothing 
 but, Hail ! fellow Day — well met — brother Day — sister Day, 
 — only Lady Day kept a little on the aloof, and seemed some- 
 what scornful. Yet some said, Twelfth Day cut her out and 
 out, for she came in a tiffany suit, white and gold, like a queen 
 on a frost-cake, all royal, glittering, and Epipltanous. The rest 
 came, some in green, some in white — but old Lent and his 
 family were not yet out of mourning. Rainy Days came in, 
 dripping; and sunshiny Days helped them to change their 
 stockings. Wedding Day was there in his marriage finery, 
 a little the worse for wear. Pay Day came late, as he always 
 does ; and Doomsday sent word — he might be expected. 
 
 April Fool (as my young lord's jester) took upon himself 
 to marshal the guests, and wild work he made with it. It 
 would have posed old Erra Pater to have found out any given 
 Dai/ in the year to erect a scheme upon — good Days, bad 
 Days, were so shuffled together, to the confounding of all 
 sober horoscopy. 
 
 He had stuck the Twenty-first if June next to the Tirenti/- 
 second of December, and the former looked like a mavpole 
 siding a marrow-bone. Ash Wednesday got wedged in (as 
 was concerted) between Christmas and Lord Mayor's Days. 
 Lord ! how he laid about him ! Nothing but barons of beef 
 and turkeys would go down with him — to the great L, r r< ■asiii<> 
 and detriment of his new sackcloth bib and tucker. Ami 
 still Christmas Day was at his elbow, plying him with the 
 wassail-bowl, till he roared, and hiccoughed, and protested 
 there was no faith in dried ling, but commended it to the devil 
 for a sour, windy, acrimonious, censorious, hy-po-crit-crit- 
 critical mess, and no dish for a gentleman. Then lie dipped his 
 fist into the middle of the great custard that stood before Ins 
 lift-hand mighbour, and daubed his hungry beard all over with 
 it, till you would have taken him for the Last Da// in Decem- 
 ber, it so hung in icicles. 
 
 At another part of the table, Shrove Tuesday was helping
 
 256 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 the Second of September to some cock-broth — which courtesy 
 the latter returned with the delicate thigh of a hen pheasant 
 —so there was no love lost for that matter. The Last of 
 Lent was sponging upon Shrove tide'' s pancakes ; which April 
 Fool perceiving, told him he did well, for pancakes were proper 
 to a good fry-day. 
 
 In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of Jan- 
 uary, who, it seems, being a sour, Puritanic character, that 
 thought nobody's meat good or sanctified enough for him, 
 had smuggled into the room a calf's head,which he had had 
 cooked at home for that purpose, thinking to feast thereon in- 
 continently ; but as it lay in the dish, March Manyweathers, 
 who is a very fine lady, and subject to the megrims, screamed 
 out there was a '• human head in the platter," and raved about 
 Herodias' daughter to that degree, that the obnoxious viand 
 was obliged to be removed ; nor did she recover her stomach 
 till she had gulped down a Restorative, confected of Oak Apple, 
 which the merry Twenty-ninth of May always carries about 
 with him for that purpose. 
 
 The king's health* being called for after this, a notable dis- 
 pute arose between the Twelfth of August (a zealous old whig 
 gentlewoman) and the Ticenty-third of April, (a new-fangled lady 
 of the tory stamp,) as to which of them should have the honour 
 to propose it. August grew hot upon the matter, affirming time 
 out of mind the prescriptive right to have lain with her, till her 
 rival had basely supplanted her ; whom she represented as 
 little belter than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, 
 while she (the legitimate Birthday) had scarcely a rag, &c. 
 
 April Fool, being made mediator, confirmed the right in the 
 strongest form of words to the appellant, but decided for peace' 
 sake that the exercise of it should remain with the present 
 possessor. At the same time, he slily rounded the first lady 
 in the ear, that an action might lie against the crown for bi- 
 geny. 
 
 It beginning to grow a little duskish, Candlemas lustily 
 bawled out for lights, which was opposed by all the Daus, 
 who protested against burning daylight. Then fair water was 
 handed round in silver ewers, and the same lady was observed 
 to take an unusual time in washing herself. 
 
 May Day, with that sweetness which is peculiar to her, in 
 a neat speech proposing the health of the founder, crowned 
 her goblet (and by her example the rest of the company) 
 with garlands. This being done, the lordly New Year from 
 the upper end of the table, in a cordial but somewhat lofty 
 
 » The late king.
 
 ESSAVS OF ELIA. 237 
 
 tone, returned thanks. lie felt proud on an occasion of meet- 
 ing so many of his worthy father's late tenants, promised to 
 improve their farms, and, at the same time, to abate (if any- 
 thing was Pound unreasonable) in their rents. 
 
 At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days involuntarily 
 looked at each other, and smiled ; April Fool whistled to an 
 old tune of " New Brooms ;" and a surly old rebel at the 
 farther end of the table (who was discovered to be no other 
 than the Fifth of November) muttered out, distinctly enough 
 to be heard by the whole company, words to this effect, that, 
 " when the old one is gone, he is a fool that looks for a bet- 
 ter." Which rudeness of his the guests, resenting, unani- 
 mously voted his expulsion ; and the malecontent was thrust 
 out neck and heels into the cellar, as the properest place for 
 such a boutifiu and firebrand as he had shown himself to be. 
 
 Order being restored — the young lord (who, to say truth, 
 had been a little milled, and put beside his oratory) in as few, 
 and yet as obliging words as possible, assured them of entire 
 welcome ; and, with a graceful turn, singling out poor Ticenty- 
 ninth of February, that hltd sat all this while mumchance 
 at the sideboard, begged to couple his health with that of the 
 good company before him — which he drank accordingly ; ob- 
 serving, that he had not seen his honest face any time these 
 four years — with a number of endearing expressions besides. 
 At the same time, removing the solitary Day from the forlorn 
 seat which had been assigned him, be stationed him at his 
 own board, somewhere between the Greek Calends and Lat- 
 ter Lammas. 
 
 Ash Wednesday, being now called upon for a song, with his 
 eyes fast stuck in his head, and as well as the Canary he had 
 swallowed would give him leave, struck up a carol, which 
 Christmas Day had taught him for the nonce ; and was fol- 
 lowed by the latter, who gave " Miserere" in fine style, hitting 
 oil' the mumping notes and lengthened drawl of Old Mortifi- 
 cation with infinite humour. April Fool swore they had ex- 
 changed conditions : but Good Friday was observed to look 
 extremely grave ; and Sunday held her fan before her face, 
 that she might not be seen to smile. 
 
 Shrovetide, Lord Mayor's Day, and April Fool, next joined 
 in a glee — 
 
 " Which is the properest day to drink ?" 
 
 in which all the Days chiming in, made a merry burden. 
 
 They next fell to quibbles and conundrums. The question 
 being proposed, who had the greatest number of followers — 
 the Quarter Days said, there could be no question as to that , 
 22*
 
 2oO ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 for they had all the creditors in the world dogging their heels. 
 But April Fool gave it in favour of the Forty Days before 
 Easter; because the debtors in all cases outnumbered the 
 creditors, and they kept lent all the year. 
 
 All this while, Valentine's Day kept courting pretty May, 
 who sat next him, slipping amorous billets-doux under the 
 table, till the Dog Days (who are naturally of a warm consti- 
 tution) began to be jealous, and to bark and rage exceedingly. 
 April Fool, who likes a bit of sport above measure, and had 
 some pretensions to the lady besides, as being but a cousin 
 once removed — clapped and hallooed them on ; and as fast as 
 their indignation cooled, those mad wags, the Ember Days, 
 were at it with their bellows, to blow it into a flame ; and all 
 was in a ferment : till old Madam Septuagesima (who boasts 
 herself the Mother of the Days) wisely diverted the conver- 
 sation with a tedious tale of the lovers which she could reckon 
 when she was young ; and of one Master Rogation Day in 
 particular, who was for ever putting the question to her ; but 
 she kept him at a distance, as the chronicle would tell — by 
 which I apprehend she meant the Almanac. Then she ram- 
 bled on to the Days that were gone, the good old Days, and so 
 to the Days before the Flood — which plainly showed her old 
 head to be little better than crazed and doited. 
 
 Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks and great- 
 coats, and took their leaves. Lord Mayor's Day went off" in 
 a mist, as usual ; Shortest Day in a deep black fog, that 
 wrapped the little gentleman all round like a hedge-hog. 
 Two Vigils — so watchmen are called in heaven — saw 
 Christmas Day safe home — they had been used to the busi- 
 ness before. Another Vigil — a stout, sturdy patrol, called 
 the Eve of St. Christopher — seeing Ash Wednesday in a con- 
 dition little better than he should be— e'en whipped him over 
 his shoulders, pick-a-back fashion, and Old Mortification went 
 floating home, singing — 
 
 " On the bat's back do I fly," 
 
 and a number of old snatches besides, between drunk and 
 sober, but very few Aves or Penitentiaries (you may believe 
 me) were among them. Longest Day set off westward in 
 beautiful crimson and gold — the rest, some in one fashion, 
 some in another ; but Valentine and pretty May took their de- 
 parture together in one of the prettiest silvery twilights a 
 Lover's Day could wish to set in.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA 259 
 
 THE WEDDING. 
 
 I Dojnot know when I have been better pleased than at be- 
 ing invited last week to be present at the wedding of a friend's 
 daughter. 1 like to make one at these ceremonies, which to 
 us old people give back our youth in a manner, and restore 
 our gayest season, in the remembrance of our own success, 
 or the regrets, scarcely less tender, of our own youthful dis- 
 appointments, in this point of a settlement. On these occa- 
 sions I am sure to be in good-humour for a week or two after, 
 and enjoy a reflected honeymoon. Being without a family, 
 I am flattered with these temporary adoptions into a friend's 
 family ; I feel a sort of cousinhood, or uncleship, for the 
 season ; I am inducted into degrees of affinity ; and, in the 
 participated socialities of the little community, I lay down 
 for a brief while my solitary bachelorship. I carry this hu- 
 mour so far, that I take it unkindly to be left out, even when 
 a funeral is going on in the house of a dear friend. But to 
 my subject. 
 
 The union itself had been long settled, but its celebration 
 had been hitherto deferred, to an almost unreasonable state of 
 suspense in the lovers, by some invincible prejudices which 
 the bride's father had unhappily contracted upon the subject 
 of the too early marriages of females. He has been lecturing 
 any time these five years — for to that length the courtship has 
 been protracted — upon the propriety of putting off the solem- 
 nity till the lady should have completed her five-and-twentieth 
 year. We all began to be afraid that a suit, which as yet 
 had abated of none of its ardours, might at last be lingered 
 on, till passion had time to cool, and love go out in the ex- 
 periment. But a little wheedling on the part of his wife, who 
 was by no means a party to these overstrained notions, joined 
 to some serious expostulations on that of his friends, who, 
 from the growing infirmities of the old gentleman, could not 
 promise ourselves many years' enjoyment of his company, 
 and were anxious to bring matters to a conclusion during his 
 lifetime, at length prevailed ; and on Monday last the (laugh- 
 ter of my old friend, Admiral , having attained the womanly 
 
 age of nineteen, was conducted to the (.lunch by her pleasant 
 eonsin J , who told some lew years older. 
 
 Before the youthful part of my female readers express 
 their indi{mati®n at the abominable loss of time occasioned to
 
 2G0 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 the lovers by the preposterous notions of my old friend, they 
 will do well to consider the reluctance which a fond parent 
 naturalhy feels at parting with his child. To this unwilling- 
 ness, I believe, in most cases may be traced the difference of 
 opinion on this point between child and parent, whatever pre- 
 tences of interest or prudence may be held out to cover it. 
 The hard-heartedness of fathers is a fine theme for romance- 
 wi iters, a sure and moving topic ; but is there not something 
 untender, to say no more of it, in the hurry which a beloved 
 child is sometimes in to tear herself from the paternal stock, 
 and commit herself to strange graftings 1 The case is heigh- 
 tened where the lady, as in the present instance, happens to 
 be an only child. I do not understand these matters experi- 
 mentally, but I can make a shrewd guess at the wounded pride 
 of a parent upon these occasions. It is no new observation, 
 I believe, that a lover in most cases has no rival so much to 
 be feared as the father. Certainly there is a jealousy in un- 
 parallel subjects, which is little less heart-rending than the 
 passion which we more strictly christen by that name. 
 Mothers' scruples are more easily got over ; for this reason, I 
 suppose, that the protection transferred to a husband is less a 
 derogation and a loss to their authority than to the paternal. 
 Mothers, besides, have a trembling foresight, which paints the 
 inconveniences (impossible to be conceived in the same de- 
 gree by the other parent) of a life of forlorn celibacy, which 
 the refusal of a tolerable match may entail upon their child. 
 Mothers' instinct is a surer guide here than the cold reason- 
 ings of a father on such a topic. To this instinct may be 
 imputed, and by it ajone may be excused, the unbeseeming 
 artifices by which some wives push on the matrimonial pro- 
 jects of their daughters, which the husband, however appro- 
 ving, shall entertain with comparative indifference. A little 
 shamelessness on this head is pardonable. With this expla- 
 nation, forwardness becomes a grace, and maternal importu- 
 nity receives the name of a virtue. But the parson stays, 
 while I preposterously assume his office ; I am preaching, 
 while the bride is on the threshold. 
 
 Nor let any of my female readers suppose that the sage 
 reflections which have just escaped me have the obliquest 
 tendency of application to the young lady, who, it will be 
 seen, is about to venture upon a change in her condition, 
 at a mature and competent age, and not without the fullest 
 approbation of all parties. I only deprecate very hasty mar- 
 riages. 
 
 It had been fixed that the ceremony should be gone through 
 at an early hour, to give time for a little dijeune afterward,
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 2G1 
 
 to which a select party of friends had Keen invited. We were 
 in church a little before the clock struck eight. 
 
 Nothing could be more judicious or graceful than the dress 
 ol the bridemaids — the three charmirlg Miss Foresters — on 
 this morning. To give the bride an opportunity of shining 
 singly, they had come habited all in green. I am ill at de- 
 scribing female apparel ; but, while she stood at the altar in 
 vestments white and candid as her thoughts, a sacrificial 
 whiteness, they assisted in robes, such as might become 
 Diana's nymphs — Foresters indeed — as such who had not yet 
 come to the resolution of putting off cold virginity. These 
 young maids, not being so blessed as to have a mother living, 
 I am told, keep single for their father's sake, and live all to- 
 gether so happy with their remaining parent, that the hearts 
 of their lovers are ever broken with the prospect (so inau- 
 spicious to their hopes) of such uninterrupted and provoking 
 home-comfort. Gallant girls ! each a victim worthy of Iphi- 
 genia ! 
 
 I do not know what business I have to be present in solemn 
 places. I cannot divest me of an unseasonable disposition to 
 levity upon the most awful occasions. I was never cut out 
 for a public functionary. Ceremony and I have long shaken 
 hands ; but I could not resist the importunities of the young 
 lady's father, whose gout unhappily confined him at home, 
 to act as parent on this occasion, and give away the bride. 
 Something ludicrous occurred to me at this most serious of all 
 moments — a sense of my unfitness to have the disposal, even 
 in imagination, of the sweet young creature beside me. I 
 fear I was betrayed to some lightness, for the awful eye of 
 the parson — and the rector's eye of Saint Mildred's in the 
 poultry is no trifle of a rebuke — was upon me in an instant, 
 souring my incipient jest to the tristful severities of a funeral. 
 
 This was the only misbehaviour which I can plead to upon 
 this solemn occasion, unless what was objected to me after 
 the ceremony by one of the handsome Miss T 's, be ac- 
 counted a solecism. She was pleased to say that she had 
 never seen a gentleman before me give away a bride in black. 
 Now black has been my ordinary apparel so long — indeed, I 
 take it to be the proper costume of an author — the stage sanc- 
 tions it — that to have appeared in some lighter colour would 
 have raised more mirth at my expense than the anomaly had 
 created censure. But I could perceive that the bride's moth- 
 er, and some elderly ladies present, (God bless them !) would 
 have been well content if I had come in any other colour 
 than that. But I got over the omen by a lucky apologue, 
 which I remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian author, of
 
 262 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 all the birds being invited to the linnets' wedding, at which, 
 when all the rest came in their gayest feathers, the raven 
 alone apologized for his cloak because " he had no other." 
 This tolerably reconciled the elders. But with the young 
 people all was merriment, and shakings of hands, and con- 
 gratulations, and kissing away the bride's tears, and kissings 
 from her in return, till a young lady, who assumed some 
 experience in these matters, having worn the nuptial bands 
 some four or five weeks longer than her friend, rescued her, 
 archly observing, with half an eye upon the bridegroom, that 
 at this rate she would have " none left." 
 
 My friend the admiral was in fine wig and buckle on this 
 occasion — a striking contrast to his usual neglect of personal 
 appearance. He did not once shove up his borrowed locks 
 (his custom ever at his morning studies) to betray the few 
 gray stragglers of his own beneath them. He wore an aspect 
 of thoughtful satisfaction. I trembled for the hour, which at 
 length approached, when, after a protracted breakfast of three 
 hours — if stores of cold fowls, tongues, hams, botargoes, dried 
 fruits, wines, cordials, &c, can deserve so meager an appella- 
 tion — the coach was announced which was come to carry off 
 the bride and bridegroom for a season, as custom has sensibly 
 ordained, into the country ; upon which design, wishing them 
 a felicitous journey, let us return to the assembled guests 
 
 " As when a well-graced actor leaves the stage, 
 The eyes of men 
 Are idly bent on him that enters next," 
 
 so idly did we bend our eyes upon one another, when the 
 chief performers in the morning's pageant had vanished. 
 None told his tale. None sipped her glass. The poor ad- 
 miral made an effort — it was not much. I had anticipated so 
 far. Even the infinity of full satisfaction, that had betrayed 
 itself through the prim looks and quiet deportment of his lady, 
 began to wane into something of misgiving. No one knew 
 whether to take their leaves or stay. We seemed assembled 
 upon u. silly occasion. In this crisis, between tarrying and 
 departure, I must do justice to a foolish talent of mine, which 
 had otherwise like to have brought me into disgrace in the 
 forepart of the day; I mean a power, in any emergency, of 
 thinking and giving vent to all manner of strange nonsense. 
 In this awkward dilemma I found it sovereign. I rattled off 
 some of my most excellent absurdities. All were willing to 
 be relieved, at any expense of reason, from the pressure of the 
 intolerable vacuum which had succeeded to the morning bustle. 
 By this means 1 was fortunate in keeping together the better
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 2G3 
 
 part of the company to a late hour : ^nd a rubber of whist 
 (the admiral's favourite game) with some rare strokes of chance 
 as well as skill, which came opportunely on his side — length- 
 ened out till midnight — dismissed the old gentleman at last to 
 his bed with comparatively easy spirits. 
 
 I have been at my old friend's various times since. I do 
 not know a visiting-place where every guest is so perfectly at 
 his ease ; nowhere, where harmony is so strangely th<' result 
 of confusion. Everybody is at cross purposes, yet the effect 
 is so much better than uniformity. Contradictory orders ; 
 servants pulling one way ; master and mistress driving some 
 other, yet both diverse ; visiters huddled up in corners ; chairs 
 unsymmetrized ; candles disposed by chance ; meals at odd 
 hours, tea and supper at once, or the latter preceding the for- 
 mer; the host and the guest conferring, yet each upon a dif- 
 ferent topic, each understanding himself, neither trying to under- 
 stand or hear the other; draughts and politics, chess and political 
 economy, cards and conversation on nautical matters, going on 
 at once, without the hope, or, indeed, the wish, of distinguishing 
 them, make it altogether the most perfect concordia discors you 
 shall meet with. Yet somehow the old house is not quite what it 
 should be. The admiral still enjoys his pipe, but he has no 
 Miss Emily to fill it for him. The instrument stands where 
 it stood, but she is gone whose delicate touch could some- 
 times for a short minute appease the warring elements. He 
 has learned, as Marvel expresses it, to "make his destiny his 
 choice." He bears bravely up. but he does not come out with 
 his flashes of wild wit so thick as formerly. His sea-songs 
 seldomer escape him. His wife, too, looks as if she wanted 
 some younger body to scold and set to rights. We all miss a 
 junior presence. It is wonderful how one young maiden 
 freshens up and keeps green the paternal roof. Old and young 
 seem to have an interest in her, so long as she is not abso- 
 lutely disposed of. The youthfulness of the house is flown, 
 Emily is married. 
 
 THE CHILD ANGEL. 
 
 A DREAM. 
 
 I chanced upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a 
 dream the other night, that you shall hear of. I had been
 
 264 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 reading the " Loves of the Angels," and went to bed with my 
 head full of speculations, suggested by that extraordinary 
 legend. It had given birth to innumerable conjectures ; and, I 
 remember, the last waking thought which I gave expression 
 to on my pillow was a sort of wonder, " what could come of 
 it." 
 
 I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could scarcely 
 make out — but to some celestial region. It was not the real 
 heavens neither — not the downright Bible heaven — but a kind 
 of fairy-land heaven, about which a poor human fancy may 
 have leave to sport and air itself, I will hope, without pre- 
 sumption. 
 
 Methought — what wild things dreams are ! — I was presen 
 — at what would you imagine ? — at an angel's gossiping. 
 
 Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, or 
 whether it came purely of its own head, neither you nor I 
 know — but there lay, sure enough, wrapped in its little cloudy 
 swaddling-bands — a child angel. 
 
 Smvthreads— filmy beams — ran through the celestial na- 
 pery of what seemed its princely cradle. All the winged 
 orders hovered round, watching when the new-born should 
 open its yet closed eyes ; which, when it did, first one, and 
 then the other — with a solicitude and apprehension, yet not 
 such as, stained with fear, dim the expanding eyelids of mortal 
 infants, but as if to explore its path in those its unhereditary 
 palaces — what an inextinguishable titter that time spared not 
 celestial visages ! Nor wanted there to my seeming — oh 
 the inexplicable simpleness of dreams ! — bowls of that cheer- 
 ing nectar, 
 
 " Which mortals caudle call below." 
 
 Nor were wanting faces of female ministrants — stricken in 
 years, as it might seem — so dexterous were those heavenly 
 attendants to counterfeit kindly similitudes of earth, to greet 
 with terrestrial child-rites the young present which earth had 
 made to heaven. 
 
 Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full symphony, as 
 those by which the spheres are tutored, but, as loudest in- 
 struments on earth speak oftentimes, muffled ; so to accommo- 
 date their sound the better to the weak ears of the imperfect- 
 born. And, with the noise of those subdued poundings, the 
 angelet sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of pinions— but 
 forthwith flagged and was recovered into the arms of those 
 full-winged angels. And a wonder it was to see how, as 
 years went round in heaven — a year in dreams is as a day — 
 continually its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but,
 
 EM*?S DP lua. 265 
 
 wanting the perfect angelic nutriment, anon was shorn of its 
 aspiring, and fell fluttefing — still caught by angel hands — for 
 ever to put forth shoots, and to fall fluttering, because its birth 
 was not of the unmixed vigour of heaven. 
 
 And a name was given to the babe angel, and it was to be 
 called Ge-Urania, because its production was of earth and 
 heaven. 
 
 And it could not taste of death, by reason of its adoption 
 into immortal palaces : but it was to know weakness and re- 
 liance, and the shadow of human imbecility ; and it went with 
 a lame gait ; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children 
 in grace and swiftness. Then pity first sprang up in angelic 
 bosoms ; and yearnings (like the human) touched them at the 
 sight of the immortal lame one. 
 
 And with pain did then first those intuitive essences, with 
 pain and strife to their natures, (not grief,) put back their bright 
 intelligences, and reduce their ethereal minds, schooling them 
 to degrees and slower processes, so to adapt their lessons to 
 the gradual illumination (as must needs be) of the half-earth- 
 born ; and what intuitive notices they could not repel, (by rea- 
 son that their nature is, to know all things at once,) the half- 
 heavenly novice, by the better part of its nature, aspired to 
 receive into its understanding; so that humility and aspira- 
 tion went on even-paced in the instruction of the glorious am- 
 phibium. 
 
 But, by reason that mature humanity is too gross to breathe 
 the air of that super-subtile region, its portion was, and is, to 
 be a child for ever. 
 
 And because the human part of it might not press into the 
 heart and inwards of the palace of its adoption, those full-na- 
 tured angels tended it by turns in the purlieus of the palace, 
 where were shady groves and rivulets, like this green earth 
 from which it came : so Love, with voluntary humility, waited 
 upon the entertainment of the new-adopted. 
 
 And myriads of years rolled round, (in dreams time is noth- 
 ing,) and still it kept, and is to keep, perpetual childhood, and 
 is the tutelar genius of childhood upon earth, and still goes 
 lame and lovely. 
 
 By the banks of the river Pison is seen, lone-sitting by the 
 grave of the terrestrial Adah, whom the angel Nadir loved, a 
 child ; but not the same which I saw in heaven. A mournful 
 hue overcasts its lineaments ; nevertheless, a correspondence 
 is between the child by the grave and that celestial orphan 
 whom I saw above; and the dimness of the grief upon the 
 heavenly, is a shadow or emblem of that which stains the 
 23 M
 
 266 ESSAYS OF EL1A. 
 
 beauty of the terrestrial. And this correspondence is not to 
 be understood but by dreams. 
 
 And in the archives of heaven I had grace to read, how that 
 once the angel Nadir, being exiled from his place for mortal 
 passion, upspringing on the wings of parental love, (such 
 power had parental love for a moment to suspend the else ir- 
 revocable law,) appeared for a brief instant in his station ; and, 
 depositing a wondrous birth, straightway disappeared, and the 
 palaces knew him no more. And this charge was the self- 
 same babe, who goeth lame and lovely — but Adah sleepeth 
 by the river Pison. 
 
 OLD CHINA. 
 
 I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When 
 I go to see any great house, I inquire for the china-closet, and 
 next for the picture-gallery. I cannot defend the order of 
 preference, but by saying, that we have all some taste or other, 
 of too ancient a' date to admit of our remembering distinctly 
 that it was an acquired one. I can call to mind the first play 
 and the first exhibition that I was taken to ; but I am not con- 
 scious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced 
 into my imagination. 
 
 I had no repugnance then — why should I now have I — to 
 those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under 
 the notion of men and women float about, uncircumscribed by 
 any element, in that world before perspective — a china tea- 
 cup. 
 
 I like to see my old friends — whom distance cannot dimin- 
 ish — figuring up in the air, (so they appear to our optics,) yet 
 on terra fir ma still — for so we must in courtesy interpret that 
 speck of deeper blue — which the decorous artist, to prevent 
 absurdity, had made to spring up beneath their sandals. 
 
 I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if pos- 
 sible, with still more womanish expressions. , 
 
 Here is a young and courtly mandarin, handing tea to a 
 lady from a salver — two miles off. See how distance seems 
 to set off respect ! And here the same lady, or another — for 
 likeness is identity on teacups — is stepping into a little fairy 
 boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with 
 a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as 
 angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the midst
 
 ESSAYS OF EUA. 267 
 
 of a flowery mead — a furlong off on the other side of the same 
 strange stream ! 
 
 Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of their world 
 — see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays. 
 
 Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and coextensive — so 
 objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Ca- 
 thay. 
 
 1 w;is pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our 
 Hyson, (which we are oldfashioncd enough to drink unmixed 
 still of an afternoon,) some of these spe.ciosa miracula upon a 
 set of extraordinary old. blue china (a recent purchase) which 
 we were now for the first time using ; and could not help re- 
 marking how favourable circumstances had been to us of late 
 years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes with 
 trifles of this sort — when a passing sentiment seemed to over- 
 shade the brows of my companion. I am quick at detecting 
 these summer clouds in Bridget. 
 
 ' k I wish the good old times would come again," she said, 
 M when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want 
 to be poor ; but there was a middle state" — so she was 
 pleased to ramble on — " in which I am sure we were a great 
 deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you 
 have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a 
 triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and, oh ! how 
 much ado I had to get you to consent in those times !) we 
 were used to have a debate two or three days before, and to 
 weigh the for and against, and think what we might spare 
 it out of, and what saving we could hit upon, that should be an 
 equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the 
 money that we paid for it. 
 
 " Do you remember the brown suit which you made to hang 
 upon you till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew 
 so threadbare — and all because of that folio Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's 
 in Covent Garden ? Do you remember how we eyed it for 
 weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, 
 and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock 
 of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing 
 you should be too late — and when the old bookseller, with some 
 grumbling, opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he 
 w;is setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treas- 
 ures — and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as 
 cumbersome — and when you presented it to me — and when we 
 were exploring the perfectness of it (collating you called it) 
 — and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with 
 paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till day- 
 M 2
 
 2G8 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 break — was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can 
 those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so 
 careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and fini- 
 cal, give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted 
 it about in that overworn suit — your old corbeau — for four or 
 five weeks longer than you should have done, to pacify your 
 conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen — or sixteen shillings 
 was it? — a great affair we thought it then — which you had 
 lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any 
 book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me 
 home any nice old purchases now. 
 
 " When you came home with twenty apologies for laying- 
 out a less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo, 
 which we christened the ' Lady Blanch ;' when you looked at 
 the purchase, and thought of the money — and thought of the 
 money, and looked again at the picture — was there no pleas- 
 ure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but 
 to walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. 
 Yet do you ? 
 
 " Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, 
 and Potter's Bar, and Waltham, when we had a holyday — 
 holydays, and all other fun, are gone, now we are rich — and 
 the little hand-basket in which I used to deposite our day's fare 
 of savoury cold lamb and salad — and how you would pry about 
 at noontide for some decent house, where we might go in, and 
 produce our store — only paying for the ale that you must call 
 for — and speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and wheth- 
 er she was likely to allow us a table-cloth — and wish for such 
 another honest hostess as Izaak Walton has described many 
 a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he went a fish- 
 ing — and sometimes they would prove obliging enough, and 
 sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us — but we had 
 cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain 
 food savourily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall ? 
 Now — when we go out a day's pleasuring, which if seldom 
 moreover, we ride part of the way — and go into a fine inn, 
 and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense — 
 which, after all, never has half the relish of those chance 
 country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage 
 and a precarious welcome. 
 
 " You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the 
 pit. Do you remember where it was we used to sit when we 
 saw the Battle of Hexham, and the Surrender of Calais, and 
 Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood — ■ 
 when we squeezed out our shillings apiece to sit three or 
 four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery — where you
 
 ESSAYS OK KLIA. 269 
 
 felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me — and 
 more strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me 
 — and the pleasure was the better for a little shame — and 
 when the. curtain drew up, what cared we for our place in the 
 house, or what mattered it where we were sitting, when our 
 thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, or with Viola at the 
 court of Illyria ? You used to say that the gallery was the 
 best place of all for enjoying a play socially — that the relish 
 of such exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency 
 of going — that the company we met there, not being in gen- 
 eral readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did 
 attend, to what was going on on the stage — because a word 
 lost would have been a chasm which it was impossible for 
 them to fill up, With such reflections we consoled our pride 
 then — and I appeal to you whether, as a woman, I met gen- 
 erally with less attention and accommodation than I have 
 done since in more expensive situations in the house ? The 
 getting in, indeed, and the crowding up those inconvenient 
 staircases, was bad enough — but there was still a law of ci- 
 vility to woman recognised to quite as great an extent as we 
 ever found in the other passages — and how a little difficulty 
 overcome heightened the snug seat and the play afterward ! 
 Now we can only pay our money, and walk in. You cannot 
 see, you say, in the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and 
 heard too, well enough then — but sight, and all, I think, is 
 gone with our poverty. 
 
 " There was pleasure in eating strawberries before they 
 became quite common — in the first dish of peas, while they 
 were yet dear — to have them for a nice supper, a treat. What 
 treat can we have now? If we were to treat ourselves now 
 — that is, to have dainties a little above our means, it Avould 
 be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we al- 
 low ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that 
 makes what I call a treat — when two people living together, 
 as wc have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap 
 luxury, which both like ; while each apologizes, and is wil- 
 ling to take both halves of the blame to his single share. I 
 see no harm in people making much of themselves in that 
 sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make 
 much of others. But now — what I mean by the word — wc 
 never do make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. 
 I do not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons as we were, 
 just above poverty. 
 
 il I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty 
 pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet — and much 
 ado we used to have every thirty-first night of December to 
 23*
 
 270 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 account for our exceedings — many a long face did you 
 make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make 
 it out how we bad spent so much — or that we had not spent 
 so much — or that it was impossible we should spend so much 
 next year — and still we found our slender capital decreasing 
 — but then, between ways, and projects, and compromises of 
 one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and 
 doing without that for the future — and the hope that youth 
 brings, and laughing spirits, (in which you were never poor 
 till now,) we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with 
 ' lusty brimmers,' (as you used to quote it out of hearty, cheer- 
 ful Mr. Cotton, as you call him,) we used to welcome in the 
 ' coming guest.' Now we have no reckoning at all at the 
 end of the old year — no flattering promises about the new 
 year doing better for us." 
 
 Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that 
 when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I in- 
 terrupt it. I could not help, however, smiling at the phantom 
 of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of 
 a clear income of poor — hundred pounds a year. " It is true 
 we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also 
 younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put up with the 
 excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we 
 should not much mend ourselves. That we had much to 
 struggle with, as we grew up together, we have reason to be 
 most thankful. It strengthened, and knit our compact closer. 
 We could never have been what we have been to each other, 
 if we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain 
 of. The resisting power — those natural dilations of the 
 youthful spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten — with us 
 are long since passed away. Competence to age is supple- 
 mentary youth, a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best 
 that is to be had. "We must ride, where we formerly walked : 
 live better, and lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — than 
 we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. 
 Yet, could those days return — could you and I once more walk 
 our thirty miles a day — could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again 
 be young, and you and I be young to see them — could the 
 good old one-shilling gallery days return — they are dreams, 
 my cousin, now — but could you and I at this moment, instead 
 of this quiet argument by our well-carpeted fireside, sitting 
 on this luxurious sofa — be once more struggling up those in- 
 convenient staircases, pushed about, and squeezed, and el- 
 bowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers — could 
 I once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours — and the 
 delicious Thank God, we are safe, which always followed
 
 ESSAYS OF LLIA. 271 
 
 when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the 
 whole cheerful theatre down beneath us — 1 know not the 
 fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would 
 he willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or the 
 
 great Jew R is supposed to have, to purchase it. And 
 
 now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding 
 an umbrella, big enough lor a bed-tester, over the head of that 
 pretty, insipid, half-Madonaish chit of a lady in that very blue 
 summer-house." 
 
 CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 
 
 Deiiortations from the use of strong liquors have been the 
 favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been 
 received with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. 
 But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, un- 
 fortunately, their sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil is 
 acknowledged ; the remedy simple. Abstain. No force can 
 oblige a man to raise the glass to his head against his will. 
 'Tis as easy as not to steal, not to tell lies. 
 
 Alas ! the hand to pilfer, and the tongue to bear false wit- 
 ness, have no constitutional tendency. These are actions in- 
 different to them. At the first instance of the reformed will, 
 they can be brought off without a murmur. The itching finger 
 is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar can with 
 the same natural delight give forth useful truths, with which 
 it has been accustomed to scatter their pernicious contraries. 
 But when a man has commenced sot — 
 
 Oh pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout nerves 
 and a strong head, whose liver is happily untouched, and ere 
 thy gorge nseth at the namr. which 1 have written, first learn 
 what the thing is ; how much of compassion, how much of 
 human allowance, thou mayst virtuously mingle with thy dis- 
 approbation. Trample not on the ruins of a man. Exact not, 
 under so terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation from a 
 state of death almost as real as that from which Lazarus rose 
 not but by a miracle. 
 
 n a reformation, and custom will make it easy. But 
 what if the beginning be dreadful ; the first steps not like 
 climbing a mountain, but going through fire ? what if the whole 
 system must undergo a change violent as that which we con- 
 ceive of the mutation of form in some insects? what if a pFO-
 
 272 ESSAYS OF EL1A. 
 
 cess comparable to flaying alive be to be gone through ? is the 
 weakness that sinks under such struggles to be confounded 
 with the pertinacity which clings to other vices, which have 
 induced no constitutional necessity, no engagement of the 
 whole victim, body and soul 1 
 
 I have known one in that state, when he has tried to abstain 
 but for one evening — though the poisonous potion had long 
 ceased -to bring back its first enchantments, though he was 
 sure it would rather deepen his gloom than brighten it — in the 
 violence of the struggle, and the necessity he has felt of get- 
 ting rid of the present sensation at any rate, I have known him 
 to scream out, to cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife 
 within him. 
 
 Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I 
 speak is myself? I have no puling apology to make to man- 
 kind. I see them all in one way or another deviating from the 
 pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am accountable 
 for the wo that I have brought upon it. 
 
 I believe that there are constitutions, robust heads and iron 
 insides, whom scarce any excesses can hurt ; whom brandy, 
 (I have seen them drink it like wine,) at all events whom 
 wine, taken in ever so plentiful measure, can do no worse in- 
 jury to than just to muddle their faculties, perhaps never very 
 pellucid. On them this discourse is wasted. They would but 
 laugh at a weak brother, who, trying his strength with them, 
 and coming off foiled from the contest, would fain persuade 
 them that such agonistic exercises are dangerous. It is to a 
 verv different description of persons I speak. It is to the 
 weak, the nervous; to those who feel the want of some artifi- 
 cial aid to raise their spirits in society to what is no more 
 than the ordinary pitch of all around them without it. This is 
 the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the convivial board 
 in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves for 
 term of life. 
 
 Twelve years ago I had completed my six-and-twentieth 
 year. I had lived from the. period of leaving school to that 
 time pretty much in solitude. My companions were chiefly 
 books, or at most one or two living ones of my own book-lov- 
 ing and sober stamp. I rose early, went to bed betimes, and 
 the faculties which God had given me, I have reason to think, 
 did not rust in me unused. 
 
 About that time I fell in with some companions of a differ- 
 ent order. They were men of boisterous spirits, sitters up 
 a-nights, disputants, drunken ; yet seemed to have something 
 noble about them. We dealt about the wit, or what passes 
 for it after midnight, jovially. Of the quality called fancy I
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 certainly possessed a larger share than my companions. ] m- 
 couraged by their applause,] ael up Cm a professed joker! 1, 
 
 who of all men am least fitted lor such an occupation, having, 
 in addition to the greatest difficulty which I experience at all 
 times of finding words to express my meaning, a natural ner- 
 vous impediment in my speech ! 
 
 Header, it' you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to 
 any character but that of a wit. When you find a tickling 
 relish upon your tongue disposing you to that sort of conversa- 
 tion, especially if you find a preternatural llow of ideas setting 
 in upon you at the sight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid 
 giving way to it as you would fly your greatest destruction. 
 If you cannot crush the power of fancy, or that within you 
 which you mistake for such, divert it, give it some other play. 
 Write an essay, pen a character or description — but not, as I 
 do now, with tears trickling down your cheeks. 
 
 To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes ; 
 to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools ; to be es- 
 teemed dull when you cannot be witty, to be applauded for 
 witty when you know that you have been dull ; to be called 
 upon for the extemporaneous exercise of that faculty which no 
 premeditation can give; to be spurred on to efforts which end 
 in contempt ; to be set on to provoke mirth which procures the 
 procurer hatred ; to give pleasure, and be paid with squinting 
 malice ; to swallow draughts of life-destroying wine which are 
 to be distilled into airy breath to tickle vain auditors ; to mort- 
 gage miserable morrows for nights of madness ; to waste 
 whole seas of time upon those who pay it back in little incon- 
 siderable drops of grudging applause — are the wages of buf- 
 foonery and death. 
 
 Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all connexions 
 which have no solider fastening than this liquid cement, moro 
 kind to me than my own taste or penetration, at length opened 
 my eyes to the supposed qualities of my first friends. No 
 trace of them is left but in the vices which they introduced, 
 and the habits they infixed. In them my friends survive still 
 and exercise ample retribution for any supposed infidelity thai 
 I may have been guilty of towards them. 
 
 My next more immediate companions were and are per- 
 sons of such intrinsic and felt worth, that though accidentally 
 their acquaintance has proved pernicious to me, I do not know 
 that if the thing were to do over again, I should have the 
 courage to eschew the mischief at the price of forfeiting the 
 benefit. I came to them reeking from the steams of my late 
 overheated notions of companionship ; and the slightest fuel 
 M3
 
 274 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 ■which they unconsciously afforded, was sufficient to feed my 
 old fires into a propensity. 
 
 They were no drinkers, but, one from professional habits, 
 and another from a custom derived from his father, smoked to- 
 bacco. The devil could not have devised a more subtle trap 
 to retake a backsliding penitent. The transition from gulp- 
 ing down draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous blasts 
 of dry smoke, was so like cheating him. But he is too hard 
 for us when we hope to commute. He beats us at barter ; 
 and when we think to set off a new failing against an old in- 
 firmity, 'tis odds but he puts the trick upon us of two for one. 
 That (comparatively) white devil of tobacco brought with him 
 in the end seven worse than himself. 
 
 It were impertinent to carry the reader through all the pro- 
 cesses by which, from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took 
 my degrees through thin wines, through stronger wine and 
 water, through small punch, to those juggling compositions, 
 which, under the name of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of 
 brandy or other poison under less and less water continually, 
 until they come next to none, and so to none at all. But it is 
 hateful to disclose the secrets of my Tartarus. 
 
 I should repel my readers, from a mere incapacity of be- 
 lieving me, were I to tell them what tobacco has been to me, 
 the drudging service which I have paid, the slavery which I 
 have vowed to it. How, when I have resolved to quit it, a 
 feeling as of ingratitude has started up ; how it has put on 
 personal claims and made the demands of a friend upon me 
 How the reading of it casually in a book, as where Adams 
 takes his whiff in the chimney-corner of some inn in Joseph 
 Andrews, or Piscator in the Complete Angler breaks his fast 
 upon a morning pipe in that delicate room Piscatoribus Sa- 
 crum, has in a moment broken down the resistance of weeks. 
 How a pipe was ever in my midnight path before me, till the 
 vision forced me to realize it — how, then, its ascending vapours 
 curled, its fragrance lulled, and the thousand delicious minister- 
 ings conversant about it, employing every faculty, extracted 
 the sense of pain. How from illuminating it came to darken, 
 from a quick solace it turned to a negative relief, thence to a 
 restlessness and dissatisfaction, thence to a positive misery. 
 How, even now, when the whole secret stands confessed in 
 all its dreadful truth before me, I feel myself linked to it be- 
 yond the power of revocation. Bone of my bone — 
 
 Persons not accustomed to examine the motives of their 
 actions, to reckon up the countless nails that rivet the chains 
 of habit, or perhaps being bound by none so obdurate as those 
 I have confessed to, may recoil from this as from an over-
 
 E8SAYS OF ELTA. UTft 
 
 charged picture. But what short of such a bondage is it, 
 which, in spite of protesting friends, ;i weeping wife, and a 
 reprobating world, chains down many a poor fellow, of no 
 original indisposition to goodness, to his pipe and his pot? 
 
 1 have .seen a print alter Correggio, in which three femalo 
 figures are ministering to a man who sits fast bound at the 
 root of a tree. Sensuality is soothing him, Evil Habit is nailing 
 him to a branch, and Repugnance at the same instant of time 
 is applying a snake to his side. In his face is feeble delight, 
 the recollection of past rather than perception of present 
 pleasures, languid enjoyment of e^l with utter imbecility to 
 good, a Sybaritic effeminacy, a submission to bondage, the 
 springs of the will gone down like a broken clock, the sin and 
 thr Bufiering coinstantaneous, or the latter forerunning the 
 former, remorse preceding action — all this represented in one 
 point of time. When I saw this, I admired the wonderful 
 skill of the painter. But when I went away, I wept, because 
 I thought of my own condition. 
 
 Of that there is no hope that it should ever change. The 
 waters have gone over me. But out of the black depths, 
 could 1 be heard, I would cry out to all those who have but set 
 a foot in the perilous flood Could the youth, to whom the 
 flavour of his first wine is delicious as the opening scenes 
 of life or the entering upon some newly-discovered paradise, 
 look Into my desolation, and be made to understand what a 
 dreary thing it is when a man shall feel himself going down a 
 precipice with open eyes and a passive will — to see his de- 
 struction, and have no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all 
 the way emanating from himself; to perceive all goodness 
 emptied out of him, and vet not to be able to forget a time when 
 it was otherwise ; to bear about rhe piteous spectacle of his 
 own self-ruins: could he see my fevered eye, feverish with 
 last night's drinking, and feverishly looking for this night's 
 repetition of the folly ; could he feel the body of the death out 
 of which I cry hourly with feebler and feebler outcry to be de- 
 livered — it were enough to make him dash the sparkling bev- 
 _e to the earth in all the pride of its mantling temptation; 
 to make him clasp his teeth — 
 
 " And not undo 'em 
 To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em." 
 
 Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety be 
 that tine thing you would have us to understand, if the com- 
 forts of a cool brain are to be preferred to that state of heated 
 excitement which you describe and deplore, what hinders iu 
 your own instance that you do not return to those habits from
 
 276 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 which you would induce others never to swerve ? if the bles- 
 sing be worth preserving, is it not worth recovering? 
 
 Recovering ! — Oh, if a wish could transport me back to those 
 days of youth, when a draught from the next clear spring 
 could slake any heats which summer suns and youthful exer- 
 cise had power to stir up in the blood, how gladly would I re- 
 turn to thee, pure element, the drink of children, and of child- 
 like holy hermit. In my dreams I can sometimes fancy thy 
 cool refreshment purling over my burning tongue. But my 
 waking stomach rejects it. That which refreshes innocence 
 only makes me sick and faint. 
 
 But is there no middle way between total abstinence and the 
 excess which kills you? For your sake, reader, and that you 
 may never attain to my experience, with pain 1 must utter the 
 dreadful truth, that there is none, none that I can find. In 
 my stage of habit (I speak not of habits less confirmed — for 
 some of them I believe the advice to be most prudential) in 
 the stage which 1 have reached, to stop short of that measure 
 which is sufficient to draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing, 
 apoplectic sleep of the drunkard, is to have taken none at all. 
 The pain of the self-denial is all one. And what that is, I 
 had rather the reader should believe on my credit, than know 
 from his own trial. He will come to know it, whenever he 
 shall arrive at that state, in which, paradoxical as it may ap- 
 pear, reason shall only visit him through intoxication ; for it 
 is a fearful truth, that the intellectual faculties, by repeated 
 acts of intemperance, may be driven from their orderly sphere 
 of action, their clear daylight ministeries, until they shall be 
 brought at last to depend, for the faint manifestations of their 
 departing energies, upon the returning periods of the fatal 
 madness to which they owe their devastation. The drinking 
 man is never less himself than during his sober intervals. 
 Evil is so far his good.* 
 
 Behold me, then, in the robust period of life, reduced to im- 
 becility and decay. Hear me count my gains, and the profits 
 which I have derived from the midnight cup. 
 
 Twelve years ago I was possessed of a healthy frame of 
 mind and body. I was never strong, but I think my consti- 
 tution (for a weak one) was as happily exempt from the ten- 
 dency to any malady as it was possible to be. I scarce knew 
 what it was to ail anything. Now, except when I am losing 
 
 * When poor M painted his last picture, with a pencil in one trembling 
 
 hand and a glass of brandy and water in the other, his lingers owed the compara- 
 tive steadiness, with which they were enabled to go through their task in an 
 jr^/ifdect manner, to a temporary firmness derived from a repetition of prac 
 tices, the general effect of which had shaken both them and him so terribly.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 27] 
 
 myself in a sea of drink, I am never free from those uneasy 
 sensations in head and stomach, which are so much worse to 
 bear than any deiinite pains or aches. 
 
 At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the morning, 
 summer and winter. I awoke refreshed, and seldom without 
 some merry thoughts in my head, or some piece of a song to 
 welcome the new-born day. Now, the first feeling which 
 besets me, after stretching out the hours of reeumbence t» 
 their last possible extent, is a forecast of the wearisome da) 
 that lies before me, with a secret wish that I could have lain 
 on still, or never awaked. 
 
 Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, the 
 trouble, and obscure perplexity of an ill dream. In the day- 
 time I stumble upon dark mountains. 
 
 Business, which, though never particularly adapted to my 
 nature, yet as something of necessity to be gone through, and 
 therefore best undertaken with cheerfulness, 1 used to enter 
 upon with some degree of alacrity, now wearies, affrights, 
 perplexes me. I fancy all sorts of discouragements, and am 
 ready to give up an occupation which gives me bread, from a 
 harassing conceit of incapacity. The slightest commission 
 given me by a friend, or any small duty which I have to per- 
 form for myself, as giving orders to a tradesman, &c, haunts 
 me as a labour impossible to be got through. So much thn 
 springs of action are broken. 
 
 The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse with 
 mankind. I dare not promise that a friend's honour, or his 
 cause, would be safe in my keeping, if I were put to the ex- 
 pense of any manly resolution in defending it. So much the 
 springs of moral action are deadened within me. 
 
 My favourite occupations in times past now cease to en- 
 tertain. I can do nothing readily. Application for ever so 
 short a time kills me. This poor abstract of my condition 
 was penned at Long intervals, with scarcely any attempt at 
 connexion of thought, which is now difficult to me. 
 
 The noble passages which formerly delighted me in history 
 or poetic fiction, now only draw a few weak tears, allied to 
 dotage. My broken and dispirited nature seems to sink be- 
 fore anything great and admirable. 
 
 I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or none. 
 It is inexpressible how much this infirmity adds to a sense of 
 shame, and a general feeling of deterioration. 
 
 These are some of the instances, concerning which I can 
 say with truth, that it was not always so with me. 
 
 Shall I lift up the veil of my weakness any further? or is 
 this disclosure sufficient ? 
 5M
 
 273 ESSAYS OF ELIa. 
 
 lam a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to consult 
 by these confessions. 1 know not whether I shall be laughed 
 at, or heard seriously. Such as they are, I commend them 
 to the reader's attention, if he find his own case any way 
 touched. I have told him what I am come to. Let him 
 stop in time. 
 
 POPULAR FALLACIES. 
 I. 
 
 THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD. 
 
 This axiom contains a principle of compensation, which 
 disposes us to admit the truth of it. But there is no safe 
 trusting to dictionaries and definitions. We should more 
 willingly fall in with this popular language, if we did not find 
 brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour in the 
 same vocabulary. The comic writers, with their poetical 
 justice, have contributed not a little to mislead us upon this 
 point. To see a hectoring fellow exposed and beaten upon 
 the stage has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some 
 people's share of animal spirits is notoriously low and de- 
 fective. It has not strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out 
 the wind of a tolerable bluster. These love to be told that 
 huffing is no part of valour. The truest courage with diem 
 is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. But confront 
 one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, 
 and his confidence in the theory quickly vanishes. Preten- 
 sions do not uniformly bespeak nonperformance. A modest, 
 inoffensive deportment does not necessarily imply valour ; 
 neither does the absence of it justify us in denying that qual- 
 ity. Hickman wanted modesty — we do not mean him of 
 Clarissa — but who ever doubted his courage 1 Even the 
 poets — upon whom this equitable distribution of qualities 
 should be most binding — have thought it agreeable to nature 
 to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the 
 "Agonistes," is indeed a bully upon the received notions. 
 Milton has made Him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a das- 
 tard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies singly 
 before him — and does it. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight 
 into this kind of character than either of his predecessors. 
 He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a
 
 ESSAYS OF SUA. 270 
 
 sort of dimidiate pre-eminence: — "Bully Dawson kicked by 
 half the (own, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." 
 This was true distributive justice. 
 
 II. 
 
 THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS. m 
 
 The weakest part of mankind have this saying commonest 
 in their mouth. It is the trite consolation administered to the 
 easy dupe, when he has been tricked out of his money or es- 
 tate, that the acquisition of it will do the owner no good. 
 But the rogues of this world — the prudenter part of them, at 
 least — know better; and, if the observation had been as true 
 as it is old, would not have failed by this time to have discov- 
 ered it. They have pretty sharp distinctions of the fluctua- 
 ting and the permanent. " Lightly come, lightly go," is a 
 proverb which they can very well afford to leave, when they 
 leave little else, to the losers. They do not always find 
 manors, got by rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away, 
 as the poets will have it ; or that all gold glides, like thawing 
 snow, from the thief's hand that grasps it. Church land, alien- 
 ated to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this slippery 
 quality. But some portions of it somehow always stuck so 
 fast, that the denunciators have been fain to postpone the 
 prophecy of refundment to a late posterity. 
 
 III. 
 
 THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST. 
 
 The severest exaction surely ever invented upon the self- 
 denial of poor human nature ! This is to expect a gentleman 
 to give a treat without partaking of it ; to sit esurient at his 
 own table, and commend the llavour of his venison upon the 
 absurd strength of his never touching it himself. On the con- 
 trary, we love to see a wag taste his own joke to his party ; 
 to watch a quirk, or a merry conceit, flickering upon the lips
 
 280 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 some seconds before the tongue is delivered of it. If it b( 
 good, fresh, and racy — begotten of the occasion ; if he that 
 utters it never thought it before, he is naturally the first to be 
 tickled with it ; and any suppression of such complacence we 
 hold to be churlish and insulting. What does it seem to 
 imply, but that your company is weak or foolish enough to be 
 moved by an image or a fancy that shall stir you not all, or 
 but faintly 1 This is exactly the humour of the tine gentleman 
 in Mandeville, who, while lie dazzles his guests with the dis- 
 play of some costly toy, affects himself to " see nothing con- 
 siderable in it." 
 
 IV. 
 
 THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING.— THAT IT IS 
 EASY TO PERCEIVE HE IS NO GENTLEMAN. 
 
 A speech from the poorest sort of people, which always 
 indicates that the party vituperated is a gentleman. The very 
 fact which they deny, is that which galls and exasperates 
 them to use this language. The forbearance with which it is 
 usually received, is a proof what interpretation the bystander 
 sets upon it. Of a kin to this, and still less politic, are the 
 phrases with which, in their street rhetoric, they ply one 
 another more grossly ; — He is a poor creature. — He has not a 
 
 rag to cover , <yc. ; though this last, we confess, is more 
 
 frequently applied by females to females. They do not perceive 
 that the satire glances upon themselves. A poor man, of all 
 things in the world, should not upbraid an antagonist with 
 poverty. Are there no other topics — as, to tell him his father 
 
 was hanged — his sister, &c. , without exposing a secret 
 
 which should be kept snug between them, and doing an af- 
 front to the order to which they have the honour equally to 
 belong? All this while they do not see how the wealthier 
 man stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both.
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 2S 1 
 
 V. 
 
 THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH. 
 
 A smooth text to the letter ; and, preached from the pulpit, 
 is sure of a docile audience from the pews lined with satin. 
 It is twice sitting upon velvet to a foolish squire to be told, 
 that he, and not perverse nature, as the homilies would make 
 us imagine, is the true cause of all the irregularities in his 
 parish. This is striking at the root of free-will indeed, and de- 
 nying the originality of sin in any sense. But men are not quite 
 such implicit sheep as this comes to. If the abstinence from 
 evil on the part of the upper classes is to derive itself from no 
 higher principle than the apprehension of setting ill patterns 
 to the lower, we beg leave to discharge them from all squeam- 
 ishness on that score ; they may even take their fill of pleas- 
 ures, where they can find them. The genius of poverty, 
 hampered and straitened as it is, is not so barren of invention 
 but it can trade upon the staple of its own vice, without draw- 
 ing upon their capital. The poor are not quite such servile 
 imitators as they take them for. Some of them are very 
 clever artists in their way. Here and there we find an 
 original. Who taught the poor to steal, to pilfer ? They did 
 not go to the great for schoolmasters in these faculties surely. 
 It is well if in some vices they allow us to be — no copyists. 
 In no other sense is it true that the poor copy them, than as 
 servants may be said to take after their masters and mis- 
 tresses, when they succeed to their reversionary cold meats. 
 If the master, from indisposition or some other cause, neglect 
 his food, the servant dines notwithstanding. 
 
 " Oh, but (some will say) the force of example is great." 
 We knew a lady who was so scrupulous on this head, that she 
 would put up with the calls of the most impertinent visiter, 
 rather than let her servant say she was not at home, for fear 
 of teaching her maid to tell an untruth; and this in the very 
 face of the fact, which she knew well enough, that the wench 
 was one of the greatest liars upon the earth without teaching; 
 so much so, that her mistress possibly never heard two words 
 of consecutive truth from her in her life. But nature must go 
 for nothing : example must be everything. This liar in grain, 
 who never opened her mouth without a lie, must be guarded 
 2 1*
 
 282 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 against a remote inference, which she (pretty casnist !) might 
 possibly draw from a form of words — literally false, But es- 
 sentially deceiving no one — that under some circumstances a 
 fib might not be so exceedingly sinful — a fiction, too, not at 
 all in hei own way, or one that she could be suspected of 
 adopting, for few servant-wenches care to be denied to 
 visiters. 
 
 This word example reminds us of another fine word which 
 is in use upon these occasions — encouragement. " People in 
 our sphere must not be thought to give encouragement to such 
 proceedings." To such a frantic height is this principle 
 capable of being carried, that we have known individuals who 
 have thought it within the scope of their influence to sanction 
 despair, and give eclat to — suicide. A domestic in the family 
 of a county member lately deceased, for love, or some un- 
 known cause, cut his throat, but not successfully. The poor 
 fellow was otherwise much loved and respected ; and great 
 interest was used in his behalf, upon his recovery, that he 
 might be permitted to retain his place ; his word being first 
 pledged, not without some substantial sponsors to promise for 
 him, that the like should never happen again. His master 
 was inclinable to keep him, but his mistress thought other- 
 wise ; and John in the end was dismissed, her ladyship de- 
 claring that she " could not think of encouraging any such 
 doings in the county." 
 
 VI. 
 
 THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST. 
 
 Not a man, woman, or child in ten miles round Guildhall, 
 who really believes this saying. The inventor of it did not 
 believe it himself. It was made in revenge by somebody 
 who was disappointed of a regale. It is a vile cold-scrag-of- 
 mutton sophism : a lie palmed upon the palate, which knows 
 better things. If nothing else could be said for a feast, this is 
 sufficient, that from the superflux there is usually something 
 left for the next day. Morally interpreted, it belongs to a 
 class of proverbs which have a tendency to make us under- 
 value money. Of this cast are those notable observations, 
 that money is not health; riches cannot purchase everything; 
 the metaphor which makes gold to be mere muck, with the
 
 LSSAVS OP KLIA. 2S3 
 
 morality which traces fine clothing to the sheep's back, and 
 denounces pearl as the unhandsome excretion of an oyster. 
 Hence, too, the phrase which imputes dirt to acres — a sophis- 
 try so barefaced, that even the literal sense of it is true only 
 in a wet season. This, and abundance of similar sage saws 
 assuming to inculcate content, we verily believe to have been 
 the invention of some cunning borrower, who had designs 
 upon the purse of his wealthier neighbour, which he could 
 only hope to carry by force of these verbal jugglings. Trans- 
 late any one of these sayings out of the artful metonyme 
 which envelops it, and the trick is apparent. Goodly legs 
 and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pic- 
 tures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independ- 
 ence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck 
 — however we may be pleased to scandalize with that appel- 
 lation the faithful metal that provides them for us. 
 
 VII. 
 
 OF TWO DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN' 
 THE WRONG. 
 
 Our experience would lead us td" quite an opposite conclu- 
 sion. Temper, indeed, is no test of truth ; but warmth and 
 earnestness are a proof at least of a man's own conviction of 
 the rectitude of that which he maintains. Coolness is as 
 often the result of an unprincipled indifference to truth or 
 falsehood, as of a sober confidence in a man's own side in a 
 dispute. Nothing is more insulting sometimes than the ap- 
 pearance of this philosophic temper. There is little Titubus, 
 the stammering law-stationer in Lincoln's Inn — we have sel- 
 dom known this shrewd little fellow engaged in an argument 
 where we were not convinced he had the best of it, if his 
 tongue would but fairly have seconded him. When he has 
 been spluttering excellent broken sense for an hour together, 
 writhing and labouring to be delivered of the point of dispute 
 — the very gist of the controversy knocking at his teeth, 
 which, like some obstinate iron-grating, still obstructed its de- 
 liverance — his puny frame convulsed, and face reddening all 
 over at an unfairness in the logic which he wanted articula- 
 tion to expose, it has moved our gall to see a smooth, portly 
 fellow of an adversary, that cared not a button for the merits
 
 284 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 of the question, by merely laying his hand upon the head of 
 the stationer, and desiring him to be calm, (your tall disputants 
 have always the advantage,) with a provoking sneer carry the 
 argument clean from him in the opinion of all the by-standers, 
 who have gone away clearly convinced that Titubus must 
 have been in the wrong, because he was in a passion ; and 
 
 that Mr. , meaning his opponent, is one of the fairest, 
 
 and at the same time one of the most dispassionate arguers 
 breathing. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, BECAUSE THEY 
 WILL NOT BEAR A TRANSLATION. 
 
 The same might be said of the wittiest local allusions. A 
 custom is sometimes as difficult to explain to a foreigner as 
 a pun. What would become of a great part of the wit of 
 the last age, if it were tried by this test? How would cer- 
 tain topics, as aldermanity, cuckoldry, have sounded to a 
 Terentian auditory, though Terence himself had been alive to 
 translate them 1 Senator urbanus, with Curruca to boot for 
 a synonyme, would but faintly have done the business. Words, 
 involving notions, are hard enough to render ; it is too much 
 to expect us to translate a sound, and give an elegant version 
 to a jingle. The Virgilian harmony is not translatable, but 
 by substituting harmonious sounds in another language for it. 
 To Latinize a pun, we must seek a pun in Latin that will an- 
 swer to it ; as, to give an idea of the double endings in Hu- 
 dibras, we must have recourse to a similar practice in the old 
 monkish doggerel. Dennis, the fiercest oppugner of puns in 
 ancient or modern times, professes himself highly tickled 
 with the " a stick" chiming to " ecclesiastic." Yet what is 
 this but a species of pun, a verbal consonance ?
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 285 
 
 IX. 
 
 THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST. 
 
 If by worst be only meant the most far-fetched and .startling, 
 we agree to it. A pun is not bound by the laws which limit 
 nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to 
 tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon 
 manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not 
 show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by the 
 head and shoulders. What though it limp a little, or prove 
 defective in one leg — all the better. A pun may easily be 
 too curious and artificial. Who has not at one time or other 
 been at a party of professors, (himself perhaps an old offender 
 in that line,) where, after ringing a round of the most inge- 
 nious conceits, every man contributing his shot, and some there 
 the most expert shooters of the day ; after making a poor 
 word run the gantlet till it is ready to drop; after hunting 
 and winding it through all the possible ambages of similar 
 sounds ; after squeezing, and hauling, and tugging at it, till 
 the very milk of it will not yield a drop further — suddenly 
 some obscure, unthought-of fellow in a corner, who was never 
 'prentice to the trade, whom the company for very pity passed 
 over, as we do by a known poor man when a money-subscrip- 
 tion is going round, no one calling upon him for his quota — 
 has all at once come out with something so whimsical, yet so 
 pertinent ; so brazen in its pretensions, yet so impossible to 
 be denied ; so exquisitely good and so deplorably bad at the 
 same time — that it has proved a Robin Hood's shot ; any- 
 thing ulterior to that is despaired of; and the party breaks up, 
 unanimously voting it to be the very worst (that is, best) pun of 
 the evening. This species of wit is the better for not being 
 perfect in all its parts. What it gains in completeness, it loses 
 in naturalness. The more exactly it satisfies the critical, the 
 less hold it has upon some other faculties. The puns which 
 are most entertaining are those which will least bear an anal- 
 ysis. Of this kind is the following, recorded, with a sort of 
 stigma, in one of Swift's miscellanies. 
 
 An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a 
 hare through the streets, accosts htm with this extraordinary 
 question : " Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare, or a wig ?" 
 
 There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man
 
 286 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it 
 against a critic who should be laughter-proof. The quibble 
 in itself is not considerable. It is only a new turn given, by 
 a little false pronunciation, to a very common, though not 
 very courteous inquiry. Put by one gentleman to another at 
 a dinner-party, it would have been vapid ; to the mistress of 
 the house, it would have shown much less wit than rudeness. 
 We must take in the totality of time, place, and person ; the 
 pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the 
 puzzled porter ; the one stopping at leisure, the other hurry- 
 ing on with his burden ; the innocent though rather abrupt 
 tendency of the first member of the question, with the utter 
 and inextricable irrelevancy of the second ; the place — a 
 public street, not favourable to frivolous investigations ; the 
 affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry (the common ques- 
 tion) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the new turn 
 given to it) in the implied satire ; namely, that few of that 
 tribe are expected to eat of the good things which they carry, 
 they being in most countries considered rather as the temporary 
 trustees than owners of such dainties — which the fellow was 
 beginning to understand ; but then the wig again comes in, 
 and he can make nothing of it : all put together constitute a 
 picture : Hogarth could have made it intelligible on canvass. 
 Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very bad 
 pun, because of the defectiveness in the concluding member, 
 which is its very beauty, and constitutes the surprise. The 
 same persons shall cry up for admirable the cold quibble from 
 Virgil about the broken Cremona ;* because it is made out in 
 all its parts, and leaves nothing to the imagination. We ven- 
 ture to call it cold ; because, of thousands who have admired 
 it, it would be difficult to find one who has heartily chuckled 
 at it. As appealing to the judgment merely, (setting the ris- 
 ible faculty aside,) we must pronounce it a monument of cu- 
 rious felicity. But as some stories are said to be too good to 
 be true, it may with equal truth be asserted of this bi-verbal 
 allusion, that it is too good to be natural. One cannot help 
 suspecting that the incident was invented to fit the line. It 
 would have been better had it been less perfect. Like some 
 Virgilian hemistichs, it has suffered by filling up. The nimi- 
 um Vicina was enough in conscience ; the Cremona afterward 
 loads it. It is, in fact, a double pun ; and we have always 
 observed that a superfetation in this sort of wit is dangerous. 
 When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic to fol- 
 low it up. We do not care to be cheated a second time ; or, 
 
 * Swift.
 
 LSSSAYS OF ELIA. 287 
 
 perhaps, the mind of man (with reverence be it spoken) 
 is not capacious enough to lodge two puns at a time. The 
 impression, to be forcible, must be simultaneous and undivided. 
 
 THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES. 
 
 Those who use this proverb can never have seen Mrs. 
 Conrady. 
 
 The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from the ce- 
 lestial beauty. As she partakes more or less of this heavenly 
 light, she informs, with corresponding characters, the fleshy 
 tenement which she chooses, and frames to herself a suitable 
 mansion. 
 
 All which only proves that the soul of Mrs. Conrady, in 
 her pre-existent state, was no great judge of architecture. 
 
 To the same effect, in a hymn in honour of beauty, divine 
 Spenser, platonizing, sings : — 
 
 " Every spirit as it is more pure, 
 And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
 So it the fairer body doth procure 
 To habit in, and it more fairly dight 
 With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 
 For of the soul the body form doth take : 
 For soul is form, and doth the body make." 
 
 But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. Conrady. 
 
 These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philosophy ; for 
 here, in his very next stanza but one, is a saving clause, which 
 throws us all out again, and leaves us as much to seek as 
 ever : — 
 
 " Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind 
 Dwells in deformed tabernacle drovvn'd, 
 Father by chance, against the course of kind, 
 Or through unaptness in the substance found, 
 Which it assumed of some stubborn ground, 
 That will not yield unto her form's direction, 
 But is perfoim'd with some foul imperfection." 
 
 From which it would follow, that Spenser had seen somebody 
 like Mrs. Conrady. 
 
 The spirit of this good lady — her previous anima — must have 
 stumbled upon one of these untoward tabernacles which he 
 speaks of. A more rebellious commodity of clay for a ground.
 
 288 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 as the poet calls it, no gentle mind — and sure hers is one of 
 the gentlest — ever had to deal with. 
 
 Pondering upon her inexplicable visage — inexplicable, we 
 mean, but by this modification of the theory — we have come 
 to a conclusion that, if one must be plain, it is better to be 
 plain all over, than, amid a tolerable residue of features, to 
 hang out one that shall be exceptionable. No one can say of 
 Mrs. Conrady's countenance, that it would be better if she 
 had but a nose. It is impossible to pull her to pieces in this 
 manner. We have seen the most malicious beauties of her own 
 sex baffled in the attempt at a selection. The tout ensemble 
 defies particularizing. It is too complete — too consistent, as 
 we may say — to admit of these invidious reservations. It is 
 not as if some Apelles had picked out here a lip — and there a 
 chin — out of the collected ugliness of Greece, to frame a model 
 by. It is a symmetrical whole. We challenge the minutest 
 connoisseur to cavil at any part or parcel of the countenance in 
 question ; to say that this or that is improperly placed. We 
 are convinced that true ugliness, no less than is affirmed of 
 true beauty, is the result of harmony. Like that, too, it reigns 
 without a competitor. No one ever saw Mrs. Conrady, with- 
 out pronouncing her to be the plainest woman he ever met 
 with in the course of his life. The first time that you are in- 
 dulged with a sight of her face is an era in your existence 
 ever after. You are glad to have seen it — ldie Stonehenge. 
 No one can pretend to forget it. No one ever apologized to 
 her for meeting her in the street, on such a day and not know- 
 ing her : the pretext would be too bare. Nobody can mistake 
 her for another. Nobody can say of her, " I think I have seen 
 that face somewhere, but I cannot call to mind where." You 
 must remember that in such a parlour it first struck you — like 
 a bust. You wondered where the owner of the house had 
 picked it up. You wondered more when it began to move its 
 lips — so mildly too ! No one ever thought of asking her to sit 
 for her picture. Lockets are for remembrance ; and it would 
 be clearly superfluous to hang an image at your heart, which, 
 once seen, can never be out of it. It is not a mean face either; 
 its entire originality precludes that. Neither is it of that or- 
 der of plain faces which improve upon acquaintance. Some 
 very good but ordinary people, by an unwearied perseverance 
 in good offices, put a cheat upon our eyes ; juggle our senses 
 out of their natural impressions ; and set us upon discovering 
 good indications in a countenance, which at first sight prom- 
 ised nothing less. We detect gentleness, which had escaped 
 us, lurking about an under lip. But when Mrs. Conrady has 
 done you a service, her face remains the same ; when she
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 has done you a thousand, and you know that she is ready to 
 double the number, still it is that individual face. Neither 
 can you say of it, that it would be a good face if it were not 
 marked by the smallpox — a compliment which is always more 
 admissive than excusatory — for either Mrs. Conrady never 
 had the smallpox, or, as we say, took it kindly. No, it stands 
 upon its own merits fairly. There it is. It is her mark, her 
 token ; that which she is known by. 
 
 XL 
 
 THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE 
 MOUTH. 
 
 Nor a lady's age in the parish register. We hope we have 
 more delicacy than to do either ; but some faces spare us the 
 trouble of these dental inquiries. And what if the beast, 
 which my friend would force upon my acceptance, prove, upon 
 the face of it, a sorry Kosinante, a lean, ill-favoured jade, whom 
 no gentleman couhl think of setting up in his stables? Must I, 
 rather than not be obliged to my friend, make her a companion 
 to Eclipse or Lightfoot ? A horse-giver, no more than a horse- 
 seller, has a right to palm his spavined article upon us for good 
 ware. An equivalent is expected in either case; and, with 
 my own good-will, I would no more be cheated out of my 
 thanks than out of my money. Some people have a knack 
 of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to 
 substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing. Our 
 friend Mitis carries this humour of never refusing a present 
 to the very point of absurdity — if it were possible to couple 
 the ridiculous with so much mistaken delicacy and real good- 
 nature. Not an apartment in his fine house (and he has a 
 true taste in household decorations) but is stuffed up with 
 some preposterous print or mirror — the worst adapted to his 
 panels that may be — the presents of his friends that know 
 his weakness ; while his noble Vandykes are displaced, to" 
 make room for a set of daubs, the works of some wretched 
 artist of his acquaintance, who, having had them returned 
 upon his hands for bad likenesses, finds 'his account in be- 
 stowing them here gratis. The good creature has not tin: 
 heart to mortify the painter at the expense of an honest re- 
 fusal. It is pleasant (if it did not vex one at the same time) 
 25 N
 
 290 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 to see him sitting in his dining-parlour, surrounded with ob- 
 scure aunts and cousins, to God knows whom, while the true 
 Lady Marys and Lady Bettys of his own honourable family, 
 in favour to these adopted frights, are consigned to the stair- 
 case and the lumber-room. In like manner his goodly shelves 
 are one by one stripped of his favourite old authors, to give place 
 to a collection of presentation copies — the flour and bran of 
 modern poetry. A presentation copy, reader — if haply you 
 are yet innocent of such favours — is a copy of a book which 
 does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish auto- 
 graph at the beginning of it ; for which, if a stranger, he 
 only demands your friendship ; if a brother author, he expects 
 from you a book of yours, which does sell, in return. We can 
 speak to experience, having by us a tolerable assortment of 
 these gift-horses. Not to ride a metaphor to death — we are 
 Milling to acknowledge that in some gifts there is sense. A 
 duplicate out of a friend's library (where he has more than 
 one copy of a rare author) is intelligible. There are favours, 
 short of the pecuniary — a thing not fit to be hinted at among 
 gentlemen — which confer as much grace upon the accepter as 
 the offerer; the kind, we confess, which is most to our palate, 
 is of those little conciliatory missives, which for their vehicle 
 generally choose a hamper — little odd presents of game, fruit, 
 perhaps wine — though it is essential to the delicacy of the latter 
 that it be home-made. We love to have our friund in the country 
 sitting thus at our table by proxy ; to apprehend his presence 
 (though a hundred miles may be between us) by a turkey, 
 whose goodly aspect reflects to us his "plump corpusculum ;" 
 to taste him in grouse or woodcock ; to feel him gliding down 
 in the toast peculiar to the latter; to concorporate him in a 
 slice of Canterbury brawn. This is indeed to have him 
 within ourselves ; to know him intimately: such participation 
 is, methinks, unitive, as the old theologians phrase it. For 
 these considerations we should be sorry if certain restrictive 
 regulations, winch are thought to bear hard upon the peasantry 
 of this country, were entirely done away with. A hare, as 
 the law now stands, makes many friends. Cains concil- 
 iates Titius (knowing his gout) with a leash of partridges. 
 Titius (suspecting his partiality for them) passes them to 
 Lucius ; who in his turn, preferring his friend's relish to his 
 own, makes him over to Marcius ; till, in their ever-widening 
 progress and round of unconscious circum-migration, they 
 distribute the seeds of harmony over half a parish. We are 
 well disposed to this kind of sensible remembrances ; and are 
 the less apt to be taken by those little airy tokens — impalpable 
 to the palate — which, under the names of rings, lockets, keep-
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 291 
 
 sakes, amuse some people's fancy mightily. We could never 
 away with these indigestible miles. They are the very kick- 
 shaws and foppery of friendship. 
 
 XII. 
 
 THAT HOME IS HOME, THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO 
 HOMELY. 
 
 Homks there are, we are sure, that are nit homes ; the home 
 of the v» iv pdor man. and another which we shall -speak to 
 presently. Crowded places of cheap entertainment, and the 
 benches of alehouses, if they could speak, might bear mourn- 
 ful testimony to the first. To them the very poor man resorts 
 for an image of the home which he cannot iind at home. For 
 a starved grate, and a scanty firing, that is not enough to keep 
 alive the natural heat in the lingers of so many shivering 
 children with their mother, he finds in the depths of winter 
 always a biasing hearth, and a hob to warm his pittance of 
 beer by. Instead of the clamours of a wife, made gaunt by 
 famishing, he meets with a cheerful attendance beyond the 
 merits of the trifle which he can afford to spend. He has 
 companions which his home denies him, for the very poor 
 man has no visiters. He can look into the goings on of the 
 world, and speak a little to politics. At home there are no poli- 
 tics stirring but the domestic. All interests, real or imaginary, 
 all topics that should expand the mind of man, and connect 
 him to a sympathy with general existence, are crushed in the 
 absorbing consideration of food to be obtained for the family. 
 Beyond the price of bread, news is senseless and impertinent. 
 At home there is no larder. Here there is at least a show 
 of plenty ; and while he cooks his lean scrap of butcher's meat 
 before the common bars, or munches his humbler cold viands, 
 his relishing bread and cheese with an onion, in a corner, 
 where no one reflects upon his poverty, he has a sight of the 
 substantial joint providing for the landlord and his family. 
 He takes an interest in the dressing of it ; and while he assists 
 in removing the trivet from the lire, he feels that there is such 
 a thing as beef and cabbage, winch he was beginning to for- 
 get at home. All this while lie deserts his wife and children. 
 But what wife, and what children ! Prosperous men, who 
 object to this desertion, image to themselves some clean, con- 
 
 N -z
 
 292 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 tented family like that which they go home to. But look at 
 the countenance of the poor wives who follow and persecute 
 their good man to the door of the public house, which he is 
 about to enter, when something like shame would restrain 
 him, if stronger misery did not induce him to pass the thresh- 
 old. That face, ground by want, in which every cheerful, 
 every conversable lineament has been long effaced by misery 
 — is that a face to stay at home with ? is it more a woman, 
 or a wild cat? alas ! it is the face of the wife of his youth, 
 that once smiled upon him. It can smile no longer. What 
 comforts can it share ? what burdens can it lighten ? Oh, 
 'tis a fine thing to talk of the humble meal shared together ! 
 But what if there be no bread in the cupboard 1 The inno- 
 cent prattle of his children takes out the sting of a man's pov- 
 erty. But the children of the very poor do not prattle. It is 
 none of the least frightful features in that condition, that there 
 is no childishness in its dwellings. Poor people, said a sen- 
 sible old nurse to ns once, do not bring up their children ; 
 they drag them up. The little careless darling of the wealth- 
 ier nursery, in their hovel is transformed betimes into a pre- 
 mature reflecting person. No one has time to dandle it, no 
 one thinks it worth while to coax it, to sooth it, to toss it up 
 and down, to humour it. There is none to kiss away its tears. 
 If it cries, it can only be beaten. It has been prettily said 
 that " a babe is fed with milk and praise." But the aliment 
 of this poor babe was thin, unnourishing ; the return to its lit- 
 tle baby-tricks, and efforts to engage attention, bitter cease- 
 less objurgation. It never had a toy, or knew what a coral 
 meant. It grew up without the lullaby of nurses, it was a 
 stranger to the patient fondle, the hushing caress, the attract- 
 ing novelty, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper off-hand 
 contrivance to divert the child ; the prattled nonsense, (best 
 sense to it,) the wise impertinences, the wholesome lies, the 
 apt story interposed, that puts a stop to present sufferings, and 
 awakens the passions of young wonder. It was never sung 
 to — no one ever told to it a tale of the nursery. It was 
 dragged up, to live or to die as it happened. It had no young 
 dreams. It broke at once into the iron realities of life. A 
 child exists not for the very poor as any object of dalliance ; 
 it is only another mouth to be fed, a pair of little hands to be 
 betimes inured to labour. It is the rival, till it can be the co- 
 operator, for food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his 
 diversion, his solace ; it never makes him young again, with 
 recalling his young times. The children of the very poor 
 have no young times. It makes the very heart to bleed to 
 overhear the casual street-talk bet-ween a poor woman and her
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 203 
 
 little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition 
 rather above the squalid beings which we have been contem- 
 plating. It is not of toys, of nursery-books, of summer holv- 
 days ; (fitting that age ;) of the promised sight, or play ; of 
 praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear- 
 starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions 
 of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity 
 in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy provi- 
 dence. It has tome to be a woman — before it was a child. 
 It has learned to go to market; it chaffers, it haggles, it en- 
 vies, it murmurs : it is knowing, acute, sharpened ;- it never 
 prattles. Had we not reason to say, that the home of the 
 very poor is no home ? 
 
 There is yet another home, which we are constrained to 
 deny to be one. It lias a larder, which the home of the poor 
 man wants ; its fireside conveniences, of which the poor 
 dream not. But with all this, it is no home. It is — the 
 house of the man that is infested with many visiters. May 
 we be branded for the veriest churl, if we deny our heart to 
 the many noble-hearted friends that at times exchange their 
 dwelling for our poor roof! It is not of guests that we com- 
 plain, but of endless, purposeless visitants ; droppers in, as 
 they are called. We sometinTes wonder from what sky they 
 fall. It is the very error of the position of our lodging; its 
 horoscopy was ill calculated, being just situate in a medium 
 — a plaguy suburban mid-space — fitted to catch idlers from 
 town or country. We are older than we were, and age is 
 easily put out of its way. We have fewer sands in our glass 
 to reckon upon, and we cannot brook to see them drop in end- 
 lessly succeeding impertinences. At our time of life, to be 
 alone sometimes is as needful as sleep. It is the refreshing- 
 sleep of the day. The growing infirmities of age manifest 
 themselves in nothing more strongly, than in an inveterate 
 dislike of interruption. The thing which we are doing, we 
 wish to be permitted to do. We have neither much knowl- 
 edge nor devices ; but there are fewer in the place to which 
 we hasten. We are not willingly put out of our way, even at 
 a game of nine-pins. While youth was, we had vast rever- 
 sions in time future ; we are reduced to a present pittance, 
 and obliged to economize in that article. W r e bleed away our 
 moments now as hardly as our ducats. We cannot bear to 
 have our thin wardrobe eaten and fretted into by moths. We 
 are willing to barter our good time with a friend, who gives 
 us in exchange his own. Herein is the distinction between 
 the genuine guest and the visitant. This latter takes your 
 good time, and gives you his bad in exchange. The guest is 
 25*
 
 294 ESSAYS OJF EL1A 
 
 domestic to you as your good cat or household bird ; the 
 visitant is your fly, that flaps in at your window, and out again, 
 leaving nothing but. a sense of disturbance, and victuals spoiled. 
 The inferior functions of life begin to move heavily. We 
 cannot concoct our food with interruptions. Our chief meal, 
 to be nutritive, must be solitary. With difficulty we can eat 
 before a guest ; and never understood what the relish of pub- 
 lic feasting meant. Meats have no sapor, nor digestion fair 
 play, in a crowd. The unexpected coming in of a visitant 
 stops the machine. There is a punctual generation who time 
 their calls to the precise commencement of your dining-hour 
 — not to eat — but to see you eat. Our knife and fork drop 
 instinctively, and we feel that we have swallowed our latest 
 morsel. Others again show their genius, as we have said, in 
 knocking the moment you have just sat down to a book. 
 They have a peculiar compassionate sneer, with which they 
 "hope that they do not interrupt your studies." Though 
 they flutter off the next moment, to carry their impertinences 
 to the nearest student that they can call their friend, the tone 
 of the book is spoiled ; we shut the leaves, and, with Dante's 
 lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the effect of 
 intrusion were simply coextensive with its presence ; but it 
 mars all the good hours afterward. These scratches in ap- 
 pearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. " It is a 
 prostitution of the bravery of friendship," says worthy Bishop 
 Taylor, " to spend it upon impertinent people, who are, it 
 may be, loads to their families, but can never ease my loads." 
 This is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, and morning 
 calls. They too have homes, which are — no homes. 
 
 XIII. 
 THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, AND LOVE MY DOG. 
 
 " Good sir, or madam, as ii may be — we most willingly 
 embrace the oiler of your friendship. We long have known 
 your excellent qualities. We have wished to have vou nearer 
 to us ; tn hold you within the very innermost fold of our heart. 
 We can have no reserve towards a person of your open anil 
 noble nature. The frankness of your humour suits us ex- 
 actly. We have been long looking for such a friend. Quick — 
 let us disburden our troubles into eacl other's bosom — let us
 
 ESSAYS OF KL1A. 295 
 
 make our single joys shine by reduplication — But yap, yap, 
 yap! — what is tins confounded cur.' he has fastened his 
 tooth, which is none of the bluntest, just in the fleshy partof 
 my leg." 
 
 "It is niv dug, sir. You must love him for my sake. 
 Here, Test— Test— Test!" 
 
 " But he has bitten inc." 
 
 "Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better acquainted with 
 him. I have had hun three years. He never bites me." 
 
 \ 'a/>, yap, yap ! — " He is at it again." 
 
 '' Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like to be 
 kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with all the respect 
 due to myself." 
 
 " But do you always take him out with you when you go a 
 
 friendship-hunting ■ 
 
 " Invariably, "fis the sweetest, prettiest, best-conditioned 
 animal. I call him my test — the touchstone by which I try 
 a friend. No one can properly be said to love me who does 
 not love him." 
 
 " Excuse us, dear sir — or madam aforesaid — if upon further 
 consideration we are obliged to decline the otherwise invaluable 
 offer of your friendship. We do not like dogs." 
 
 " Mighty well, sir — you know the conditions — you may 
 have worse oilers. Come along, Test." 
 
 The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, in the in- 
 tercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions of breaking 
 oil' an agreeable intimacy by reason of these canine appen- 
 dages. They do not always come in the shape of dogs; they 
 sometimes wear the more plausible and human character of 
 kinsfolk, near acquaintances, my friend's friend, his partner, 
 his wife, or his children. We could never yet form a friend- 
 ship — not to speak of more delicate correspondence — however 
 much to our taste, without the intervention of some third 
 anomaly, some impertinent clog affixed to the relation — the 
 understood </()«• in the proverb. The good things of life are 
 not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture ; like a 
 schoolboy's holyday, with a task affixed to the tail of it. 
 What a delightful companion is * * * *, if he did not always 
 bring his tall cousin with him ! He seems to grow with him ; 
 like some of those double births, which we remember to have 
 read of with such wonder and delight in the old " Athenian 
 Oracle," where Swift commenced author by writing Pin- 
 daric Odes (what a beginning for him!) upon Sir William 
 Temple. There is the picture of the brother, with the 
 little brother peeping out at his shoulder; a species of 
 fraternity which we have no name of kin close enough to
 
 296 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 
 
 comprehend. When * * * * comes, poking in his head and 
 shoulder into your room, as if to feel his entry, you think, 
 surely you have now got him to yourself — what a three-hours' 
 chat we shall have ! — but, ever in the haunch of him, and be- 
 fore his diffident body is well disclosed in your apartment, ap- 
 pears the haunting shadow of the cousin, over-peering his modest 
 kinsman, and sure to overlay the expected good talk with his 
 insufferable procerity of stature, and uncorresponding dwarf- 
 ishness of observation. Misfortunes seldom come alone. 
 'Tis hard when a blessing comes accompanied. Cannot we 
 like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess with her eternal 
 brother 1 or know Sulpicia, without knowing all the round of 
 her card-playing relations ? must my friend's brethren of ne- 
 cessity be mine also ? must we be hand and glove with Dick 
 Selby the parson, or Jack Selby the calico-printer, because 
 W. S., who is neither, but a ripe wit and a critic, has the mis- 
 fortune to claim a common parentage with them 1 Let him lay 
 down his brothers ; and 'tis odds but we will cast him in a pair 
 of ours (we have a superflux) to balance the concession. Let 
 F. H. lay down his garrulous uncle ; and Honorius dismiss his 
 vapid wife, and superfluous establishment of six boys: things 
 between boy and manhood — too ripe for play, too raw for con- 
 versation — that come in, impudently staring their father's old 
 friend out of countenance ; and will neither aid nor let alone 
 the conference : that we may once more meet upon equal 
 terms, as we were wont to do in the disengaged state of bach- 
 elorhood. 
 
 It is well if your friend or mistress be content with these 
 canicular probations. Few young ladies but in this sense 
 keep a dog. But when Rutilia hounds at you her tiger aunt ; 
 or Ruspina expects you to cherish and fondle her viper sister, 
 whom she has preposterously taken into her bosom, to try 
 stinging conclusions upon your constancy ; they must not 
 complain if the house be rather thin of suiters. Scylla must 
 have broken off many excellent matches in her time, if she 
 insisted upon all that loved her loving her dogs also. 
 
 An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, of Delia 
 Cruscan memory. In tender youth, he loved and courted a 
 modest appanage to the opera, in truth a dancer, who had 
 won him by the artless contrast between her manners and 
 situation. She seemed to him a native violet, that had been 
 transplanted by some rude accident into that exotic and ar- 
 tificial hotbed. Nor, in truth, was she less genuine and sin- 
 cere than she appeared to him. He wooed and won this flower. 
 Only for appearance' sake, and for due honour to the bride's 
 relations, she craved that she might have the attendance of
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 297 
 
 her friends and kindred at the approaching solemnity. The 
 request was too amiable not to be conceded : and in this so- 
 licitude for conciliating the good-will of mere relations, he 
 found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, when 
 the golden shaft should have "killed the flock of all affec- 
 tions else." The morning came : and at ihe Star and Garter, 
 Richmond — the place appointed for the breakfasting — accom- 
 panied with one English friend, he impatiently awaited what 
 re-enforcements the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. 
 A rich muster she had made. They came in six coaches — 
 the whole corps du ballet — French, Italian, men and women. 
 Monsieur De B., the famous pimucttcr of the day, led his fair 
 spouse, but craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The prima 
 donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second bulla 
 were there ; and Signor Sc — , and Signora Ch — , and^Madame 
 V , with a countless cavalcade besides of chorusers, figur- 
 antes, at the sight of whom Merry afterward declared, that 
 " then for the first time it struck him seriously that he wa3 
 about to marry — a dancer." But there was no help for it. 
 Besides, it was her day ; these were, in fact, her friends and 
 kinsfolk. The assemblage, though whimsical, was all very 
 natural. But when the bride — handing out of the last coach 
 a still more extraordinary figure than the rest — presented to 
 him as her father — the gentleman that was to give her away — 
 no less a person than Signor Delpini himself — with a sort 
 of pride, as much as to say, See what I have brought to do us 
 honour! — the thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite over- 
 came him; and slipping away under some pretence from the 
 bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry took horse from 
 the back yard to the nearest seacoast, from which, shipping 
 himself to America, he shortly after consoled himself with a 
 more congenial match in the person of Miss Brunton ; relieved 
 from his intended clown father, and a bevy of painted bufTas 
 for bridemaids. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK. 
 
 At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his 
 night-gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, 
 we are not naturalists enough to determine. But for a mere 
 N 3
 
 29S ESSA1S OF ELIA. 
 
 human gentleman — that nas no orchestra business to call him 
 from his warm bed to such preposterous exercises — we take 
 ten, or half after ten, (eleven, of course, during this Christmas 
 solstice,) to be the very earliest hour at which he can begin 
 to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say ; 
 for to do it in earnest requires another half hour's good con- 
 sideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are 
 told, and such like gauds, abroad in the world, in summer 
 time especially, some hours before what we have assigned ; 
 which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getting up. 
 But, having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to 
 assist at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. 
 We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's courtiers, to 
 attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of the 
 dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances ; which 
 have in them, besides, something pagan and Persic. To say 
 truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the 
 sun, (as 'tis called,) to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole 
 day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after 
 in listlessness and headaches ; Nature herself sufficiently de- 
 claring her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate 
 our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and 
 sleepless traveller. We deny not that there is something 
 sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break- 
 of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy 
 world ; to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the 
 seeds of sleep and mortality are in us ; and we pay usually 
 in strange qualms, before night falls, the penalty of the unnat- 
 ural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind 
 are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about 
 their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by 
 wholesale ; we choose to linger abed, and digest our dream*. 
 It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which 
 night in a confused mass presented ; to snatch them from for- 
 getfulness ; to shape and mould them. Some people have no 
 good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too 
 grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud 
 of a foregone vision : to collect the scattered rays of a brighter 
 phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder 
 nocturnal tragedies; to drag into daylight a struggling and 
 half-vanishing nightmare ; to handle and examine the terrors, 
 or the airy solaces. We have tot) much respect for these 
 spiritual communications to let them go so lightly. We are 
 not. so stupid, or 80 careless, as that imperial forget ter of his 
 dreams, that, we should need a seer to remind US of the form 
 of them. They seem to us to have as much significance as
 
 KS&iYfl Of KLIA. 299 
 
 our waking concerns ; or rather to import us more nearly, as 
 mure nearly we approach by years to the shadowy world, 
 whither we are hastening. \\ e have shaken hands with the 
 world's business ; we have done with it ; we have discharged 
 OUrself ol' it. Why should we get up .' we have neither suit 
 to solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut in upon 
 ns at the fourth act. We have nothing here to expect, hut in 
 a short time a sickbed, and a dismissal. We delight to an- 
 ticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We are 
 already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much 
 in the world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil be- 
 tween us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed gray 
 before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world already 
 appear as but the vain stuff out of which dreams are composed. 
 \\ e have asked no more of life than what the mimic images 
 in play-houses present us with. Even those types have waxed 
 fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We are super- 
 annltatkd. In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we con- 
 tract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to have 
 I n ends at court. The abstracted media of dreams seem no 
 ill introduction to that spiritual presence, upon which, in 
 no long tune, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to 
 know a little of the usages of that colony ; to learn the 
 language and the faces we shall meet with there, that we 
 may be the less awkward at our first coming among them. 
 We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall 
 soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore, we cherish 
 dreams. We try to spell in ihem the alphabet of the invisible 
 world ; and think we know already how it shall be with us. 
 Those uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and 
 blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. We feel attenua- 
 ted into their meager essences, and have given the hand of 
 half-way approach to incorporeal being. We once thought 
 life to be something; but it has unaccountably fallen from us 
 before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions. 
 The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should 
 we get up I
 
 300 ESSAYS OF EL1A. 
 
 XV. 
 
 THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB. 
 
 We could never quite understand the philosophy of this 
 arrangement, or the wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for 
 instruction to these woolly bedfellows. A sheep, when it is 
 dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if 
 he can. Man found out long sixes. Hail candlelight ! with- 
 out disparagement to sun or moon, the kindliest luminary of 
 the three — if we may not rather style thee their radiant deputy, 
 mild viceroy of the moon ! We love to read, talk, sit silent, 
 eat, drink, sleep, by candlelight. They are everybody's sun 
 and moon. This is our peculiar and household planet. Want- 
 ing it, what savage, unsocial nights must our ancestors have 
 spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses ! They 
 must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the dark. 
 What repartees could have passed, when you must have 
 felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbour's cheek to 
 be sure that he understood it I This accounts for the se- 
 riousness of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast, (try He- 
 siod or Ossian,) derived from the tradition of those unlanterned 
 nights. Jokes came in with candles. We wonder how they 
 saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup? 
 what a melange of chance carving they must have made of 
 it ! — here one had got a leg of a goat, when he wanted a 
 horse's shoulder — there another had dipped his scooped palm in 
 a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's milk. 
 There is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, 
 even in these civilized times, has never experienced this, 
 when at some economic table he has commenced dining 
 after dusk, and waited for the flavour till the lights came ? 
 The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally. Can you 
 tell pork from veal in the dark? or distinguish Sherris from 
 pure Malaga? Take away the candle from the smoking man ; 
 by the glimmering of the left ashes, he knows that he is still 
 smoking, but he knows it only by an inference ; till the re- 
 stored light, coining in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both 
 senses the full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs ! 
 how he burnishes ! There is absolutely no such thing as 
 reading, but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a 
 book at noonday in gardens, and in sultry arbours; but it was
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 301 
 
 labour thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come 
 about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquettes, that 
 will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstrac- 
 tions. By the midnight taper, the writer digests his medita- 
 tions. By the same light, we must approach to their perusal, 
 if we would catch the flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all 
 that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem 
 ever owed its birth to the sun's light. They are abstracted 
 works — 
 
 " Things that were born when none but the still night, 
 And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes." 
 
 Marry, daylight — daylight might furnish the images, the crude 
 material ; but for the fine shapings, the true turning and filing 
 (as mine author haih it,) they must be content to hold their in- 
 spiration of the candle. The mild internal light, that reveals 
 them, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sun- 
 shine. Night and silence call out the starry fancies. Milton's 
 Morning Hymn on Paradise, we would hold a good wager, 
 was penned at midnight ; and Taylor's richer description of a 
 sunrise smells decidedly of the taper. Even our self, in these 
 our humbler lucubrations, tune our best measured cadences 
 (prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the 
 drowsier watchman, " blessing the doors;" or the wild sweep 
 of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier speculation than we 
 have yet attempted courts our endeavours. We would endite 
 something about the solar system. Betty, bring the candles 
 
 XVI. 
 
 THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE. 
 
 We grant that it is, and a very serious one — to a man's 
 friends, and to all that have to do with him ; but whether the 
 condition of the man himself is so much to be deplored, may 
 admit of a question. We can speak a little to it, being our- 
 self but lately recovered — we whisper it in confidence, reader 
 — out of a Ion? and desperate fit of the sullens. Was the cure 
 a blessing? The conviction which wrought it came too 
 clearly to leave a scruple of the fanciful injuries — for they were 
 mere fancies— which had provoked the humour. But the hu- 
 mour itself was too self-pleasing while it lasted — we know how
 
 302 ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 bare we lay ourself in the confession — to be abandoned all at 
 once with the grounds of it. We still brood over wrongs whicb 
 we know to have been imaginary; and for our old acquaint- 
 ance, N . whom we find to have been a truer friend than 
 
 we took him for, we substitute some phantom — a Caius or a 
 Titius — as like him as we dare to form it, to wreak our yet 
 unsatisfied resentments on. It is mortifying to fall at once 
 from the pinnacle of neglect ; to forego the idea of having been 
 ill-used and contumaciously treated by an old friend. The 
 first thing to aggrandize a man in his own conceit, is to con- 
 ceive of himself as neglected. There let him fix if he can. 
 To undeceive him is to deprive him of the most tickling mor- 
 sel within the range of self-complacency. No flattery can 
 come near it. Happy is he who suspects his friend of an in- 
 justice ; but supremely blessed, who thinks all his friends in a 
 conspiracy to depress and undervalue him. There is a pleas- 
 ure (we sing not to the profane) far beyond the reach of all 
 that the world counts joy — a deep, enduring satisfaction in the 
 depths, where the superficial seek it not, of discontent. Were 
 we to recite one half of this mystery, which we were let into 
 by our late dissatisfaction, all the world would be in love with 
 disrespect ; we should wear a slight for a bracelet, and neg- 
 lects and contumacies would be the only matter for courtship. 
 Unlike to that mysterious book in the Apocalypse, the study 
 of this mystery is unpalatable, only in the commencement. The 
 first sting of a suspicion is grievous ; but wait — out of that 
 wound, which to flesh and blood seemed so difficult, there is 
 balm and honey to be extracted. Your friend passed you on 
 such or such a day, having in his company one that you con- 
 ceived worse than ambiguously disposed towardsyou — passed 
 you in the street without notice. To be sure, he is something 
 shortsighted ; and it was in your power to have accosted Kim. 
 Uut facts and sane inferences are trifles to a true adept in the 
 science of dissatisfaction. He must have seen you ; and 
 
 S— , who was witli him, must have been the cause of the 
 
 contempt. It galls you, and well it may. Hut have patience, 
 do home and make die worst of it, and you are a made man 
 from this time. Shut yourself up, and — rejecting as an enemy 
 to your peace every whispering suggestion that bin insinuatea 
 there may be a mistake — reflect seriously upon the many 
 lesser instances which you have begun to perceive, in proof 
 of your friend's disaffection towards you. None of them singly 
 was much to the purpose, but the aggregate weightis positive ; 
 and you have this last affront to clinch them. Thus far the 
 process is anything but agreeable. Hut now to your re- 
 lief comes in (he comparative faculty. You conjure up all the
 
 ESSAYS OF ELI A. 303 
 
 kind feelings you have had for your friend ; what you have 
 been to him, and what vmi would have been to him, if he 
 would have Buffered you ; bow you have defended him is tins 
 
 or that place ; and his good Dane — -his literary reputation, and 
 so forth, was alwavs dearer to you than your own ! Your 
 heart, spite of itself, yearns towards him. \ uu could weep 
 tears of blood but for a restraining pride. How say you ? do 
 you not yet begin to apprehend a comfort ? sonic allay of 
 sweetness iu the bitter waters ? Stop not here, nor peuuri- 
 ously cheat yourself of your reversions. You are on vantage 
 ground. Enlarge your speculations, and take iu the rest of 
 your friends, as a spark kindles more sparks. Was there one 
 among them who has not to you proved hollow, false, slippery 
 as water? Begin to think that the relation itself is inconsis- 
 tent with mortality That the very idea of friendship, with its 
 component parts, as honour, fidelity, steadiness, exists but in 
 your single bosom. Image yourself to yourself, as the only 
 possible friend in a world incapable of that communion. 
 Now the gloom thickens. The little star of self-love twinkles, 
 that is to encourage you through deeper glooms than this. You 
 are not yet at the half-point of your elevation. You arc not 
 yet, believe me, half sulky enough. Adverting to the world in 
 general, (as these circles in the mind will spread to infinity,) 
 reflect with what strange injustice you have been treated in 
 quarters where; (setting gratitude and the expectation of 
 friendly returns aside as chimeras) you pretended no claim 
 bevond justice, the naked due of all men. Think the very 
 idea of right and fit fled from the earth, or your breast the 
 solitary receptacle of it, till you have swelled yourself into 
 at least one hemisphere ; the other being the vast Arabia Stony 
 of your friends and the world aforesaid. To grow bigger every 
 moment in your own conceit, and the world to lessen : todeily 
 yourself at the expense of your species; to judge the world — 
 this is the acme and supreme point of your mystery — these the 
 true PLEASURES of sulkiness. We profess no more of this 
 grand secret than what ourself experimented on one rSiny 
 afternoon iu the last week, sulking in our study. We had 
 proceeded to the penultimate point, at which the true adept 
 seldom stops, where the consideration of benefit forgot is about 
 to merge in the meditation of general injustice — when a knock 
 at the door was followed by the entrance of the very friend, 
 whose not seeing of us in the morning, (for we will now cOnfes'd 
 the case our own,) an accidental oversight, had given rise tj 
 so much agreeable generalization! To mortify us still move 
 and take down the whole flattering superstructure which pride 
 had piled upon neglect, lie had brought in ir.s hand the idea-
 
 301 ESSAYS OF EL1A. 
 
 tical S , in whose favour we had suspected him of the 
 
 contumacy. Asseverations were needless, where the frank 
 manner of them both was convictive of the injurious nature 
 of the suspicion. We fancied that they perceived our em- 
 barrassment ; but were too proud, or something else, to confess 
 to the secret of it. We had been but too lately in the condi- 
 tion of the noble patient in Argos : — 
 
 " Qui se credebat miros audire tragoedos, 
 In vacuo laetus sessor plausorque theatro" — 
 
 and could have exclaimed with equal reason against the 
 friendly hands that cured us — 
 
 " Pol me occidistis, amici, 
 Non servastis, ail ; cui sic extorta voluptas, 
 Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error." 

 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 It was noontide. The sun was very hot. An old gentle- 
 woman sat spinning in a Little arbour at the dour of her cot- 
 tage. She was blind ; and her grand-daughter was reading 
 the Bible to her. The old lady had just left her work, to at- 
 tend to the story of Ruth. 
 
 " Orpah kissed her mother-in-law ; but Ruth clave unto 
 her." It was a passage she could not let pass without a 
 comment. The moral she drew from it was not very new, to 
 be sure. The girl had heard it a hundred times before — and 
 a hundred times more she could have heard it, without sus- 
 pecting it to be tedious. Rosamund loved her grandmother. 
 
 The old lady loved Rosamund too ; and she had reason 
 for so doing. Rosamund was to her at once a child and a 
 servant. She had oidy her left in the world. They too lived 
 together. 
 
 They had once known better days. The story of Rosa- 
 mund's parents, their failure, their folly, and distresses, may 
 be told another time. Our tale hath grief enough in it. 
 
 It was now about a year and a half since old Margaret Gray 
 had sold off all her effects, to pay the debts of Rosamund's 
 father — just after the mother had died of a broken heart; for 
 her husband had fled his country to hide his shame in a for- 
 eign land. At that period the old lady retired to a small cot- 
 tage, in the village of Widford in Hertfordshire. 
 
 Rosamund, in her thirteenth year, was left destitute, with- 
 out fortune or friends : she went with her grandmother. In 
 all this time she had served her faithfully and lovingly. 
 
 Old Margaret Gray, when she first came into these parts, 
 had eyes, and could see. The neighbours said, they had 
 been dimmed by weeping: be that as it may, she was latterly 
 grown quite blind. "God is very good to us, child ; I can 
 feel you yet." This she would sometimes say; and we need 
 not wonder to hear that Rosamund clave unto her grand 
 mother. 
 26*
 
 306 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 Margaret retained a spirit unbroken by calamity. Thero 
 was a principle luithin, which it seemed as if no outward cir- 
 cumstances could reach. It was a religious principle, and 
 she had taught it to Rosamund ; for the girl had mostly re- 
 sided with her grandmother from her earliest years. Indeed, 
 she had taught her all that she knew herself; and the old 
 lady's knowledge did not extend a vast way. 
 
 Margaret had drawn her maxims from observation ; and a 
 pretty long experience in life had contributed to make her, at 
 times, a Utile. positive: but Rosamund never argued with her 
 grandmother. 
 
 Their library consisted chiefly in a large family Bible, with 
 notes and expositions by various learned expositors from 
 Bishop Jewell downward. 
 
 This might never be suffered to lie about like other books 
 — but was kept constantly wrapped up in a handsome case of 
 green velvet, with gold tassels — the only relic of departed 
 grandeur they had brought with them to the cottage — every- 
 thing else of value had been sold off for the purpose above 
 mentioned. 
 
 This Bible Rosamund, when a child, had never dared to 
 open without permission ; and even yet, from habit, continued 
 the custom. Margaret had parted with none of her authority ; 
 indeed, it was never exerted with much harshness ; and happy 
 was Rosamund, though a girl grown, when she could obtain 
 leave to read her Bible. It was a treasure too valuable for 
 an indiscriminate use ; and Margaret still pointed out to her 
 grand-daughter where to read. 
 
 Besides this, they had the " Complete Angler, or Contem- 
 plative Man's Recreation," with cuts — " Pilgrim's Progress," 
 the first part — a cookery book, with a few dry sprigs of rose- 
 mary and lavender stuck here and there between the leaves, 
 (I suppose, to point to some of the old lady's most favourite 
 receipts,) and there was "Wither's Emblems," an old book, 
 and quaint. The oldfashioned pictures in this last book were 
 among the first exciters of the infant Rosamund's curiosity. 
 Her contemplation had fed upon them in rather older years. 
 
 Rosamund had not read many books besides these ; or, if 
 any, they had been only occasional companions : these were 
 to Rosamund as old friends, that she had long known. I 
 know not whether the peculiar cast of her mind might not be 
 traced, in part, to a tincture she had received, early in life, 
 from Walton and Wither, from John Bunyan, and her Bible. 
 
 Rosamund's mind was pensive and reflective, rather than 
 what passes usually for clever or acute. From a child she 
 was remarkably shy and thoughtful — this was taken for stu-
 
 ROSAMUND OKAY. 307 
 
 pidity and want of feeling ; and the child had been sometimes 
 whipped for being a stubborn thing, when her little heart was 
 almost bursting with affection. 
 
 Even now her grandmother would often reprove her, when 
 she found her too grave or melancholy ; give her sprightly 
 lectures about good-humour and rational mirth ; and not uu- 
 1 1 « i j mnt I \ tall a crying herself, to the great discredit of her 
 lecture. Those tears endeared her the more to Rosamund. 
 
 Margaret would say, " Child, 1 love you to cry, when I think 
 you are only remembering your poor dear father and mother 
 — 1 would have you think, about them sometimes — it would be 
 strange if you did, not — but I fear, Rosamund, I fear, girl; 
 you sometimes think too deeply about your own situation and 
 poor prospects in life. When you do so, you do wrong — re- 
 member the naughty rich man in the parable. He never had 
 anv good thoughts about God, ami his religion : and that might 
 have been your case." 
 
 Rosamund, at these times, could not reply to her ; she was 
 not in the habit of arguing with her grandmother ; so she was 
 quite silent on these occasions — or else the girl knew well 
 enough herself, that she had only been sad to think of the 
 desolate condition of her best friend, to see her, in old a^v, 
 so infirm and blind. But she had never been used to make 
 excuses when the old ladv said she was doing wrong. 
 
 The neighbours were all very kind to them. The veriest 
 rustics never passed them without a bow, or a pulling off of 
 the hat — some show of courtesy, awkward indeed, but affec- 
 tionate — with a " good-morrow, madam,'' or "young madam,"' 
 as it might happen. 
 
 Rude and savage natures, who seem born with a propensity 
 to express contempt for anything that looks like prosperity, 
 yet felt respect for its declining lustre. 
 
 The tanners and better sort of people (as they are called) 
 all promised to provide for Rosamund when her grandmother 
 should die. Margaret trusted in God, and believed them. 
 
 She used to say, "I have lived many years in the world, 
 and have never known people, good people, to be left without 
 some friend; a relation, a benefactor, a something. God 
 knows our wants — that it is not good for man or woman to be 
 alone ; and he always sends us a helpmate, a leaning-place, 
 a somewhat." Upon this sure ground of experience did M - 
 »aret build her trust in Providence.
 
 308 ROSAMUND GRAY, 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Rosamund had just male an end of her story, (as I was 
 about to relate,) and was listening to the application of the 
 moral, ("which said application she was old enough to have 
 made herself, but her grandmother still continued to treat her 
 in many respects as a child, and Rosamund was in no haste 
 to lay claim to the title of womanhood,) when a young gentle- 
 man made his appearance, and interrupted them. 
 
 It was young Allan Clare, who had brought a present of 
 peaches and some roses for Rosamund. 
 
 He laid his little basket down on a seat of the arbour ; and 
 in a respectful tone of voice, as though he were addressing a 
 parent, inquired of Margaret " how she did." 
 
 The old lady seemed pleased with his attentions — an- 
 swered his inquiries by saying, that " her cough was less 
 troublesome a-nights, but she had not yet got rid of it, and 
 probably she never might ; but she did not like to tease young 
 people with an account of her infirmities." 
 
 A few kind words passed on either side, when young Clare, 
 glancing a tender look at the girl, who had all this time 
 been silent, took leave of them with saying, " I shall bring 
 Elinor to see you in the evening." 
 
 When he was gone, the old lady began to prattle. 
 
 " That is a sweet-dispositioned youth, and I do love him 
 dearly, I must say it — there is such a modesty in all he says or 
 does — he should not come here so often, to be sure, but I 
 don't know how to help it ; there is so much goodness in him, 
 I can't find in my heart to forbid him. But, Rosamund, girl, 
 I must tell you beforehand ; when you grow older, Mr. Clare 
 must be no companion for you — while you were both so young, 
 it was all very well — but the time is coming, when folks 
 will think harm of it, if a rich young gentleman, like Mr. 
 Clare, comes so often to our poor cottage. Dost hear, girl ? 
 "Why don't you answer? Come, I did not mean to say any- 
 thing to hurt you— speak to me, Rosamund — nay, I must not 
 have you be sullen — I don't love people that are sullen." 
 
 And in this manner was this poor soul running on, unheard 
 and unheeded, when it occurred to her, that possibly the girl 
 might not be within hearing. 
 
 And true it was, that Rosamund had slunk away at the first 
 mention of Mr. Clare's good qualities : and when she returned,
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 309 
 
 which was not till a few minutes after Margaret had made an 
 end of her fine harangue, it was cert a in her cheeks did look 
 very rosy. That mi^ht have been from the heat of the day 
 or from exercise, for she had been walking in the garden. 
 
 Margaret, we know, was blind ; and, in this case, it was 
 lucky for Rosamund that she was so, or she might have made 
 some not unlikely surmises. 
 
 I must not have my reader infer from this that I at all think 
 it likely a young maid of fourteen would fall in love without 
 asking her grandmother's leave — the thing itself is not to be 
 conceived. 
 
 To obviate all suspicions, I am disposed to communicate a 
 little anecdote of Rosamund. 
 
 A month or two back her grandmother had been giving her 
 the strictest prohibitions, in her walks, not to go near a cer- 
 tain spot, which was dangerous from the circumstance of a 
 huge overgrown oak-tree spreading its prodigious arms across 
 a deep chalk-pit, which they partly concealed. 
 
 To this fatal place Rosamund came one day — female curi- 
 osity, we know, is older than the flood — let us not think hard- 
 ly of the girl if she partook of the sexual failing. 
 
 Rosamund ventured farther and farther — climbed along one 
 of the branches — approached the forbidden chasm — her foot 
 slipped — she was not killed — but it was by a mercy she es- 
 caped — other branches intercepted her fall — and with a pal 
 pitaling heart she made her way back to the cottage. 
 
 It happened, that evening, that her grandmother was in one 
 of her best humours, caressed Rosamund, talked of old times, 
 and what a blessing it was they two found a shelter in their 
 little cottage ; and, in conclusion, told Rosamund " she was a 
 good girl, and God would one day reward her for her kind- 
 ness to her old blind grandmother." 
 
 This was more than Rosamund could bear. Her morning's 
 disobedience came fresh into her mind ; she felt she did not 
 deserve all this from Margaret ; and at last burst into a fit of 
 crying, and made confession of her fault. The old gentle- 
 woman kissed and forgave her. 
 
 Rosamund never went near that naughty chasm again. 
 
 Margaret would never have heard of this, if Rosamund had 
 not told of it herself. But this young maid had a delicate 
 moral sense, which would not suffer her to take advantage of 
 her grandmother, to deceive her, or conceal anything from 
 her, though Margaret was old and blind, and easy to be im- 
 posed upon. 
 
 Another virtuous trait I recollect of Rosamund, and, now I 
 am in the vein, will tell it.
 
 810 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 Some, T know, will think these things trifles — and they are 
 so — but if these minutiae make my reader better acquainted 
 with Rosamund, I am content to abide the imputation. 
 
 These promises of character, hints, and early indications of 
 a sweet nature, are to me more dear, and choice in the selec- 
 tion, tban any of those pretty wild flowers, which this young 
 maid, this virtuous Rosamund, has ever gathered in a fine 
 May morning, to make a posy to place in the bosom of her 
 old blind friend. 
 
 Rosamund had a very just notion of drawing, and would 
 often employ her talent in making sketches of the surrounding 
 scenery. 
 
 On a landscape, a larger piece than she had ever yet at- 
 tempted, she had now been working for three or four months. 
 She had taken great pains with it, given much time to it, and 
 it was nearly finished. For whose particular inspection it was 
 designed, I will not venture to conjecture. We know it could 
 not have been for her grandmother's. 
 
 One day she went out on a short errand, and left her land- 
 scape on the table. When she returned she found it gone. 
 
 Rosamund from the first suspected some mischief, but held 
 her tongue. At length she made the fatal discovery. Mar- 
 garet, in her absence, had laid violent hands on it ; not know- 
 ing what it was, but taking it for some waste paper, had torn 
 it in half, and with one half of this elaborate composition had 
 twisted herself up — a thread-paper ! 
 
 Rosamund spread out her hands at sight of the disaster, 
 gave her grandmother a roguish smile, but said not a word. 
 She knew the poor soul would only fret if she told her of it ; 
 and when once Margaret was set a fretting for other people's 
 misfortunes, the fit held her pretty long. 
 
 So Rosamund that very afternoon began another piece of 
 the same size and subject ; and Margaret, to her dying day, 
 never dreamed of the mischief she had unconsciously done 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Rosamund Gray was the most beautiful young creature 
 that eyes ever beheld. Her face had the sweetest expression 
 in it — a gentleness — a modesty — a timidity — a certain charm 
 — a grace without a name. 
 
 There was a sort of melancholy mingled in her smile. It
 
 ROSAMUND GRAV. 31 ' 
 
 was not the thoughtless levity of a girl — it was not the re- 
 strained simper of premature womanhood — it was something 
 which the poet Young nnglit have reim inhen d, when he com- 
 po&ed that perfect line, 
 
 "Soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair." 
 
 She was a mild-eyed maid, and everybody hived her. 
 Young AUaq Clare, when but a boy, sighed for her. 
 Her yellow hair fell in bright and curling clusters, like 
 
 '• Those hanging lucks 
 Of young Apollo." 
 
 Her voice was trembling and musical. A graceful diffi- 
 dence pleaded for her whenever she spake — and, if she said 
 but little, that little found its way to the heart. 
 
 Y<mng, and artless, and innocent, meaning no harm, and 
 thinking none ; affectionate as a smiling infant — playful, yet 
 inohtrusive, as a weaned lamb — everybody loved her. Young 
 Allan Clare, when but a boy, sighed for her. 
 
 The moon is shining in so brightly at my window, where I 
 write, that I feel it a crime not to suspend my employment 
 a while to gaze at her. 
 
 See how she glideth, in maiden honour, through the clouds, 
 Who divide on either side to do her homage. 
 
 Beautiful vision ! — as I contemplate thee, an internal har- 
 mony is communicated to my mind, a moral brightness, a tacit 
 analogy of mental purity ; a calm like that we ascribe in 
 fancy to the favoured inhabitants of thy fairy regions, " ar»enl 
 fields." 
 
 I marvel not, oh moon, that heathen people, in the ;< olden 
 times," did worship Thy deity — Cynthia, Diana, Hecate. 
 Christian Europe invokes thee not by these names now — her 
 idolatry is of a blacker stain: Belial is her God — she wor- 
 ships Mammon. 
 
 False things are told concerning thee, fair planet — for I will 
 ne'er believe that thou canst take a perverse pleasure in dis- 
 torting the brains of us poor mortals. Lunatics ! moon- 
 struck ! Calumny invented, and folly took up, these names. 
 I would hope better things from thy mild aspect and benign 
 influences. 
 
 Lady of heaven, thou lendest thy pure lamp to light the way 
 to the virgin mourner, when she goes to seek the tomb where 
 her warrior lover lies.
 
 312 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 Friend of the distressed, thou speakest only peace to the 
 lonely sufferer, who walks forth in the placid evening, beneath 
 thy gentle light, to chide at fortune, or to complain of changed 
 friends, or unhappy lovers. 
 
 Do I dream, or doth not even now a heavenly calm descena 
 from thee into my bosom, as I meditate on the chaste loves 
 of Rosamund and her Clare ? 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Allan Clare was just two years older than Rosamund. 
 He was a boy of fourteen when he first became acquainted 
 with her — it was soon after she had come to reside with her 
 grandmother at Widford. 
 
 He met her by chance one day, carrying a pitcher in her 
 hand, which she had been filling from a neighbouring well — 
 the pitcher was heavy, and she seemed to be bending with its 
 weight. 
 
 Allan insisted on carrying it for her — for he thought it a 
 sin that a delicate young maid like her should be so em- 
 ployed, and he stand idle by. 
 
 Allan had a propensity to do little kind offices for every- 
 body — but at the sight of Rosamund Gray his first fire was 
 kindled — his young mind seemed to have found an object, and 
 his enthusiasm was from that lime forth awakened. His visits, 
 from that day, were pretty frequent at the cottage. 
 
 He was never happier than when he could get Rosamund 
 to walk out with him. He would make her admire the scenes 
 he admired — fancy the wild flowers he fancied — watch the 
 clouds he was watching — and not unfrequently repeat to her 
 poetry which he loved, and make her love it. 
 
 On their return, the old lady, who considered them yet as 
 but children, would bid Rosamund fetch Mr. Clare a glass of 
 her currant wine, a bowl of new milk, or some cheap dainty, 
 which was more welcome, to Allan than the costliest delicacies 
 of a prince's court. 
 
 The boy and girl, for they were no more at that age, grew 
 fond of each other — more fond than either of them suspected. 
 
 " They would sit and sigh, 
 And look upon each other, and conceive 
 Not what they ail'd ; yet something they did ail, 
 And yet were well — and yet they were not well ; 
 And what was their disease, they could not tell."
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 313 
 
 And thus, 
 
 " In this first garden of their simpleness 
 They spent their childhood." 
 
 A circumstance had lately happened, which in some sort 
 altered the nature of their attachment. 
 
 Rosamund was one day reading the tale of " Julia de Rou- 
 oigne" — a book which young Clare had lent her. 
 
 Allan was standing by, looking over her, with one hand 
 thrown round her neck, and a linger of the other pointing to a 
 passage in Julia's third letter. 
 
 " Maria ! in my hours of visionary indulgence, I have some- 
 times painted to myself a husband — no matter whom — com- 
 forting me amid the distresses which fortune has laid upon 
 us. I have smiled upon him through my tears; tears, not of 
 anguish, but of tenderness ; our children were playing around 
 us, unconscious of misfortune ; we had taught them to be 
 humble, and to be happy ; our little shed was reserved to us, 
 and their smiles to cheer it. I have imagined the luxury of 
 such a scene, and affliction became a part of my dream of 
 happiness." 
 
 The girl blushed as she read, and trembled — she had a sort 
 of confused sensation that Allan was noticing her — yet sho 
 durst not lift her eyes from the book, bin continued reading, 
 scarce knowing what she read. 
 
 Allan guessed the cause of her confusion, Allan trembled 
 too — his colour came and went — his feelings became impetuous 
 — and, flinging both arms round her neck, he kissed his young 
 favourite. 
 
 Rosamund was vexed and pleased, soothed and frightened, 
 all in a moment — a fit of tears came to her relief. 
 
 Allan had indulged before in these little freedoms, and 
 Rosamund had thought no harm of them — but from this time 
 the girl grew timid and reserved — distant in her manner, and 
 careful of her behaviour, in Allan's presence — not seeking his 
 society as before, but rather shunning it — delighting more to 
 feed upon his idea in absence. 
 
 Allan too, from this day, seemed changed : his manner be- 
 came, though not less tender, yet more respectful and diffident 
 — his bosom felt a throb it, had till now not known, in the so- 
 ciety of Rosamund — and, if he was less familiar with her than 
 in former times, that charm of delicacy had superadded a grace 
 to Rosamund, which, while he feared, he loved. 
 
 There is a mysterious character, heightened indeed by fancy 
 and passion, but not without foundation in reality and observa- 
 tion, which true lovers have ever imputed to the object of their 
 27
 
 314 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 affections. This character Rosamund had now acquired with 
 Allan — something angelic, perfect, exceeding ?tature. 
 
 Young Clare dwelt very near to the cottage. He had lost 
 his parents, who were rather wealthy, early in life ; and was 
 left to the care of a sister some ten years older than himself. 
 
 Elinor Clare was an excellent young lady — discreet, intel- 
 ligent, and affectionate. Allan revered her as a parent, while 
 he loved her as his own familiar friend. He told all the little 
 secrets of his heart to her — but there was o?ie, which he had 
 hitherto unaccountably concealed from her — namely, the ex- 
 tent of his regard for Rosamund. 
 
 Elinor knew of his visits to the cottage, and was no stranger 
 to the persons of Margaret and her grand-daughter. She had 
 several times met them when she had been walking with her 
 brother — a civility usually passed on either side — but Elinor 
 avoided troubling her brother with any unseasonable questions. 
 
 Allan's heart often beat, and he had been going to tell 
 his sister all — but something like shame (false or true, I shall 
 not stay to inquire) had hitherto kept him back — still the 
 secret, unrevealed, hung upon his conscience like a crime — 
 for his temper had a sweet and noble frankness in it, which 
 bespake him yet a virgin from the world. 
 
 There was a fine openness in his countenance — the char- 
 acter of it somewhat resembled Rosamund's — except that 
 more fire and enthusiasm were discernible in Allan's — his 
 eyes were of a darker blue than Rosamund's — his hair was 
 of a chestnut colour — his cheeks ruddy, and tinged with brown. 
 There was a cordial sweetness in Allan's smile, the like to 
 which I never saw in any other face. 
 
 Elinor had hitherto connived at her brother's attachment to 
 Rosamund. Elinor, T believe, was a sort of a physiognomist, 
 and thought she could trace in the countenance and manner of 
 Rosamund qualities which no brother of hers need be ashamed 
 to love. 
 
 The time was now come when Elinor was desirous of 
 knowing her brother's favourite more intimately — an opportu- 
 nity offered of breaking the matter to Allan. 
 
 The morning of the day in which he carried his present of 
 fruit and flowers to Rosamund, his sister had observed him 
 more than usually busy in the garden, culling fruit with a 
 nicety of choice not common to him. 
 
 She came up to him unobserved, and, taking him by the 
 arm, inquired, with a questioning smile — " What are you 
 doing, Allan ? and who are those peaches designed for ?" 
 
 " For Rosamund Gray," he replied — and his heart seemed 
 relieved of a burden which had long oppressed it.
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 313 
 
 u I have a mind to become acquainted with your handsome 
 friend — will you introduce me, Allan ? I think I should like 
 to #o and see her this afternoon." 
 
 " Do go, do go, Elinor — you don't know what .l »ood crea- 
 ture she is — and old blind Margaret, you will like her very 
 much." 
 
 His sister promised to accompany him after dinner ; and 
 they parted. Allan gathered no more peaches, but hastily 
 cropping a few roses to fling into his basket, went away with 
 it half tilled, being impatient to announce to Rosamund the 
 coming of her promised visiter 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 When Allan returned home, he found an invitation had been 
 left for him, in his absence, to spend that evening with a young 
 friend, who had just quitted a public school in London, and 
 was come to pass one night in his father's house at Widford, 
 previous to his departure the next morning for Edinburgh Uni- 
 versity. 
 
 It was Allan's bosom friend — they had not met for some 
 months — and it was probable a much longer time must inter- 
 vene before they should meet again. 
 
 Yet Allan could not help looking a little blank when he first 
 heard of the invitation. This was to have been an important 
 evening. But Elinor soon relieved her brother, by expressing 
 her readiness to go alone to the cottage. 
 
 " I will not lose the pleasure I promised myself, whatever 
 you may determine upon, Allan — I wdl go by myself rather than 
 be disappointed." 
 
 " Will you, will you, Elinor?" 
 
 Elinor promised to go — and, I believe, Allan, on a second 
 thought, was not very sorry to be spared the awkwardness of 
 introducing two persons to each other, both so dear to him, but 
 either of whom might happen not much to fancy the other. 
 
 At times, indeed, he was confident that Elinor must love 
 Rosamund, and Rosamund must love Elinor — but there were 
 also times in which he felt misgivings — it was an event he 
 could scarce hope for very joy ! 
 
 Allan's real presence that evening was more at the cottage 
 than at the house where his bodily semblance was visiting — his 
 
 O 2
 
 316 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 friend could not help complaining of a certain absence of mind, 
 a coldness, he called it. 
 
 It might have been expected, and in the course of things 
 predicted, that Allan would have asked his friend some ques- 
 tions of what had happened since their last meeting, what his 
 teelings were on leaving school, the probable time when they 
 should meet again, and a hundred natural questions which 
 friendship is most lavish of at such times ; but nothing of all 
 this ever occurred to Allan — they did not even settle the 
 method of their future correspondence. 
 
 The consequence was, as might have been expected, Allan's 
 friend thought him much altered, and, after his departure, sat 
 down to compose a doleful sonnet about a " faithful friend ;" I 
 do not find that he ever finished it — indignation, or a dearth of 
 rhymes, causing him to break off in the middle. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 In my catalogue of the little library at the cottage. I forgot 
 to mention a book of Common Prayer. My reader's fancy 
 might easily have supplied the omission — old ladies of Mar- 
 garet's stamp (God bless them) may as well be without their 
 spectacles, or their elbow-chair, as their prayer-book — I love 
 them for it. 
 
 Margaret's was a handsome octavo, printed by Baskerville, 
 the binding red, and fortified with silver at the edges. Out of 
 this book it was their custom every afternoon to read the proper 
 psalms appointed for the day. 
 
 The way they managed was this : they took verse by verse 
 — Rosamund read her little portion, and Margaret repeated 
 hers, in turn, from memory — for Margaret could say all the 
 psalter by heart, and a good part of the Bible besides. She 
 would not uufrequently put the girl right when she stumbled 
 or skipped. This Margaret imputed to giddiness — a quality 
 which Rosamund was by no means remarkable for — but old 
 ladies like Margaret are not in all instances alike discrimina- 
 tive. 
 
 They had been employed in this manner just before Miss 
 Clare arrived at the cottage. The psalm they had been read- 
 ing was the hundred and fourth — Margaret was naturally led by 
 it into a discussion of the works of creation. 
 
 There had been thunder in the course of the dav — an occa-
 
 ROSAMUND GKAV. 317 
 
 eion of instruction which the old lady rever let pass — she 
 began — 
 
 " Thunder has a very awful sound — some say God Almighty 
 is angry whenever it thunders — that it is the voice of God 
 speaking to us — for my part, I am not afraid of it — " 
 
 And in this manner the old lady was going on to particu- 
 larize, as usual, its beneficial effects, in clearing the air, de- 
 stroying of vermin, &c, when the entrance of Miss Clare 
 put an end to her discourse. 
 
 Rosamund received her with respectful tenderness — and, 
 taking her grandmother by the hand, said, with great sweetness, 
 •• Miss (hire is come to see you, grandmother." 
 
 " I beg pardon, lady — I cannot see you — but you are heart- 
 ily welcome — is your brother with you, Miss Clare ? I don't 
 hear him." 
 
 " He could not come, madam, but he sends his love by me." 
 
 " You have an excellent brother, Miss Clare ; but pray do 
 us the honour to take some refreshment — Rosamund — " 
 
 And the old lady was going to give directions for a bottle of 
 her currant wine, when Elinor, smiling, said " she had come to 
 take a cup of tea with her, and expected to find no ceremony." 
 
 " After tea, I promise myself a walk with >/ou, Rosamund, 
 if your grandmother can spare you." Rosamund looked at her 
 grandmother. 
 
 " Oh, for that matter, I should be sorry to debar the girl 
 from any pleasure — I am sure it's lonesome enough for her to 
 be with mc always ; and if Miss Clare will take you out, child, 
 I shall do very well by myself till you return ; it will not 
 be the first time, you know, that I have been left here alone — 
 some of the neighbours will be dropping iu by-and-by — or, if not, 
 I shall take no harm." 
 
 Rosamund had all the simple manners of a child, she kissed 
 her grandmother, and looked happy. 
 
 All teatime the old lady's discourse was little more than a 
 panegyric on young Clare's good qualities. Elinor looked at 
 her young friend, and smiled. Rosamund was beginning to 
 look grave — but there was a cordial sunshine in the face of 
 Elinor, before which any clouds of reserve that had been gath- 
 ering on Rosamund's soon broke away. 
 
 " Does your grandmother ever go out, Rosamund V 
 
 Margaret prevented the girl's reply, by saying, " My dear 
 young lady, I am an old woman, and very infirm — Rosamund 
 lakes me a few paces beyond the door sometimes — but I walk 
 very badly ; I love best to sit in our little arbour, when the 
 sun shines; I can yet feel it warm and cheerful ; and if I lose the 
 27*
 
 313 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 beauties of the season, I shall be very happy if you and Ros- 
 amund can take delight in this fine summer evening." 
 
 " I shall want to rob you of Rosamund's company now and 
 then, if we like one another. I had hoped to have seen you, 
 madam, at our house. I don't know whether we could not 
 make room for you to come and live with us — what say you to 
 it ? Allan would be proud to tend you, I am sure ; and Rosa- 
 mund and I should be nice company." 
 
 Margaret was all unused to such kindnesses, and wept — 
 Margaret had a great spirit — yet she was not above accepting 
 an obligation from a worthy person ; there was a delicacy in 
 Miss Clare's manner — she could have no interest, but pure 
 goodness, to induce her to make the offer — at length the old 
 lady spake from a full heart. 
 
 " Miss Clare, this little cottage received us in our distress 
 — it gave us shelter when we had no home — we have praised 
 God in it — and, while life remains, I think I shall never part 
 from it — Rosamund does everything for me — " 
 
 " And will do, grandmother, as long as I live ;" and then 
 Rosamund fell a crying. 
 
 " You are a good girl, Rosamund ; and if you do but find 
 friends when I am dead and gone, I shall want no better ac- 
 commodation while I live — but God bless you, lady, a thou- 
 sand times, for your kind offer." 
 
 Elinor was moved to tears, and, affecting a sprightliness, 
 bade Rosamund prepare for her walk. The girl put on her 
 white silk bonnet ; and Elinor thought she never beheld so 
 lovely a creature. 
 
 They took leave of Margaret, and walked out together — • 
 they rambled over all Rosamund's favourite haunts — through 
 many a sunny field — by secret glade or woodvvalk, where the 
 girl had wandered so often with her beloved Clare. 
 
 Who now so happy as Rosamund ? She had ofttimes heard 
 Allan speak with great tenderness of his sister — she was now 
 rambling, arm in arm, with that very sister, the " vaunted sis- 
 ter" of her friend, her beloved Clare. 
 
 Not a tree, not a bush, scarce a wild flower in their path, 
 but revived in Rosamund some tender recollection, a conver- 
 sation perhaps, or some chaste endearment. Life, and a new 
 scene of things, were now opening before her — she was got 
 into a fairy land of uncertain existence. 
 
 Rosamund was too happy to talk much — but Elinor was 
 delighted with her when she did talk: the girl's remarks 
 were suggested, most of them, by the passing scene — and 
 they betrayed, all ol them, the liveliness of present impulse: 
 her conversation did not consist in a comparison of vapid feel-
 
 ROSAMUISD GRAY. 319 
 
 trig, an interchange of sentiment lip-deep — it had all the fresh- 
 ness of young sensation in it. 
 
 Sninrtimes (hey talked of Allan. 
 
 "Allan is very good," said Rosamund, " very good indeed 
 to my grandmother — he will sit with her, and hear her stones, 
 and read to her, and try to divert her a hundred ways. I 
 wonder sometimes he is not tired. She talks him to death !'' 
 
 " Then you confess, Rosamund, that the old lady docs tire 
 you sometimes?" 
 
 " Oh no, I did not mean that — it's very different — I am used 
 to all her ways, and I can humour her, and please her, and I 
 ought to do it, for she is the only friend I ever had in the 
 world." 
 
 The new friends did not conclude their walk till it was 
 late, and Rosamund began to be apprehensive about the old 
 lady, who had been all this time alone. 
 
 On their return to the cottage they found that Margaret 
 had been somewhat impatient — old ladies, good old ladies, will 
 be so at times — age is timorous and suspicious of danger, 
 where no danger is. 
 
 Besides, it was Margaret's bedtime, for she kept verv good 
 hours — indeed, in the distribution of her meals, and sundry 
 other particulars, she resembled the livers in the antique world, 
 more than might well beseem a creature of this. 
 
 So the new friends parted for that night — Elinor having 
 made Margaret promise to give Rosamund leave to come and 
 see her the next day. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Miss Clare, we may be sure, made her brother very happy 
 when she told him of the engagement she had made for the 
 morrow, and how delighted she had been with his handsome 
 friend. 
 
 Allan, I believe, got little sleep that night. I know not 
 whether joy be not a more troublesome bedfellow than grief 
 — hope keeps a bodv very wakeful, I know. 
 
 Elinor Clare was the best good creature — the least selfish 
 human being I ever knew — always at work for other people's 
 good, planning other people's happiness — continually forget- 
 ful to consult for her own personal gratifications, except indi- 
 rectly, in the welfare of another — while her parents lived, the
 
 320 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 most attentive of daughters — since they died, the kindest of 
 sisters — I never knew but one like her. 
 
 It happens that I have some of this young lady's letters in 
 my possession — 1 shall present my reader with one of them. 
 It was written a short time after the death of her mother, and 
 addressed to a cousin, a dear friend of Elinor's who was then 
 on the point of being married to Mr. Beaumont, of Stafford- 
 shire, and had invited Elinor to assist at her nuptials. I will 
 transcribe it with minute fidelity. 
 
 Elinor Clare to Maria Leslie. 
 
 Widford, July the — , 17—. 
 
 Health, Innocence, and Beauty shall be thy bridemaids, 
 my sweet cousin. I have no heart to undertake the office. 
 Alas ! what have I to do in the house of feasting 1 
 
 Maria ! 1 fear lest my griefs should prove obtrusive. Yet 
 bear with me a little — I have recovered already a share of my 
 former spirits. 
 
 I fear more for Allan than myself. The loss of two such 
 parents, within so short an interval, bears very heavy on him. 
 The boy hangs about me from morning till night. He is per- 
 petually forcing a smile into his poor pale cheeks — you know 
 the sweetness of his smile, Maria. 
 
 To-day, after dinner, when he took his glass of wine in his 
 hand, he burst into tears, and would not, or could not then tell 
 me the reason — afterward he told me — "he had been used to 
 drink mamma's health after dinner, and that came into his 
 head and made him cry." I feel the claims the boy has upon 
 me — I perceive that I am living to some end — and the thought 
 supports me. 
 
 Already I have attained to a state of complacent feelings — 
 my mother's lessons were not thrown away upon her Elinor. 
 
 In the visions of last night her spirit seemed to stand at my 
 bedside — a light, as of noonday, shone upon the room — she 
 opened my curtains — she smiled upon me with the same pla- 
 cid smile as in her lifetime. I felt no fear. " Elinor," she 
 said, " for my sake take care of young Allan," — and I awoke 
 with calm feelings. 
 
 Maria ! shall not the meeting of blessed spirits, think you, 
 be something like this? — I think I could even now behold my 
 mother without dread — I would ask pardon of her for all my 
 past omissions of duty, for all the little asperities in my tem- 
 per, which have so often grieved her gentle spirit when living. 
 Maria! I think she would not turn away from me. 
 
 Oftentimes a feeling, more vivid than memory, brings her
 
 ROSAMUND GRAV. 321 
 
 before nu — I see her sit in lier old elbow-chair — her arms 
 folded upon her l.i|> — a tear upon her cheek, that seems to 
 upbraid her unkind daughter lor some inattention — I wipe it 
 away and kiss her honoured lips. 
 
 Maria ! when I have been fancying all this, Allan will come 
 in, with his poor eyes red with Weeping, and, taking me by 
 the hand, destroy the vision in a moment. 
 
 1 am prating to you, my sweet cousin, but it is the prattle of 
 the heart which Maria loves. Besides, whom have I to talk 
 to of these things but you — you who have been my counsel- 
 lor in times past, my companion, and sweet familiar friend. 
 Bear with me a little — I mourn the " cherishers of my in- 
 fancy." 
 
 I sometimes count it a blessing ; that my father did not prove 
 the survive*. You know something of his story. You know 
 there was a foul tale current — it was the busy malice of that 
 
 bad man, S , which helped to spread it abroad — you will 
 
 recollect the active good-nature of our friends W and 
 
 T ; what pains they took to undeceive people — with 
 
 the better sort their kind labours prevailed ; but there was still 
 a party who shut their ears. You know the issue of it. My 
 father's great spirit bore up against it for some time — my 
 father never was a bad man — but that spirit was broken at the 
 last — and the greatly-injured man was forced to leave his old 
 paternal dwelling in Staffordshire — for the neighbours had 
 begun to point at him. Maria ! 1 have seen them point at him, 
 and have been ready to drop. 
 
 In this part of the country where the slander had not 
 reached, he sought a retreat — and he found a still more grate- 
 ful asylum in the daily solicitudes of the best of wives. 
 
 " An enemy hath done this," I have heard him say — and at 
 such times my mother would speak to him so soothingly of 
 forgiveness, and long-suffering, and the bearing of injuries with 
 patience; would heal all his wounds with so gentle a touch; 
 I have seen the old man weep like a child. 
 
 The gloom that beset his mind, at times betrayed him into 
 skepticism — he has doubted if there be a Providence ! I 
 have heard him say, "God has built a brave world, but me- 
 thinks he has left his creatures to bustle in it how (her/ may." 
 
 At such times he could not endure to hear my mother talk 
 in a religious strain. He would say, " Woman, have done — 
 you confound, you perplex me, when you talk of these mat- 
 ters, and for one dav at least unlit me for the business of life." 
 
 I have seen her look at him — oh Gtod, Maria ! such a look ! 
 it plainly spake that she was willing to have shared her 
 03
 
 322 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 precious hope with the partner of her earthly cares — hut she 
 found a repulse. 
 
 Deprived of such a wife, think you the old man could have 
 long endured his existence ? or what consolation would his 
 wretched daughter have had to offer him, but silent and imbe- 
 cile tears 1 
 
 My sweet cousin, you will think me tedious — and I am so 
 — but it does me good to talk these matters over. And do not 
 you be alarmed for me — my sorrows are subsiding into a deep 
 and sweet resignation. I shall soon be sufficiently composed, 
 I know it, to participate in my friend's happiness. 
 
 Let me call her, while yet 1 may, my own Maria Leslie ! 
 Methinks I shall not like you by any other name. Beaumont ! 
 Maria Beaumont ! it hath a strange sound with it — I shall 
 never be reconciled to this name — but do not you fear — Maria 
 Leslie shall plead with me for Maria Beaumont. 
 And now, my sweet friend, 
 
 God love you, and your 
 
 Elinor Clare. 
 
 I find in my collection several letters, written soon after the 
 date of the preceding, and addressed all of them to Maria 
 Beaumont. I am tempted to make some short extracts from 
 these — my tale will suffer interruption by them — but I was 
 willing to preserve whatever memorials I could of Elinor 
 Clare. 
 
 From Elinor Clare to Maria Beaumont. 
 (an extract.) 
 
 I have been strolling out for half an hour in the fields ; and 
 my mind has been occupied by thoughts which Maria has a 
 right to participate. I have been bringing my mother to my 
 recollection. My heart ached with the remembrance of in- 
 firmities, that made her closing years of life so sore a trial to 
 her. 
 
 I was concerned to think that our family differences have 
 been one source of disquiet to her ; I am sensible that this last 
 we are apt to exaggerate after a person's death — and surely, 
 in the main, there was considerable harmony among the mem- 
 bers of our little family — still I was concerned to think that 
 we ever gave her gentle spirit disquiet. 
 
 I thought on many years back — on all my parents' fiiends 
 
 — the II s, the F s, on D S , and on many a 
 
 merry evening, in the fireside circle, in that comfortable back 
 parlour — it is never used now.
 
 110SAMUND GKAY. 323 
 
 Oh yc Malravises* of the age, ye know not what ye lose 
 in despising these petty topics of endeared remembrance, as- 
 sociated circumstances of past times ; ye know not the throb- 
 bings of the heart, tender yet affectionately familiar; which 
 accompany the dear and honoured uaun is o( father or of mother. 
 
 Maria! I thought on all these things; my heart ached at 
 the review of them — it yet aches while. I write this — but I 
 am never so satisfied with my train of thoughts as when they 
 run upon these subjects — the tears they draw from us meli- 
 orate and soften the heart, and keep fresh within us that mem- 
 ory of dear friends dead, which alone can fit us for a read- 
 mission to their society hereafter. 
 
 From another letter. 
 
 1 had a bad dream this morning — that Allan was dead — 
 and who, of all persons in the world, do you think put on 
 mourning for him? Why — Matravis. This alone might 
 cure me of superstitious thoughts, if I were inclined to them ; 
 for why should Matravis mourn for us, or our family 1 Still 
 it was pleasant to awake and find it but a dream. Methinks 
 something like an awaking from an ill dream shall the res- 
 urrection from the dead be. Materially different from our 
 accustomed scenes and ways of life, the world to come may 
 possibly not be — still it is represented to us under the notion 
 of a rest, a Sabbath, a state of bliss. 
 
 From another letter. 
 
 Methinks you and I should have been born under the same 
 roof, sucked the same milk, conned the same horn-book, 
 thumbed the same Testament together : for we have been 
 more than sisters, Maria ! 
 
 Something will still be whispering to me that I shall one 
 day he inmate of the same dwelling with my cousin, partaker 
 with her in all the delights which spring from mutual good 
 offices, kind words, attentions in sickness and in health — con- 
 versation, sometimes innocently trivial, and at others profita- 
 bly serious ; books read and commented on together ; meals 
 ate and walks taken together — and conferences, how we may 
 best do good to this poor person or that, and wean our spirits 
 from the world's cares, without divesting ourselves of its chari- 
 ties. What a picture I have drawn, Maria ! and none of all 
 these things may ever come to pass. 
 
 * This name will be explained presently.
 
 324 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 From another letter. 
 
 Continue to write to me, my sweet cousin. Many good 
 thoughts, resolutions, and proper views of things pass through 
 the mind in the course of the day, hut are lost for want 
 of committing them to paper. Seize them, Maria, as they 
 pass, these Birds of Paradise, that show themselves and 
 are gone — and make a grateful present of the precious fugitives 
 to your friend. 
 
 To use a homely illustration, just rising in my fancy — shall 
 the good housewife take such pains in pickling and pre- 
 serving her worthless fruits, her walnuts, her apricots, and 
 quinces — and is there not much spiritual housewifery in treas- 
 tiring up our mind's best fruits — our heart's meditations in its 
 most favoured moments 1 
 
 This said simile is much in the fashion of the old moral- 
 izers, such as I conceive honest Baxter to have been, such as 
 Quarles and Wither were, with their curious, serio-comic, 
 quaint emblems. But they sometimes reach the heart, when 
 a more elegant simile rests in the fancy. 
 
 Not low and mean, like these, but beautifully familiarized 
 to our conceptions, and condescending to human thoughts and 
 notions, are all the discourses of our Lord — conveyed in par- 
 able or similitude, what easy access do they win to the heart 
 through the medium of the delighted imagination ! speaking 
 of heavenly things in fable, or in simile, drawn from earth, 
 from objects common, accustomed. 
 
 Life's business, with such delicious little interruptions as 
 our correspondence affords, how pleasant it is ! — why can we 
 not paint on the dull paper our whole feelings, exquisite as thev 
 rise up ? 
 
 From another letter. 
 
 I had meant to have left off at this place; but looking 
 back, I am sorry to find too gloomy a cast tincturing my last 
 page — a representation of life false and unthankful. Life is 
 not all vanity and dis'appoiuttnent — it hath much of evil in it, 
 no doubt; but to those who do not misuse it, it affords com- 
 fort, temporary comfort, much, much that endears us to it, and 
 dignifies it — many true and good feelings, I trust, of which 
 we need not be ashamed — hours of tranquillity and hope. 
 But the morning was dull and overcast, and my spirits were 
 under a cloud. I feel my error. 
 
 Is it no blessing, that we two love one another so dearly —
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 325 
 
 that Allan is left me — that you are settled in life — that worldly 
 affairs go smooth with us both — above all, that our lot hath 
 fallen to us in a Christian country J Maria! these things are 
 not little. I will consider life as a long feast, and not forget 
 to say grace. 
 
 From another letter. 
 
 Allan has written to me — you know, he is on a visit at 
 his old tutor's in Gloucestershire — he is to return home on 
 Thursday — Allan is a dear boy— he concludes his letter, which 
 is very affectionate throughout, in this manner : — 
 
 " Elinor, I charge you to learn the following stanza by 
 heart — 
 
 ' The monarch may forget his crown, 
 
 That on his head an hour hath been; 
 The bridegroom may forget his bride 
 
 Was made his wedded wife yestreen ; 
 The mother may forget her child, 
 
 That smiles so sweetly on her knee : 
 But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, 
 
 And all that thou hast done for me.' 
 
 " The lines are in Burns — you know, we read him for the 
 first time together at Margate — and I have been used to refer 
 them to you, and to call you, in my mind, Glencairn — for you 
 were always very good to me. I had a thousand failings, but 
 you would love me in spite of them all. I am going to drink 
 your health." 
 
 I shall detain my reader no longer from the narrative. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 They had but four rooms in the cottage. Margaret slept 
 in the biggest room up stairs, and her grand-daughter in a kind 
 of closet adjoining, where she could be within hearing, if her 
 grandmother should call her in the night. 
 
 The «irl was often disturbed in that manner— two or three 
 times in a sight she has been forced to leave her bed to fetch 
 her grandmother's cordials, or do some little service for her — 
 but she knew that Margaret's ailings were real and pressing, 
 and Rosamund never complained — never suspected that her 
 grandmother's requisitions had anything unreasonable in them. 
 23
 
 326 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 The night she parted with Miss Clare she had helped Mar- 
 garet to bed, as usual — and, after saying her prayers, as the 
 custom was, kneeling by the old lady's bedside, kissed her 
 grandmother, and wished her a good-night — Margaret blessed 
 her, and charged her to go to bed directly. It was her cus- 
 tomary injunction, and Rosamund had never dreamed of diso- 
 beying. 
 
 So she retired to her little room. The night was warm and 
 clear — the moon very bright — her window commanded a view 
 of scenes she had been tracing in the daytime with Miss 
 Clare. 
 
 All the events of the day past, the occurrences of their 
 walk, arose in her mind. She fancied she should like to re- 
 trace those scenes — but it was now nine o'clock, a late hour 
 in the village. 
 
 Still she fancied it would be very charming — and then her 
 grandmother's injunction came powerfully to her recollection 
 — she sighed, and turned from the window — and walked up 
 and down her little room. 
 
 Ever, when she looked at the window, the wish returned. 
 It was not so very late. The neighbours were yet about, 
 passing under the window to their homes — she thought, and 
 thought again, till her sensations became vivid, even to pain- 
 fulness — her bosom was aching to give them vent. 
 
 The village clock struck ten ! — the neighbours ceased to 
 pass under the window. Rosamund, stealing down siairs, 
 fastened the latch behind her, and left the cottage. 
 
 One that knew her met her, and observed her with some 
 surprise. Another recollects having wished her a good-night. 
 Rosamund never returned to the cottage. 
 
 An old man, that lay sick in a small house adjoining to 
 Margaret's, testified the next morning that he had plainly 
 heard the old creature calling for her granddaughter. All the 
 night long she made her moan, and ceased not to call upon the 
 name of Rosamund. But no Rosamund was there — the voice 
 died away, but not till near daybreak. 
 
 When the neighbours came to search in the morning, Mar- 
 garet was missing ! She had straggled out of bed, and made 
 her way into Rosamund's room — worn out with fatigue and 
 fright, when she found the girl not there, she had laid 
 herself down to die — and, it. is thought, she died praying — 
 for she was discovered in a kneeling posture, her arms and 
 face extended on the pillow, where Rosamund had slept the 
 night before — a smile was on her face in death.
 
 ROSAMUND G1UV. 327 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Fain would I draw a veil over the transactions of that night 
 —but I cannot — grief and burning shame forbid mi: to be 
 silent — black deeds are about to be made public, which reflect 
 a stain upon our common nature. 
 
 Rosamund, enthusiastic and improvident, wandered unpro- 
 tected to a distance from her guardian doors — through lonely 
 glens and wood walks, where she had rambled many a day 
 in safety — till she arrived at a shady copse, out of the hearing 
 of any human habitation. 
 
 Matrmis met her. " Flown with insolence and wine," re 
 turning home late at night, he passed that way ! 
 
 Matravis was a very ugly man. Sallow onmplexioned ! 
 and, if hearts can wear that colour, his heart was sallow com- 
 plexioned also. 
 
 A young man with. gray deliberation! cold and systematic 
 in all his plans ; and all his plans were evil. His very lust 
 was systematic. 
 
 He would brood over his bad purposes for sucli a dreary 
 length of time, that it might have been expected some solitary 
 check of conscience must have intervened to save him from 
 commission. But that light from Heaven was extinct in his 
 dark bosom. 
 
 Nothing that is great, nothing that is amiable, existed for 
 this unhappy man. He feared, he envied, he suspected ; but 
 he never loved. The sublime and beautiful in nature, the ex- 
 cellent and becoming in morals, were things placed beyond 
 the caput ity of his sensations. He loved not poetry — nor 
 ever took a lonelv walk to meditate — never beheld virtue, 
 which he did not try to disbelieve, or female beauty and inno- 
 cence, which he did not lust to contaminate. 
 
 A sneer was perpetually upon his face, and malice grinning 
 at his heart. He would say the most ill-natured things with 
 the least remorse of any man I ever knew. This gained him 
 the reputation of a wit — other traits got him the reputation of 
 a villain. 
 
 And this man formerly paid his court to Elinor Clare ! — 
 with what success I leave my readers to determine. It was 
 not in Elinor's nature to despise any living thing — but, in the 
 estimation of this man, to be rejected was to be despised — and 
 Matravis never forgave- .
 
 328 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 He had long turned his eyes upon Rosamund Gray. To 
 steal from the bosom of her friends the jewel they prized so 
 much, the little ewe lamb they held so dear, was a scheme of 
 delicate revenge, and Matravis had a twofold motive for ac- 
 complishing this young maid's ruin. 
 
 Often had he met her in her favourite solitudes, but found 
 her ever cold and inaccessible. Of late the girl had avoided 
 straying far from her own home, in the fear of meeting him — 
 but she had never told her fears to Allan. 
 
 Matravis had, till now, been content to be a villain within 
 the limits of the law ; but, on the present occasion, hot fumes 
 of wine, co-operating with his deep desire of revenge, and the 
 insolence of an unhoped-for meeting, overcame his customary 
 prudence, and Matravis rose, at once, to an audacity of glori- 
 ous mischief. 
 
 Late at night he met her, a lonely, unprotected virgin — no 
 friend at hand — no place near of refuge. 
 
 Rosamund Gray, my soul is exceeding sorrowful for thee 
 — I loath to tell the hateful circumstances of thy wrongs. 
 Night and silence were the only witnesses of this young 
 maid's disgrace — Matravis fled. 
 
 Rosamund, polluted and disgraced, wandered, an abandoned 
 thing, about the fields and meadows till daybreak. Not ca- 
 ring to return to the cottage, she sat herself down before the 
 gate of Miss Clare's house — in a stupor of grief. 
 
 Elinor was just rising, and had opened the windows of her 
 chamber, when she perceived her desolate young friend. She 
 ran to embrace her — she brought her into the house — she 
 took her to her bosom — she kissed her — she spake to her ; 
 but Rosamund could not speak. 
 
 Tidings came from the cottage. Margaret's death was an 
 event which could not be kept concealed from Rosamund. 
 When the sweet maid heard of it, she languished, and fell 
 sick — she never held up her head after that time. 
 
 If Rosamund had been a sister, she could not have been 
 kindlier treated than by her two friends. 
 
 Allan had prospects in life — might, in time, have married 
 into any of the first families in Hertfordshire — but Rosamund 
 Gray, humbled though she was, and put to shame, had yet a 
 charm for him — and he would have been content to share his 
 fortunes with her yet, if Rosamund would have lived to be his 
 companion. 
 
 But this was not to be — and the girl soon after died. She 
 expired in the arms of Elinor — quiet, gentle, as she lived — 
 thankful that she died not among Btrangers — and expressing 
 by signs, rather than words, a gratitude for the most trifling
 
 ROSAMUND OKAY. 329 
 
 services, the common offices of humanity. She died uncom- 
 plaining ; and this young maid, this untaught Rosamund, might 
 have given a lesson to the grave philosopher in death. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 I was but a boy when these events took place. All the 
 village remember the story, and tell of Rosamund Gray and 
 old blind Margaret. 
 
 I parted from Allan Clare on that disastrous night, and set 
 out for Edinburgh the next morning, before the facts were com- 
 monly known — I heard not of them — and it was four months 
 before I received a letter from Allan. 
 
 " His heart," he told me, " was gone from him — for his 
 sister had died of a phrensy fever '" — not a word of Rosamund 
 in the letter — I was left to collect her story from sources which 
 may one day be explained. 
 
 I soon after quitted Scotland, on the death of my father, and 
 returned to my native village. Allan had left the place, and 
 1 could gain no information whether he were dead or living. 
 
 I passed the cottage. I did not dare to look that wav, or 
 to inquire who lived there. A little dog, that had been Rosa- 
 mund's, was yelping in my path. I laughed aloud like one 
 mad, whose mind had suddenly gone from him — I stared va- 
 cantly around me, like one alienated from common perceptions. 
 
 But I was young at that time, and the impression became 
 gradually weakened as I mingled in the business of life. It 
 is now ten years since these events took place, and I some- 
 times think of them as unreal. Allan Clare was a dear friend 
 to me — but there are times when Allan and his sister, Mar- 
 garet and her granddaughter, appear like personages of a dream 
 — an idle dream. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Strange things have happened unto me — I seem scarce 
 awake — but I will recollect my thoughts, and try to give an 
 account of what has befallen me in the few last weeks. 
 
 28*
 
 330 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 Since my father's death our family have resided in London. 
 I am in practice as a surgeon there. My mother died two 
 years after we left Widford. 
 
 A month or two ago I had been busying myself in drawing 
 up the above narrative, intending to make it public. The 
 employment had forced my mind to dwell upon facts, which 
 had begun to fade from it — the memory of old times became 
 vivid, and more vivid — I felt a strong desire to revisit the 
 scenes of my native village — of the young loves of Rosamund 
 and her Clare. 
 
 A kind of dread had hitherto kept me back ; but I was 
 restless now, till I had accomplished my wish. I sat out one 
 morning to walk — I reached Widford about eleven in the 
 forenoon — after a slight breakfast at my inn — where I was 
 mortified to perceive the old landlord did not know me again 
 — (old Thomas Billet — he has often made angle rods for 
 me when a child) — I rambled over all my accustomed 
 haunts. 
 
 Our old house was vacant, and to be sold. I entered, un 
 molested, into the room that had been my bedchamber. I 
 kneeled down on the spot where my little bed had stood — I 
 felt like a child — I prayed like one — it seemed as though old 
 times were to return again — I looked round involuntarily, ex- 
 pecting to see some face I knew — but all was naked and mute. 
 The bed was gone. My little pane of painted window, through 
 which I loved to look at the sun when I awoke in a fine sum- 
 mer's morning, was taken out, and had been replaced by one 
 of common glass. 
 
 I visited, by turns, every chamber — they were all desolate 
 and unfurnished, one excepted, in which the owner had left a 
 harpsichord, probably to be sold — I touched the keys — I 
 played some old Scottish tunes, which had delighted me when 
 a child. Past associations revived with the music — blended 
 with a sense of unreality, which at last became too powerful 
 — 1 rushed out of the room to give vent to my feelings. 
 
 I wandered, scarce knowing where, into an old wood that 
 stands at the back of the house — we called it the wilderness. 
 A well-known form was missing, that used to meet me in this 
 place — it was thine, Ben Moxam — the kindest, gentlest, po- 
 litest of human beings, yet was he nothing higher than a 
 gardener in the family. Honest creature, thou didst never 
 pass me in my childish rambles without a soft speech and a 
 smile. I remember thy good-natured face. But there is one 
 thing, for which I can never forgive thee, Ben Moxam — that 
 thou didst join with an old maiden aunt of mine in a cruel
 
 ROSAMUND ORAV. 331 
 
 plot, to lop away the hanging branches of the old fir-trees. 
 I remember them sweeping to the ground. 
 
 I have often left my childish sport* to ramble in this place 
 — its glooms and its solitude had ;i mysterious charm for my 
 young mind, nurturing within me that love of quietness and 
 lonely thinking which have accompanied me to maturer years. 
 In this wilderness 1 found myself after a ten years' absence. 
 Its stately fir-trees were yet standing, with all their luxuriant 
 company of underwood — the squirrel was there, and the melan- 
 choly cooings of the wood-pigeon — all was as I had left it — 
 my heart softened at tlie sight — it seemed as though my char- 
 acter had been suffering a change since I forsook these shades. 
 
 My parents were both dead — 1 had no counsellor left, no 
 experience of age to direct me, no sweet voice of reproof. 
 The Loud had taken away my friends, and I knew not where 
 he had laid them. I paced round the wilderness, seeking a 
 comforter. I prayed that I might be restored to that state of 
 innocence in which I had wandered in those shades. 
 
 Methought my request was heard — for it seemed as though 
 the stains of manhood were passing from me, and I were re- 
 lapsing into the purity and simplicity of childhood. I was 
 content to have been moulded into a perfect child. I stood 
 still, as in a trance. I dreamed that I was enjoying a person- 
 al intercourse with my heavenly Father — and, extravagantly, 
 put off the shoes from my feet — for the place where 1 stood, 
 I thought, was holy ground. 
 
 This state of mind could not last long — and I returned with 
 languid feelings to my inn. I ordered my dinner — green 
 peas and a sweetbread — it had been a favourite dish with me 
 in my childhood — I was allowed to have it on my birthdays. 
 I was impatient to see it come upon the table — but, when it 
 came, I could scarce eat a mouthful — my tears choked me. I 
 called for wine — I drank a pint and a half of red wine — and 
 not till then had I dared to visit the churchyard, where my 
 parents were interred. 
 
 The cottage lay in my way — Margaret had chosen it for 
 that very reason, to be near the church — lor the old lady was 
 regular in her attendance on public worship — I passed on — 
 and in a moment found myself among the tombs. 
 
 I had been present at my father's burial, and knew the spot 
 again — my mother's funeral I was prevented by illness from 
 attending — a plain stone was placed over the grave, with their 
 initials carved upon it — for they both occupied one grave. 
 
 1 prostrated myself before the spot — 1 kissed the earth 
 that covered them — 1 contemplated, with gloomy delight, the 
 time when 1 should mingle my dust with theirs — and kneeled.
 
 332 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 with my arms incumbent on the gravestone, in a kind of 
 mental prayer — for I could not speak. 
 
 Having performed these duties, I arose with quieter feel- 
 ings, and felt leisure to attend to indifferent objects. Still I 
 continued in the churchyard, reading the various inscriptions, 
 and moralizing on them with that kind of levity which will 
 not unfrequently spring up in the mind in the midst of deep 
 melancholy. 
 
 I read of nothing but careful parents, loving husbands, and 
 dutiful children. I said jestingly, Where be all the bad people 
 buried? Bad parents, bad husbands, bad children — what 
 cemeteries are appointed for these ? do they not sleep in con- 
 secrated ground? or is it but a pious fiction, a generous over- 
 sight, in the survivers, which thus tricks out men's epitaphs 
 when dead, who, in their lifetime, discharged the offices of 
 life, perhaps, but lamely. Their failings, with their re- 
 proaches, now sleep with them in the grave. Man wars not 
 with the dead. It is a trait of human nature for which I love it. 
 
 I had not observed, till now, a little group assembled at the 
 other end of the churchyard ; it was a company of children, 
 who were gathered round a young man, dressed in black, sit- 
 ting on a gravestone. 
 
 He seemed to be asking them questions — probably about 
 their learning — and one little dirty ragged headed fellow was 
 clambering up his knees to kiss him. The children had been 
 eating black cherries — for some of the stones were scattered 
 about, and their mouths were smeared with them. 
 
 As I drew near them, I thought I discerned in the stranger 
 a mild benignity of countenance, which I had somewhere 
 seen before — I gazed at him more attentively. 
 
 It was Allan Clare ! sitting on the grave of his sister. 
 
 I threw my arms about his neck. I exclaimed " Allan" — he 
 turned his eyes upon me — he knew me — we both wept aloud 
 — it seemed as though the interval since we parted had been as 
 nothing — I cried out, " Come and tell me about these things." 
 
 I drew him away from his little friends — he parted with a 
 show of reluctance from the churchyard — Margaret and her 
 grand-daughter lay buried there, as well as his sister — I took 
 him to my inn — secured a room, where we might be private — 
 ordered fresh wine — scarce knowing what I did, I danced for joy. 
 
 Allan was quite overcome, and, taking me by the hand, he 
 said, " This repays me for all." 
 
 It was a proud day for me — I had found the friend I thought 
 dead — earth seemed to me no longer valuable, than as it con- 
 tained him; and existence a blessing no longer than while I 
 should live to be his comforter. 

 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 333 
 
 I began at leisure to survey him with more attention. Time 
 and grief had left few traces of that fine enthusiasm which 
 once burned in his countenance— his eyes had lost their ori- 
 ginal lire, but they retained an uncommon Bweetnese, and, 
 whenever they were turned upon me, their smile pierced to 
 my heart 
 
 " Allan, I fear you have been a sufferer." He replied not, 
 and I could not press him further. 1 could not call the dead 
 to life again. 
 
 So we drank, and told old stories — and repeated old poetry 
 — and sang old songs — as if nothing had happened. We sat 
 till very late — I forgot that 1 had purposed returning to town 
 that evening — to Allan ail places were alike — I grew noisy, 
 he grew cheerful — Allan's old manners, old enthusiasm, were 
 returning upon him — we laughed, we wept, we mingled our 
 tears, and talked extravagantly. 
 
 Allan was my chamber-fellow that night — and lay awake, 
 planning schemes of living together under the same roof, en- 
 tering upon similar pursuits — and praising God that we had 
 met. 
 
 I was obliged to return to town the next morning, and Allan 
 proposed to accompany me. " Since the death of his sister," 
 he told me, " he had been a wanderer." 
 
 In the course of our walk he unbosomed himself without 
 reserve — told me many particulars of his way of life for the 
 last nine or ten years, which I do not feel myself at liberty to 
 divulge. 
 
 Once, on my attempting to cheer him, when I perceived him 
 over thoughtful, he replied to me in these words : — 
 
 " Do not regard me as unhappy when you catch me in 
 these moods. I am never more happy than at times when, 
 by the cast of my countenance, men judge me most miserable. 
 
 '• My friend, the events which have left this sadness behind 
 them are of no recent date. The melancholy, which comes 
 over me with the recollection of them, is not hurtful, but only 
 tends to soften and tranquillize my mind, to detach me from 
 the restlessness of human pursuits. 
 
 "The stronger I feel this detachment, the more I find my- 
 self drawn heavenward to the contemplation of spiritual objects. 
 
 "I love to keep old friendships aiive and warm within me, 
 because I expect a renewal of them in the world of spirits. 
 
 "I am a wandering and unconnected thing on the earth. I 
 have made no new friendships that can compensate me for 
 the loss of the old — and the more I know mankind, the more 
 does it become necessary for me to supply their loss by little 
 images, recollections, and circumstances of past pleasures.
 
 334 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 "I am sensible that lam surrounded by a multitude of very 
 worthy people, plain-hearted souls, sincere and kind. But 
 they have hitherto eluded my pursuit, and will continue to 
 bless the little circle of their families and friends, while I must 
 remain a stranger to them. 
 
 " Kept at a distance by mankind, I have not ceased to love 
 them — and could I find the cruel persecutor, the malignant 
 instrument of God's judgments on me and mine, I think I 
 would forgive, and try to love him too. 
 
 " I have been a quiet sufferer. From the beginning of my 
 calamities it was given to me not to see the hand of man 
 in them. I perceived a mighty arm, which none but myself 
 could see, extended over me. I gave my heart to the Purifier, 
 and my will to the Sovereign Will of the universe. The irre- 
 sistible wheels of destiny passed on in their everlasting rota- 
 tion — and I suffered myself to be carried along with them 
 without complaining." 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Allan told me, that for some years past, feeling himself 
 disengaged from every personal tie, but not alienated from 
 human sympathies, it had been his taste, his humour he called 
 it, to spend a great portion of his time in hospitals and lazar- 
 houscs. 
 
 He had found a wayward pleasure, he refused to name it a 
 virtue, in tending a description of people, who had long ceased 
 to expect kindness or friendliness from mankind, but were 
 content to accept the reluctant services, which the oftentimes 
 unfeeling instruments and servants of these well-meant insti- 
 tutions deal out to the poor sick people under their care. 
 
 It is not medicine, it is not broths and coarse meats, served 
 up at a stated hour with all the hard formalities of a prison — 
 it is not the scanty dole of a bed to die on — which dying man 
 requires from his species. 
 
 Looks, attentions, consolations — in a word, sympathies, are 
 what a man most needs in this awful close of mortal Buffer* 
 ings. A kind look, a smile, a drop of cold water to the 
 parched lip — for these things a man shall bless you in death. 
 
 And these better things than cordials did Allan love to ad- 
 minister — to stay by a bedside the whole day, when some- 
 thing disgusting in a patient's distemper has kept the very
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 333 
 
 nurses at a distance — to sit by, while the poor wretch got a 
 little sleep — and be there to smile upon hira when he awoke 
 ^to Blip a guinea, now and then, into the hand* of a nur.se or 
 attendant — -these things have been to Allan as privileges, for 
 which he was content to live, choice marks, and circumstances 
 of his .Maker's goodness to him. 
 
 And I do not know whether occupations of this kind be not 
 a spring of purer and nobler delight (certainly instances of a 
 more disinterested virtue) than arises from what are called 
 friendships of sentiment. 
 
 Between two persons of liberal education, like opinions, 
 and common feelings, oftentimes subsists a vanity of sentiment, 
 which disposes each to look upon the other as the only being 
 in the universe worthy of friendship, or capable of understand- 
 ing it — themselves they consider as the solitary receptacles 
 of all that is delicate in feeling or stable in attachment: when 
 the odds are, that under every green hill, and in every crowded 
 street, people of equal worth are to be found, who do more 
 good in their generation, and make less noise in the doing of 
 it. 
 
 It was in consequence of these benevolent propensities I 
 have been describing, that Allan oftentimes discovered con- 
 siderable inclinations in favour of my way of life, which I have 
 before mentioned as being that of a surgeon. He would fre- 
 quently attend me on my visits to patients ; and I began to 
 think that he had serious intentions of making my profession 
 his study. 
 
 He was present with me at a scene — a deathbed scene — I 
 shudder when I do but think of it. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 I was sent for the other morning to the assistance of a gen- 
 tleman who had been wounded in a duel, and his wounds by 
 unskilful treatment had been brought to a dangerous crisis. 
 
 'The uncomnionness of the name, which was ^[atravis, sug- 
 gested to me that this might possibly be no other than Allan's 
 old enemy. Under this apprehension, I did what I could to 
 dissuade Allan from accompanying me — but he seemed bent 
 upon going, and even pleased himself with the notion, that it 
 might lie within his ability to do the unhappy man some scr- 
 r' e. So he went with me.
 
 336 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 When we came to the house, which was in Sdho-square, we 
 discovered that it was indeed the man, the identical Matravis, 
 who had done all that mischief in times past — but not in a 
 condition to excite any other sensation than pity in a heart 
 more hard than Allan's. 
 
 Intense pain had brought on a delirium — we perceived this 
 on first entering the room — for the wretched man was raving to 
 himself — talking idly in mad unconnected sentences, that yet 
 seemed, at times, to have reference to past facts. 
 
 One while he told us his dream. " He had lost his way on 
 a great heath, to which there seemed no end — it was cold, 
 cold, cold — and dark, very dark — an old woman in leading- 
 straigs, blind, was groping about for a guide ;" and then he 
 frightened me, for he seemed disposed to be jocular, and sang 
 a song about " an old woman clothed in gray," and said " he 
 did not believe in a devil." 
 
 Presently he bid us " not tell Allan Clare." Allan was 
 hanging over him at that very moment, sobbing. I could not 
 resist the impulse, but cried out, " This is Allan Clare — Allan 
 Clare is come to see you, my dear sir." The wretched man 
 did not hear me, I believe, for he turned his head away, and 
 began talking of charnel-houses and dead men, " whether they 
 knew anything that passed in their coffins." 
 
 Matravis died that night.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 
 
 To comfort the desponding parent with the thought that, 
 without diminishing the stock which is imperiously demanded 
 to furnish the more pressing and homely wants of our nature, 
 he has disposed of one or more perhaps out of a numerous off- 
 spring, under the shelter of a care scarce less tender than the 
 paternal, where not only their bodily cravings shall be sup- 
 plied, but that mental pabulum is also dispensed, which He hath 
 declared to be no less necessary to our sustenance who said, 
 that " not by bread alone man can live ;" for this Christ's 
 Hospital unfolds her bounty. Here neither, on the one hand, 
 are the youth lifted up above their family, which we must sup- 
 pose liberal, though reduced ; nor, on the other hand, are they 
 liable to be depressed below its level by the mean habits and 
 sentiments which a common charity-school generates. It is, 
 in a word, an institution to keep those who have yet held up 
 their heads in the world from sinking; to keep alive the spirit 
 of a decent household, when poverty was in danger of crushing 
 it; to assist those who are the most willing, but not always 
 the most able, to assist themselves ; to separate a child from 
 bis family for a season, in order to render him back hereafter 
 with feelings and habits more congenial to it than he could 
 have attained by remaining at home in the bosom of it. It is 
 a preserving and renovating principle, an antidote for the res 
 angusia domi, when it presses, as it always does, most heavily 
 upon the most ingenuous natures. 
 
 This is Christ's Hospital; and whether its character would 
 be improved by confining its advantages to the very lowest of 
 the people, let those judge who have witnessed the looks, the 
 gestures, the behaviour, the manner of their play with one an- 
 other, their deportment towards strangers, the whole aspect 
 and physiognomy of that vast assemblage of boys on the Lon- 
 29 P
 
 338 RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 don foundation, who freshen and make alive again with their 
 sports the else mouldering cloisters of the old Gray Friars — 
 which strangers who have never witnessed, if they pass 
 through Newgate-street, or by Smithfield, would do well to go 
 a little out of their way to see. 
 
 For the Christ's Hospital boy feels that he is no charity-boy ; 
 he feels it in the antiquity and regality of the foundation to 
 which he belongs ; in the usage which he meets with at 
 school, and the treatment he is accustomed to out of its bounds ; 
 in the respect, and even kindness, which his well-known garb 
 never fails to procure him in the streets of the metropolis ; he 
 feels it in his education, in that measure of classical attain- 
 ments, which every individual at that school, though not des- 
 tined to a learned profession, has it in his power to procure ; at- 
 tainments, which it would be worse than folly to put it in the 
 reach of the labouring classes to acquire : he feels it in the 
 numberless comforts, and even magnificences, which surround- 
 ed him ; in his old and awful cloisters, with their traditions ; 
 in his spacious schoolrooms, and in the well-ordered, airy, 
 and lofty rooms where he sleeps ; in his stately dining-hall, 
 hung round with pictures, by Verrio, Lely, and others, one 
 of them surpassing in size and grandeur almost any other in 
 the kingdom ;* above all, in the very extent and magnitude of 
 the body to which he belongs, and the consequent spirit, the 
 intelligence, and public conscience, which is the result of so 
 many various yet wonderful combining members. Compared 
 with this last-named advantage, what is the stock of informa- 
 tion, (I do not here speak of book-learning, but of that knowl- 
 edge which boy receives from boy,) the mass of collected 
 opinions, the intelligence in common, among the few and nar- 
 row members of an ordinary boarding-school. 
 
 The Christ's Hospital or blue-coat boy has a distinctive 
 character of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities 
 of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forward- 
 ness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools. 
 There is pride in it, accumulated from the circumstances 
 which I have described as differencing him from the former ; 
 and there is a restraining modesty, from a sense of obligation 
 and dependance, which must ever keep his deportment from 
 assimilating to that of the latter. His very garb, as it is an- 
 tique and venerable, feeds his self-respect ; as it is a badge of 
 dependance, it restrains the natural petulance of that age from 
 breaking out into overt acts of insolence. This produces si- 
 
 * By Verrio, representing James the Second on his throne, surrounded by 
 his courtiers, (all curious portraits,) receiving the mathematical pupils at their 
 annual presentation, a custom still kept up on JNewyear's day at court.
 
 CHRIST I HOSPITAL. 339 
 
 lence and a reserve before strangers, yet not that cowardly 
 shyness which boys mewed np at home will feel ; lie will 
 speak, np when spoken to, but the Stranger must begin the 
 conversation with him. Within bis bounds he is all fire and 
 play ; but iu the streets he steals along with all the sclf-con- 
 ceutration of a young monk. He is never known to mix with 
 other boys, they are a soit of laity to him. All this proceeds, 
 1 have no doubt, from (he continual consciousness which he 
 carries about him of the difference of his dress from that of the 
 rest of die world ; with a modest jealousy over himself, lest, by 
 overhastily mixing with common and secular playfellows, he 
 should commit the dignity of his cloth. Nor let any one laugh 
 at. this; for considering the propensity of the multitude, and 
 especially of the small multitude, to ridicule anything unusual 
 in dress — above all, where such peculiarity may be construed 
 by malice into a mark of disparagement — this reserve will 
 appear to be nothing more than a wise instinct in the blue- 
 coat boy. That it is neither pride nor rusticity, at least that 
 it has none of the offensive qualities of either, a stranger may 
 soon satisfy himself by putting a question to any of these 
 boys : he may be sure of an answer couched in terms of plain 
 civility, neither loquacious nor embarrassed. Let him put the 
 same question to a parish-boy, or to one of the trencher-caps 
 
 in the cloisters, and the impudent reply of the one shall 
 
 not fail to exasperate any more than the certain servility, and 
 mercenary eye to reward, which he will meet with in the 
 other, can fail to depress and sadden him. 
 
 The Christ's Hospital boy is a religious character. His 
 school is eminently a religious foundation ; it has its peculiar 
 prayers, its services at set times, its graces, hymns, and an- 
 thems, following each other in an almost monastic closeness of 
 succession. This religious character in him is not always 
 UHtinged with superstition. That is not wonderful, when we 
 consider the thousand tales and traditions which must circu- 
 late, with undisturbed credulity, among so many boys, that 
 have so few checks to their belief from any intercourse with 
 the world at large ; upon whom their equals in age must work 
 so much, their elders so little. With this leaning towards an 
 over-belief in matters of religion, which will soon correct it- 
 self when he comes out into society, may be classed a turn 
 for romance above most other boys. This is to be traced in 
 the same manner to their excess of society with each other, and 
 defect of mingling with the world. Hence the peculiar avid- 
 ity with which such books as the Arabian Nights Kntertain- 
 ments, and others of a still wilder cast, are, or at least were 
 in my time, sought for by the boys, 1 remember when some 
 
 P2
 
 340 RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 half dozen of them set off from school, without map, card, or 
 compass, on a serious expedition to find out Philip QuarlVs 
 Island. 
 
 The Christ's Hospital boy's sense of right and wrong is pe- 
 culiarly tender and apprehensive. It is even apt to run out 
 into ceremonial observances, and to impose a yoke upon itself 
 beyond the strict obligations of the moral law. Those who 
 were contemporaries with me at that school thirty years ago, 
 will remember with what more than Judaic rigour the eating 
 of the fat of certain boiled meats* was interdicted. A boy 
 would have blushed as at the exposure of some heinous im- 
 morality, to have been detected eating that forbidden portion 
 of his allowance of animal food, the whole of which, while 
 he was in health, was little more than sufficient to allay his 
 hunger. The same, or even greater, refinement was shown 
 in the rejection of certain kinds of sweet-cake. What gave 
 rise to these supererogatory penances, these self-denying or- 
 dinances, I could never learn ;| they certainly argue no de- 
 fect of the conscientious principle. A little excess in that ar- 
 ticle is not undesirable in yonth, to make allowance for the 
 inevitable waste which comes in maturer years. But in the 
 less ambiguous line of duty, in those directions of the moral 
 feelings which cannot be mistaken or depreciated, I will re- 
 late what took place in the year 1785, when Mr. Perry, the 
 steward, died. I must be pardoned for taking my instances 
 from my own times. Indeed, the vividness of my recollec- 
 tions, while I am upon this subject, almost bring back those 
 times ; they are present to me still. But I believe that in 
 the years which have elapsed since the period which I speak 
 of, the character of the Christ's Hospital boy is very little 
 changed. Their situation, in point of many comforts, is im- 
 proved ; but that which I ventured before to term the public 
 conscience, of the school, the pervading moral sense, of which 
 every mind partakes, and to which so many individual minds 
 contribute, remains, I believe, pretty much the same as when 
 I left it. I have seen within this twelvemonth almost the 
 change which has been produced upon a boy of eight or nine 
 years of age, upon being admitted into that school ; how, from 
 a pert young coxcomb, who thought tliat all knowledge was com- 
 prehended within his shallow brains, because a smattering of 
 
 * Under the denomination of gags. 
 
 t I am told that the late steward, [Mr. Hathaway,] who evinced on many 
 occasions a mbst praiseworthy anxiety to promote the comfort of the boys, 
 had occasion lor all his address arid perseverance to eradicate the first of these 
 unfortunate prejudices, m winch lie ;il length happily succeeded, and thereby 
 re.slbred to one half of the animal nutrition of the school those honours which 
 painful superstition and blind zeal had so lung conspired to withhold from it.
 
 CHRIST S HOSPITAL. 311 
 
 two or three languages and one or two sciences were stuffed 
 into him by injudicious treatment at home, by a mixture with 
 the wholesome society of so many schoolfellows, in less time 
 than I have spok< n of, lie has sunk to his own level, and is 
 contented to be carried on in the quiet orb of modest self- 
 knowledge in which the common mass of that unpreSuinptu-* 
 ous assemblage of boys seem to move : from being a little un- 
 feeling mortal, he has got to feel and reflect. Nor would it be a 
 difficult matter to show how, at a school like this, where the 
 boy is neither entirely separated from home nor yet exclu- 
 sively under its influence^tfie best feelings, the filial, for in- 
 stance, are brought to a maturity which they could not have 
 attained under a completely domestic education ; how the re- 
 lation of parent is rendered less tender by unremitted associ- 
 ation, and the very awfulness of age is best apprehended by 
 some sojourning amid the comparative levity of youth ; how 
 absence, not drawn out by too great extension into alienation 
 or forgetfulness, puts an edge upon the relish of occasional 
 intercourse, and the boy is made the better child by that which 
 keeps the force of that relation from being felt as perpet- 
 ually pressing on him ; how the substituted paternity, into the 
 care of which he is adopted, while in everything substantial 
 it makes up for the natural, in the necessary omission of in- 
 dividual fondnesses and partialities, directs the mind only the 
 more strongly to appreciate that natural and first tie, in which 
 such weaknesses are the bond of strength, and the appetite 
 which craves after them betrays no perverse palate. But 
 these speculations rather belong to the question of the com- 
 parative advantages of a public over a private education in 
 general. I must get back to my favourite school ; and to that 
 which took place when our old and good steward died. 
 
 And I will say, that when I think of the frequent instances 
 which I have met with in children of a hard-heartedness, a 
 callousness, and insensibility to the loss of relations, even of 
 those who have begot and nourished them, I cannot but con- 
 sider it as a proof of something in the peculiar conformation 
 of that school, favourable to the expansion of the best feelings 
 of our nature, that, at the period which I am noticing, out of 
 five hundred boys, there was not a dry eye to be found among 
 them, nor a heart that did not beat with genuine emotion. 
 Every impulse to play, until the funeral-day was past, seemed 
 suspended throughout the school ; and the boys, lately so 
 mirthful and sprightly, were seen pacing their cloisters alone, 
 or in sail groups standing about, lew of them without some 
 token, such as their slender means could provide. 8 black rib- 
 and, or something to denote respect and a sense of their loss. 
 29*
 
 842 RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 The time itself was a time of anarchy, a time in which all 
 authority (out of school hours) was abandoned. The ordi- 
 nary restraints were for those days superseded ; and the gates, 
 which at other times kept us in, were left without watchers. 
 Yet, with the exception of one or two graceless boys at most, 
 who took advantage of that suspension of authorities to skulk 
 out, as it was called, the whole of the body of that great school 
 kept rigorously within their bonds, by a voluntary self-imprison- 
 ment ; and they who broke bounds, though they escaped pun- 
 ishment from any master, fell into a general disrepute among us, 
 and, for that which at any other time would have been ap- 
 plauded and admired as a mark of spirit, were consigned to 
 infamy and reprobation : so much natural government have 
 gratitude and the principles of reverence and love, and so 
 much did a respect to their dead friend prevail with these 
 Christ's Hospital boys above any fear which his presence 
 among them when living could ever produce. And if the im- 
 pressions which were made on my mind so long ago are to be 
 trusted, very richly did their steward deserve this tribute. It 
 is a pleasure to me even now to call to mind his portly form, 
 the regal awe which he always contrived to inspire, in spite of 
 a tenderness and even weakness of nature that would have en- 
 feebled the reins of discipline in any other master ; a yearn- 
 ing of tenderness towards those under his protection, which 
 could make five hundred boys at once feel towards him each 
 as to their individual father. He had faults, with which we 
 had nothing to do ; but, with all his faults, indeed Mr. Perry 
 was a most extraordinary creature. Contemporary with him, 
 and still living, though lie has long since resigned his occupa- 
 tion, will it be impertinent to mention the name of our excel- 
 lent upper grammar-master, the Rev. James Boyer 1 He was 
 a disciplinarian, indeed, of a different stamp from him whom 
 I have just described ; but, now the terrors of the rod, and of 
 a temper a little too hasty to leave the more nervous of us quite 
 at our ease to do justice to his merits in those days, are long 
 since over, ungrateful were we if we should refuse our testi- 
 mony to that unwearied assiduity with which he attended to 
 (lie particular improvement, of each of us. Had we been the 
 offspring of the. first gentry in the land, he could not have been 
 instigated by the strongest views of recompense and reward 
 to make himself a greater slave to the most laborious <>( 
 all occupations, than he did for us sons of charity, from whom 
 or from our parents he could expect nothing, lie lias had his 
 reward in the satisfaction of having discharged bis duty, in the 
 pleasurable consciousness of having advanced the respecta- 
 bility of that institution to which, both man and boy, he was
 
 Christ's hospital. 313 
 
 attached ; in the honours to which so many of his pupils have 
 successfully aspired at both our universities.; and in the staff 
 with which the governors of the Hospital, at the close of his 
 hard labours, with the highest expressions of the obligations 
 
 the school lay under to him, unanimously voted to present 
 him. 
 
 1 have often considered it among the felicities of the consti- 
 tution of this school, that the offices of steward and school- 
 master are kept distinct; the strict business of education 
 alone devolving upon the latter, while the former has the 
 charge of all things out of school, the control of the provis- 
 ions, the regulation of meals, of dress, of play, and the ordi- 
 nary intercourse of the boys. By this division of manage- 
 ment, a superior respectability must attach to the teacher 
 while his office is unmixed with any of these lower concerns. 
 A still greater advantage over the construction of common 
 boarding-schools is to be found in the settled salaries of the 
 masters, rendering them totally free of obligation to any indi- 
 vidual pupil or his parents. This never fails to have its ef- 
 fect at schools where each boy can reckon up to a hair what 
 profit the master derives from him, where he views him every 
 day in the light of a caterer, a provider for the family, who is 
 to get so much by him in each of his meals. Boys will see 
 and consider these things ; and how much must the sacred 
 character of preceptor suffer in their minds by these degrading 
 associations ! The very bill which the pupil carries home 
 with him at Christinas, eked out, perhaps, with elaborate 
 though necessary minuteness, instructs him that his teachers 
 have other ends than the mere love to learning in the lessons 
 which they give him ; and though they put into his hands the 
 fine sayings of Seneca or Epictetus, yet they themselves are 
 none of those disinterested pedagogues to teach philosophy 
 gratis. The master, too, is sensible that he is seen in this 
 light ; and how much this must lessen that affectionate regard 
 to the learners which alone can sweeten the bitter labour of 
 instruction, and convert the whole business into unwelcome 
 and uninteresting task-work, many preceptors that I have con- 
 versed with on the subject are ready, with a sad heart, to ac- 
 knowledge. From this inconvenience the settled salaries of 
 the masters of this school in great measure exempt them ; 
 while the happy custom of choosing masters (indeed, every 
 officer of the establishment) from those who have received 
 their education there, gives them an interest in advancing the 
 character of the school, and binds them to observe a tender- 
 ness and a respect to the children, in which a stranger, feeling
 
 344 ItECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 that independence which I have spoken of, might well be ex- 
 pected to fail, 
 
 In affectionate recollections of the place where he was 
 bred up, in hearty recognitions of old schoolfellows met with 
 again after the lapse of years, or in foreign countries, the 
 Christ's Hospital boy yields to none ; I might almost say, 
 he goes beyond most other boys. The very compass and 
 magnitude of the school, its thousand bearings, the space it 
 takes up in the imagination beyond the ordinary schools, im- 
 presses a remembrance, accompanied with an elevation of 
 mind, that attends him through life. It is too big, too affecting 
 an object to pass away quickly from his mind. The Christ's 
 Hospital boy's friends at school are commonly his intimates 
 through life. For me, I do not know whether a constitutional 
 imbecility does not incline me too obstinately to cling to the 
 remembrances of childhood ; in an inverted ratio to the usual 
 sentiments of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in 
 since seems of any value or importance, compared to the col- 
 ours which imagination gave to everything then. I belong to 
 no body corporate such as I then made a part of. And here, 
 before I close, taking leave of the general reader, and addres- 
 sing myself solely to my old schoolfellows, that were contem- 
 poraries with me from the year 1782 to 1789, let me have 
 leave to remember some of those circumstances of our school, 
 which they will not be unwilling to have brought back to 
 their minds. 
 
 And first, let us remember, as first in importance in our 
 childish eyes, the young men (as they almost were) who, un- 
 der the denomination of Grecians, were waiting the expiration 
 of the period when they should be sent, at the charges of the 
 Hospital, to one or other of our universities, but more frequently 
 to Cambridge. These youth, from their superior acquirements, 
 their superior age and stature, and the fewness of their num- 
 bers, (for seldom above two or three at a time were inaugurated 
 into that high order,) drew the eyes of all, and especially of the 
 younger boys, into a reverent observance and admiration. 
 How tall they used to seem to us ! how stately would they pace 
 along the cloisters ! while the play of the lesser boys was 
 absolutely suspended, or its boisterousness at least allayed, at 
 their presence ! Not that they ever beat or struck the boys — 
 that would have been to have demeaned themselves — the dig- 
 nity of their persons alone ensured them all respect. The task 
 of blows, of corporeal chastisement, they loft to the common 
 monitors, or heads of wards, who, it must be confessed, in our 
 time, had rather too much license allowed them to oppress 
 and misuse their inferiors ; and the interference of the Gre- 

 
 CHRIST S HOSPITAL. 345 
 
 cian, who may be considered as the spiritual power, u as 
 not unfrequently called for to mitigate by its mediation the 
 heavy, unrelenting arm of this temporal power, or monitor. 
 In line, the Grecians were the solemn muftis of the school. 
 Eras were computed from their time ; it used to be said, 
 
 such or such a thing was done when .S or T — - — was 
 
 Grecian; 
 
 As I ventured to call the Grecians the muftis of the school, 
 the king's boys,* as their character then was, may well pass 
 lor the jan zaries. They were the terror of all the other bovs; 
 bred up under that hardy sailor, as well as excellent mathe- 
 matician, and co-navigator with Captain Cook, William Wales* 
 All his systems were adapted to lit them for the rough element 
 which they were destined to encounter. Frequent and severe 
 punishments, which were expected to be borne with more than 
 Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as mllictions of 
 disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To make his 
 boys hardy, and give them early sailor habits, seemed to be his 
 only aim : to this everything was subordinate. Moral obli- 
 quities, indeed, were sure of receiving their full recompense, 
 for no occasion of laying on the lash was ever let slip ; but 
 the effects expected to be produced from it were something 
 verv different from contrition or mortification. There was in 
 William Wales a perpetual fund of humour, a constant glee about 
 him, which, heightened by an inveterate provincialism of North- 
 country dialect, absolutely took away the sting from his severi- 
 ties. His punishments were a game at patience, in which the 
 master was not always worst contented when he found himself 
 at times overcome by his pupil. What success this discipline 
 had, or how the effects of it operated upon the after-lives of 
 these king's boys, I cannot say ; but I am sure that, for the 
 time, they were absolute nuisances to the rest of the school. 
 Hardv, brutal, and often wicked, they were the most graceless 
 lump in the whole mass ; older and bigger than the other boys, 
 (for by the system of their education they were kept longer at 
 school by two or three years than any of the rest, except the 
 Grecians,) they were a constant terror to the younger part of 
 the school ; and some who may read this, I doubt not, will 
 remember the consternation into which the juvenile fry of us 
 were thrown, when the cry was raised in the cloisters, that 
 the First Order was coming— for so they termed the first form 
 or class of those bovs. JSiill these sea-boys answered some 
 good purposes in the school. They were the military class 
 among the boys, foremost in athletic exercises, who extended 
 
 * The mathematical pupils, bred up to the sea, on the foundation of Charlca 
 cond
 
 346 RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 the fame of the prowess of the school far and near ; and the 
 apprentices in the vicinage, and sometimes the hutchers' boys 
 in the neighbouring market, had sad occasion to attest their 
 valour. 
 
 The time would fail me if I were to attempt to enumerate 
 all those circumstances, some pleasant, some attended with 
 some pain, which, seen through the mist of distance, come 
 sweetly softened to the memory. But I must crave leave to 
 remember our transcending superiority in those invigorating 
 sports, leap-frog and basting the bear ; our delightful excur- 
 sions in the summer holydays to the New River, near Newing- 
 ton, where, like otters, we would live the long day in the 
 water, never caring for dressing ourselves when we had once 
 stripped ; our savoury meals afterward, when we came home 
 almost famished, with staying out all day without our dinners ; 
 our visits, at other times, to the Tower, where, by ancient priv- 
 ilege, we had free access to all the curiosities ; our solemn 
 processions through the city at Easter, with the lord mayor's 
 largess of buns, wine, and a shilling, with the festive questions 
 and civic pleasantries of the dispensing aldermen, which were 
 more to us than all the rest of the banquet ; our stately sup- 
 pings in public, where the well-lighted hall, and the confluence 
 of well-dressed company who came to see us, made the whole 
 look more like a concert or assembly, than a scene of a plain 
 bread and cheese collation ; the annual orations upon St. 
 Matthew's day, in which the senior scholar, before he had done, 
 seldom failed to reckon up, among those who had done honour 
 to our school by being educated in it, the names of those ac- 
 complished critics and Greek scholars, Joshua Barnes and 
 Jeremiah Markland (I marvel they left out Camden while they 
 Avere about it.) Let me have leave to remember our hymns 
 and anthems, and well-toned organ ; the doleful tune of the 
 burial anthem chanted in the solemn cloisters, upon the seldom- 
 occurring funeral of some schoolfellow, the festivities ;it 
 Christmas, when the richest of us would club our stock to 
 have a gaudy day, sitting round the fire, replenished to (he 
 height with logs, and the penniless, and he that could contrib- 
 ute nothing, partook in all the mirth, and in some of the sub- 
 stantialities of the feasting ; the carol sung by night at that 
 time of the year, which, when a young boy, 1 have so often 
 lain awake to hear from seven (the hour of going to bed) till 
 ten, when it was sung by the older boys and monitors, and 
 have listened to it in their rude chanting, till I have been trans- 
 ported in fancy to the fields of IJetlilehem, and the sunt; 
 which was sung at that season by angels' voices to the shep- 
 herds.
 
 CHRIST S HOSPITAL. .'J 17 
 
 Nor would I willingly forget any of those things which ad- 
 ministered to our vanity. The hem-stitched bands and town- 
 made slnrts, which some of tie most fashionable among us wore ; 
 the lown*girdles, with buckles of silver, or shining none ; the 
 
 badges of the sea-boys ; the cots, or superior shoestrings of 
 the monitors ; the medals of the markers, (those who were ap- 
 pointed to hoar the Bible read in the wards on Sunday morninir 
 and evening,) which bore on their obverse in silver, as certain 
 parts of our garments carried in meaner metal, the counte- 
 nance of our founder, that godly and royal child, King Edward 
 the Sixth, the ilower of the Tudor name — the young flower 
 that was untimely cropped as it began to till our land with its 
 early odours — the boy-patron of boys — the serious and holy 
 child who walked with Cranmer and Ridley — fit associate, in 
 those tender years, for the bishops and future martyrs of our 
 church, to receive or (as occasion sometimes proved) to give 
 instruction. 
 
 " But, ah ! what means the silent tear? 
 Why, e'en mid joy, my bosom heave? 
 Ye long-lost scenes, enchantments dear ! 
 Lo ! now I linger o'er your grave. 
 
 " Fly, then, ye hours of rosy hue, 
 
 And bear away the bloom of years ! 
 And quick succeed, ye sickly crew 
 
 Of doubts and sorrows, pains and fears ! 
 
 " Still will I ponder Fate's unalter'd plan, 
 Nor, tracing back the child, forget that I am man."* 
 
 * Lines meditated in the cloisters of Christ's Hospital, in the Poetics, ol 
 Mr. George Dyer.
 

 
 ESSAYS. 
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SIIAKSPEARK, 
 
 CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR ST 
 REPRESENTATION, 
 
 Taking a turn the other day in the abbey, 1 was struck 
 with the affected attitude of a figure, which I do not r< ■mem- 
 ber to have seen before, and which, upon examination, proved 
 to be a whole length of the celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though 
 I would not go so far with some good catholics abroad as to 
 shut players altogether out of consecrated ground, yet I own 
 I was not a little scandalized at the introduction of theatrical 
 airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of tin; 
 saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this 
 harlequin figure the following lines : — 
 
 " To paint fair Nature, by divine command, 
 Her magic pencil in his glowing ham!, 
 A Shakspeare rose; then, to expand his fame 
 Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came. 
 Though sunk in death the forms the poet drew, 
 The actor's genius bade them breathe anew ; 
 Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay, 
 Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day: 
 And till eternity with power sublime 
 Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time, • 
 Shakspeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine, 
 And earth irradiate with a beam divine." 
 
 It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to at- 
 tempt anything like a criticism on this farrago of false 
 thoughts and nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was 
 a kind of wonder, how, from the days of the actor here cele- 
 brated to our own, it should have been the fashion to compli- 
 ment every performer in his turn, that has had the luck to 
 please the town in any of the great characters of Shakspeare, 
 with the notion of possessing a mind congenial with thepoefs: 
 how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the 
 power of originating poetical images and conceptions with 
 the (acuity of being able to lead or recite the same when put
 
 350 on shakspeare's tragedies. 
 
 into words ;* or what connexion that absolute mastery over 
 the heart and soul of man which a great dramatic poet pos- 
 sesses, has with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which 
 a player, by observing a few general effects which some 
 common passion, as grief, anger, &c, usually has upon the 
 gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the 
 internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an 
 Othello or a Hamlet, for instance, and the when, and the why, 
 and the how far they should be moved ; to what pitch a pas- 
 sion is becoming ; to give the reins, and to pull in the curb 
 exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the slackening 
 is most graceful, seems to demand a reach of intellect of a 
 vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the 
 bare imitation of the signs of these passions in the counte- 
 nance or gesture, which signs are usually observed to be 
 most lively and emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and 
 which signs can, after all, but indicate some passion, as I said 
 before, anger, or grief, generally ; but of the motives and 
 grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from the same pas- 
 sion in low and vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no 
 more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without a met- 
 aphor) can speak or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. 
 But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which 
 we take in at the eye and ear at a play-house, compared with 
 the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in 
 reading, that we are apt not oidy to sink the play-writer in 
 the consideration which we pay to the actor, but even to iden- 
 tify in our minds, in a perverse manner, the actor with the 
 character which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent 
 play-goer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person 
 and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we 
 are in reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion in- 
 cidental alone to unlettered persons, who, not possessing the 
 advantage of reading, are necessarily dependant upon the 
 stage-playe.r for all the pleasure which they can receive from 
 the drama, and to whom the very idea of what an author is 
 cannot be made comprehensible without some pain and per- 
 plexity of mind : the error is one from which persons, other- 
 wise not meanly lettered, find it almost impossible to extricate 
 themselves. 
 
 * It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in dramatic recita- 
 tions. We never dream that the gentleman who reads Lucretius in public 
 with great applause is therefore a threat poet and philosopher; nor do we find 
 that Tom Davis, the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the Paradise 
 Lost better than any man 111 Knjrland in his day, (though ' cannot help think- 
 ing there mu8l lie some mistake in this tradition,; was therefore, by his inti- 
 mate ft iend , el upon a level with Milton.
 
 ON SHAKSPEARE S TRAGEDIES. 351 
 
 Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high 
 degree of satisfaction which I received some years hack from 
 seeing, for the first time, a tragedy of Shakapeare performed, 
 in which those two great performers sustained the principal 
 
 parte, It seemed to imhody and realize concept ions which 
 had hitherto assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we 
 pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure, this sense of 
 distinctness. When the novelty is past, we lind to our cost 
 that, instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized 
 and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and 
 blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable 
 substance. 
 
 How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free 
 conceptions thus cramped and pressed down to the measure of 
 a straight-lacing actuality, may be judged from that delightful 
 sensation of freshness with which we turn to those plays of 
 Shakspeare which have escaped being performed, and to those 
 passages in the acting plays of the same writer which have 
 happily been left out in the performance. How far the very 
 custom of hearing anything spouted withers and blows upon 
 B line passage, may be seen in those speeches from Henry 
 the Fifth, &c. which are current in the mouths of schoolboys 
 from their being found in Enfield's Speaker, and such kind of 
 books. I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that cel- 
 ebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning "To be, or not to be," 
 or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent; it has been 
 so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men 
 and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of 
 continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead 
 member. 
 
 It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion 
 that the plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for perform- 
 ance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist 
 whatever. Their distinguishing excellence is a reason that 
 they should be so. There is so much in them which comes 
 not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, 
 and gesture have nothing to do. 
 
 The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion and the 
 turns of passion ; and the more coarse and palpable the pas- 
 sion is, the more hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators 
 the performer obviously possesses. For this reason, scolding 
 scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a lit 
 of fury, ami then m a surprising manner talk themselves out 
 of it again; have always been the most popular upon our stage. 
 And the reason is plain, because the spectators are lure most 
 palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges m this war
 
 352 on shakspeare's tragedies. 
 
 of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formert 
 round such " intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the 
 direct object of the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, 
 and in Shakspeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form 
 of speaking, whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a 
 medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader 
 or spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner 
 structure and workings of mind in a character, which he could 
 otherwise never have arrived at in that form of composition by 
 any gift short of intuition. We do here as we do with novels 
 written in the epistolary form. How many improprieties, per- 
 fect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with in Clarissa, 
 and other books, for the sake of the delight which that form 
 upon the whole gives us. 
 
 But the practice of stage representation reduces everything 
 to a controversy of elocution. Every character, from the 
 boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity 
 of womanhood, must play the orator. The love-dialogues of 
 Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues 
 by night ; the more intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial 
 colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus with their married 
 wives ; all those delicacies which are so delightful in the read- 
 ing, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in paradise — 
 
 " As beseem'd 
 Fair couple linlt'd in happy nuptial league, 
 Alone ;" 
 
 by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these 
 things sullied and turned from their very nature by being ex- 
 posed to a large assembly ; when such speeches as Imogen ad- 
 dresses to her lord come drawling out of the mouth of a hired 
 actress, whose courtship, though nominally addressed to the 
 personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed at the specta- 
 tors, who are to judge of her endearments and her returns of 
 love. 
 
 The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since 
 the days of Betterton, a succession of popular performers have 
 had the greatest ambition to distinguish themselves. The 
 length of the part may be one of their reasons. But for the 
 character itself, we find it in a play ; and therefore we judge 
 it a fit subject of dramatic representation. Tin; play itself 
 abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other, and 
 therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying 
 moral instruction. But Hamlet himself — what does he suffer 
 meanwhile by being dragged forth as (lie public schoolmaster, 
 to give lectures to the crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of 
 • . hut Hamlet does are transactions between himself and his
 
 on siiaxspeare's tragedies. 353 
 
 moral sense; they are the effusions of his solitary musings, 
 •which he retires to holes, and corners, and the must sequestered 
 
 parts of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the silent 
 meditations with which his bosom is bursting, reduced to words 
 for the sake of the reader, who must else remain ignorant oi 
 what is passing there. These profound sorrows, these light- 
 aiul-noise-ahhoning ruminations, which the tongue scarco 
 dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be rep- 
 resented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths 
 them out before an audience, making four hundred people his 
 Confidants at once. I say not. that it is the fault of (lit; actor 
 so to do ; he must pronounce them ore rotundo, he must ac- 
 company them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his 
 auditory by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. 
 He must be thinking all the while of his appearance, because lie 
 knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it. And 
 this is the way to represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet. 
 It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast 
 quantity of thought and feeling to a great portion of the audi- 
 ence, who otherwise would never earn it for themselves by 
 reading, and the intellectual acquisition gained this way may, 
 for aught I know, be inestimable ; but I am not arguing that 
 Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made 
 another thing by being acted. I have heard much of the 
 wonders which Garrick performed in this part ; but, as I never 
 saw him, I must have leave to doubt whether the representa- 
 tion of such a character came within the province of his art. 
 Those who tell me of him, speak of his eye, of the magic of 
 his eye. and his commanding voice — physical properties, 
 vastly desirable in an actor, and without which he can never 
 insinuate meaning into an auditory ; but what have they to do 
 with Hamlet ; what have they to do with intellect? In fact, 
 the things aimed at in theatrical representation are to arrest 
 the spectator's eye upon the form and the gesture, and so to 
 gain a more favourable hearing to what is spoken : it is not 
 what the character is, but how he looks ; not what he says, 
 but how he speaks it. I see no reason to think that if the 
 play of Hamlet were written over again by 6ome such writer 
 as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally 
 omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shak- 
 Bpeare, his stupendous intellect, and only taking care to give 
 us enough of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo w< r< 
 never at a loss to furnish, I see not how the effect could be 
 much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in 
 his power to represent Shakspeare to us differently from his 
 representation of Banks or Liilo. Hamlet woidd still be a
 
 354 ON SHAKSPEARE S TRAGEDIES. 
 
 youthful accomplished prince, and must be gracefully person- 
 ated ; lie might be puzzled in his mind, wavering in his con- 
 duct, seemingly cruel to Ophelia ; he might see a ghost, and 
 start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be his 
 father : all this in the poorest and most homely language of 
 the servilest creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate 
 of an audience, without troubling Shakspeare for the matter : 
 and I see not but there would be room for all the power which 
 an actor has to display itself. All the passions and changes 
 of passion might remain : for those are much less difficult to 
 write or act than is thought ; it is a trick easy to be attained : 
 it is but rising or falling a note or two in the voice, a whisper, 
 with a significant foreboding look to announce its approach, and 
 so contagious the counterfeit appearance of any emotion is, 
 that let the words be what they will, the look and tone shall 
 carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in the passions. 
 
 It is common for people to talk of Shakspeare's plays being 
 so natural; that everybody can understand him. They are 
 natural indeed, they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that 
 the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of us. You 
 shall hear the same person say that George Barnwell is very 
 natural, and Othello is very natural, that they are both very 
 deep ; and to them they are the same kind of thing. At the 
 one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of young man 
 is tempted by a naughty woman to commit a trifling peccadillo, 
 the murder of an uncle or so, # that is all, and so comes to an 
 untimely end, which is so moving ; and at the other because a 
 blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife : 
 and the odds are, that ninety-nine out of a hundred would wil- 
 lingly behold the same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, 
 and have thought the rope more due to Othello than to Barn- 
 well. For of the texture of Othello's mind, the inward con- 
 struction marvellously laid open with all its strengths and 
 weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human misgivings, 
 its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love, they see 
 no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their 
 
 * If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the managers, I would 
 entreat and bfeg of them, in the name of both the galleries, that this insult 
 upon the morality (.1 the common people of London should cease to be eter- 
 nally repeated in the holyday weeks. Why are the 'prentices of this famous 
 and well-governed city, instead of an amusement, to be treated over and over 
 agairi with a nauseous sermon of George Barnwell I Why nt the end of tkeir 
 vistas are we to place the gallows ? Were I an uncle, I should not much like 
 a nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes. It is 
 really making uncle-murder- too trivial to exhibit it as done upon such slight 
 motives ; it, is attributing too much to such characters as Millwood ; it is 
 putting things into the heads of good young men, which they would never 
 otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think anything of their lives should 
 fairly petition the chamberlain against it.
 
 ON SIIAKSPEARE S TRAGEDIES. 355 
 
 pennies apiece to look through the man's telescope in Leices- 
 ter fields, sec into the inward plot and topography of the 
 moon. Some dim thing or other they see ; they see an actor 
 personating a passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, and they 
 recognise it as a copy of the usual external effects of such 
 passions ; or at least as being true to that symbol of the emo- 
 tion which passes current at the theatre for it, for it is often no 
 more than that : but of the grounds of the passion, its corres- 
 pondence to a great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy 
 object of tragedy — that common auditors know anything of 
 this, or can have any such notions dinned into them by the 
 mere strength of an actor's lungs — that apprehensions foreign 
 to them should be thus infused into them by storm, I can nei- 
 ther believe, nor understand how it can be possible. 
 
 We talk of Shakspcare's admirable observation of life, when 
 we should feel, that not from a pettv inquisition into those 
 cheap and every-day characters which surrounded him, as 
 they surround us, but from his own mind, which was, to bor- 
 row a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very " sphere of humanity," 
 he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which 
 every one of us, recognising a part, think we comprehend in 
 our natures the whole ; and oftentimes mistake the powers 
 which he positively creates in us for nothing more than indi- 
 genous faculties of our own minds, which only waited the 
 application of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and 
 clear echo of the same. 
 
 To return to Hamlet. Among the distinguishing features 
 of that wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet 
 painful) is that soreness of mind which makes him treat the 
 intrusions of Polonius with harshness, and that asperity which 
 he puts on in his interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of 
 an unhinged mind (if they be not mixed in the latter case with 
 a profound artifice of love, to alienate Ophelia by affected dis- 
 courtesies, so to prepare her mind for the breaking off of that 
 loving intercourse, which can no longer find a place amid 
 business so serious as that which he has to do) are parts of 
 his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of Ham- 
 let, the most patient consideration of his situation is no more 
 than necessary ; they are what we forgive aftcriran?, and 
 explain by the whole of his character, but at the time they 
 are harsh and unpleasant. Yet such is the actor's necessity 
 of giving strong blows to the audience, that I have neve? seen 
 a player in this character who did not exaggerate and strain 
 to the utmost these ambiguous features — these temporary de- 
 formities in the character. They make him express a vulgar 
 scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his gentility, and
 
 356 on shakspeare's tragedies. 
 
 which no explanation can render palatable ; they make him 
 show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's father — con- 
 tempt in its very grossest and most hateful form : but they 
 get applause by it : it is natural, people say ; that is, the 
 words are scornful, and the actor expresses scorn, and that 
 they can judge of: but why so much scorn, and of that sort, 
 they never think of asking. 
 
 So to Ophelia. All the Hamlets that I have ever seen 
 rant and rave at her as if she had committed some great crime, 
 and the audience are highly pleased, because the words of the 
 part are satirical, and they are enforced by the strongest ex- 
 pression of satirical indignation of which the face and voice 
 are capable. But, then, whether Hamlet is likely to have put 
 on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved so dearly, 
 is never thought on ; the truth is, that in all such deep affec- 
 tions as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is 
 a stock of supererogatory love, (if I may venture to use the ex- 
 pression) which, in any great grief of heart, especially where that 
 which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers 
 a kind of indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself, 
 even to its heart's dearest object, in the language of a tempo- 
 rary alienation ; but it is not alienation, it is a distraction 
 purely, and so it always makes itself to be felt by that object : 
 it is not anger, but grief assuming the appearance of anger — 
 love awkwardly counterfeiting hate, as sweet countenances 
 when they try to frown : but such sternness and fierce disgust 
 as Hamlet is made to show is no counterfeit, but the real face 
 of absolute aversion — of irreconcilable alienation. It. may 
 be said he puts on the madman ; but, then, he should only so 
 far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction 
 will give him leave ; that is, incompletely, imperfectly ; not 
 in that confirmed, practised way, like a master of his art, or, 
 as Dame Quickly would say, " like one of those harlotry 
 players." 
 
 I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure 
 which Shakspeare's plays give in the acting, seems to me not 
 at all to differ from that which the audience receive from those of 
 other writers ; and, they being in themselves essentially so differ- 
 ent from all others, I must conclude that there is something in 
 the nature of acting which levels all distinctions. And, in fact, 
 who does not speak indifferently of the Gamester and of 
 Macbeth as fine stage performances, and praise the Mrs. Bev- 
 erley in the same way as the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. S. ? 
 Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella, and Euphrasia, are they 
 leas liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than Desdemona? 
 Are they not spoken of and remembered in the same way ? Ts
 
 on shakspeaue's tragedies. Uo7 
 
 not the female performer as great (as they call it) in one as in 
 the other? Did not Garrick shjne, and was he not ambitious 
 of shining in every drawling tragedy that his wretched day 
 produced — the productions of the Hills, and the Murphys, 
 and the lirouns — and shall lie have that honour to dwell in 
 our minds for ever as an inseparable concomitant with Shak- 
 speare? A kindred mind! Oh, , who can read that affecting 
 sonnet of Shakspeare which alludes to his profession as a 
 player: — 
 
 " Oh for my sake do you with fortune chide, 
 The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds, 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 Than public means which public custom breeds — 
 Tbeilce comes it that my uame receives a brand ; 
 And almost thence my nature is subdui d 
 To what it works in, like the dier's hand" — 
 
 Or that other confession : — 
 
 " Alas ! 'tis true, I have gone here and there, 
 And made myself a motley to thy view, 
 Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear"- 
 
 Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in 
 our sweet Shakspeare, and dream of any congeniality be- 
 tween him and one that, by every tradition of him, appears to 
 have been as mere a player as ever existed ; to have had his 
 mind tainted with the lowest players' vices — envy and jeal- 
 ousy, and miserable cravings after applause ; one who, in the 
 exercise of his profession, was jealous even o! the women- 
 performers that stood in his way ; a manager full of manage- 
 rial tricks, and stratagems, and finesse : that any resemblance 
 should be dreamed of between him and Shakspeare — Shaks- 
 peare who, in the plenitude and consciousness of his own 
 powers, could with that noble modesty, which we can neitln r 
 imitate nor appreciate, express himself thus of his own sense 
 of his own defects : — 
 
 " Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, 
 
 Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd ; 
 
 Desiring this man's art, anil that man's scope." 
 
 I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being 
 an admirer of Shakspeare. A true lover of his excellences 
 he certainly was not; for would any true lover of them have 
 admitted into his matchless scenes such ribald trash as Tate 
 and Gibber, and the rest of them, that 
 
 "With their darkness durst affront his light," 
 
 have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspeare ? I believe 
 it impossible that, he could have had a proper reverence for 
 Shakspeare, and have condescended to go through that interpo-
 
 358 on shakspare's tragedies. 
 
 lated scene in Richard the Third, in which Richard tries to break 
 his wife's heart by telling her he loves another woman, and says, 
 " if she suvives this, she is immortal." Yet I doubt not he de- 
 livered this vulgar stuff with as much anxiety of emphasis as 
 any of the genuine parts : and for acting, it is as well calculated 
 as any. But we have seen the part of Richard lately pro- 
 duce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing it, and 
 it lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular judgments 
 of Shakspeare derived from acting. Not one of the specta- 
 tors who have witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that part, but 
 has come away with a proper conviction that Richard is a very 
 wicked man, and kills little children in their beds, with some- 
 thing like the pleasure which the giants and ogres in chil- 
 dren's books are represented to have taken in that practice ; 
 moreover, that he is very close, and shrewd, and devilish cun- 
 ning, for you can see that by his eye. 
 
 But is, in fact, this the impression we have in reading the 
 Richard of Shakspeare ? Do we feel anything like disgust, as 
 we do at that butcher-like representation of him that passes 
 for him on the stage ? A horror at his crimes blends with the 
 . effect which we feel, but how is it qualified, how is it carried 
 off, by the rich intellect which he displays, his resources, his 
 wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast knowledge and insight into 
 characters, the poetry of his part — not an atom of all which 
 is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting it. Nothing 
 but his crimes, his actions, is visible ; they are prominent and 
 staring ; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty 
 genius, the man of vast capacity — the profound, the witty, 
 accomplished Richard 1 
 
 The truth is, the characters of Shakspeare are so much 
 the objects of meditation rather than of interest or curiosity 
 as to their actions, that while we are reading any of his great, 
 criminal characters — Macbeth, Richard, even Iago — we think 
 not so much of the crimes which they commit as of the am- 
 bition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity, which 
 prompts them to overleap these moral fences. Barnwell is a 
 wretched murderer ; there is a certain fitness between his 
 neck and the rope ; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows ; 
 nobody who thinks at all can think of any alleviating circum- 
 stances in his case to make him a fit object of mercy. Or, 
 to take an instance from the higher tragedy, what else but a 
 mere assassin is (Mcnalvon? Do we think of anything but 
 of the crime which he commits, and the rack which he de- 
 serves? That is all which we really think about him. Whereas, 
 in corresponding characters in Shakspeare, so little do the ac-
 
 ON SIIAKSPEAUE S TRAGEDIES. 359 
 
 tions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the 
 inner mind in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real, 
 and is exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively 
 nothing. But when we .see ihese things r< presented, the acts 
 ■which they do are comparatively everything, their unpul 
 nothing. The state of sublime emotion into which we are 
 elevaled by those images of night ami horror which Macbeth 
 is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he enter- 
 tains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to 
 murder Duncan — when we no longer read it in a book, when 
 we have given up that vantage ground of abstraction which 
 reading possesses over seeing, and come to see a man in his 
 bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a 
 murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as 1 have wit- 
 nessed it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful 
 anxiety about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while 
 it yet seems impenetrated, the too close pressing semblance 
 of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy 
 all the delight which the words in the book convey, where 
 the deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense 
 of presence ; it rather seems to belong to history — to something 
 past and inevitable, if it has anything to do with time at all. 
 The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which is present 
 to our minds in the reading. 
 
 So to see Lear acted — to see an old man tottering about the 
 stage with a walking--stick, turned out of doors by his daugh- 
 ters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and 
 disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve 
 him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever 
 produced in me. But the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be act- 
 ed. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the 
 storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to repre- 
 sent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to 
 represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate 
 the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's ter- 
 rible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporeal dimen- 
 sion, but in intellectual : the explosions of his passion are terri- 
 ble as a volcano : they are storms turning up and disclosing to 
 the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his 
 mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems 
 too insignificant to be thought on ; even as he himself neglects 
 it. On the stage we see nothing but corporeal infirmities and 
 weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see 
 not Lear, but we are Lear — we arc in his mind, we are sus- 
 tained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters 
 and storms ; in the aberrations of his reason we discover a
 
 360 on shakspeare's tragedies. 
 
 mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the 
 ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind 
 blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses 
 of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sub- 
 lime identification of his age with that of the heavens them- 
 selves, when, in his reproaches to them for conniving at the 
 injustice of his children, he reminds them that "they them- 
 selves are old." What gesture shall we appropriate to this I 
 What has the voice or the eye to do with such things ? But 
 the play is beyond all art. as the tamperings with it show : it 
 is too hard and stony ; it must have love-scenes, and a happy 
 ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she 
 must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nos- 
 trils of this leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the show- 
 men of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easi- 
 ly. A happy ending ! — as if the living martyrdom that Lear 
 had gone through — the flaying of his feelings alive, did not 
 make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous 
 thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could 
 sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and prep- 
 aration, why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy ? 
 As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and scep- 
 tre again could tempt him to act over again his misused sta- 
 tion ; as if, at his years, and with his experience, anything was 
 left but to die. 
 
 Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. 
 But how many dramatic personages are there in Shakspeare, 
 which, though more tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) 
 than Lear, yet, from some circumstance, some adjunct to their 
 character, are improper to be shown to our bodily eye. Othel- 
 lo, for instance. Nothing can be more soothing, more flat- 
 tering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to read of a 
 young Venetian lady of highest extraction, through the force 
 of love, and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, lay- 
 ing aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and 
 colour, and wedding with a coal-black Moor — (for such he is 
 represented, in the imperfect state of knowledge respecting 
 foreign countries in those days, compared with our own, or in 
 compliance with popular notions, though the Moors are now 
 well enough known to be by many shades less unworthy of a 
 white woman's fancy) — it is the perfect triumph of virtue 
 over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees 
 ( Hlndlo's colour in his mind. But upon the stage, when the 
 imagination is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left, to 
 our poor unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has 
 seen Othello played, whether he did not, on the contrary, sink
 
 ON SHAKSrEARE's TRAGEDIES. 301 
 
 Othello^s mind in his colour ; whether he did not find some- 
 thing extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded carca- 
 ses of Othello and Deedemona ; and whether the actual sight 
 of the thing did not overweigh all that beautiful compromise 
 which we make in reading ; and the reason it should do so is 
 obvious, because there is just so much reality presented to 
 our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not 
 enough of belief in the internal motives — all that which is 
 unseen — to overpower and reconcile the first and obvious pre- 
 judices.* What we see upon a stage is body and bodily ac- 
 tion ; what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclu- 
 sively the mind, and its movements: and this I think may 
 sufficiently account for the very different sort of delight with 
 which the same play so often affects us in the reading and 
 the seeing. 
 
 It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those char- 
 acters in Shakspeare which are within the precincts of nature, 
 have yet something in them which appeals too exclusively to 
 the imagination to admit of their being made objects to the 
 senses without suffering a change and a diminution — that still 
 stronger the objection must lie against representing another 
 line of characters, which Shakspeare has introduced to give 
 a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his scenes, as if to 
 remove them still farther from that assimilation to common 
 life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. 
 When we read the incantations of those terrible beings, trie 
 witches, in Macbeth, though some of the ingredients of their 
 hellish composition savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect 
 upon us other than the most serious and appalling that can be 
 imagined ? Do we not feel spell-bound as Macbeth was ? 
 Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence ? We 
 might as well laugh under a consciousness of the principle 
 of Evil himself being truly and really present with us. But 
 attempt to bring these beings on to a stage, and vou turn them 
 instantly into so many old women, that men and children are 
 to laugh at. Contrary to the old saying, that " seeing is be 
 lieving," the sight actually destroys the faith : and the mirth 
 in which we indulge at their expense, when we see these 
 
 * The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does not offend as 
 in the reading, it should also not offend us in the seeing-, is just sucn a fallacy 
 as supposing that an Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do* 
 iq the poem. But in the poem we for a while have paradisaical senses given 
 vis, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without clothes in a 
 ture. The painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the awkward shifts 
 they have recourse to to make them look not quite naked ; by a prophetic an- 
 achronism, antedating the invention of rig-leaves. So in the reading of th« 
 play, we see with Desdeinona's eyes ; in the seeing of it, we are forced to look 
 with our own 
 
 31 Q
 
 362 on shakspeare's tragedies. 
 
 creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification 
 which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us 
 in when reading made them an object of belief — when we sur- 
 rendered up our reason to the poet, as children to their nurses 
 and their elders ; and we laugh at our fears, as children who 
 thought they saw something in the dark triumph when the 
 bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. 
 For this exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is tru- 
 ly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness. It 
 is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in 
 these terrors : a ghost by chandelier light, and in good compa- 
 ny, deceives no spectators — a ghost that can be measured by 
 the eye, and his human dimensions made out at leisure. The 
 sight of a well-lighted house and a well-dressed audience 
 shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions : 
 as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles 
 with his impenetrable armour over it, " Bully Dawson would 
 have fought the devil with such advantages.'' 
 
 Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the 
 vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest : 
 doubtless without some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of 
 that age would never have sat out to hear so much innocence 
 of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and 
 Miranda. But is the Tempest of Shakspeare at all a subject 
 for stage representation ? It is one thing to read of an en- 
 chanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are read- 
 ing it ; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his con- 
 juring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but him- 
 self and some hundred of favoured spectators before the cur- 
 tain are supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the hate- 
 ful incredible, that all our reverence for the author cannot 
 hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses 
 to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits 
 and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted 
 — they can only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious 
 provision of scenery which the luxury of the age demands, in 
 these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. 
 That which, in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much 
 to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher 
 faculties positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced 
 to aid. A parlour, or a drawing-room — a library opening into 
 a garden — a garden with an alcove in it — a street, or the pi- 
 azza of Covent Garden, does well enough in a scene ; we are 
 content to give as much credit, to it as it demands ; or rather, 
 we think little about it — it is little more than reading at the top 
 of a page, •' Scene, a Garden ;" we do not imagine ourselves
 
 ON SHAKSPEARES TRAGEDIES. 363 
 
 there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. 
 Hut to think by the help of painted trees and taverns, which 
 avc know to be painted, to transport our minds to l'rospero, 
 and bis island, and bis lonely cell ;* or, by the aid of a fiddle, 
 dexterously thrown in, in an interval of Bpeaking, to make us 
 believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the 
 isle was full : the Orrery lecturer at the Haymarket might as 
 well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight 
 behind his apparatus, to make us believe that we do indeed hear 
 the crystal spheres ring out that chime, which, if it were to 111- 
 wrap our fancy long, Milton thinks, 
 
 " Time would run back and fetch the age of gold, 
 And speckled Vanity 
 Would sicken soon and die, 
 And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould ; 
 Yea, Hell itself would pass away, 
 And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day." 
 
 The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more 
 impossible to be shown on a stage than the enchanted isle, 
 with its no less interesting and innocent first settlers. 
 
 The subject of scenery is closely connected with that of 
 dresses, which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I 
 remember the last time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy 
 I felt at the changes of garment which he varied, the shiftings 
 and reshiftings, like a Romish priest at mass. The luxury 
 of stage improvements and the importunity of the public eye 
 require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish monarch was 
 fairly a counterpart to that which our king wears when he goes 
 to the parliament house, just so full and cumbersome, and set 
 out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, 
 I see not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what 
 robe are we conscious of? Some dim images of royalty — a 
 crown, a sceptre, may float before our eyes, but who shall de- 
 scribe the fashion of it 1 Do we see in our mind's eye what 
 Webb or any other robemaker could pattern ? This is the 
 inevitable consequence of imitating everything, to make all 
 things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine 
 abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external 
 appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and 
 blood, while by far the greater and better part of our imagina- 
 tion is employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of 
 the character. But in acting, scenery, dress, the most con- 
 temptible things call upon us to judge of their naturalness. 
 
 * It will be said these things are done in pictures. Uut pictures and scenes 
 are very different things. Painting is a world of itself, but m Bceoe-painting 
 there is the attempt to deceive ; and there is the discordancy, never to be got 
 over, between painted scenes and real people. 
 
 Q2
 
 364 on shakspeare's tragedies. 
 
 Perhaps it would be no bad similitude to liken the pleasure 
 which we take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, com- 
 pared with that quiet delight which we find in the reading of it, 
 to the different feelings with which a reviewer, and a man that 
 is not a reviewer, reads a fine poem. The accursed critical 
 habit, the being called upon to judge and pronounce, must 
 make it quite a different thing to the former. In seeing these 
 plays acted, we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet 
 compares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second 
 husband, who wants to see the pictures ? But in the acting, 
 a miniature must be lugged out ; which we know not to be the 
 picture, but only to show how finely a miniature may be rep- 
 resented. This showing of everything levels all things ; it 
 makes tricks, bows, and courtesies of importance. Mrs. S. 
 never got more fame by anything than by the manner in 
 which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in Mac- 
 beth ; it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones 
 or impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into 
 the imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful 
 scene ? Does not the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as 
 it can ? Does it care about the gracefulness of the doing it 1 
 But by acting, and judging of acting, all these nonessentials 
 are raised into an importance injurious to the main interest of 
 the play. 
 
 I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shaks- 
 peare. It would be no very difficult task to extend the in- 
 quiry to his comedies, and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir 
 Hugh Evans, and the rest, are equally incompatible with stage 
 representation. The length to which this essay has run will 
 make it, I am afraid, sufficiently distasteful to the amateurs of 
 the theatre, without going any deeper into the subject at 
 Dresent.
 
 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS. 305 
 
 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS 
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 When I selected for publication, in 1808, Specimens of 
 English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shaks- 
 peare, the kind of extracts which I was anxious to give were 
 not so much passages of wit and humour, though the old plays 
 are rich in such, as scenes of passions sometimes of the 
 deepest quality, interesting situations, serious descriptions, 
 that which is more nearly allied to poetry than to wit, and to 
 tragic rather than to comic poetry. The plays which I made 
 choice of were, with few exceptions, such as treat of human 
 life and manners, rather than masks and Arcadian pastorals, 
 with their train of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, pas- 
 sionate mortals — Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and 
 Amarillis. My leading design was to illustrate what may be 
 called the moral sense of our ancestors. To show in what 
 manner they felt, when they placed themselves by the power 
 of imagination in trying circumstances, in the conflicts of duty 
 and passion, or the strife of contending duties ; what sort of 
 loves and enmities theirs were ; how their griefs were tem- 
 pered, and their full-swollen joys abated : how much of Shaks- 
 peare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far 
 in his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all 
 mankind. I was also desirous to bring together some of the 
 most admired scenes of Fletcher and Massinger, in the esti- 
 mation of the world the only dramatic poets of that age enti- 
 tled to be considered after Shakspeare, and, by exhibiting 
 them in the same volume with the more impressive scenes of 
 old Marlowe, Hey wood, Toumeur, W r ebster, Ford, and others, 
 to show what we had slighted, while beyond all proportion 
 we had been crying up one or two favourite names. From 
 the desultory criticisms which accompanied that publication, 
 I have selected a few which I thought would best stand by 
 themselves, as requiring least immediate reference to the play 
 or passage by which they were suggested. 
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 
 
 Lust's Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen. — This tragedy is 
 in King Cambyses' vein ; rape, and murder, and superlatives ; 
 31*
 
 366 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS 
 
 Ct huffing braggart puffed lines," such as the play-writers ante- 
 rior to Shakspeare are full of, and Pistol but coldly imitates. 
 
 Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shepherd. — The 
 lunes of Tamburlaine are perfect midsummer madness. Neb- 
 uchadnezzar's are mere modest pretensions compared with the 
 thundering vaunts of this Scythian shepherd. He comes in 
 drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches these pampered 
 jades of Asia that they can draw but twenty miles a day. 
 Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, 1 never believed 
 that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of mine 
 ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set 
 down in a play, which their ancestors took to be serious. 
 
 Edward the Second. — In a very different style from mighty 
 Tamburlaine is the tragedy of Edward the Second. The re- 
 luctant pangs of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints, 
 which Shakspeare scarcely improved in his Richard the 
 Second ; and the death-scene of Marlowe's king moves pity 
 and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I 
 am acquainted. 
 
 The Rich Jew of Malta. — Marlowe's Jew does not approach 
 so near to Shakspeare's as his Edward the Second does to 
 Richard the Second. Barabas is a mere monster brought in 
 with a large painted nose to please the rabble. He kills in 
 sport, poisons whole nunneries, invents infernal machines. He 
 is just such an exhibition as a century or two earlier might 
 have been played before the Londoners " by the royal com- 
 mand," when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews 
 had been previously resolved on in the cabinet. It is curious 
 to see a superstition wearing out. The idea of a Jew, which 
 our pious ancestors contemplated with so much horror, has 
 nothing in it now revolting. We have tamed the claws of the 
 beast, and pared its nails, and now we take it to our arms, 
 fondle it, write plays to flatter it ; it is visited by princes, af- 
 fects a taste, patronises the arts, and is the only liberal and 
 gentleman-like thing in Christendom. 
 
 Doctor Faustits. — The growing horrors of Faustus's last 
 scene are awfully marked by the hours and half hours as ihey 
 expire, and bring him nearer and nearer to the exactment of 
 his dire compact. It is indeed an agony and a fearful col- 
 luetation. Marlowe is said to have been tainted with atheist- 
 ical positions, to have denied CJod and the Trinity. To such 
 a genius tin; history of Faustus must have been delectable 
 Food : to wander in the fields where curiosity is forbidden to 
 go, to approach the dark gulf near enough to look in, to be 
 busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SUAKSPEARE. 367 
 
 oi the fruit that fell from the tree of knowledge.* Barabas 
 the Jew and Faustus the conjurer are offsprings of a mind 
 which ;it least delighted to dallv with interdicted subjects. 
 They both talk a language which a believer would have been 
 tender of putting into the mouth of a character, though but in 
 fiction. But the holiest minds have souk times not thought it 
 reprehensible to counterfeit impiety in the person of another, 
 to bring Vice upon the stage speaking her own dialect ; and, 
 themselves being armed with an unction of self-confident im- 
 punity, have not scrupled to handle and touch that familiarly, 
 which would be death to others. Milton in the person of 
 Satan has started speculations hardier than any which the 
 feeble armory of the atheist ever furnished -, and the precise, 
 straight-laced Richardson has strengthened Vice, from the 
 mouth of Lovelace, with entangling sophistries and abstruse 
 pleas against her adversary Virtue, which Sedley, Villiers, and 
 Rochester wanted depth of libertinism enough to have in- 
 vented. 
 
 THOMAS DECKER. 
 
 Old Fortwiatus. — The humour of a frantic lover in the 
 scene where Orleans to his friend Galloway defends the pas- 
 sion with which himself, being a prisoner in the English king's 
 court, is enamoured to phrensy of the king's daughter Agri- 
 pyna, is done to the life. Orleans is as passionate an inamo- 
 rato as any which Shakspeare ever drew. He is just such 
 another adept in Love's reasons. The sober people of the 
 world are with him, 
 
 " A swarm of fools 
 Crowding together to be counted wise." 
 
 He talks ' ; pure Biron and Romeo." he is almost as poetical 
 as they, quite as philosophical, only a little madder. After all, 
 Love's secretaries are a reason unto themselves. We have 
 gone retrograde to the noble heresy, since the days when Sid- 
 ney proselyted our nation to this mixed health and disease ; 
 the kindliest symptom, yet the most alarming crisis in the 
 ticklish state of youth ; the nourisher and the destroyer of 
 hopeful wits ; the mother of twin births, wisdom and folly, 
 valour and weakness ; the servitude above freedom ; the gen- 
 tle mind's religion ; the liberal superstition. 
 
 The Honest Whore. — There is in the second part of this 
 
 * "Error, entering into the world with sin among us poor Adamites, may 
 be said to spring from the tree of knowledge itself, and from the rotten kernels 
 of that fatal apple." — Howell's Letters.
 
 368 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS 
 
 play, where Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of 
 the miseries of her profession, a simple picture of honour and 
 shame, contrasted without violence, and expressed without 
 immodesty, which is worth all the strong lines against the har- 
 lot's profession, with which both parts of this play are offen- 
 sively crowded. A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to 
 make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest cir- 
 cumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective fondness. 
 But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, 
 that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best 
 declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions 
 Avhich, in his unregenerate state, served but to inflame his ap- 
 petites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him, a 
 little turned, to expose the enormity of those appetites in other 
 men. When Cervantes with such proficiency of fondness 
 dwells upon the don's library, who sees not that he has been 
 a great reader of books of knight-errantry — perhaps was at 
 some time of his life in danger of falling into those very ex- 
 travagances which he ridiculed so happily in his hero ? 
 
 JOHN MARSTON. 
 
 Antonio and Mcllida. — The situation of Andrugio and Lu- 
 cio, in the first part of this tragedy, where Andrugio, duke of 
 Genoa, banished his country, with the loss of a son supposed 
 drowned, is cast upon the territory of his mortal enemy, the 
 Duke of Venice, with no attendants but Lucio, an old noble- 
 man, and a page — resembles that of Lear and Kent, in that 
 king's distresses. Andrugio, like Lear, manifests a king-like 
 impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected resignation. 
 The enemies which he enters lists to combat, " Despair, and 
 mighty Grief, and sharp Impatience," and the forces which he 
 brings to vanquish them, " cornets of horse," Sic, are in the 
 boldest style of allegory. They are such a " race of mourn- 
 ers" as the " infection of sorrows loud" in the intellect might 
 beget on some " pregnant cloud" in the imagination. The 
 prologue to the second part, for its passionate earnestness, and 
 for the tragic note of preparation which it sounds, might have 
 preceded one of those old tales of Thebes or Pelop's line, 
 which Milton has so highly commended, as free from the com- 
 mon error of the poets in his day, of" intermixing comic stuff 
 with tragic sadness and gravity, brought in without discretion 
 corruptly to gratify the people." It is as solemn a preparative 
 as the " warning voice which he who saw the Apocalypse 
 heard cry." 
 
 What You Will. — Oh, I shaU ?ie , er forget how he went
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 3(39 
 
 clothed. Act 1, scene 1. — To judge of the liberality of these 
 notions of dress, we must advert to the days of Clresham, and 
 i lie consternation which a phenomenon habited like the mer- 
 chant here described would have excited among the flat round 
 caps and cloth stockings upon change, when those "original 
 arguments or tokens of a citizen's vocation were in fashion, 
 not more for thrift and usefulness than for distinction and 
 grace." The blank uniformity to which all professional dis- 
 tinctions in apparel have been long hastening, is one instance 
 of the decay of symbols among us, which, whether it has 
 contributed or not to make us a more intellectual, has cer- 
 tainly made us a less imaginative people. Shakspeare knew 
 the force of signs : a " malignant and a turban'd Turk.*' 
 This " meal-cap miller," says the author of God's Revenge 
 against .Murder, to express his indignation at an atrocious 
 outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon the person of 
 the fair Marieta. 
 
 AUTHOR UNKNOWN. 
 
 The Merry Devil of Edmonton. — The scene in this delight- 
 ful comedy, in which Jerningham, " with the true feeling of a 
 zealous friend," touches the griefs of Mounchensey, seems 
 written to make the reader happy. Few of our dramatists or 
 novelists have attended enough to this. They torture and 
 wound us abundantly. They are economists only in delight. 
 Nothing can be finer, more gentleman-like, and nobler, than 
 the conversation and compliments of these young men. How 
 delicious is Raymond Mounchensey's forgetting, in his fears, 
 that Jerningham has a "Saint in Essex;" and how sweetly 
 his friend reminds him ! I wish it could be ascertained, 
 which there is some grounds for believing, that Michael 
 Drayton was the author of this piece. It would add a worthy 
 appendage to the renown of that panegyrist of my native 
 earth ; who has gone over her soil, in his Polyolbion, with 
 the fidelity of a herald and the painful love of a son ; who 
 has not left a rivulet, so narrow that it may be stepped over, 
 without honourable mention ; and has animated hills and 
 streams with life and passion beyond the dreams of old my- 
 thology. 
 
 THOMAS HEYWOOD. 
 
 -4. Woman Killed with Kindness. — Heywood is a sort of 
 prose Shakspeafe. His scenes are to the full as natural and 
 affecting. Hut we miss the puct, that which in Shakspeare
 
 370 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS 
 
 always appears out and above the surface of the nature. 
 Heywood'g characters, in this play, for instance, his country 
 gentlemen, &c, are exactly what we see, but of the best 
 kind of what we see in life. Shakspeare makes us believe, 
 while we are among his lovely creations, that they are no- 
 thing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things 
 seem old ; but we awake, and sigh for the difference. 
 
 The English Traveller. — Heywood's preface to this play 
 is interesting, as it shows the heroic indifference about the 
 opinion of posterity which some of these great writers seem 
 to have felt. There is a magnanimity in authorship as in 
 everything else. His ambition seems to have been confined 
 to the pleasure of hearing the players speak his lines while 
 he lived. It does not appear that he ever contemplated the 
 possibility of being read by after ages. What a slender pit- 
 tance of fame was motive sufficient to the production of such 
 plays as the English Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, 
 and the Woman Killed with Kindness ! Posterity is bound 
 to take care that a writer loses nothing by such a noble 
 modesty. 
 
 THOMAS MIDDLETON AND WILLIAM ROWLEY. 
 
 A Fair Quarrel. — The insipid levelling morality to which 
 the modern stage is tied down, would not admit of such ad- 
 mirable passions as these scenes are filled with. A Puritani- 
 cal obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is 
 creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions, and 
 virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists 
 present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern 
 in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of men, a 
 beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the ever- 
 lastingly inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. 
 With us, all is hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation- 
 scene, be the occasion never so absurd, never fails of ap- 
 plause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be compli- 
 mented on their goodness. They compare notes with the 
 amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful sympathy 
 of disposition between them. We have a common stock of 
 dramatic morality, out of which a writer may he supplied 
 without the trouble of copying it from originals within his 
 own breast. To know the boundaries of honour, to be ju- 
 diciously valiant, to have a temperance which shall beget a 
 smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to esteem life as 
 nothing When the sacred reputation of a parent is to he defend- 
 ed, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 371 
 
 that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and tot- 
 tering, to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that 
 sword which the imaginary strokes of a supposed false im- 
 putation had put so keen an edge upon but lately : to do or 
 to imagine this done in a feigned story, asks something more 
 of a moral sense, somewhat a greater delicacy of perception 
 in questions of right and wrong, than goes to the writing of 
 two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of honour 
 as opposed to the laws of the land, or a commonplace against 
 duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer nowadays 
 in far better stead than Captain Agar and his conscientious 
 honour ; and he would be considered as a far better teacher 
 of morality than old Rowley or Middleton, if they were 
 living. 
 
 WILLIAM ROWLEY. 
 
 A New Wonder ; a Woman Never Vexed. — The old play- 
 writers are distinguished by an honest boldness of exhibition ; 
 they show everything without being ashamed. If a reverse 
 in fortune is to be exhibited, they fairly bring us to the pris- 
 on-grate and the alms-basket. A poor man on our stage is 
 always a gentleman ; he may be known by a peculiar neatness 
 of apparel, and by wearing black. Our delicacy, in fact, for- 
 bids the dramatizing of distress at all. It is never shown in 
 its essential properties ; it appears but as the adjunct of some 
 virtue, as something which is to be relieved, from the appro- 
 bation of which relief the spectators are to derive a certain 
 soothing of self-referred satisfaction. We turn away from the 
 real essences of things to hunt after their relative shadows, 
 moral duties ; whereas, if the truth of things were fairly 
 represented, the relative duties might be safely trusted to 
 themselves, and moral philosophy lose the name of a science. 
 
 THOMAS MIDDLETON. 
 
 The Witch. — Though some resemblance may be traced 
 between the charms in Macbeth and the incantations in this 
 play, which is supposed to have preceded it, this coincidence 
 will not detract much from the originality of Shakspeare. 
 His witches are distinguished from the witches oT Middleton 
 by essential differences. These are creatures to whom man 
 or woman, plotting some dire mischief, might resort for occa- 
 sional consultation. Those originate deeds of blood, and 
 begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their 
 3 first meet with Macbeth's he is spell-bound. That
 
 372 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS 
 
 meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fasci- 
 nation. The3e witches can hurt the body, those have power 
 over the soul. Hecate, in Middleton, has a son, a low buffoon : 
 the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor 
 seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anom- 
 alies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor 
 whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without 
 human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. 
 They come with thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy 
 m,usic. This is all we know of them. Except Hecate, 
 they have no names; which heightens their mysteriousness. 
 The names and some of the properties which the other 
 author has given to his hags excite smiles. The Weird Sis- 
 ters are serious things. Their presence cannot coexist with 
 mirth. But, in a lesser degree, the witches of Middleton are 
 fine creations. Their power, too, is, in some measure, over 
 the mind. They raise jars, jealousies, strifes, " like a thick 
 scurf" over life. 
 
 WILLIAM ROWLEY THOMAS DECKER JOHN FORD, &C 
 
 The Witch of "Edmonton. — Mother Sawyer, in this wild 
 play, differs from the hags of both Middleton and Shakspeare. 
 She is the plain traditional old woman witch of our ancestors ; 
 poor, deformed, and ignorant; the terror of villages, herself 
 amenable to a justice. That should be a hardy sheriff, with 
 the power of the county at his heels, that would lay hands 
 upon the Weird Sisters. They are of another jurisdiction. 
 But, upon the common and received opinion, the author (or 
 authors) have ingrafted strong fancy. There is something 
 frightfully earnest in her invocations to the familiar. 
 
 CYRIL TOURNEUR. 
 
 The Revenger's Tragedy. — The reality and life of the dia- 
 logue in which Vindici and Hippolito first tempt their mother, 
 and then threaten her with death for consenting to the dis- 
 honour of their sister, passes any scenical illusion I ever felt. 
 I never read it, but my cars tingle, and 1 feel a hot blush over- 
 spread my cheeks, as if I were presently about to proclaim 
 such malefactions of myself as the brothers here rebuke in 
 their unnatural parent, in words more keen and dagger-like 
 than those which Hamlet speaks to his mother. Such power 
 has the passion of shame truly personated, not. only to strike 
 guilty creatures unto the soul, but to " appal" even those that 
 are " free."
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SIIAKSPEARE. 373 
 
 JOHN WEBSTER. 
 
 The Duchess of ' Mulfy. — All the several parts of the dread- 
 ful apparatus with which the death of the duchess is ushered 
 in, the waxen images which counterfeit death, the wild mask 
 of madmen, the toinbmaker, the bellman, the living person's 
 dirge, the mortification by degrees — are not more remote from 
 the conceptions of ordinary vengeance, than the strange char- 
 acter of suffering which they seem to bring upon their victim 
 is out of the imagination of ordinary poets. As they are not 
 like inflictions of this life, so her language seems not of this 
 world. She has lived among horrors till she is become " na- 
 tive and endowed unto that element." She speaks the dialect 
 of despair ; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls 
 in bale. To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the 
 quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and 
 weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with 
 mortal instruments to take its last forfeit : this only a Web- 
 ster can do. Inferior geniuses may *' upon horror's head 
 horrors accumulate," but they cannot do this. They mistake 
 quantity for quality ; they " terrify babes with painted devils ;" 
 but they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors 
 want dignity, their afTrightments are without decorum. 
 
 The White Devil, or Vittoria Coromhona. — This white devil 
 of Italy sets off a bad cause so speciously, and pleads with 
 such an innocent-resembling boldness, that we seem to see 
 that matchless beauty of her face which inspires such gay 
 confidence into her, and are ready to expect, when she has 
 done her pleadings, that her very judges, her accusers, the 
 grave ambassadors who sit as spectators, and all the court, 
 will rise and make proffer to defend her in spite of the utmost 
 conviction of her guilt ; as the shepherds in Don Quixote 
 make profler to follow the beautiful shepherdess Marcela, 
 " without making any profit of her manifest resolution made 
 there in their hearing." 
 
 " So sweet and lovely does she make the shame. 
 Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, 
 Does spot the beauty of her budding name !" 
 
 I never saw anything like the funeral dirge in this play for 
 the death of Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdi- 
 nand of his drowned father, in the Tempest. As that is of the 
 water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have 
 that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into 
 the element which it contemplates. 
 
 Jn a note on the Spanish Tragedy in the Specimens, I have 
 32
 
 374 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS 
 
 said that there is nothing in the undoubted plays of Jonson 
 Avhich would authorize us to suppose that he could have sup- 
 plied the additions to Hieronymo. I suspected the agency 
 of some more potent spirit. I thought that Webster might 
 have furnished them. They seemed full of that wild, solemn, 
 preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in the Duchess 
 of Malfy. On second consideration, I think this a hasty crit- 
 icism. They are more like the overflowing griefs and talk- 
 ing distraction of Titus Andronicus. The sorrows of the 
 duchess set inward ; if she talks, it is little more than soliloquy 
 imitating conversation in a kind of bravery. 
 
 JOHN FORD. 
 
 The Broken Heart. — I do not know where to find, in any 
 play, a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising as 
 in this. This is, indeed, according to Milton, to describe high 
 passions and high actions. The fortitude of the Spartan boy, 
 who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without ex- 
 pressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration 
 of the spirit and exenteration of the inmost mind, which Ca- 
 lantha, with a holy violence against her nature, keeps closely 
 covered, till the last duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled. 
 Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the stake ; a little 
 bodily suffering. These torments 
 
 " On the purest spirits prey, 
 As on entrails, joints, and limbs, 
 With answerable pains, but more intense." 
 
 "What a noble thing is the soul in its strengths and in its weak 
 nesses ! Who would be less weak than Calantha ? Who 
 can be so strong? The expression of this transcendent scene 
 almost bears us in imagination to Calvary and the cross ; and 
 we seem to perceive some analogy between the scenical suf- 
 ferings which we are here contemplating and the real agonies 
 of that final completion to which we dare no more than hint a 
 reference. Ford was of the first order of poets. He sought 
 for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors, or visible images, 
 but directly where she has her full residence in the heart of 
 man ; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds. 
 There is a grandeur of the soul above mountains, seas, and 
 the (dements. Even in the poor, perverted reason of Giovanni 
 and Annabella, in the play* which stands at the head of the 
 modern collection of the works of this author, we discern 
 traces of that fiery particle, which, in the irregular starting 
 
 * 'Tis pi!y t>he is a whore.
 
 CONTEMPORARY - WITH SHAKSPEARE. 375 
 
 from out the road of beaten action, discovers something of a 
 right line even in obliquity, and shows hints of an trnproveable 
 greatness in the lowest descents and degradations of our nature. 
 
 FULKE OREVILLE, LORD BROOKE. 
 
 Alaham, Mustapha. — The two tragedies of Lord Brooke, 
 printed among his poems, might with more propriety have 
 been termed political treatises than plays. Their author has 
 strangely contrived to make passion, character, and interest of 
 the highest order subservient to the expression of state dog- 
 mas and mysteries. He is nine parts Machiavel and Tacitus, 
 for one part Sophocles or Seneca. In this writer's estimate 
 of the powers of the mind, the understanding must have held 
 a most tyrannical pre-eminence. Whether we look into his 
 plays, or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all 
 frozen and made rigid with intellect. The finest movements 
 of the human heart, the utmost grandeur of which the soul is 
 capable, are essentially comprised in the actions and speeches 
 of Caelica and Camena. Shakspeare, who seems to have had 
 a peculiar delight in contemplating womanly perfection, whom, 
 for his many sweet images of female excellence, all women 
 are in an especial manner bound to love, has not raised the 
 ideal of the female character higher than Lord Brooke, in 
 these two women, has done. But it requires a study equiva 
 lent to the learning of a new language to understand their 
 meaning when they speak. It is, indeed, hard to hit: 
 
 " Much like thy riddle, Samsnn, in one day 
 Or seven though one should musing sit." 
 
 It is as if a being of pure intellect should take upon him to 
 express the emotions of our sensitive natures. There would 
 be all knowledge, but sympathetic expressions, would be 
 wanting. 
 
 BEN JONSON. 
 
 The Case is Altered. — The passion for wealth has worn out 
 much of its grossness in tract of time. Our ancestors cer- 
 tainly conceived of money as able to confer a distinct gratifi- 
 cation in itself, not considered simply ;is a symbol of wealth. 
 The old poets, when they introduce a miser, make him address 
 his gold as his mistress ; as something to be seen, felt, and 
 hugged ; as capable of satisfying two of the senses at least. 
 The substitution of a thin, unsatisfying medium in the place 
 of the good old tangible metu!. has made avarice quite a Pla-
 
 376 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS 
 
 tonic affection in comparison with the seeing, touching, and 
 handling-pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A bank-note 
 can no more satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this pas- 
 sion, than Creusa could return her husband's embrace in the 
 shades. See the Cave of Mammon in Spencer; Barabas's 
 contemplation of his wealth in the Rich Jew of Malta ; Luke's 
 raptures in the City Madam ; the idolatry and absolute gold 
 worship of the miser Jaques in this early comic produc- 
 tion of Ben Jonson's. Above all, hear Guzman, in that ex- 
 cellent old translation of the Spanish Rogue, expatiate on the 
 " ruddy cheeks of your golden ruddocks, your Spanish pisto- 
 lets, your plump and full-faced Portuguese, and your clear- 
 skinned pieces of eight of Castile," which he and his fellows, 
 the beggars, kept secret to themselves, and did privately en- 
 joy in a plentiful manner. " For to have them, to pay them 
 away, is not to enjoy them ; to enjoy them is to have them 
 lying by us ; having no other need of them than to use them 
 for the clearing of the eyesight, and the comforting of our 
 senses. These we did carry about with us, sewing them in 
 some patches of our doublets near unto the heart, and as close 
 to the skin as we could handsomely quilt them in, holding them 
 to be restorative." 
 
 Poetaster. — This Roman play seems written to confute 
 those enemies of Ben in his own days and ours, who have 
 said that he made a pedantical use of his learning. He has 
 here revived the whole court of Augustus, by a learned spell. 
 We are admitted to the society of the illustrious dead. Vir- 
 gil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, converse in our own tongue more 
 finely and poetically than they were used to express them- 
 selves in their native Latin. Nothing can be imagined more 
 elegant, refined, and court-like than the scenes between this 
 Louis the Fourteenth of antiquity and his literati. The 
 whole essence and secret of that kind of intercourse is con- 
 tained therein. The economical liberality by which great- 
 ness, seeming to waive some part of its prerogative, takes care 
 to lose none of the essentials ; the prudential liberties of an 
 inferior, which flatter by commanded boldness and sooth with 
 complimentary sincerity. These, and a thousand beautiful 
 passages from his New Inn, his Cynthia's Revels, and from 
 those numerous court-masks and entertainments which he 
 was in the daily habit of furnishing, might be adduced to 
 show the poetical fancy and elegance of mind of the supposed 
 rugged old bard. 
 
 Alchymist. — The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed by the 
 torrfcnt of images, words, and book-knowledge with which 
 Epicure Mammon (act 2, scene 2) confounds and stuns his
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 377 
 
 incredulous hearer. They come pouring out like the succes- 
 sive falls of IS'ilus. They ''doubly redouble strokes upon the 
 foe." Description outstrides proof. We are made to believe 
 effects before we have testimony for their causes. If there 
 is no one image which attains the height of the sublime, yet 
 the confluence and assemblage of them all produces a result 
 equal to the grandest poetry. The huge Xer.van army coun- 
 tervails against single Achilles. Epicure Mammon is the 
 most determined offspring of its author. It has the whole 
 "matter and copy of the father — eye, nose, lip, the trick of 
 his frown." It is just such a swaggerer as contemporaries 
 have described old lien to be. Meercraft, Bobadil, the Host 
 of the New Inn, have all his image and Superscription, Hut 
 Mammon is arrogant pretension personified. Sir Samson Le- 
 gend, in Love for Love, is such another lying, overbearing 
 character, but he does not come up to Epicure Mammon. 
 What a " towering bravery" there is in his sensuality ! he af- 
 fects no pleasure under a sultan. It is as if " Egypt and As- 
 syria strove in luxury." 
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 Bussy (TAmbois, Byron's Conspiracy, Byron's Tragedy, 
 Sfc, <§c. — Webster has happily characterized the " full and 
 heightened style" of Chapman, who, of all the English play- 
 writers, perhaps approaches nearest to Shakspeare in the de- 
 scriptive and didactic, in passages which are less purely dra- 
 matic. He could not go out of himself, as Shakspeare could 
 shift at pleasure, to inform and animate other existences, but 
 in himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul to embrace 
 all forms and modes of being. He would have made a great 
 epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself 
 to be one ; for his Homer is not so properly a translation 
 as the stories of Achilles and Ulyssea rewritten. The earn- 
 estness and passion which he has put into every part of 
 these poems would be incredible to a reader of mere modem 
 translations. His almost Greek zeal for the glory of his he- 
 roes can only be paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew 
 bigotry with which Milton, as if personating one of the zealots 
 of the old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the 
 acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great obsta- 
 cle to Chapman's translations being read, is their unconquer- 
 able quaintness. He pours out in the same breath the most 
 just and natural, and the most violent and crude expressions. 
 He seems to grasp at whatever words come hrst to hand while 
 the enthusiasm is upon him, as if all other must be inadequate 
 82*
 
 378 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS 
 
 to the divine meaning. But passion (the all in all in poetry) 
 is everywhere present, raising the low, dignifying the mean, 
 and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers 
 glow, weep, tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be 
 moved by words, or, in spite of them, be disgusted and over 
 come their disgust. 
 
 FRANCIS BEAUMONT. — JOHN FLETCHER. 
 
 Maid's Tragedy. — One characteristic of the excellent old 
 poets is, their being able to bestow grace upon subjects which 
 naturally do not seem susceptible of any. I will mention two 
 instances. Zelmane in the Arcadia of Sidney, and Helena in 
 the All's Well that Ends Well of Shakspeare. What can be 
 more unpromising, at first sight, than the idea of a young man 
 disguising himself in woman's attire, and passing himself off 
 for a woman among women ; and that for a long space of time 1 
 Yet Sir Philip has preserved so matchless a decorum, that 
 neither does Pyrocles' manhood suffer any stain for the effemi- 
 nacy of Zelmane, nor is the respect due to the princesses at 
 all diminished when the deception comes to be known. In the 
 sweetly-constituted mind of Sir Philip Sidney, it seems as if 
 no ugly thought or unhandsome meditation could find a harbour. 
 He turned all that he touched into images of honour and virtue 
 Helena in Shakspeare is a young woman seeking a man in 
 marriage. The ordinary rules of courtship are reversed, the 
 habitual feelings are crossed. Yet with such exquisite address 
 this dangerous subject is handled, that Helena's forwardness 
 loses her no honour ; delicacy dispenses with its laws in her 
 favour, and nature, in her single case, seems content to suffer a 
 sweet violation. Aspatia, in the Maid's Tragedy, is a char- 
 acter equally difficult with Helena, of being managed with 
 grace. She too is a slighted woman, refused by the man who 
 had once engaged to marry her. Yet it is artfully contrived, 
 that while we pity we respect her, and she descends without 
 degradation. Such wonders true poetry and passion can do, 
 to confer dignity upon subjects which do not seem capable of 
 it. But Aspatia must not be compared at all points with Hel- 
 ena ; she does not so absolutely predominate over her situa- 
 tion but she suffers some diminution, some abatement of the 
 full lustre of the female character, which Helena never does. 
 Her character has many degrees of sweetness, some of deli- 
 cacy ; but it has weakness, which, if wc do not despise, we 
 are sorry for. After all, Beaumont and Fletcher were but an 
 inferior sort of Shakspeares and Sidneys. 
 
 Philastcr. — The character of Bellario must have been ex-
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SIIAKSPEARE. 379 
 
 tremely popular in its day. For many years after the date 
 of Phdaster's first exhibition on the stage, scarce a play can 
 be found without one of these women pages in it, following in 
 the train of some pre-engaged lover, calling on the gods to 
 bless her happy rival, (his mistress,) whom, no doubt, she 
 secretly curses in her heart, giving rise to many pretty ettft- 
 voques, by-the-way, on the confusion of sex, and either made 
 happy at last by some surprising turn of fate, or dismissed with 
 the joint pity of the lovers and the audience. Donne has a 
 copy of verses to his mistress, dissuading her from a resolu- 
 tion which she seems to have taken up from some of these 
 scenical representations, of following him abroad as a page 
 It is so earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in sense, in wit, 
 and pathos, that it deserves to be read as a solemn close in 
 future to all such sickly fancies as he there deprecates. 
 
 JOHN FLETCHER. ■ 
 
 Thierry and Theodoret. — The scene where Ordella offers 
 her life a sacrifice, that the King of France may not be child- 
 less, I have always considered as the finest in all Fletcher, 
 and Ordella to be the most perfect notion of the female heroic 
 character, next to Calantha in the Broken Heart. She is a 
 piece of sainted nature. Yet, noble as the whole passage is, 
 it must be confessed that the manner of it, compared with 
 Shakspeare's finest scenes, is faint and languid. Its motion is 
 circular, not progressive. Each line revolves on itself in a 
 sort of separate orbit. They do not join into one another like 
 a running-hand. Fletcher's ideas moved slow ; his versifica- 
 tion, though sweet, is tedious, it stops at every turn ; he lays 
 line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image 
 to image so deliberately, that we see their junctures. Shaks- 
 peare mingles everything, runs line into line, embarrasses sen- 
 tences and metaphors ; before one idea has burst its shell, an- 
 other is hatched and clamorous for disclosure. Another striking 
 difference between Fletcher and Shakspeare, is the fondness of 
 the former for unnatural and violent situations. He seems to 
 have thought that nothing great could be produced in an ordinary 
 way. The chief incidents in some of his most admired trage- 
 dies show this.* Shakspeare had nothing of this eontortion in 
 his mind, none of that craving after violent situations, and 
 flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I think always 
 betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The wit of Fletcher 
 
 * Wifc tor a Month, Cupid's Revenge, Double Marriage, &c.
 
 3S0 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS. 
 
 is excellent* like his serious scenes, but there is something 
 strained and far-fetched in both. He is too mistrustful of Na- 
 ture, he always goes a little on one side of her. Shakspeare 
 chose her without a reserve : and had riches, power, under- 
 standing, and length of days with her for a dowry. 
 
 Faithful Shepherdess. — If all the parts of this delightful pas- 
 toral had been in unison with its many innocent scenes and 
 sweet lyric intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with 
 Comus or the Arcadia, to have been put into the hands of boys 
 and virgins, to have made matter for young dreams, like the 
 loves of Hermia and Lysander. But a spot is on the face of 
 this Diana. Nothing short of infatuation could have driven 
 Fletcher upon mixing with this " blessedness" such an ugly 
 deformity as Cloe, the wanton shepherdess ! If Cloe was 
 meant to set off Clorin by contrast, Fletcher should have 
 known that such weeds by juxtaposition do not set off, but kill 
 sweet flowers. 
 
 « 
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER. THOMAS DECKER. 
 
 The Virgin Martyr. — This play has some beauties of so 
 very high an order, that, with all my respect for Massinger, 
 I do not think he had poetical enthusiasm capable of rising up 
 to them. His associate, Decker, who wrote Old Fortunatus, 
 had poetry enough for anything. The very impurities which 
 obtrude themselves among the sweet pieties of this play, like 
 Satan among the Sons of Heaven, have a strength of contrast, 
 a raciness, and a glow in them, which are beyond Massinger. 
 They are to the religion of the rest what Caliban is to Mi- 
 randa. 
 
 PHILIP MASSINCfER. THOMAS MIDDLETON. — WILLIAM ROWLEY. 
 
 Old Laiv. — There is an exquisiteness of moral sensibility, 
 making one's eyes to gush out tears of delight, and a poetical 
 strangeness in the circumstances of this sweet tragi-comedy, 
 which are unlike anything in the dramas which Massinger 
 wrote alone. The pathos is of a subtle edge. Middleton 
 and Rowley, who assisted in it, had both of them finer geni- 
 uses than their associate. 
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY. 
 
 Claims a place among the worthies of this period, not so 
 much for any transcendent talent in himself, as that he was 
 
 * Wit without Money, and his comedies generally.
 
 SPECIMENS FROM FULLERS WRITINGS. 381 
 
 the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same 
 language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in com- 
 mon. A new language, and quite a new turn of tragic and 
 comic interest, came in wilh the restoration. 
 
 SPECIMENS FROM THE WRITINGS OF FULLER, 
 
 THE CHURCH HISTORIAN. 
 
 The writings of Fuller are usually designated hy the title 
 of quaint, and with sufficient reason ; for such was his natu- 
 ral bias to conceits, that I doubt not upon most occasions it 
 would have been going out of his way to have expressed him- 
 self out of them. But his wit is not always a lumen siccum, a 
 dry faculty of surprising ; on the contrary, his conceits are 
 oftentimes deeply steeped in human feeling and passion. 
 Above all, his way of telling a story, for its eager liveliness, 
 and the perpetual running commentary of the narrator happily 
 blended with the narration, is perhaps unequalled. 
 
 As his works are now scarcely perused but by antiquaries, 
 I thought it might not be unacceptable to my readers to pre- 
 sent tbem with some specimens of his manner, in single 
 thoughts and phrases, and in some few passages of greater 
 length, chiefly of a narrative description. I shall arrange them 
 as I casually find them in my book of extracts, without being 
 solicitous to specify the particular work from which they are 
 taken. 
 
 Pyramids. — " The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, 
 have forgotten the names of their founders." 
 
 Virtue in a short person. — " His soul had but a short diocese 
 to visit, and therefore might the better attend the effectual in- 
 forming thereof." 
 
 Intellect in a very tall one. — " Ofttimes such w r ho are built 
 four stories high, are observed to have little in their cock- 
 loft." 
 
 Naturals. — " Their heads sometimes so little, that there is 
 no room for wit ; sometimes so long, that there is no wit for 
 so much room." 
 
 Negro*s. — " The image of God cut in ebony." 
 
 School-divinity. — " At the first it will be as welcome to 
 thee as a prison, and their very solutions will seem knots un- 
 to thee."
 
 382 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 
 
 Mr. Perkins the divine. — " He had a capacious head, with 
 angles winding and roomy enough to lodge all controversial 
 intricacies." 
 
 The same. — " He would pronounce the word damn with 
 such an emphasis as left a doleful echo in his auditors' ears a 
 good while after." 
 
 Judges in capital cases. — " Oh let him take heed how he 
 strikes, that hath a dead hand." 
 
 Memory. — " Philosophers place it in the rear of the head, 
 and it seems the mine of memory lies there, because there 
 men naturally dig for it, scratching it when they are at a loss." 
 
 Fancy. — " It is the most boundless and restless faculty of 
 the soul ; for while the understanding and the will are kept, 
 as it were, in libera custodia to their objects of verum et bonum, 
 the fancy is free from all engagements : it digs without spade, 
 sails without ship, flies without wings, builds without charges, 
 fights without bloodshed : in a moment striding from the cen- 
 tre to the circumference of the world ; by a kind of omnipotency 
 creating and annihilating things in an instant; and things di- 
 vorced in Nature are married in fancy as in a lawless 
 place." 
 
 Infants. — " Some, admiring what motives to mirth infants 
 meet with in their silent and solitary smiles, have resolved, 
 how truly I know not, that then they converse with angels ; 
 as, indeed, such cannot among mortals find any fitter com- 
 panions." 
 
 Music. — " Such is the sociableness of music, it conforms 
 itself to all companies, both in mirth and mourning; comply- 
 ing to improve that passion with which it finds the auditors 
 most affected. In a word, it is an invention which might 
 have beseemed a son of Seth to have been the father thereof: 
 though better it was that Cain's great grandchild should have 
 the credit first to find it, than the world the unhappiness long- 
 er to have wanted it." 
 
 St. Monica. — " Drawing near her death, she sent most 
 pious thoughts as harbingers to heaven, and her soul saw a 
 glimpse of happiness through the chinks of her sickness- 
 broken body."* 
 
 Mortality. — " To smell to a turf of fresh earth is whole- 
 some for the body, no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to 
 the soul." 
 
 Virgin. — " No lordling husband shall at the same time 
 command her presence and distance ; to be always near in 
 
 * " The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd, 
 
 Lets in new lights through chinks which time has made.*' 
 
 Waller.
 
 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER S WRITINGS. 383 
 
 constant attendance, and always to stand aloof in awful ob- 
 servance." 
 
 Elder brother. — " Is one who made haste to come into the 
 ■world to bring bis parents the first news of male posterity, 
 and is well rewarded for his tidings." 
 
 Bishop Fletcher. — " His pride was rather on him than in 
 him, as only gait and gesture deep, not sinking to his heart, 
 though causelessly condemned for a proud man, as who was 
 a good hypocrite, and far more humble than he appeared." 
 
 Blasters of colleges. — "A little allay of dulness in a master 
 of a college makes him fitter to manage secular affairs." 
 
 The good yeoman. — " Is a gentleman in ore, whom the 
 next age may see refined." 
 
 Good parent. — " For his love, therein, like a well-drawn 
 picture, he eyes all his children alike."' 
 
 Deformity in children. — " This partiality is tyranny, when 
 parents despise those that are deformed ; enough to break 
 those whom God had bowed before." 
 
 Good master. — " In correcting his servant he becomes not 
 a slave to his own passion. Not cruelly making new inden- 
 tures of the flesh of his apprentice. He is tender of his 
 servant in sickness and age. If crippled in his service, his 
 house is his hospital. Yet how many throw away those dry 
 bones, out of the which themselves have sucked the mar- 
 row ! 
 
 Good widow. — "If she can speak but little good of him, 
 [her dead husband,] she speaks but little of him. So hand- 
 somely folding up her discourse, that his virtues are shown 
 outward, and his vices wrapped up in silence; as counting it 
 barbarism to throw dirt on his memory who hath mould cast 
 on his body." 
 
 Harses. — "These are men's wings, wherewith they make 
 such speed. A generous creature a horse is, sensible in some 
 sort of honour ; and made most handsome by that which de- 
 forms men most — pride." 
 
 Martyrdom. — " Heart of oak hath sometimes warped a little 
 in the scorching heat of persecution. Their want of true 
 courage herein cannot be excused. Yet many censure them 
 for surrendering up their forts after a long siege, who would 
 have yielded up their own at the first summons. Oh ! there 
 is more required to make one valiant, than to call Cranmer or 
 Jewel coward; as if the fire in Smithfield had been no 
 hotter than what is painted in the Book of .Martyrs." 
 
 Text of St. Paul. — "St. Paul saith, let not the sun go 
 down on your wrath, to carry news to the antipodes in another 
 world of thy revengeful nature. Yet let us take the Apostle's
 
 384 SPECIMENS FROM FTJLLEIi's WRITINGS. 
 
 meaning rather than his words, with all possible speed to 
 depose our passion ; not understanding him so literally that 
 we may take leave to be angry till sunset : then might our 
 wrath lengthen with the days ; and men in Greenland, where 
 the day lasts above a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope 
 for revenge."* 
 
 Bishop Brownrig. — "He carried learning enough in nu- 
 merato about him in his pockets for any discourse, and had 
 much more at home in his chests for any serious dispute." 
 
 Modest want. — " Those that with diligence fight against 
 poverty, though neither conquer till death makes it a drawn 
 battle, expect not, but prevent their craving of thee : for God 
 forbid the heavens should never rain, till the earth first opens 
 her mouth ; seeing some grounds will sooner burn than chap." 
 
 Deathbed temptations. — " The devil is most busy on the 
 last day of his term ; and a tenant to be outed cares not what 
 mischief he doth." 
 
 Conversation. — " Seeing we are civilized Englishmen, let us 
 not be naked savages in our talk." 
 
 Wounded soldier. — " Halting is the stateliest march of a 
 soldier ; and 'tis a brave sight to see the flesh of an ancient as 
 torn as his colours." 
 
 Wat Tyler. — " A misogrammatist ; if a good Greek word 
 may be given to so barbarous a rebel." 
 
 Heralds. — "Heralds new mould men's names — taking from 
 them, adding to them, melting out all the liquid letters, tor- 
 turing mutes to make them speak, and making vowels dumb — 
 to bring it to a fallacious homonomy at the last, that their names 
 may be the same with those noble houses they pretend to." 
 
 Antiquarian diligence. — " It is most worthy observation, 
 with what diligence he [Camden] inquired after ancient 
 places, making hue and cry after many a city which was rim 
 away, and by certain marks and tokens pursuing to find it ; as 
 by the situation on the Roman highways, by just distance 
 from other ancient cities, by some affinity of name, by tradi- 
 tion of the inhabitants, by Roman coins digged up, and by 
 some appearance of ruins. A broken urn is a whole evi- 
 dence ; or an old gate still surviving, out of which the city is 
 run out. Besides, commonly some new spruce town not far off 
 is grown out of the ashes thereof, which yet hath so much 
 
 * This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one would have 
 thought of deducing — setting up an absurdam on purpose to hunt it down — 
 placing guards as it were at the very outposts of possibility — gravely giving 
 out laws to insanity, and prescribing moral fences to distempered intellects, 
 could never have entered into a head less entertainingly constructed than that 
 of Fuller or Sir Thomas Hrowne, the very air of whose style the conclusion 
 of this passage most aptly imitates.
 
 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER S WRITINGS. 385 
 
 natural affection as dutifully to own those reverend ruins for 
 her mother.'' 
 
 Hercry de Essex, — " He is too well known in our English 
 chronicles, being Baron of Raleigh in Essex, and hereditary 
 standard-bearer of England. It happened in the reign of this 
 king [Henry II.] there was a fierce battle fought in Flintshire, 
 at Coleshall, between the English and Welsh, wherein this 
 Henry de Essex animum et signum simul abjecit, between 
 traitor and coward, cast away both his courage and banner 
 together, occasioning a great overthrow of English. But he 
 that had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny the 
 doing of so foul a fact ; until he was challenged in combat by 
 Robert de Momford, a knight, eyewitness thereof, and by him 
 overcome in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance was 
 confiscated to the king, and he himself, partly thrust, partly 
 going into a convent, hid his head in a cowl, under tohich, be- 
 tween shame and sanctiti/, he blushed out the remainder of his 
 life.''''* — Worthies. Article, Bedfordshire. 
 
 Sir Edward Harwood, Knight. — " I have read of a bird 
 which hath a face like, and yet will prey upon a man ; who, 
 coming to the water to drink, and finding there by reflection 
 that he had killed one like himself, pineth away by degrees, 
 and never afterward eiijoyeth itself.t Such is in some sort 
 the condition of Sir Edward. This accident, that he had killed 
 one in a private quarrel, put a period to his carnal mirth, and 
 was a covering to his eyes all the days of his life. No pos- 
 
 * The fine imagination of Fuller has done what might have been pro- 
 nounced impossible : it has given an interest, and a holy character, to coward 
 infamy- Nothing can be more beautiful than the concluding account of the 
 last days, and expiatory retirement, of poor Henry de Essex. The address with 
 which the whole of this little story is told is most consummate ; the charm 
 of it seems to consist m a perpetual balance of antitheses not too violently op- 
 posed, and the consequent activity of mind in which the reader is kept : — 
 " Between traitor and coward" — " baseness todo, boldness to deny" — "partly 
 thrust, partly going into a convent" — "between shame and sanctity." The 
 reader by this artifice is taken into a kind of partnership with the writer— his 
 judgment is exercised in settling the preponderance — he feels as if he were 
 consulted as to the issue. But the modern historian flings at once the dead 
 weight of his own judgment into the scale, and settles the matter. 
 
 t I do not know where Fuller read of this bird ; but a more awful and af- 
 fecting story, and moralizing of a story, in natural history, or rather in that 
 fabulous natural history, where poets and mycologists found the pli 
 and the unicorn, and "other strange fowl," is nowhere extant. It is a table 
 which Sir Thomas Browne, if he had heard of it, would have exploded among 
 his Vulgar Errors ; but the delight which he would have taken in the dis- 
 cussing of its probabilities would have shown that the truth oftbzfact, though 
 the avowed object of his search was not so much the motive which put lnm 
 upon the investigation, as those hidden affinities and poetical analogies — 
 those essential verities, in the application of strange fable, which made him linger 
 with such reluctant delay among the last fading lights of popular tradition ; 
 and not seldom to conjure up a superstition, that had been long extinct, (rem 
 its dusty grave, to inter it himself with greater ceremonies and solemnities 
 of burial 
 
 33
 
 386 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER S WRITINGS. 
 
 sible provocations could afterward tempt him to a duel ; and 
 no wonder that one's conscience loathed that whereof he 
 had surfeited. He refused all challenges with more honour 
 than others accepted them ; it being well known, that he 
 would set his foot as far in the face of his enemy as any man 
 alive. — Worthies. Art. Lincolnshire. 
 
 Decayed gentry. — " It happened in the reign of King James, 
 when Henry, earl of Huntingdon, was lieutenant of Leicester- 
 shire, that a labourer's son in that county was pressed into the 
 wars ; as I take it, to go over with Count Mansfield. The old 
 man at Leicester requested his son might be discharged, as 
 being the only staff of his age, who by his industry maintained 
 him and his mother. The earl demanded his name, which 
 the man for a long time was loath to tell ; (as suspecting it a 
 fault for so poor a man to confess the truth ;) at last he told 
 his name was Hastings. " Cousin Hastings," said the earl, 
 " we cannot all be top branches of the tree, though we all 
 spring from the same root; your son, my kinsman, shall not 
 be pressed." So good was the meeting of modesty -in a poor, 
 with courtesy in an honourable person, and gentry, I believe, 
 in both. And I have reason to believe, that some who justly 
 own the surnames and blood of Bohuns, Mortimers, and Plan- 
 tagenets, (though ignorant of their own extractions,) are hid 
 in the heap of common people, where they find that under a 
 thatched cottage which some of their ancestors could not en- 
 joy in a leaded castle — contentment, with quiet and security." 
 — Worthies. Art. Of Shire-Reeves or Shiriffes. 
 
 Tenderness of conscience in a tradesman. — " Thomas Cur- 
 son, born in Allhallows, Lombard-street, armorer, dwelt with- 
 out Bishopsgate. It happened that a stage-player borrowed 
 a rusty musket, which had lain long leger in his shop : now 
 though his part were comical, he therewith acted nnex- 
 pected tragedy, killing one of the standers-by, the gun casu- 
 ally going off on the stage, which he suspected not to be 
 charged. Oh the difference of divers men in the tenderness 
 of their consciences ! some are scarce touched with a wound, 
 while others are wounded with a touch therein. This poor 
 armorer was highly afflicted therewith, though done against 
 his will, yea, without his knowledge, in his absence, by anoth- 
 er, out of mere chance. Hereupon he resolved to give all his 
 estate to pious uses : no sooner had he gotten a round sum, 
 but presently he posted with it in his apron to. the court of al- 
 dermen, and was in pain till by their direction he had settled 
 it for the relief of poor in his own and other parishes, and 
 disposed of some hundreds of pounds accordingly, as I am 
 credibly informed by the then churchwardens of the said par-
 
 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 387 
 
 ish. Tims, as he conceived himself casually (though at a 
 great distance) to have occasioned the death of one, hu was 
 tlie immediate and direct cause of giving a comfortable living 
 to many." 
 
 Burning of Wickliffes body bu order of the council of Con- 
 stance. — " Hitherto [A. D. 1428] the corpse of John Wick- 
 lifle had quietly slept in his grave about forty-one years after 
 his death, till his body was reduced to Bones, and his bones 
 almost to dust. For though the earth in the chancel of Lut- 
 terworth, in Leicestershire, where he was interred, hath not 
 so quick a digestion with the earth of Aceldama, to consume 
 flesh in twenty-four hours, yet such the appetite thereof, and 
 all other English graves, to leave small reversions of a body 
 after so many years. But now such the spleen of the coun- 
 cil of Constance, as they not only cursed his memory as dy- 
 ing an obstinate heretic, but ordered that his bones (with this 
 charitable caution, if it may be discerned from the bodies of 
 other faithful people) be taken out of the ground, and thrown 
 far off* (rom any Christian burial. In obedience hereunto, 
 Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln, diocesan of Lutter- 
 worth, sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight scent at 
 a dead carcass") to ungrave him. Accordingly, to Lutterworth 
 they come, simmer, commissary, official, chancellor, proctors, 
 doctors, and their servants, (so that the remnant of the body 
 would not hold out a bone among so many hands,) take what was 
 left out of the grave, and burnt them to ashes, and cast them 
 into Swift, a neighbouring brook running hard by. Thus this 
 brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, 
 Severn into the narrow seas, then into the main ocean ; and 
 thus the ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of his docline, which 
 now is dispersed all the world over."* — Church History. 
 
 * The concluding period of this most lively narrative 1 will not call a con- 
 ceit: it is one of the grandest conceptions I ever met with. One feels the 
 ashes of Wfcklifia gliding away out of the reach of the sumners, commissa- 
 ries, officials, proctors, doctors, and all the puddering rout of executioners of 
 the impotent rage of the baffled council : from Swift into Avon, from Avon in- 
 to Severn, from Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the 
 main ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, " dispersed all 
 the world over." Hamlet's tracing the body of Cesar to the clay that stops a 
 beer-barrel, is a no less curious pursuit of "ruined mortality ;" but it is in an 
 inverse ratio to this : it degrades and saddens us, for one part of our nature at 
 least ; but this expands the whole of our nature, and gives to the body a sort 
 of ubiquity — a diffusion, as far as the actions of its partner can have reach 
 or influence. 
 
 I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit of old 
 Fuller. But what is not a conceit to those who rend it in a tadfper different 
 from that in which the writer composed it? The most pathetic p:\rts of 
 poetry to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as divinity was to the Greeks 
 foolishness. When Richard II., meditating on his own utter annihilation as 
 to royalty, cries out— 
 
 R2
 
 388 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH; 
 
 WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IX THE WRITINGS OF 
 THE LATE MR. BARRY. 
 
 One of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a 
 boy, was in the contemplation of those capital prints by Ho- 
 garth, the Harlot's and Rake's Progresses, which, along with 
 some others, hung upon the walls of a great hall in an old- 
 fashioned house in shire, and seemed the solitary tenants 
 
 (with myself) of that antiquated and life-deserted apartment. 
 
 Recollection of the manner in which those prints used to 
 affect me, has often made me wonder, when I have heard Ho- 
 garth described as a mere comic painter, as one of those 
 whose chief ambition was to raise a lavgh. To deny that 
 there are throughout the prints which 1 have mentioned cir- 
 cumstances introduced of a laughable tendency, would be to 
 run counter to the common notions of mankind ; but to sup- 
 pose that in their ruling character they appeal chiefly to the 
 risible faculty, and not first and foremost to the very heart of 
 its best and most serious feelings, would be to mistake no 
 less grossly their aim and purpose. A set of severer satires 
 (for they are not so much comedies, which they have been 
 likened to, as they are strong and masculine satires) less 
 mingled with anything of mere fun were never written upon 
 paper or graven upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, or 
 the satiric touches in Timon of Athens. 
 
 I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who, being 
 asked which book he esteemed most in his library, answered 
 — " Shakspeare :" being asked which he esteemed next best, 
 replied — " Hogarth." His graphic representations are indeed 
 books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning 
 of words. Other pictures we look at — his prints we read. 
 
 In pursuance of this parallel, I have sometimes entertained 
 myself with comparing the Timon of Athens of Shakspeare 
 
 " Oh that I were a mockery king of snow, 
 To melt before the sun of Bolinghroke," 
 
 if we have been going on pace for pace with the passion before, this sudden 
 conversion of a strong-felt metaphor into something to be actually realized in 
 nature, like that of Jeremiah, "Oh ! that my head were waters, and mine 
 eyes a fountain of tears," is strictly and strikingly natural ; but come un- 
 prepared upon it, and it is a conceit : and so is a " head" turned into " wa- 
 ters."
 
 ON THIS GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 3&9 
 
 (which I have just mentioned) and Hogarth's Rake's Progress 
 together. The story, the moral in both is nearly the same. 
 The wild course of riot and extravagance, ending in the ono 
 with driving the prodigal from the society of men into the 
 solitude of the deserts, and in the other with conducting the 
 rake through his several stages of dissipation into the still 
 more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the play and 
 in the picture are described with almost equal force and na- 
 ture. The levee of the rake, which forms the subject of the 
 second plate in the series, is almost a transcript of Timon's 
 levee in the opening scene of that play. We find a dedica- 
 ting poet, and other similar characters, in both. 
 
 The concluding scene in the Rake's Progress is perhaps 
 superior to the last scenes of Timon. If we seek for some- 
 thing of kindred excellence in poetry, it must be in the scenes 
 of Lear's beginning madness, where the king, and the fool, 
 and the Tom-o'-Bcdlam conspire to produce such a medley 
 of mirth checked by misery, and misery rebuked by mirth ; 
 where the society of those " strange bedfellows" which mis- 
 fortunes have brought Lear acquainted with, so finely sets 
 forth the destitute state of the monarch, while the lunatic 
 bans of the one, and the disjointed sayings and wild but preg- 
 nant illusions of the other, so wonderfully sympathize with 
 that confusion, which they seem to assist in the production 
 of, in the senses of that "child-changed father." 
 
 In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Rake's Prog- 
 ress, we find the same assortment of the ludicrous with the 
 terrible. Here is desperate madness, the overturning of orig- 
 inally strong thinking faculties, at which we shudder, as we 
 contemplate the duration and pressure of affliction which it 
 must have asked to destroy such a building; and here is the 
 gradual hurtless lapse into idiocy, of faculties, which, at their 
 best of times, never having been strong, we look upon the 
 consummation of their decay with no more of pity than is 
 consistent with a smile. The mad tailor, the poor driveller 
 that has gone out of his wits (and truly he appears to have 
 had no great journey to go to get past their confines) for the 
 love of Charming Betty Careless — these half-laughable, scarce- 
 pit iable objects take off from the horror which the principal 
 figure would of itself raise, at the same time that they assist 
 the feeling of the scene by contributing to the general notion 
 of its subject: — 
 
 '• Madness, thou chaos of the brain, 
 What art, that pleasure giv'st, and pain ? 
 Tyranny of Fancy's reign ! 
 Mechanic Fancy, that can build 
 Vast labyrinths and mazes wild, 
 33*
 
 290 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 With rule disjointed, shapeless measure 
 Fiil'd with horror, rill'd with pleasure ! 
 Shapes of horror, that would even 
 Cast doubts of mercy upon heaven. 
 Shapes of pleasure, that but seen, 
 Would split the shaking sides of Spleen."* 
 
 Is it carrying the spirit of comparison to excess to remark, 
 that in the poor, kneeling, weeping female who accompanies 
 her seducer in his sad decay, there is something analogous 
 to Kent, or Caius, as he delights rather to be called, in Lear 
 — the noblest pattern of virtue which e v en Shakspeare has 
 conceived — who follows his royal master in banishment, that 
 had pronounced his banishment, and forgetful at once of his 
 wrongs and dignities, taking on himself the disguise of a 
 menial, retains his fidelity to the figure, his loyalty to the 
 carcass, the shadow, the shell, and empty husk of Lear ? 
 
 In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the im- 
 pression which we receive depends upon the habit of mind 
 which we bring with us to such perusal. The same circum- 
 stance may make one person laugh, which shall Tender 
 another very serious ; or in the same person the first impres- 
 sion may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed 
 incongruous characters at the Harlot's Funeral, on a super- 
 ficial inspection, provoke to laughter ; but when we have 
 sacrificed the first emotion to levity, a very different frame of 
 mind succeeds, or the painter has lost half his- purpose. I 
 never look at that wonderful assemblage of depraved beings, 
 who, without a grain of reverence or pity in their perverted 
 minds, are performing the sacred exteriors of duty to the 
 relics of their departed partner in folly, but I am as much 
 moved to sympathy from the very want of it in them, as I 
 should be by the finest representation of a virtuous deathbed, 
 surrounded by real mourners, pious children, weeping friends 
 — perhaps more by the very contrast. What reflections does 
 it not awake, of the dreadful heartless state in which the 
 creature (a female too) must have lived, who in death wants 
 the accompaniment of one genuine tear. That wretch who 
 is removing the lid of the coffin to gaze upon the corpse with 
 a face which indicates a perfect negation of all goodness or 
 womanhood — the hypocrite parson and his demure partner — 
 all the fiendish group — to a thoughtful mind present a moral 
 emblem more affecting than if the poor friendless carcass 
 had been depicted as thrown out to the woods, where wolves 
 had assisted at its obsequies, itself furnishing forth its own 
 funeral banquet. • 
 
 * Lines inscribed under the plate.
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 391 
 
 It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met together 
 in this picture — incongruous Objects being of the very essence 
 of laughter — but surely the laugh is far different in its kind. 
 from that thou btless species to which we are moved by 
 uicrc farce and grotesque. We laugh when Ferdinand Count 
 Fathom, at the first sight of the white cliffs of Britain, feels 
 his heart yearn with filial fondness towards the land of his 
 progenitors, which he is coming to fleece and plunder — we 
 smile at the exquisite irony of the passage — but if we are 
 not led on by such passages to some more salutary feeling 
 than laughter, we are very negligent perusers of than in book 
 or picture. 
 
 It is the fashion with those who cry up the great historical 
 school in this country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Rey- 
 nolds is placed, to exclude Hogarth from that school, as an 
 artist of an inferior and vulgar class. Those persons seem to 
 me to confound the painting of subjects in common or vulgar 
 life witli the being a vulgar artist. The quantity of thought 
 which Hogarth crowds into every picture would alone unvul- 
 garize every subject which he might choose. Let us take the 
 lowest of his subjects, the print called Gin Lane. Here is 
 plenty of poverty and low stuff to disgust upon a superficial 
 view ; and, accordingly, a cold spectator feels himself imme- 
 diately disgusted and repelled. I have seen many turn away 
 from it, not being able to bear it. The same persons would 
 perhaps have looked with great complacency upon Poussin's 
 celebrated picture of the Plague at At/tens.* Disease, and 
 Death, and bewildering Terror, in Athenian garments are en- 
 durable, and come, as the delicate critics express it, within 
 the " limits of pleasurable sensation." But the scenes of 
 their own St. Giles's delineated by their own countryman are 
 too shocking to think of. Yet if we could abstract our minds 
 from the fascinating colours of the picture, and forget the 
 coarse execution (in some respects) of the print, intended as 
 it was to be a cheap plate, accessible to the poorer sort of 
 people, for whose instruction it was done, I think we could 
 have no hesitation in conferring the palm of superior genius 
 upon Hogarth, comparing this work of his with Poussin's 
 picture. There is more of imagination in it — that power 
 which draws all things to one — which makes things animate 
 and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their 
 accessories, take one colour, and serve to one effect. Every- 
 thing in the print, to use a vulgar expression, ttlls. Every 
 part is full of " strange images of death." It is perfectly 
 
 * At the late Mr. Hope's, in Cavendish Square.
 
 392 ON THE GENIUS Of HOGAKTH. 
 
 amazing and astounding to look at. Not only the two prom- 
 inent figures, the woman and the half-dead man, which are as 
 terrible as anything which Michael Angelo ever drew, but 
 everything else in the print contributes to bewilder and stu- 
 pify — the very houses, as i heard a friend of mine express it, 
 tumbling all about in various directions, seem drunk — seem ab- 
 solutely reeling from the effect of that diabolical spirit of 
 phrensy which goes forth over the whole composition. To 
 show the poetical and almost prophetical conception in the 
 artist, one little circumstance may serve. Not content with 
 the dying and dead figures, which he has strewed in profusion 
 over the proper scene of the action, he shows you what (of a 
 kindred nature) is passing beyond it. Close by the shell, in 
 which, by direction of the parish beadle, a man is depositing 
 Ins wife, is an old wall, which, partaking of the universal 
 decay around it, is tumbling to pieces. Through a gap in 
 this wall are seen three figures, which appear to make a part 
 in some funeral procession which is passing by on the other 
 side of the wall out of the sphere of the composition. This 
 extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the subject 
 could only have been conceived by a great genius. Shaks- 
 peare, in his description of the painting of the Trojan War, 
 in his Tarquin and Lucrece, has introduced a similar device, 
 where the painter made a part stand for the whole : — 
 
 " For much imaginary work was there, 
 Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, 
 That for Achilles' image stood his spear, 
 Griped in an arm'd hand ; himself behind 
 Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind : 
 A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, 
 Stood for the whole to be imagined." 
 
 This he well calls imaginary work, where the spectator 
 must meet the artist in his conceptions halfway; and it is 
 peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust so 
 much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists show every- 
 thing distinct and full, as they require an object to be made 
 out to themselves before they can comprehend it. 
 
 When I think of the power displayed in this (I will not 
 hesitate to say) sublime print, it seems to me the extreme 
 narrowness of system alone, and of that rage for classification, 
 by which, in matters of taste at least, we are perpetually per- 
 plexing instead of arranging our ideas, that would make us 
 concede to the work of Poussin above mentioned, and deny 
 to this of Hogarth, the name of a grand serious composition. 
 
 We are for ever deceiving ourselves with names and the- 
 ories. We call one man a great historical painter, because
 
 ON THE GENIUS OK HOGARTH. 393 
 
 he has takes for his subjects kings or great men, or transac- 
 tions over which time baa thrown ;i grandeur; We term an- 
 other, the painter, of common life, and set him down in our minds 
 for an artist of an inferior class, without reflecting whether 
 the quantity of thought shown by the latter may not much 
 more than level the distinction which their mere choice of suh- 
 jects may seem to place between them; or whether, in fact, 
 from that very common life a great artist may not extract aa 
 deep an interest as another man from that which we are 
 pleased to call history. 
 
 I entertain the highest respect for the talents and virtues of 
 Reynolds, but I do not like that his reputation should over- 
 shadow and stille the merits of such a man as Hogarth, nor 
 that to mere names and classifications we should be content 
 to sacrifice one of the greatest ornaments of England. 
 
 I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Reynolds, 
 whether in the countenances of his Staring and Grinning 
 Despair, which he has given us for the faces of Ugolino and 
 dying Beaufort, there be anything comparable to the expression 
 which Hogarth has put into the face of his broken-down rake 
 in the last plate but one of the Rake's Progress,* where a let- 
 ter from the manager is brought to him to say that his play 
 " will not do ?" Here all is easy, natural, undistorted ; but 
 withal, what a mass of wo is here accumulated ! — the long 
 history of a misspent life is compressed into the countenance 
 as plainly as the series of plates before had told it ; here is 
 no attempt at (iorgonian looks which are to freeze the be- 
 holder, no grinning at the antique bedposts, no face-making, 
 or consciousness of the presence of spectators, in or out of the 
 picture, but grief kept to a man's self, a face retiring from 
 notice with the shame which great anguish sometimes brings 
 with it — a final leave taken of hope — the coming on of vacancy 
 and stupefaction — a beginning alienation of mind looking like 
 tranquillity. Here is matter for the mind of the beholder to 
 feed on for the hour together — matter to feed and fertilize 
 the mind. It is too real to admit one thought about the power 
 of the artist who did it. When we compare the expression in 
 subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and find the 
 superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere 
 contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid in the one 
 case in our Fleet or King's Bench Prison, and in the other in 
 the State Prison of Pisa, or the bedroom of a cardinal — or 
 
 * The first, perhaps, in all Hogarth for mrious expression. That which 
 comes next to it, I think, is the jaded morning countenance of the aebanciiee 
 in the second plate of the Marxiagi U < , w Inch lectures on the vanity of 
 pleasure as audibly as anything in Bcdesiaste^.
 
 394 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 that the subject of the one has never been authenticated, and 
 the other is matter of history — so weigh down the real points 
 of the comparison, as to induce us to rank the artist who has 
 chosen the one scene or subject (though confessedly inferior 
 in that which constitutes the soul of his art) in a class from 
 which we exclude the better genius (who has happened to 
 make choice of the other) with something like disgrace ?* 
 
 The Boys tinder Demoniacal Possession of Raffaelle and Do- 
 menichino, by what law of classification are we bound to as- 
 sign them to belong to the great style in painting, and to de- 
 grade into an inferior class the Rake of Hogarth, when he is 
 the madman in the Bedlam scene 1 I am sure he is far more 
 impressive than either. It is a face which no one that has 
 seen can easily forget. There is the stretch of human suffer- 
 ing to the utmost endurance, severe bodily pain brought on by 
 strong mental agony, the frightful, obstinate laugh of madness 
 — yet all so unforced and natural, that those who never were 
 witness to madness in real life, think they see nothing but 
 what is familiar to them in this face. Here are no tricks of 
 distortion, nothing but the natural face of agony. This is 
 high tragic painting, and we might as well deny to Shakspeare 
 the honours of a great tragedian, because he has interwoven 
 scenes of mirth with the serious business of his plays, as re- 
 fuse to Hogarth the same praise for the two concluding scenes 
 of the Rake's Progress, because of the comic lunaticsf which 
 
 * Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his lectures, speaks of the presump- 
 tion of Hogarth in attempting the grand style in painting, by which he means 
 his choice of certain Scripture subjects. Hogarth's excursions into holy land 
 were not very numerous, but what he has left us in this kind have at least tbia 
 merit, that they have expression of some sort or other in them — the Child Moses 
 before Pharaoh's Daughter, for instance : which is more than can be said of Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds's Repose in Egypt, painted for Macklin's Bible, where, for a 
 Madona, he has substituted a sleepy, insensible, unmotherly girl, one so little 
 worthy to have been selected as the mother of the Saviour, that she seems to 
 have neither heart nor feeling to entitle her to become a mother at all. Hut 
 indeed the race of Virgin Mary painters seem to have been cut up, root and 
 branch, at the reformation. Our artists are too good Protestants to give life 
 to that admirable commixture of maternal tenderness with reverential aweanr! 
 wonder approaching to worship, with which the Virgin Mothers of L. da Vinci 
 and Raffaelle (themselves by their divine countenances inviting men to wor- 
 ship) contemplate the union of the two natures in the person of their heaven 
 born infant. 
 
 t " There are of madmen, as here are of tame, 
 
 All humour'd not alike. We have here some 
 
 So apish and fantastic, play with a feather ; 
 
 And though 'twould grieve a soul so see God's image 
 
 So blemish'd and defaced, yet do they act 
 
 Such antic and such pretty lunacies, 
 
 That, spite of sorrow, they will make you smile. 
 
 Others again we have, like angry lions, 
 
 Fierce as wild bulls, untameable as flies." 
 
 Hoiusl 11 hore.
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 395 
 
 he has thrown into the one, or the alchymist that he lias in- 
 troduced into the other, who is paddling in the coals of his 
 furnace, keeping alive the flames of vain hope within the very 
 walls of the prison to which the vanity has conducted him, 
 which have taught the darker lesson of extinguished hope to 
 the desponding figure who is the principal person of the scene. 
 
 It is the force of these kindly admixtures which assimilates 
 the scenes of Hogarth and of Shakspeare to the drama of real 
 life, where no such thing as pure tragedy is to be found ; but 
 merriment and infelicity, ponderous crime and feather-light 
 vanity, like twi-formed births, disagreeing, complexions of one 
 intertexture, perpetually unite to show forth motley spectacles 
 to the world. Then it is that the poet or painter shows his 
 art, when in the selection of these comic adjuncts he chooses 
 such circumstances as shall relieve, contrast with, or fall into, 
 without forming a violent opposition to his principal object. 
 Who sees not that the gravedigger in Hamlet, the fool in 
 Lear, have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with the 
 subjects which they seem to interrupt, while the comic stuff 
 in Venice Preserved, and the doggerel nonsense of the cook and 
 his poisoning associates in the Hollo of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
 are pure, irrelevant, impertinent discords — as bad asthequar- 
 relling dog and cat under the table of the Lord and his Dis- 
 ciples at Emmaus of Titian. 
 
 Not to tire the reader with perpetual reference to prints 
 which he may not be fortunate enough to possess, it may be 
 sufficient to remark, that the same tragic cast of expression 
 and incident, blended in some instances with a greater alloy 
 of comedy, characterizes his other great work, the Marriage 
 Alumode, as well as those less elaborate exertions of his ge- 
 nius, the prints called Industry and Idleness, the Distressed 
 Poet, &c, forming, with the Harlot's and Rake's Progresses, the 
 most considerable, if not the largest class of his productions, 
 enough surely to rescue Hogarth from being a mere buffoon, 
 or one whose general aim was only to shake the sides. 
 
 There remains a very numerous class of his performances, 
 the object of which must be confessed to be principally 
 comic. But in all of them will be found something to distin- 
 guish them from the droll productions of Bunbury and others. 
 They have this difference, that we do not merely laugh at, 
 we are led into long trains of reflection by them. In this re- 
 spect they resemble the characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims, 
 which have strokes of humour in them enough to designate 
 them for the most part as comic ; but our strongest feeling still 
 is wonder at the Comprehensiveness of genius which could
 
 396 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 crowd, as poet and painter have done, into one small canvass 
 so many diverse yet co-operating materials. 
 
 The faces of Hogarth have not a mere momentary interest, 
 as in caricatures, or those grotesque physiognomies which 
 we sometimes catch a glance of in the street, and, struck with 
 their whimsicality, wish for a pencil and the power to sketch 
 them down, and forget them again as rapidly — but they are 
 permanent, abiding ideas. Not the sports of nature, but her 
 necessary eternal classes. We feel that we cannot part with 
 any of them, lest a link should be broken. 
 
 It is worthy of observation, that he has seldom drawn a 
 mean or insignificant countenance.* Hogarth's mind was 
 eminently reflective ; and, as it has been well observed of 
 Shakspeare, that he has transfused his own poetical charac- 
 ter into the persons of his drama (they are all more or less 
 poets) Hogarth has impressed a thinking character upon the 
 persons of his canvass. This remark must not be taken uni- 
 versally. The exquisite idiotism of the little gentleman in 
 the bag and sword beating his drum in the print of the En- 
 raged Musician, would of itself rise up against so sweeping 
 an assertion. But I think it will be found to be true of the 
 generality of his countenances. The knife-grinder and Jew 
 flute-player in the plate just mentioned may serve as instances 
 instead of a thousand. They have intense thinking faces, 
 though the purpose to which they are subservient by no 
 means required it ; but indeed it seems as if it was painful to 
 Hogarth to contemplate mere vacancy or insignificance. 
 
 This reflection of the artist's own intellect from the faces 
 of his characters, is one reason why the works of Hogarth, so 
 much more than those of any other artist, are objects of med- 
 itation. Our intellectual natures love the mirror which gives 
 them back their own likenesses. The mental eye will not bend 
 long with delight upon vacancy. 
 
 Another line of eternal separation between Hogarth and 
 the common painters of droll or burlesque subjects, with whom 
 he is often confounded, is the sense of beauty, which in the 
 most unpromising subjects seems never wholly to have de- 
 serted him. " Hogarth himself," says Mr. Coleridge,! from 
 whom I have borrowed this observation, speaking of a scene 
 which took place at Ratzeburg, " never drew a more ludicrous 
 
 * If there are any of that description. Siey are in his Strolling Plmfer^, a 
 print which has been cried up by Lord Orford as the richest of Ins pr'< 
 
 lions, ,-inc] it may be, for what I know, in the mci r I'imh'r. I he properties, an. I 
 
 dead furniture of the scene, but in living character and expression it is (lor 
 Hogarth) lamentably poor and wanting ; it is perhaps the only one of his per 
 formaneeS at which we have a right to feel disgusted, 
 t The Friend, No. XVI.
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 397 
 
 distortion both of attitude and physiognomy than this ( - 1 1". •. t 
 occasioned : nor was then wanting beside it one of those 
 beautiful female faces which the same Hogarth, in wfumi the 
 satirist never extinguished that luvc of beauty which belonged 
 to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces as the cen- 
 tral figure in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figure 
 (such is the power of true genius) neither acts nor is meant to 
 act as a contrast ; but diffuses through all, and over each of 
 the group, a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness ; and 
 even when the attention is no longer consciously directed to 
 the cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness with our 
 laughter: and thus prevents tin instructive merriment at the 
 nhims of /tot ore, or the foibles or humours of our fcUou;-m< ju 
 f rum degenerating into the heart-poison of contempt or hatred." 
 To the beautiful females in Hogarth, which .Mr. G. has point- 
 ed out, might be added, the frequent introduction of children 
 (which Hogarth seems to have taken a particular delight in) 
 into his pieces. They have a singular effect in giving tran- 
 quillity and a portion of their own innocence to the subject. 
 The baby riding in its mother's lap in the March to Finehhy 
 (its careless, innocent face placed directly behind the intrigu- 
 ing, time-furrowed countenance of the treason-plotting French 
 priest) perfectly sobers the whole of that tumultuous scene. 
 The boy mourner winding up his top with so much unpre- 
 tending insensibility in the plate of the Harlot's Funeral, (the 
 only thing in that assembly that is not a hypocrite,) quiets 
 and sooths the mind that has been disturbed at the sight of 
 so much depraved man and woman kind. 
 
 1 had written thus far when I met with a passage in the 
 writings of the late Mr. Barry, which, as it falls in with the 
 vulgar notion respecting Hogarth, which this essay has been 
 employed in combating, 1 shall take the liberty to transcribe, 
 with such remarks as may suggest themselves to me in the 
 transcription ; referring the reader for a full answer to that 
 which has gone before. 
 
 " Notwithstanding Hogarth's merit does undoubtedly entitle him to an 
 honourable place among the artists, and that his little compositions, considered 
 as so many dramatic representations, abounding with humour, character, and 
 extensive observations on the various incidents of low, faulty, and vicious life 
 are very ingeniously brought together, and frequently tell their own story with 
 moil' facility than is often found m many o( the elevated and more noble in- 
 ventions of Raffaelle and other great men ; yet it must be honestly eonf 
 that in what is called knowledge of the figure, foreigners have justly ob» 
 that Hogarth is often so raw and unformed as hardly to deserve the name of 
 an artist. But this capital defect is not often perceivable, as examples oi the 
 naked and of elevated nature but rarely occur in his subjects, which are ii>r 
 the most part filled with characters, that in their nature tend todeformi'. 
 Sides, his figures are small, and the junctures, and other difficulties ot drawing 
 that might occur in their limbs, are artfully concealed \Mth then" clothes, rags, 
 34
 
 39S ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 &c. But what would atone for all his defects, even if they were twice told, 
 is his admirable fund of invention, ever inexhaustible in its resources; and his 
 satire, which is always sharp and pertinent, and often highly moral, was (ex- 
 cept in a few instances, where he weakly and meanly suffered his integrity to 
 give way to his envy) seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly 
 way. Hogarth has been often imitated in his satirical vein, sometimes in his 
 humorous ; but very few have attempted to rival him in his moral walk. The 
 line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother academician, 
 Mr. Penny, is quite distinct from that of Hogarth, and is of a much more deli- 
 cate and superior relish ; he attempts the heart, and reaches it, while Ho- 
 garth's general aim is only to shake the sides ; in other respects no compari- 
 son can be thought of, as Mr. Penny has all that knowledge of the figure and 
 academical skill which the other wanted. As to Mr. Bunbury, who had so 
 happily succeeded in the vein of humour and cancatura, he has for some time 
 past altogether relinquished it, for the more amiable pursuit of beautiful na- 
 ture : this, indeed, is not to be wondered at, when we recollect that he has, in 
 Mrs. Bunbury, so admirable an exemplar of the most finished grace and beau- 
 ty continually at his elbow. But (to say all that occurs to me on this subject) 
 perhaps it may be reasonably doubted, whether the being much conversant with 
 Hogarth's method of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, in many of his 
 works, is not rather a dangerous, or, at least, a worthless pursuit ; which, it it 
 does not find a false relish and a love of and search after satire and buffoonery 
 in the spectator, is at least not unlikely to give him one. Life is short ; and 
 the little leisure of it is much better laid out upon that species of art which is 
 employed about the amiable and the admirable, as it is more likely to be at 
 tended with better and nobler consequences to ourselves. These two pur 
 suits in art may be compared with two sets of people with whom we might 
 associate ; if we give ourselves up to the Footes, the Kenricks, &c, we shall 
 be continually busied and paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and vi- 
 cious in life ; whereas there are those to be found, with whom we should be in 
 the constant pursuit and study of all that gives a value and a dignity to human 
 nature." [Account of a Series of Pictures in the Great Room of the Society 
 of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at the Adelphi, by James Barry, R.A. 
 Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy ; reprinted in the last quarto edi- 
 tion of his works.] 
 
 " It must be honestly confessed, that in what is called knowledge of the fig- 
 ure, foreigners have justly observed," &c. 
 
 It is a secret well known to the professors of the art and 
 mystery of criticism, to insist upon what they do not find in a 
 man's works, and to pass over in silence what they do. That 
 Hogarth did not draw the naked figure so well as Michael An- 
 gelo might be allowed, especially as " examples of the naked," 
 as Mr. Barry acknowledges, " rarely (he might almost have 
 said never) occur in his subjects ;." and that his figures under 
 their draperies do not discover all the fine graces of an An- 
 tinous or an Apollo, may be conceded likewise ; perhaps it 
 was more suitable to his purpose to represent the average 
 forms of mankind in the mediocrity (as Mr. Burke expresses 
 it) of the age in which he lived: but that his figures in gen- 
 eral, and in his best subjects, are so glaringly incorrect as is 
 here insinuated, I dare trust my own eye so far as positively 
 to deny the fact. And there is one part .of the figure in which 
 Hogarth is allowed to have excelled, which these foreigners 
 seem to have overlooked, or perhaps calculating from its pro-
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 3 ( J ( J 
 
 portion to the whole, (a seventh or an eighth, I forget which.) 
 deemed it of trilling importance ; I mean the human face ; a 
 small part, reckoning by geographical inches, in the map of 
 rutin's body* but here it is that the painter of expression must 
 condense the wonders of his skill", even at the expense of neg- 
 lecting the "jonctures and other difficulties of drawing in the 
 limbs," which it must be a cold eye that in the interest so 
 strongly demanded by Hogarth's countenances has leisure to 
 .survey and censure. 
 
 "The line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother ac- 
 ademician, Mr. Penny." 
 
 The first impression caused in me by reading this pass 
 was an eager desire to know who this .Mr. Penny was. This 
 great surpasser of Hogarth in the "delicacy of his relish," 
 and the " line which he pursued," where is he, what are his 
 works, what has he to show ? In vain I tried to recollect, till, 
 by happily potting the question to a friend who is more con- 
 versant in the works of the illustrious obscure than myself, I 
 learned that he was the painter of a Death of Wolfe which 
 missed the prize the year that the celebrated picture of West 
 on the same subject obtained it ; that he also made a picture 
 of the Marquis of Granby relieving u Sick Soldier; moreover, 
 that lie was the inventor of two pictures of Suspended and 
 Restored Animation, which I now remember to have seen in 
 the exhibition some years since, and the prints from which 
 are still extant in good men's houses. This then, I suppose, is 
 the line of subjects in which Mr. Penny was so much supe- 
 rior to Hogarth. I confess I am not of that opinion. The re- 
 lieving of poverty by the purse, and the restoring a young 
 man to his parents by using the methods prescribed by the Hu- 
 mane Society, are doubtless very amiable subjects, pretty 
 things to teach the first rudiments of humanity ; they amount 
 lo about as much instruction as the stories of good boys that 
 give away their custards to poor beggar-boys in children's 
 books. But, good God ! is this milk for babes to be set up in 
 opposition to Hogarth's moral scenes, his strong meat for men ? 
 As well might we prefer the fulsome verses upon their own 
 goodness, to which the gentlemen of the Literary Fund annu- 
 ally sit still frith such shameless patience to listen, u> the sa- 
 tires of Juvenal and Persius : because the former are full of 
 tender images of Worth relieved by Charity, and Charity 
 stretching put her hand to rescue sinking Genius, and the theme 
 of the latter is men's crimes and follies with their black con- 
 sequences — forgetful, meanwhile, of those .strains of moral 
 pathos, those sublime heart-touches, which these put is (in
 
 400 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 them chiefly showing themselves poets) are perpetually darting 
 across the otherwise appalling gloom of their subject — consol- 
 atory remembrancers, when their pictures of guilty mankind 
 have made us even to despair for our species, that there is 
 such a thing as virtue and moral dignity in the world, that her 
 unquenchable spark is not utterly out — refreshing admonitions, 
 to which we turn for shelter from the too great heat and as- 
 perity of the general satire. 
 
 And is there nothing analogous to this in Hogarth? nothing 
 which " attempts and reaches the heart ?" no aim beyond that 
 " of shaking the sides ?" If the kneeling ministering female 
 in the last scene of the Rake's Progress, the Bedlam scene, 
 of which I have spoken before, and have dared almost to par- 
 allel it with the most absolute idea of virtue which Shak- 
 speare has left us, be not enough to disprove the assertion ; if 
 the sad endings of the harlot and the rake, the passionate, 
 heart-bleeding entreaties for forgiveness which the adulterous 
 wife is pouring forth to her assassinated and dying lord in the 
 last scene but one of the Marriage Alamode — if these be not 
 things to touch the heart, and dispose the mind to a medita- 
 tive tenderness, is there nothing sweetly conciliatory in the 
 mild, patient face and gesture with which the wife seems to 
 allay and ventilate the feverish, irritated feelings of her poor 
 poverty-distracted mate (the true copy of the genus irritabile) 
 in the print of the Distressed Poet ? or if an image of maternal 
 love be required, where shall we find a sublimer view of it 
 than in that aged woman in Industry and Idleness (plate V.) 
 who is clinging with the fondness of hope not quite extin- 
 guished to her brutal, vice-hardened child, whom she is accom- 
 panying to the ship which is to bear him away from his na- 
 tive soil, of which he has been adjudged unworthy : in whose 
 shocking face every trace of the human countenance seems 
 obliterated, and a brute beast's to be left instead, shocking and 
 repulsive to all but her who watched over it in its cradle be- 
 fore it was so sadly altered, and feels it must belong to her 
 while a pulse by the vindictive laws of his country shall be 
 suffered to continue to beat in it. Compared with such things, 
 what is Mr. Penny's " knowledge of the figure and academi- 
 cal skill which Hogarth wanted ?" 
 
 With respect to what follows concerning another gentleman, 
 with the congratulations to him on his escape out of the re- 
 gions of " humour and caricatura," in which it appears he was 
 in danger of travelling side by side with Hogarth, I can only 
 congratulate; my country, that Mrs. Hogarth knew her province 
 better than by disturbing her husband at his palette to divert 
 him from that universality of subject, which has stamped him
 
 ON THE GENUS OF HOGARTH. 401 
 
 perhaps, next to Shakspeare, the most inventive genius which 
 ihia island has produced, into the " amiable pursuit of beau- 
 tiful nature," i. c, copying ad infinitum the individual charms 
 and graces of Mrs. H — — . 
 
 " Hogarth's method of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, paddling in 
 whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and vicious." 
 
 A person unacquainted with the works thus stigmatized, 
 would be apt to imagine that in Hogarth there was notlnng 
 else to be found but subjects of the coarsest and most repulsive 
 nature. That his imagination was naturally unsweet, and that 
 he delighted in raking into every species of moral tilth. That 
 he preyed upon sore places only, and took a pleasure in ex- 
 posing the unsound and rotten parts of human nature ; whereas, 
 with the exception of some of the plates of the Harlot's Prog- 
 ress, which are harder in their character than any of the rest 
 of his productions, (the stages of Cruelty I omit as mere 
 worthless caricaturas, foreign to his general habits, the offspring 
 of his fancy in some wayward humour,) there is scarce one of 
 his pieces where vice is most strongly satirised, in which some 
 figure is not introduced upon which the moral eye may rest 
 satisfied ; a face that indicates goodness, or perhaps mere good- 
 humouredness and carelessness of mind (negation of evil) only, 
 yet enough to give a relaxation to the frowning brow of satire, 
 and keep the general air from tainting. Take the mild, sup- 
 plicating posture of patient Poverty in the poor woman that is 
 persuading the pawnbroker to accept her clothes in pledge, in 
 the plate of Gin Lane, for an instance. A little does it, a lit- 
 tle of the good of nature overpowers a world of bad. One 
 cordial, honest laugh of a Tom Jones absolutely clears the at- 
 mosphere that was reeking with the black, putrifying breathings 
 of a hypocrite Blifil. One homely, expostulating shrug from 
 Strap warms the whole air which the suggestions of a gen- 
 tlemanly ingratitude from his friend Random had begun to 
 freeze. One " Lord bless us !" of Parson Adams upon the 
 wickedness of the times exorcises and purges off the mass of 
 iniquity which the world-knowledge of even a Fielding could 
 call out and rake together. But of the severer class of Ho- 
 garth's performances, enough, I trust, has been said to show 
 that they do not merely shock and repulse ; that there is in 
 them the " scorn of vice" and the "pity" too; something to 
 touch the heart, and keep alive the sense of moral beauty ; the 
 " laerymae rerum," and the sorrowing by which the heart is 
 made better. If they be bad things, then is satire and tragedy 
 a bad thing ; let us proclaim at once an age of gold, and sink 
 the existence of vice and misery in our speculations : let us 
 34*
 
 402 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 " Wink and shut our apprehensions up 
 From common sense of what men were and are :" 
 
 let us make believe with the children that everybody is good 
 and happy ; and, with Dr. Swift, write panegyrics upon the 
 world. 
 
 But that larger half of Hogarth's works which were painted 
 more for entertainment than instruction, (though such was the 
 suggestiveness of his mind, that there is always something to 
 be learned from them,) his humorous scenes, are they such 
 as merely to disgust and set us against our species ? 
 
 The confident assertions of such a man as I consider the 
 late Mr. Barry to have been, have that weight of authority in 
 them which staggers, at first hearing, even a long preconceived 
 opinion. When I read his pathetic admonition concerning the 
 shortness of life, and how much better the little leisure of it 
 were laid out upon " that species of art which is employed 
 about the amiable and the admirable ;" and Hogarth's "meth- 
 od" proscribed as a " dangerous or worthless pursuit," I began 
 to think there was something in it ; that I might have been in- 
 dulging all my life in a passion for the works of this artist, to 
 the utter prejudice of my taste and moral sense ; but my first 
 convictions gradually returned ; a world of good-natured Eng- 
 lish faces came up one by one to my recollection, and a glance 
 at the matchless Election Entertainment, which I have the 
 happiness to have hanging up in my parlour, subverted Mr 
 Barry's whole theory in an instant. 
 
 In that inimitable print, (which in my judgment as far exceeds 
 the more known and celebrated March to Finchlcy as the best 
 comedy exceeds the best farce that ever was written,) let a 
 person look till he be saturated, and when he is done wonder- 
 ing at the inventiveness of genius which could bring so many 
 characters (more than thirty distinct classes of face) into a room, 
 and set them down at table together, or otherwise dispose them 
 about, in so natural a manner, engage them in so many easy 
 sets and occupations, yet all partaking of the spirit of the oc- 
 casion which brought them together, so that we feel that no- 
 thing but an election time could have assembled them ; having 
 no central figure or principal group, (for the hero of the piece, 
 the candidate, is properly set aside in the levelling indistinc- 
 tion of the day, one must look for him to find him,) nothing to 
 detain the eye from passing from part to part, where every part 
 is alike instinct with life, for here are no furniture-faces, no 
 IfigUreS broUght in to fill up the scene, like stage-choruses, but 
 all dramatis persona? ; when he shall have done wondering at 
 all these faces so strongly charactered, yet finished with the 
 accuracy of the finest miniature ; when he shall have done
 
 ON THE GENIUS OK HOGARTH. 403 
 
 admiring the numberless appendages of the scene, those gra 
 tuitous doles which rich genius flings into the heap when it 
 has already done enough, the over-measure which it delights 
 in giving, as if it felt its stores were exhaustless ; the dumb 
 rhetoric of the scenery — for tables, and chairs, and joint-stools 
 in Hogarth are living and significant things ; the witticisms 
 that are expressed by words, (all artists but Hogarth have failed 
 when they have endeavoured to combine two mediums of ex- 
 pression, and have introduced words into their pictures,) and the 
 unwritten numberless little allusive pleasantries that are scattered 
 about ; the work that is going on in the scene, and beyond it, 
 as is made visible to the "eye of mind," by the mob which 
 chokes up the doorway, and the sword that has forced an en- 
 trance before its master : when he shall have sufficiently ad- 
 mired this wealth of genius, let him fairly say what is the 
 result left on his mind. Is it an impression of the vileness and 
 worthlessness of his species? or is not the general feeling 
 which remains, after the individual faces have ceased to act 
 sensibly on his mind, a kindly one in favour of his species ? was 
 not the general air of the scene wholesome ? did it do the heart 
 hurt to be among it ? Something of a riotous spirit, to be sure, 
 is there ; some worldly-mindedness in some of the faces ; a 
 Doddingtonian smoothness which does not promise any super- 
 fluous degree of sincerity in the fine gentleman who has been 
 the occasion of calling so much good company together : but 
 is not the general cast of expression in the faces of the good 
 sort ? do they not seem cut out of the good old rock, substan- 
 tial English honesty? would one fear treachery among char- 
 acters of their expression? or shall we call their honest mir'h 
 and seldom-returning relaxation by the hard names of vice and 
 profligacy ? That poor country fellow, that is grasping his 
 staff, (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves at home 
 which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with 
 since he came into the room,) and is enjoying with a relish 
 that seems to fit all the capacities of his soul the slender joke 
 which that facetious wag his neighbour is practising upon the 
 gouty gentleman, whose eyes the effort to suppress pain has 
 made as round as rings — does ii shock the "dignity of human 
 nature 1 ' to look at that man, and to sympathize with him in the 
 seldom-heard joke which has unbent his care-worn, hard-work- 
 ing visage, and drawn iron smiles from it ? or with that lull- 
 hearted cobbler, who is honouring with the grasp of an honest 
 fist the unused palm of that annoyed patrician, whom the li- 
 cense of the time has seated next him. 
 
 I can see nothing " dangerous" in the contemplation of such 
 scenes as this, or ths Enraged Musician, or the Southivark
 
 404 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 Fair, or twenty other pleasant prints which come crowding 
 in upon my recollection, in which the restless activities, the 
 diversified bents and humours, the blameless peculiarities of 
 men, as they deserve to be called, rather than their " vices 
 and follies," are held up in a laughable point of view. All 
 laughter is not of a dangerous or soul-hardening tendency. 
 There is the petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and 
 kills love, and there is the cordial laughter of a man which 
 implies and cherishes it. What heart was ever made the 
 worse by joining in a hearty laugh at the simplicities of Sir 
 Hugh Evans or Parson Adams, where a sense of the ridicu- 
 lous mutually kindles and is kindled by a perception of 
 the amiable ? That tumultuous harmony of singers that 
 are roaring out the words, " The world shall bow to the As- 
 syrian throne," from the opera of Judith, in the third plate of 
 the series, called the Four Groups of Heads ; which the quick 
 eye of Hogarth must have struck off in the very infancy of 
 the rage for sacred oratorios in this country, while " Music 
 yet was young ;" when we have done smiling at the deafening 
 distortions which these tearers of devotion to rags and tat- 
 ters, these takers of Heaven by storm, in their boisterous 
 mimicry of the occupation of angels, are making — what un- 
 kindly impression is left behind, or what more of harsh or 
 contemptuous feeling, than when we quietly leave Uncle 
 Toby and Mr. Shandy riding their hobbyhorses about the 
 room ? The conceited, long-backed sign-painter, that with all 
 the self-applause of a Raffaelle or Correggio (the twist of body 
 which his conceit has thrown him into has something of the Cor- 
 reggeisque in it) is contemplating the picture of a bottle which 
 he is drawing from an actual bottle that hangs beside him, in 
 the print of Beer-street — while we smile at the enormity of 
 the self-delusion, can we help loving the good-humour and 
 self-complacency of the fellow 1 would we willingly wake 
 him from his dream ? 
 
 I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have 
 necessarily something in them to make us like them : some 
 are indifferent to us, some in their natures repulsive, and only 
 made interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the 
 painter ; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprink- 
 ling of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away 
 and disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in 
 them besides, that they bring us acquainted with the every- 
 day human face — they give us skill to detect those gradations 
 of sense and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious 
 observer) in the countenances of the world about us ; and 
 prevent that disgust at common life, that tadium quotidianarum
 
 ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER. 405 
 
 formarum, which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms and 
 beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in many other 
 things, they are analogous to the best novels of Smollett or 
 Fielding. 
 
 ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER. 
 
 The poems of G. Wither are distinguished by a hearty 
 homeliness of manner, and a plain moral speaking. He seems 
 to have passed his life in one continued act of an innocent 
 self-pleasing. That which he calls his Motto is a continued 
 self-eulogy of two thousand lines, yet we read it to the end 
 without any feeling of distaste, almost without a consciousness 
 that we have been listening all the while to a man praising 
 himself. There are none of the cold particles in it, the hard- 
 ness and self-ends which render vanity and egotism hateful. 
 He seems to be praising another person, under the mask of 
 self: or rather we feel that it was indifferent to him where he 
 found the virtue which he celebrates ; whether another's 
 bosom, or his own, were its chosen receptacle. His poems 
 are full, and this in particular is one downright confession, of 
 a generous self-seeking. But by self he sometimes means a 
 great deal — his friends, his principles, his country, the human 
 race. 
 
 Whoever expects to find in the satirical pieces of this wri- 
 ter any of those peculiarities which pleased him in the satires 
 of Dryden or Pope, will be grievously disappointed. Here 
 are no high-finished characters, no nice traits of individual 
 nature, few or no personalities. The game run down is 
 coarse general vice, or folly as it appears in classes. A liar, 
 a drunkard, a coxcomb, is stripped and whipped; no Shaftes- 
 bury, no Villiers, or Wharton is curiously anatomized and 
 read upon. But to a well-natured mind there is a charm of 
 moral sensibility running through them which amply compen- 
 sates the want of those luxuries. Wither seems everywhere 
 bursting with a love of goodness, and a hatred of all low and 
 base actions. At this day it is hard to discover what parts in 
 the poem here particularly alluded to, Abuses Stripped and 
 Whipped, could have occasioned the imprisonment oflhe au- 
 thor. Was vice in high places more suspicious than now ? 
 had she more power ; or more leisure to listen after ill re- 
 ports ? That a man should be convicted of a libel when he
 
 406 ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF 
 
 named no names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, 
 is like one of the endictments in the Pilgrim's Progress, where 
 Faithful is arraigned for having " railed on our noble Prince 
 Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly of his honourable friends, 
 the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord 
 Luxurious." What unlucky jealousy could have tempted the 
 great men of those days to appropriate such innocent abstrac- 
 tions to themselves ! 
 
 Wither seems to have contemplated to a degree of idolatry 
 his own possible virtue. He is for ever anticipating persecu- 
 tion and martyrdom ; fingering, as it were, the flames, to try 
 how he can bear them. Perhaps his premature defiance some- 
 times made him obnoxious to censures which he would other- 
 wise have slipped by. 
 
 The homely versification of these satires is not likely to 
 attract in the present day. It is certainly not such as we 
 should expect from a poet " soaring in the high region of his 
 fancies with his garland and his singing robes about him ;"* nor 
 is it such as he has shown in his Philarete, and in some parts 
 of his Shepherds Hunting. He seems to have adopted this 
 dress with voluntary humility, as fittest for a moral teacher, 
 as our divines choose sober gray or black ; but in their hu- 
 mility consists their sweetness. The deepest tone of moral 
 feeling in them (though all throughout is weighty, earnest, and 
 passionate) is in those pathetic injunctions against shedding 
 of blood in quarrels, in the chapter entitled Revenge. The 
 story of his own forbearance, which follows, is highly interest- 
 ing. While the Christian sings his own victory over Anger, 
 the Man of Courage cannot help peeping out to let you know, 
 that it was some higher principle than fear which counselled 
 this forbearance. 
 
 Whether encaged, or roaming at liberty, Wither never seems 
 to have abated a jot of that free spirit which sets its mark upon 
 his writings, as much as a predominant feature of independ- 
 ence impresses every page of our late glorious Burns ; but 
 the elder poet wraps his proof-armour closer about him, the 
 other wears his too much outward ; he is thinking too much 
 of annoying the foe, to be quite easy within ; the spiritual tie- 
 fences of Wither are a perpetual source of inward sunshine, 
 the magnanimity of the modern is not without its alloy of sore- 
 ness, and a sense of injustice, which seems perpetually to 
 gall and irritate. Wither was better skilled in the " sweet 
 uses of adversity," he knew how to extract the " precious jewel" 
 from the head of the " toad," without drawing any of the " ugly 
 
 * Milton. 

 
 GEORGE WITHER. 407 
 
 venom" along with it. The prison notes of Wither are finer 
 than the wood notes of most of Ins poetical brethren. The 
 description in the Fourth Eglogue of his Shepherds Hunting 
 (which was composed during his imprisonment in the Marshal- 
 sea) of the power of the muse to extract pleasure from com- 
 mon objects, has been oftener quoted, and is more known, 
 than any part of his writings. Indeed, the whole Eglogue is 
 in a strain so much above not only what himself, but almost 
 what any other poet has written, that he himself could not 
 help noticing it; he remarks, that his spirits had been raised 
 higher than they were wont " through the love of poesy." 
 The praises of poetry have been often sung in ancient and in 
 modern times ; strange powers have been ascribed to it of in- 
 fluence over animate and inanimate auditors ; its force over 
 fascinated crowds has been acknowledged ; but, before Wither, 
 no one ever celebrated its power at home, the wealth and the 
 strength which this divine gift confers upon its possessor. 
 Fame, and that, too, after death, was all which hitherto the 
 poets had promised themselves from their art. It seems to 
 have been left to Wither to discover, that poetry was a present 
 possession, as well as a rich reversion, and that the muse had 
 promise of both lives, of this, and of that which was to come. 
 
 The Mistress of Philarete is in substance a panegyric pro- 
 tracted through several thousand lines in the mouth of a single 
 speaker, but diversified so as to produce an almost dramatic 
 effect, by the artful introduction of some ladies, who are rather 
 auditors than interlocutors in the scene ; and of a boy, whose 
 singing furnishes pretence for an occasional change of metre : 
 though the seven-syllable line, in which the main part of it 
 is written, is that in which Wither has shown himself so 
 great a master, that I do not know that I am always thankful 
 to him for the exchange. 
 
 Wither has chosen to bestow upon the lady whom he com- 
 mends the name of Arete, or Virtue ; and, assuming to him- 
 self the character of Philarete, or Lover of Virtue, there is a 
 sort of propriety in that heaped measure of perfections, which 
 he attributes to this partly real, partly allegorical personage. 
 Drayton before him had shadowed his mistress under the 
 name of Idea, or Perfect Pattern, and some of the old Italian 
 love-strains are couched in such religious terms as to make it 
 doubtful, whether it be a mistress or Divine Grace which 
 the poet is addressing. 
 
 In this poem (full of beauties) there are two passages of 
 pre-eminent merit. The first is where the lover, after a flight 
 of rapturous commendation, expresses his wonder why all
 
 408 ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF 
 
 men that, are about his mistress, even to her very servants, 
 do not view her with the same eye that he does. 
 
 " Sometimes I do admire 
 All men burn not with desire : 
 Nay, I muse her servants are not 
 Pleading love ; but oh ! they dare not. 
 And I therefore>M( - onder why 
 They do not grow sick and die. 
 Sure they would do so, but that, 
 By the ordinance of fate, 
 There is some concealed thing, 
 So each gazer limiting, 
 He can see no more of merit, 
 Than beseems his worth and spirit. 
 For in her a grace there shines, 
 That o'erdaring thoughts confines, 
 Making worthless men despair 
 To be loved of one so fair. 
 Yea, the destinies agree, 
 Some good judgments blind should be 
 And not gain the power of knowing 
 Those rare beauties in her growing. 
 Reason doth as much imply : 
 For if every judging eye, 
 Which beholdeth her, should there 
 Find what excellences are, 
 All, o'ercome by those perfections, 
 Would be captive to affections. 
 So, in happiness unbless'd, 
 She for lovers should not rest." 
 
 The other is, where he has been comparing her beauties 
 to gold, and stars, and the most excellent things in nature ; 
 and, fearing to be accused of hyperbole, the common charge 
 against poets, vindicates himself by boldly taking upon him, 
 that these comparisons are no hyperboles ; but that the best 
 things in nature do, in a lover's eye, fall short of those excel- 
 lences which he adores in her. 
 
 " What pearls, what rubies can 
 Seem so lovely fair to man, 
 As her lips whom he doth love, 
 When in sweet discourse they move, 
 Or her lovelier teeth, the while 
 She doth bless him with a smile 1 
 Stars indeed fair creatures be ; 
 Yet among us where is he 
 Joys not more the while he lies 
 Sunning in his mistress' eyes, 
 Than in all the glimmering light 
 Of a starry winter's night 1 
 Note the beauty of an eye — 
 And if aught you praise it by 
 Leave such passion in your mind, 
 Let my reason's eye be blind. 
 Mark if ever red or white 
 Anywhere gave such delight. 
 As when they have taken place 
 In a worthy woman's face. 
 

 
 GEORGE WITHER 409 
 
 I must praise her as I may, 
 Which 1 do mine own rude way, 
 Sometime setting i<>rt li bei glories 
 By unheard-ol allegories," &c. 
 
 To the measure in which these lines are written, the wits 
 of Queen Anne's days contemptuously gave the name ol'JVamby 
 Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Phillips, who has used it in some 
 instances, as in the lines on Cuzzoni, to my feeling at least, 
 very deliriously ; but Wither, whose darling measure it seems 
 to have been, may show, that in skilful hands it is capable of 
 expressing the subtlest movements of passion. So true it is, 
 which Drayton seems to have felt, that it is the poet who 
 modifies the metre, not the metre the poet ; in his own words, 
 that 
 
 " It's possible to climb, 
 To kindle, or to Blake ; 
 Although in Skelton's rhimc."* 
 
 * A long line is a line we are long repeating. In the Shepherds Hunti, g 
 take the following — 
 
 " If thy verse doth bravely tower 
 As she makes wing, she gets power ; 
 Yet the higher she doth soar, 
 She's affronted still the more, 
 Till she to the high'st hath pass'd, 
 Then she rests with fame at last." 
 
 What longer measure can go beyond the majesty of this ! what Alexandrine 
 is half so long in pronouncing, or expresses labour slowly but strongly surmount- 
 ing difficulty witli the life with which it is done in the second of these lines ? 
 or what metre could go beyond these, from Philarete— 
 
 " Her true beauty leaves behind 
 Apprehensions in my mind 
 Of more sweetness, than all art 
 Or inventions can impart. 
 Thoughts too deep to be expressed, 
 And too strong to be svppress'd." 
 
 s
 
 LETTERS, 
 
 UNDER ASSUMED SIGNATURES, PUBLISHED IN 
 
 THE REFLECTOR. 
 
 THE LONDONER. 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector. 
 
 Mr. Reflector — I was born under the shadow of St. Dun- 
 stan's steeple, just where the conflux of the eastern and western 
 inhabitants of this twofold city meet and justle in friendly op- 
 position at Temple-bar. The same day which gave me to 
 the world, saw London happy in the celebration of her great 
 annual feast. This I cannot help looking upon as a lively 
 omen of the future great good-will which I was destined to bear 
 towards the city, resembling in kind that solicitude which 
 every chief magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever con- 
 cerns her interests and well-being. Indeed, I consider myself 
 in some sort a speculative lord mayor of London : for though 
 circumstances unhappily preclude me from the hope of ever 
 arriving at the dignity of a gold chain and spital sermon, yet 
 thus much will I say of myself in truth, that Whittington with 
 his cat (just emblem of vigilance and a furred gown) never 
 went beyond me in affection which I bear to the citizens. 
 
 I was born, as you have heard, in a crowd. This has begot 
 in me an entire affection for that way of life, amounting to an 
 almost insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural scenes. 
 This aversion was never interrupted or suspended, except for 
 a few vears in the younger part of my life, during a period in 
 which I had set my affections upon a charming young woman. 
 Every man, while the passion is upon him, is for a time at 
 least addicted to groves, and meadows, and purling streams. 
 During this short period of my existence, 1 contracted just 
 familiarity -enough with rural objects to understand tolerably 
 well ever after the poets, when they declaim in such passionate 
 terms in favour of a country life. 
 
 For my own part, now the fit is past, I have no hesitation 
 S2
 
 412 THE LONDONER 
 
 in declaring, that a mob of happy faces crowding op at the pit 
 door of Drury Lane Theatre, just at the hour of s>ix, gives ine 
 ten thousand sincerer pleasures than I could ever receive 
 from all the flocks of silly sheep that ever whitened the plains 
 of Arcadia or Epsom Downs. 
 
 This passion for crowds is nowhere feasted so full as in 
 London. The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy 
 who can be dull in Fleet-street. I am naturally inclined to 
 hypochondria, but in London it vanishes, like all other ills. 
 Often, when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have 
 I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humour, till 
 tears have wette rj my cheek for inutterable sympathies witli 
 the multitudinous moving picture, which she never fails to 
 present at all hours, like the scenes of a shifting pantomime. 
 
 The very deiormities of London, which give distaste to 
 others, from habit do not displease me. The endless succes- 
 sion of shops where fancy miscalled folly is supplied with per- 
 petual gauds and toys, excite in me no Puritanical aversion. 
 I gladly behold every appetite supplied with its proper food. 
 The obliging customer, and the obliged tradesman — things 
 which live by bowing, and things which exist but for homage 
 — do not affect me with disgust; from habit I perceive nothing 
 but urbanity, where other men, more refined, discover mean- 
 ness : I love the very smoke of London, because it has been 
 the medium mosi familiar to my vision. I see grand principles 
 of honour at work in the dirty ring which encompasses two 
 combatants with fists, and principles of no less eternal justice 
 in the detection of a pickpocket. The salutary astonishment 
 with which an execution is surveyed, convinces me more for- 
 cibly than a hundred volumes of abstract polity, that the uni- 
 versal instinct of man in all ages has leaned to order and good 
 government. 
 
 Thus an art o 1 ' extracting morality from the commonest in- 
 cidents of a town life, is attained by the same well-natured 
 alchymy with which the Foresters of Arden, in a beautiful 
 country, 
 
 " Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything." 
 
 Where has spleen her food but in London ! Humour, interest, 
 curiosity, suck at her measureless breasts without a possibil- 
 ity of being satiated. Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, 
 her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I 
 have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes ! 
 I am, sir, yo6r faithful servant, 
 
 A Londoner.
 
 ON BURIAL SOCIETIES. 413 
 
 ON BURIAL SOCIETIES; 
 
 AND THE CHARACTER OF AX UNDERTAKER. 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector. 
 
 Mr. Reflector — I was amused the other day with having 
 the following notice thrust into my hand by a man who gives 
 out bills at the comer of Fleet-market. Whether he saw any 
 prognostics about me, that made him judge such notice sea- 
 sonable. I cannot say ; I might, perhaps, carry in a countenance 
 (naturally not very ilorid) traces of a fever which had not long 
 left me. Those fellows have a good instinctive way of gues- 
 sing at the sort of people that are likeliest to pay attention to 
 their papers. 
 
 4< BURIAL SOCIETY. 
 
 " A favourable opportunity now offers to any person, of 
 either sex, who would wish to be buried in a genteel manner, 
 by paying one shilling entrance, and twopence per week for 
 the benefit of She stock. Members to be free in six months. 
 The money to be paid at Mr. Middleton's, at the sign of the 
 First and the Last, Stonecutter's-street, Fleet-market. The 
 deceased to be furnished as follows : — A strong elm coffin, 
 covered with superfine black, and finished with two rows, all 
 round, close drove, best japanned nails, and adorned with or- 
 namental drops, a handsome plate of inscription, angel above 
 and flower beneath, and four pairs of handsome handles, with 
 wrought gripes ; the coffin to be well pitched, lined, and ruf- 
 fled with fine crape ; a handsome crape shroud, cap, and pil- 
 low. For use, a handsome velvet pall, three gentlemen's 
 cloaks, three crape hat-bands, three hoods and scarfs, and six 
 pairs of gloves ; two porters equipped to attend the funeral, a 
 man to attend the same with band and gloves ; also, the burial 
 fees paid, if not exceeding one guinea." 
 
 '•.Man," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a noble animal, 
 splendid in ashes, and pompous in the gave." Whoever 
 drew up this little advertisement Certain!) understood this 
 appetite in the species, and has made abundant provision for 
 it. It really almost induces a tedium vita upon one to read 
 it. Melhiuks I could be willing to die, in death to be so al- 
 35*
 
 414 ON burial societies; and the 
 
 tended. The two rows all round close-drove best black ja- 
 panned nails — how feelingly do they invite and almost irre- 
 sistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down ! what 
 aching head can resist the temptation to repose, which the 
 crape shroud, the cap, and the pillow present 1 what sting is 
 there in death, which the handles with wrought gripes are not 
 calculated to pluck away ? what victory in the grave, which 
 the drops and the velvet pall do not render at least extremely 
 disputable? but, above all, the pretty emblematic plate with 
 the angel above and the flower beneath takes me mightily. 
 
 The notice goes on to inform us, that though the society 
 has been established but a very few years, upwards of eleven 
 hundred persons have put down their names. It is really an 
 affecting consideration to think of so many poor people, of the 
 industrious and hard-working class, (for none but such would 
 be possessed of such a generous forethought,) clubbing their 
 twopences to save the reproach of a parish funeral. Many a 
 poor fellow, I dare swear, has that angel and flower kept 
 from the Angel and Punch-bowl, while, to provide himself a bier, 
 he has curtailed himself of £m\ Many a savoury morsel has 
 the living body been deprived of, that the lifeless one might be 
 served up in a richer state to the worms. And sure, if the 
 body could understand the actions of the soul, and entertain 
 generous notions of things, it would thank its provident part- 
 ner, that, she had been more solicitous to defend it from dis- 
 honours at its dissolution, than careful to pamper it with good 
 things in the time of its union. If Caesar were chiefly anx- 
 ious at his death how he might die most decently, every buri- 
 al society may be considered as a club of Coesars. 
 
 Nothing tends to keep up, in the imaginations of the poor- 
 er sort of people, a generous horror of the workhouse more 
 than the manner in which pauper funerals are conducted in 
 this metropolis. The coffin nothing but a few naked planks 
 coarsely put together — the want of a pall, (that decent and 
 well-imagined veil, which, hiding the coffin that hides the 
 body, keeps that which would shock us at two removes from 
 us), the coloured coats of the men that are hired, at cheap 
 rates, to carry the body— altogether, give the notion of the 
 deceased having been some person of an ill life and conversa- 
 tion, some one who may not claim the entire rites of Chris- 
 tian burial — one by whom some parts of the sacred ceremony 
 would be desecrated if they should be bestowed upon him. I 
 meet these meager processions sometimes in the street. They 
 are sure to make me out of humour and melancholy all the 
 day after. They have a harsh and ominous aspect. 
 
 If there is anything in thu prospectus issued from Mr. Mid-
 
 CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER. 415 
 
 dlcton's, Stonecutter's-street, which pleases me less than the 
 rest, it is to find, that the six pairs of "loves are to be returned, 
 that they are only lent, or, as the bill expresses it, for use, on 
 the occasion. The hood, scarfs, and hatbands may properly 
 enough be given up after the solemnity : the cloaks no gen- 
 tleman would think of keeping; but a pair of gloves, once 
 fitted on, ought not in courtesy to be redemanded. The 
 wearer should certainly have the fee-simple of them. The 
 cost would be but trifling, and they would be a proper me- 
 morial of the day. This part of the proposal wants reconsider- 
 ing. It is not conceived in the same liberal way of thinking 
 as the rest. I am also a little doubtful whether the limit, 
 within which the burial-fee is made payable, should not be 
 extended to thirty shillings. 
 
 Some provision, too, ought undoubtedly to be made in favour 
 of those well-intentioned persons and well-wishers to the 
 fund, who, having all along paid their subscriptions regularly, 
 are so unfortunate as to die before the six months, which 
 would entitle them to their freedom, are quite completed. One 
 can hardly imagine a more distressing case than that of a poor 
 fellow lingering on in a consumption till the period of his free- 
 dom is almost in sight, and then finding himself going with a 
 velocity which makes it doubtful whether he shall be entitled 
 to his funeral honours : his quota to which he nevertheless 
 squeezes out, to the diminution of the comforts which sick- 
 ness demands. I think, in such cases, some of the contribu- 
 tion-money ought to revert. With some such modifications, 
 which might easily be introduced, I see nothing in these pro- 
 posals of Mr. iMiddleton which is not strictly fair and genteel; 
 and heartily recommend them to all persons of moderate in- 
 comes, in either sex, who are willing that this perishable 
 part of them should quit the scene of its mortal activities 
 with as handsome circumstances as possible. 
 
 Before I quit the subject, I must guard my readers against 
 a scandal which they may be apt to take at the place whence 
 these proposals purport to be issued. From the sign of the 
 First and the Last, they may conclude that Mr. Middleton is 
 some publican, who, in assembling a club of this description 
 at his house, may have a sinister end of his own, altogether 
 foreign to the solemn purpose for which the club is pretended 
 to be instituted. I must set them right by informing tliein 
 that the issuer of these, proposals is no publican, though he 
 hangs out a sign, but an honest superintendent of funerals, 
 who, by the device of a cradle and a coffin, connecting both 
 ends of human existence together, has most ingeniously con- 
 trived to insinuate, that the framers of these first and last re-
 
 416 ON BURIAL SOCIETIES ; AND THE 
 
 ceptacles of mankind divide this our life between them, and 
 that all that passes from the midwife to the undertaker may, 
 in strict propriety, go for nothing : an awful and instructive 
 lesson to human vanity. 
 
 Looking over some papers lately that fell into my hands 
 by chance, and appear to have been written about the begin- 
 ning of the last century, I stumbled, among the rest, upon the 
 following short essay, which the writer calls " The Character 
 of an Undertaker.'''' It is written with some stiffness and pe- 
 culiarities of style ; but some parts of it, I think, not unaptly 
 characterize the profession to which Mr. Middle ton has the 
 honour to belong. The writer doubtless had in his mind the 
 entertaining character of Sable, in Steele's excellent comedy 
 of the Funeral. 
 
 CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER. 
 
 " He is master of the ceremonies at burials and mourning 
 assemblies, grand marshal at funeral processions, the only 
 true yeoman of the body, over which he exercises a dicta- 
 torial authority from the moment that the breath has taken 
 leave to that of its final commitment to the earth. His min- 
 istry begins where the physician's, the lawyer's, and the di- 
 vine's end. Or if some part of the functions of the latter 
 run parallel with his, it is only in ordine ad spiritualia. His 
 temporalities remain unquestioned. He is arbitrator of all 
 questions of honour which may concern the defunct ; and 
 upon slight inspection will pronounce how long he may re- 
 main in this upper world with credit to himself, and when it 
 will be prudent for his reputation that he should retire. His 
 determination in these points is peremptory and without ap- 
 peal. Yet, with a modesty peculiar to his profession, he 
 meddles not out of his own sphere. With the good or bad 
 actions of the deceased in his lifetime he has nothing to do. 
 He leaves the friends of the dead man to form their own con- 
 jectures as to the place to which the departed spirit is gone. 
 His care is only about the exuviae. He concerns not himself 
 even about the body, as it is a structure of parts internal, and 
 a wonderful microcosm. He leaves such curious speculations 
 to the anatomy professor. Or, if anything, he is averse to 
 such wanton inquiries, as delighting rather that the parts 
 which he has care of should be returned to their kindred dust 
 in as handsome and unmutilated condition as possible ; that 
 the grave should have its full and unimpaired tribute — a com- 
 plete and just carcass. Nor is he only careful to provide for 
 the body's entireness, but for its accommodation and orna-
 
 CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER. 417 
 
 ment. lie orders the fashion of its clothes, and designs the 
 symmetry of its dwelling. Its vanity has an innocent survi- 
 val in him. He is bedmaker to the dead. The pillows 
 which he lays never rumple. The day of interment is the 
 theatre in which he displays the mysteries of his art. It is 
 hard to describe what he is, or rather to tell what he is not, 
 on that day : for, being neither kinsman, servant, nor friend, 
 he is all in turns; a transcendent, running through all those 
 relations. His office is to supply the place of self-agency in 
 the family, who are presumed incapable of it through grief. 
 He is eyes, and ears, and hands to the whole household. A 
 draught of wine cannot go round to the mourners, but he must 
 minister it. A chair may hardly be restored to its place by 
 a less solemn hand than his. He takes upon himself all 
 functions, and is a sort of ephemeral major-domo ! He dis- 
 tributes his attentions among the company assembled according 
 to the degree of affliction, which he calculates from the de- 
 gree of kin to the deceased ; and marshals them accordingly 
 in the procession. He himself is of a sad and tristful coun- 
 tenance ; yet such as (if well examined) is not without some 
 show of patience and resignation at bottom ; prefiguring, as 
 it were, to the friends of the deceased what their grief shall 
 be when the hand of Time shall have softened and taken 
 down the bitterness of their first anguish; so handsomely 
 can he foreshape and anticipate the work of time. Lastly, 
 ■with his wand, as with another divining-rod, he calculates 
 the depth of earth at which the bones of the dead man may 
 rest, which he ordinarily contrives may be at such a distance 
 from the surface of this earth as may frustrate the profane 
 attempts of such as would violate his repose, yet sufficiently 
 on this side the centre to give his friends hopes of any easy 
 and practicable resurrection. And here we leave him, casting 
 in dust to dust, which is the last friendly office that he under- 
 takes to do." 
 
 Begging your pardon for detaining you so long among 
 " graves, and worms, and epitaphs," 
 
 I am, sir, 
 
 Your humble servant, 
 
 Morituru8.
 
 418 ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING 
 
 ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING MORAL 
 WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY; 
 
 WITH A HINT TO THOSE WHO HAVE THE FRAMING OF AD 
 VERTISEMENTS FOR APPREHENDING OFFENDERS. 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector . 
 
 Mr. Reflector — There is no science in their pretensions 
 to which mankind are more apt to commit grievous mistakes, 
 than in the supposed very obvious one of physiognomy. I 
 quarrel not with the principles of this science, as they are 
 laid down by learned professors ; much less am I disposed, 
 with some people, to deny its existence altogether as any 
 inlet of knowledge that can be depended upon. I believe 
 that there is, or may be, an art to " read the mind's construc- 
 tion in the face." But, then, in every species of reading, so 
 much depends upon the eyes of the reader ; if they are blear, 
 or apt to dazzle, or inattentive, or strained with too much at- 
 tention, the optic power will infallibly bring home false re- 
 ports of what it reads. How often do we say, upon a cursory 
 glance at a stranger, what a fine open countenance he has, 
 who, upon second inspection, proves to have the exact fea- 
 tures of a knave. Nay, in much more intimate acquaintances, 
 how a delusion of this kind shall continue for months, years, 
 and then break up all at once. 
 
 Ask the married man, who has been so but for a short space 
 of time, if those blue eyes where, during so many years of 
 anxious courtship, truth, sweetness, serenity seemed to be 
 written in characters Avhich could not be misunderstood — ask 
 him if the characters which they now convey be exactly the 
 same ? if for truth he does not read a dull virtue (the mimic 
 of constancy) which changes not, only because it wants the 
 judgment to make a preference ? if for sweetness he does not 
 read a stupid habit of looking pleased at everything ? if for 
 serenity he does not read animal tranquillity, the dead pool of 
 the heart, which no breeze of passion can stir into health 1 
 Alas ! what is this book of the countenance good for, which 
 when we have read so long, and thought that we understood 
 its contents, there comes a countless list of heart-breaking er- 
 rata at the end !
 
 MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFOUMITV. 419 
 
 But these are the pitiable mistakes to which love alone is 
 subject. I have inadvertently wandered from my purpose, 
 which was to expose quite an opposite blunder, into which we 
 are no less apt to fall, through hate. How ugly a person 
 looks upon whose reputation some awkward aspersion hangs, 
 and how suddenly his countenance clears up with his charac- 
 ter. I remember being persuaded of a man whom 1 had con- 
 ceived an ill opinion of, that he had a very bad set of teeth ; 
 which, since I have had better opportunities of being ac- 
 quainted with his face and facts, I find to have been the very 
 reverse of the truth. That crooked old woman, I once said, 
 speaking of an ancient gentlewoman, whose actions did not 
 square altogether with my notions of the rule of right. The 
 unanimous surprise' of the company before whom I uttered 
 these words soon convinced me that I had confounded mental 
 with bodily obliquity, and that there was nothing tortuous 
 about the old lady but her deeds. 
 
 This humour of mankind to deny personal comeliness to 
 those with whose moral attributes they are dissatisfied, is very 
 strongly shown in those advertisements, which stare us in the 
 face from the walls of every street, and, with the tempting 
 bait which they hang forth, stimulate at once cupidity and an 
 abstract love of justice in the breast of every passing peruser ; 
 I mean, the advertisements offering rewards for the apprehen- 
 sion of absconded culprits, strayed apprentices, bankrupts who 
 have conveyed away their effects, debtors that have run away 
 from their bail. I observe, that in exact proportion to the in- 
 dignity with which the prosecutor, who is commonly the 
 framer of the advertisement, conceives he has been treated, 
 the personal pretensions of the fugitive are denied, and his de- 
 fects exaggerated. 
 
 A fellow whose misdeeds have been directed against the 
 public in general, and in whose delinquency no individual shall 
 feel himself particularly interested, generally meets with fair 
 usage. A coiner or a smuggler shall get off tolerably well. 
 His beauty, if he has any, is not much underrated, his de- 
 formities are not much magnilied. A runaway apprentice, 
 who excites perhaps the next least degree of spleen in his pros- 
 ecutor, generally escapes with a pair of bandy legs ; if he has 
 taken anvthing with him in his flight, a hitch in his gait is 
 generally superadded. A bankrupt, who has been guilty of 
 withdrawing his effects, if his ease be not very atrocious, com- 
 monly meets with mild usage. But a debtor who has left his 
 bail in jeopardy is sure to be described in characters of un- 
 mingled deformity. Here the personal feelings of the bail, 
 which may be allowed to be somewhat poignant, are admitted
 
 420 THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING 
 
 to interfere ; and, as wrath and revenge commonly strike in 
 the dark, the colours are laid on with a grossness which I am 
 convinced must often defeat its own purpose. The fish that 
 casts an inky cloud about him that his enemies may not finr" 
 him, cannot more obscure himself by that device than the 
 blackening representations of these angry advertisers must in- 
 evitably serve to cloak and screen the persons of those who 
 have injured them from detection. I have before me at this 
 moment one of these bills, which runs thus : — 
 
 « Fifty Pounds Reward. 
 
 " Run away from his bail, John Tomkins, formerly resident 
 in Princes-street, Soho, but lately of CleVkenwell. Whoever 
 shall apprehend, or cause to be apprehended and lodged in 
 one of his majesty's jails, the said John Tomkins, shall re- 
 ceive the above reward. He is a thickset, sturdy man, about 
 five foot six inches high, halts in his left leg, with a stoop in 
 his gait, with coarse red hair, nose short and cocked up, with 
 little gray eyes, one of them bears the effect of a blow which 
 he has lately received, with a pot belly, speaks with a thick 
 and disagreeable voice, goes shabbily dressed, had on when 
 he went away a greasy shag great-coat with rusty yellow but- 
 tons." 
 
 Now although it is not out of the compass of possibility 
 that John Tomkins aforesaid may comprehend in his agreeable 
 person all the above-mentioned aggregate of charms ; yet, 
 from my observation of the manner in which these advertise- 
 ments are usually drawn up, though I have not the pleasure 
 of knowing the gentleman, yet would I lay a wager, that an 
 advertisement to the following effect would have a much bet- 
 ter chance of apprehending and laying by the heels this John 
 Tomkins than the above description, although penned by one 
 who, from the good services which he appears to have done 
 for him, has not improbably been blessed with some years of 
 previous intercourse with the said John. Taking, then, the 
 above advertisement to be true, or nearly so, down to the words 
 " left leg" inclusive, (though I have some doubt if the blemish 
 there implied amount to a positive lameness, or be perceiva- 
 ble by any but the nearest friends of John,) I would proceed 
 thus : — 
 
 " Leans a little forward in his walk, his hair thick and in- 
 clining to auburn, his nose of the middle size, a little turned 
 up at the end, lively hazel eyes, (the contusion, as its effects 
 are probably gone off by this time, I judge better omitted,) in- 
 clines to be corpulent, his voice thick but pleasing, especially
 
 MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY. 421 
 
 when he sings, had on a decent shag great-coat with yellow 
 butions." 
 
 Now, I would stake a considerable wager (though by no 
 means a positive man) that sonic such mitigated description 
 would lead the beagles of the law into a much surer track for 
 finding this ungracious varlet, than to set them upon a false 
 scent after fictitious ugliness and fictitious shabbmess ; though, 
 to do those gentlemen justice, I have no doubt their experi- 
 ence has taught them in all such cases to abate a great deal 
 of the deformity which they are instructed to expect; and has 
 discovered to them that the devil's agents upon this earth, 
 like their master, are far less ugly in reality than they are 
 painted. 
 
 I am afraid, Mr. Reflector, that I shall be thought to have 
 gone wide of my subject, which was to detect the practical 
 errors of physiognomy, properly so called; whereas 1 have in- 
 troduced physical defects, such as lameness, the effects of ac 
 ciilcnts upon a man's person, his wearing apparel, &c, as cir- 
 cumstances on which the eye of dislike, looking askance, may 
 report erroneous conclusions to the understanding. But if we 
 are liable, through a kind or an unkind passion, to mistake so 
 grossly concerning things so exterior and palpable, how much 
 more are we likely to err respecting those nicer and less per- 
 ceptible hints of character in a face, whose detection consti- 
 tutes the triumph of the physiognomist. 
 
 To revert to those bestowers of unmerited deformity, the 
 framers of advertisements for the apprehension of delinquents, 
 a sincere desire of promoting the ends of public justice, in- 
 duces me to address a word to them on the best means of at- 
 taining those ends. I will endeavour to lay down a few prac- 
 tical, or rather negative rules for their use, for my ambition 
 extends no further than to arm them with cautions against the 
 self-defeating of their own purposes : — 
 
 1. Imprimis, then, Mr. Advertiser! If the culprit whom 
 you are willing to recover be one to uhom in times past you 
 have shown kindness, and been disposed to think kindly of him 
 yourself, but he has deceived your trust, and has run away and 
 left you with a load of debt to answer for him, sit down calinlv, 
 and endeavour to behold him through the spectacles of memory 
 rather than of present conceit. Image to yourself, before you 
 pen a tittle of his description, the same plausible, good-looking 
 man who took you in : and trv to put awuv from your mind 
 every intrusion of that deceitful spectre which perpetually 
 obtrudes itself in the room of your former friend's known visage. 
 It will do you more credit to have been deceived bv such a one ; 
 and, depend upon it, the traitor will convey to the eyes of the 
 36
 
 422 ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING 
 
 world in general much more of that first idea which you formed 
 (perhaps in part erroneous) of his physiognomy, than of tha* 
 frightful substitute which you have suffered to creep in upon 
 your mind and usurp upon it ; a creature which has no arche- 
 type except in your own brain. 
 
 2. If you be a master that have to advertise a runaway ap- 
 prentice, though the young dog's faults are known only to 
 you, and no doubt his conduct has been aggravating enough, do 
 not presently set him down as having crooked ankles. He may 
 have a good pair of legs, and run away notwithstanding. In- 
 deed, the latter does rather seem to imply the former. 
 
 3. If the unhappy person against whom your laudable ven- 
 geance is directed be a thief, think that a thief may have a 
 good nose, good eyes, good ears. It is indispensable to his pro- 
 fession that he be possessed of sagacity, foresight, vigilance ; 
 it is more than probable, then, that he is endued with the bodily 
 types or instruments of these qualities to some tolerable degree 
 of perfectness. 
 
 4. If petty larceny be his offence, I exhort you, do not con- 
 found meanness of crime with diminutiveness of stature. 
 These things have no connexion. I have known a tall man 
 stoop to the basest action, a short man aspire to the height of 
 crime, a fair man be guilty of the foulest actions, &c. 
 
 5. Perhaps the offender has been guilty of some atrocious 
 and aggravated murder. Here is the most difficult case of 
 all. It is above all requisite that such a daring violator of 
 the peace and safety of society should meet with his reward, 
 a violent and ignominious death. But how shall we get 
 at him ? Who is there among us, that has known him be- 
 fore he committed the offence, that shall take upon him to say 
 he can sit down coolly and pen a dispassionate description of 
 a murderer ? The tales of our nursery— the reading of our 
 youth — the ill-looking man that, was hired by the uncle to de- 
 spatch the Children in the Wood — the grim ruffians who 
 smothered the babes in the Tower — the black and beetle- 
 browed assassin of Mrs. Radcliffe — the shag-haired villain of 
 Mr. Monk Lewis — the Tarquin-tread and mill-stone dropping 
 eyes of murder in Shakspeare — the exaggerations of picture 
 and of poetry — what we have read and what we have dreamed 
 of — rise up and crowd in upon us such eye-scaring portraits of 
 the man of blood, that our pen is absolutely forestalled; we 
 commence poets when we should play the part of strictest histo- 
 rians, and the very blackness of horror which the deeii calls up, 
 serves as a cloud to screen the doer. The fiction is blameless, 
 it is accordant with those wise prejudices with which nature has 
 guarded our innocence, as with impassable barriers, against tho
 
 MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFOUMITV. 423 
 
 commission of such appalling crimes ; but meantime the crim- 
 inal escapes, or if — owing to that wise abatement in their ex- 
 pectation of deformity, winch, as I hinted at before, the officers 
 of pursuit never fail to make, and no doubt in cases of this 
 sort they make a more than ordinary allowance — if, owing to 
 this or any accident, the offender is caught and brought to Ins 
 trial, who that has been led out of curiosity to witness such a 
 scene, has not with astonishment reflected on the difference 
 between a real committer of a murder, and the idea of one 
 which he has been collecting and heightening all his life out 
 of books, dreams, &c. The fellow, perhaps, is a sleek, suug- 
 looking man, with light hair and eyebrows — the latter by no 
 means jutting out or like a crag — and with none of those 
 marks which our fancy had pre-bestowed upon him. 
 
 I find I am getting unawares too serious ; the best way on 
 such occasions is to leave off, which I shall do by generally 
 recommending to all prosecuting advertisers not to confound 
 crimes with ugliness ; or rather, to distinguish between that 
 physiognomical deformity, which lam willing to grant always 
 accompanies crime, and mere physical ugliness — which signi- 
 fies nothing, is the exponent of nothing, and may exist in a 
 good or bad person indifferently. 
 
 Crito. 
 
 ON THE INCONVENIENCES RESULTING FROM 
 BEING HANGED. 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector. 
 
 Sir — I am one of those unhappy persons whose misfor- 
 tunes, it seems, do not entitle them to the benefit of pure pity. 
 All that is bestowed upon me of that kindest alleviator of hu- 
 man miseries, comes dashed with a double portion of con- 
 tempt. My griefs have nothing in them that is felt as sacn d 
 by the bystanders. Yet is my affliction in truth of the deep- 
 est grain. The heaviest task that was ever given to mortal 
 patience to sustain. Time, that wears out all other sorrows, 
 can never modify or soften mine. Here they must continue 
 to gnaw, as long as that fatal mark — 
 
 Why was I ever born ? Why was innocence in my person 
 suffered to be branded with a stain which was appointed only 
 fpx the blackest guilt I What had 1 done, or mv parents, that 
 a disgrace of mine should involve a whole posterity in infamy ?
 
 424 ON THE INCONVENIENCES 
 
 I am almost tempted to believe, that, in some pre-existent 
 state, crimes to which this sublunary life of mine hath been as 
 much a stranger as the babe that is newly born into it, have 
 drawn down upon me this vengeance, so disproportionate to 
 my actions on this globe. 
 
 My brain sickens, and my bosom labours to be delivered of 
 the weight that presses upon it, yet my conscious pen shrinks 
 from the avowal But out it must — 
 
 Oh, Mr. Reflector ! guess at the wretch's misery who now 
 writes this to you, when, with tears and burning blushes, he 
 is obliged to confess that he has been hanged — 
 
 Methinks I hear an involuntary exclamation burst from you 
 as your imagination presents to you fearful images of your 
 correspondent unknown — hanged ! 
 
 Fear not, Mr. Editor. No disimbodied spirit has the hon- 
 our of addressing you. I am flesh and blood, an unfortunate 
 system of bones, muscles, sinews, arteries, like yourself. 
 
 Then, I presume, you mean to be pleasant — that expression 
 of yours, Mr. Correspondent, must be taken somehow in a met 
 aphorical sense. 
 
 In the plainest sense, without trope or figure — yes, Mr. 
 Editor ! this neck of mine has felt the fatal noose, these hands 
 have tremblingly held up the corroborative prayer-book, these 
 lips have sucked the moisture of the last consolatory orange, 
 this tongue has chanted the doleful cantata which no per- 
 former has ever been called upon to repeat, this face has had 
 the veiling nightcap drawn over it — 
 
 But for no crime of mine. Far be it from me to arraign 
 the justice of my country, which, though tardy, did at length 
 recognise my innocence. It is not for me to reflect upon 
 judge or jury, now that eleven years have elapsed since the 
 erroneous sentence was pronounced. Men will always be 
 fallible, and perhaps circumstances did appear at the time a 
 little strong. 
 
 Suffice it to say, that after hanging four minutes, (as the 
 spectators were pleased to compute it — a man that is being 
 strangled, I know from experience, has altogether a different 
 measure of time from his friends who are breathing leisurely 
 about him — I suppose the minutes lengthen as time approaches 
 eternity, in the same manner as miles get longer as you travel 
 northward,) after hanging four minutes, according to the best 
 calculation of the bystanders, a reprieve came, and I was cut 
 down — 
 
 Really I am ashamed of deforming your pages with these 
 technical phrases — if I knew how to express my meaning 
 shorter —
 
 RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED. 425 
 
 But to proceed. My first care after 1 had been brought to 
 myself by the usual methods, (those methods that arc bo 
 
 interesting to the operator and his assistants, who are pretty 
 numerous on such occasions, but which no patient was ever 
 deSirous of undergoing a second time for Ihe benefit of sci- 
 ence,) my first care was to provide myself with an enor- 
 mous stock or cravat to hide the place — you understand me ; 
 my next care was to procure a residence as distant as possi- 
 ble from that part of the country where I had Buffered. For, 
 that reason I chose the metropolis, as the place where wiund- 
 ed honour (I had been told) could lurk with the least danger 
 of exciting inquiry, and stigmatized innocence had the best 
 chance of hiding her disgrace in a crowd. I sought out a 
 new circle of acquaintance, and my circumstances happily en- 
 abling me to pursue my fancy in that respect, I endeavoured, 
 by mingling in all the pleasures which the town affords, to 
 efface the memory of what I had undergone. 
 
 Hut alas ! such is the portentous and all-pervading chain of 
 connexion which links together the head and members of this 
 great community, my scheme of lying perdu was defeated almost 
 at the outset. A countryman of mine, whom a foolish lawsuit 
 had brought to town, by chance met me, and the secret was 
 soon blazoned about. 
 
 In a short time I found myself deserted by most of those 
 who had been my intimate friends. Not that, any guilt was 
 supposed to attach to my character. My officious country- 
 man, to do him justice, had been candid enough to explain 
 my perfect innocence. But, somehow or other, there is a 
 want of strong virtue in mankind. We have plenty of the 
 softer instincts, but the heroic character is gone. How else 
 can I account for it, that of all my numerous acquaintance, 
 among whom I had the honour of ranking sundry persons of 
 education, talents, and worth, scarcely here and there one or 
 two could be found who had the courage to associate with a 
 man that had been hanged. 
 
 Those few who did not desert me altogether were persons 
 of strong but coarse minds ; and from the absence of all deli- 
 cacy in them I suffered almost as much as from the super- 
 abundance of a false species of it in the others. Those who 
 stuck by me were the jokers, who thought themselves entitled 
 by the fidelity which they had shown towards me to use me 
 with what familiarity they pleased. Many and unfeeling are 
 the jests that I have suffered from these rude (because faith- 
 ful) Achateses. As they passed me in the streets, one would 
 nod significantly to his companion and say, pointing to me, 
 Smoke his cravat, and ask me if I had got a wen, that 1 was so 
 36*
 
 426 ON THE INCONVENIENCES 
 
 solicitous to cover my neck. Another would inquire what 
 news from * * * Assizes, (which you may guess, Mr. Edi- 
 tor, vvas the scene of my shame,) and whether the sessions was 
 like to prove a maiden one. A third would offer to ensure me 
 from drowning. A fourth would tease me with inquiries how 
 I felt when I was swinging, whether I had not something like 
 a blue flame dancing before my eyes. A fifth took a fancy 
 never to call me anything but Lazarus. And an eminent 
 bookseller and publisher — who, in his zeal to present the pub- 
 lic with new facts, had he lived in those days, I am confident, 
 would not have scrupled waiting upon the person himself last 
 mentioned, at the most critical period of his existence, to so- 
 licit a few facts relative to resuscitation — had the modesty to of- 
 fer me guineas per sheet, if I would write, in his maga- 
 zine, a physiological account of my feelings upon coming to 
 myself. , 
 
 But these were evils which a moderate fortitude might 
 have enabled me to struggle with. Alas ! Mr. Editor, the 
 women, whose good graces I had always most assiduously 
 cultivated, from whose softer minds I had hoped a more deli- 
 cate and generous sympathy than I found in the men — the 
 women began to shun me — this was the unkindest blow of 
 all. 
 
 But is it to be wondered at? How couldst thou imagine, 
 wretchedest of beings, that that tender creature Seraphina 
 would fling her pretty arms about that neck which previous 
 circumstances had rendered infamous ? That she would put up 
 with the refuse of the rope, the leavings of the cord '{ Or that 
 any analogy could subsist between the knot which binds true 
 lovers, and the knot which ties malefactors 1 
 
 I can forgive that pert baggage Flirtilla, who, when I com- 
 plimented her one day on the execution which her eyes had 
 done, replied, that, to be sure, Mr. * * was a judge of those 
 things. But from thy more exalted mind, Celestina, I expect- 
 ed a more unprejudiced decision. 
 
 The person whose true name I conceal under this appella- 
 tion, of all the women that I was ever acquainted with, had 
 the most manly turn of mind, which she had improved by 
 reading and the best conversation. Her Understanding was 
 not more masculine than her manners and whole disposition 
 were delicately and truly feminine. She was the daughter 
 of an officer who had fallen in the service of his country, 
 leaving his widow and Celestina an only child, with a fortune 
 sufficient to set them above want, but not to enable them to 
 live in splendour. 1 had the mother's permission to pay my
 
 RESULTING FROM DEIM; HANGED. 427 
 
 addresses to the young lady, and Celestina seemed to approve 
 of my suit. 
 
 Often and often have I poured out mv overcharged soul in 
 the presence of Celestina, complaining of the hard and un- 
 feeling prejudices of the world, and the sweet maid has again 
 and again declared, that no irrational prejudice should hinder 
 her from esteeming every man according to his intrinsic worth. 
 Often lias she repeated the consolatory assurance, that she 
 could never consider as essentially ignominious an accident, 
 which was indeed to be deprecated, hut which might have 
 happened to the most innocent of mankind. Then would she 
 set forth some illustrious example, which her reading easily 
 furnished, of a Phocion or a Socrates unjustly condemned ; 
 of a Raleigh or a Sir Thomas More, to whom late posterity 
 jiad done justice ; and by soothing my fancy with some such 
 agreeable parallel, she would make me almost to triumph in 
 my disgrace, and convert my shame into glory. 
 
 In such entertaining and instructive conversations the time 
 passed on, till I importunately urged the mistress of my affec- 
 tions to name a day for our union. To this she obligingly 
 consented, and 1 thought myself the happiest of mankind. 
 But how was I surprised one morning on the receipt of the 
 following billet from my charmer: — 
 
 Sir, 
 You must not impute it to levity, or to a worse failing, in- 
 gratitude, if, with anguish of heart, I feel myself compelled by 
 irresistible arguments to recall a vow which I fear 1 made with 
 too little consideration. I never can be yours. The reasons 
 of my decision, which is final, are in my own breast, anc you 
 must everlastingly remain a stranger to them. Assure your- 
 self that I can never cease to esteem you as I ought. 
 
 Celestina. 
 
 At the sight of this paper, I ran in frantic haste to Celes- 
 tina's lodgings, where I learned, to my infinite mortification, 
 that the mother and daughter w-ere set oil" on a journey to 
 a distant part of the country, to visit a relation, and were not 
 expected to return in less than four months. 
 
 Stunned by this blow, which left me without the courage 
 to solicit an explanation by letter, even if I had known where 
 they were, (for the particular address was industriously con- 
 cealed from me,) 1 waited with impatience the termination of 
 the period, in the vain hope that 1 might be permitted to have 
 a chance of softening the harsh decision by a personal inter- 
 view with Celestina alter her return. But before three months
 
 428 ON THE INCONVENIENCES 
 
 were at an end, I learned from the newspapers, that my be- 
 loved had — given her hand to another ! 
 
 Heart-broken as I was, I was totally at a loss to account 
 for the strange step which she had taken ; and it was not 
 till some years after that I learned the true reason from 
 a female relation of hers, to whom it seems Celestina had 
 confessed in confidence, that it was no demerit of mine 
 that had caused her to break off* the match so abruptly, nor 
 any preference which she might feel for any other person, for 
 she preferred me (she was pleased to say) to all mankind; 
 but when she came to lay the matter closer to her heart, she 
 found that she never should be able to bear the sight (I give 
 you her very words as they were detailed to me by her rela- 
 tion) the sight of a man in a nightcap, who had appeared on a 
 public platform, it would lead to such a disagreeable associa- 
 tion of ideas ! And to this punctilio I was sacrificed. 
 
 To pass over an infinite series of minor mortifications, to 
 which this last and heaviest might well render me callous, 
 behold me here, Mr. Editor ! in the thirty-seventh year of my 
 existence, (the twelfth, reckoning from my reanimation,) cut 
 off from all respectable connexions, rejected by the fairer 
 half of the community — who in my case alone seem to have 
 laid aside the characteristic pity of their sex ; punished be 
 cause I was once punished unjustly ; suffering for no other 
 reason than because I once had the misfortune to suffer 
 without any cause at all. In no other country, I think, but 
 ihis, could a man have been subject to such a life-long perse 
 cution, when once his innocence had been clearly established. 
 
 Had I crawled forth a rescued victim from the rack in the 
 horrible dungeons of the Inquisition — had I heaved myself up 
 from a half bastinado in China, or been torn from the just 
 entering, ghastly empaling-stake in Barbary — had I dropped 
 alive from the knout in Russia, or come off with a gashed 
 neck from the half-mortal, scarce-in-time-retracted cimeter of 
 an executioneering slave in Turkey — I might have borne about 
 the remnant of this frame (the mangled trophy of reprieved 
 innocence) with credit to myself, in any of those barbarous 
 countries. No scorn, at least, would have mingled with the 
 pity (small as it might be) with which what was left of me 
 would have been surveyed. 
 
 The singularity of my case has often led me to inquire into 
 the reasons of the general levity with which the subject of 
 hanging is treated as a topic in this country. I say as a topic : 
 for let the very persons who speak so lightly of the tiling 
 at a distance be brought to view the; real scene — let the plat- 
 form be bona fide exhibited, and the trembling culprit brought
 
 RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED. 420 
 
 forth — the case is changed ; but as a topic of conversation, I 
 appeal to the vulgar jukes which pass current in every street 
 15 11 1 why mention them, when the politest authors have agreed 
 in making use of this subject as a source of the ridiculous J 
 Swift, and Pope, and Prior are fond of recurring to it. Gay lias 
 built an entire drama upon this single foundation. The whole 
 interest of the Beggars' Opera may be said to hang upon it. 
 To such writers as Fielding and Smollett it is a perfect bom 
 louche. Hear the facetious 'Pom Brown, in his Comical I 
 of London and Westminster, describe the Order of the IS how 
 at one of the Tyburn Executions in his time : — " Mr. Ordinary 
 visits his melancholy flock in Newgate by eight. Doleful 
 procession up Ilolboni-lnll about eleven. Men handsome and 
 proper that were never thought so before, which is some com- 
 fort, however. Arrive at the fatal place by twelve. Burnt 
 brandy, women, and Sabbath-breaking repented of. Some few 
 penitential drops fall under the gallows. Sheriffs' men, par- 
 son, pickpockets, criminals, all very busy. The last conclu- 
 ding peremptory psalm struck up. Show over one by one." 
 In this sportive strain does this misguided wit think proper to 
 play with a subject so serious, which yet he would hardly 
 have done if he had not known that there existed a predispo- 
 sition in the habits of his unaccountable countrymen to con- 
 sider the subject as a jest. 
 
 But what shall we say to Shakspeare, who, (not to mention 
 the solution which the Gravedigger in Hamlet gives of his 
 fellow-workman's problem,) in that scene in Measure for 
 Measure, where the clown calls upon Master Bumardine to get 
 up and be hanged, which he declines on the score of being 
 sleepy, has actually gone out of his way to gratify this amiable 
 propensity in his countrymen ; for it is plain, from the use 
 that was to be made of his head, and from Auhorson's asking, 
 " is the axe upon the block, sirrah?" that beheading, and not 
 hanging, was the punishment to which Barnardine was des- 
 tined. But Shakspeare knew that the axe and block were 
 pregnant with no ludicrous images, and therefore falsified the 
 historic truth of his own drama (if I may so speak) rather 
 than he would leave out such excellent matter for a jest as the 
 suspending of a fellow-creature in mid air has been ever 
 esteemed to be by Englishmen. 
 
 One reason why the ludicrous never fails to intrude itself 
 into our contemplations upon this mode of death, I suppose to 
 Ik , the absurd ppsture into which :i man is thrown who is 
 condemned to dance, as the vulgar delight to express it, upon 
 nothing. To see him whisking and wavering in the air,
 
 430 ON THE INCONVENIENCES, ETC. 
 
 " As the wind you know will wave a man ;"* 
 
 to behold the vacant carcass, from which the life is newly 
 dislodged, shifting between earth and heaven, the sport of 
 every gust ; like a weathercock, serving to show from which 
 point the wind blows ; like a maukin, fit only to scare away 
 birds ; like a nest left to swing upon a bough when the bird 
 is flown : these are uses to which we cannot without a mix- 
 ture of spleen and contempt behold the human carcass reduced. 
 VVe string up dogs, foxes, bats, moles, weasels. Man surely 
 deserves a steadier death. 
 
 Another reason why the ludicrous associates more forcibly 
 with this than with any other mode of punishment, I cannot help 
 thinking to be, the senseless costume with which old pre- 
 scription has thought fit to clothe the exit of malefactors in 
 this country. Let a man do what he will to abstract from his 
 imagination all idea of the whimsical, something of it will 
 come across him when he contemplates the figure of a fellow- 
 creature in the daytime (in however distressing a situation) in 
 a nightcap. Whether it be that this nocturnal addition has 
 something discordant with daylight, or that it is the dress 
 which we are seen in at those times when we are " seen," as 
 the angel in Milton expresses it, " least wise ;" this I am 
 afraid will always be the case ; unless, indeed, as in my in- 
 stance, some strong personal feeling overpower the ludicrous 
 altogether. To me, when I reflect upon the train of misfor- 
 tunes which have pursued men through life, owing to that ac- 
 cursed drapery, the cap presents as purely frightful an object 
 as the sleeveless yellow coat and devil-painted mitre of the 
 San Benitos. An ancestor of mine, who suffered for his loy- 
 alty in the time of the civil wars, was so sensible of the truth 
 of what I am here advancing, that on the morning of execution, 
 no entreaties could prevail upon him to submit to the odious 
 dishabille, as he called it, but he insisted upon wearing, and 
 actually suffered in, the identical flowing periwig which he 
 is painted in, in the gallery belonging to my uncle's seat in 
 shire. 
 
 Suffer me, Mr. Editor, before I quit the subject, to say a 
 word or two respecting the minister of justice in this country ; 
 in plain words, 1 mean the hangman. It has always appeared 
 to me that, in the mode of inflicting capital punishments with 
 us, there is too much of the ministry of the human hand. 
 The guillotine, as performing its functions more of itself and 
 sparing human agency, though a cruel and disgusting exhibi- 
 tion, in my mind, has many ways the advantage over our way. 
 
 * Hieronimo in the Spanish tragedy.
 
 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS. 431 
 
 In beheading, indeed, as it was formerly practised in England, 
 and in whipping to death, as is sometimes practised now, the 
 hand of man is no doubt sufficiently busy ; but there is some- 
 thing less repugnant in these downright blows than in the offi- 
 cious barber-like ministerings of the other. To have a fellow 
 with his hangman's hands fumbling about your collar, adjusting 
 the thing as your valet would regulate your cravat, valuing 
 himself on his menial dexterity — 
 
 I never shall forget meeting my rascal — I mean the fellow 
 who officiated for me — in London last winter. I think I see 
 him now — in a waistcoat that had been mine — smirking along 
 as if he knew me — 
 
 In some parts of Germany, that fellow's office is by law de- 
 clared infamous, and his posterity incapable of being ennobled. 
 They have hereditary hangmen, or had, at least, in the same 
 manner as they had hereditary other great officers of state : 
 and the hangmen's families of two adjoining parishes inter- 
 married with each other, to keep the breed entire. I wish 
 something of the same kind were established in England. 
 
 But it is time to quit a subject which teems with disagree- 
 able images. 
 
 Permit me to subscribe myself, Mr. Editor, 
 
 Your unfortunate friend, 
 
 Pensilis. 
 
 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS. 
 
 " Sedet, aeternumque sedebit, 
 Infelix Theseus." — Virgil. 
 
 That there is a professional melancholy, if I may so ex- 
 press myself, incident to the occupation of a tailor, is a fact 
 which I think very few will venture to dispute. I may safely 
 appeal to my readers, whether they ever knew one of that 
 faculty that was not of a temperament, to say the least, far re- 
 moved from mercurial or jovial. 
 
 Observe the suspicious gravity of their gait. The peacock 
 is not more tender, from a consciousness of his peculiar in- 
 firmity, than a gentleman of this profession is of being known 
 by the same infallible testimonies of his occupation. " Walk, 
 that I may know thee." 
 
 Do you ever see him go whistling along the foot-path like
 
 432 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS. 
 
 a carman, or brush through a crowd like a baker, or go smi- 
 ling to himself like a lover ? Is he forward to thrust into 
 mobs, or to make one at the ballad-singer's audience ? Does 
 he not rather slink by assemblies and meetings of the people, 
 as one who wisely declines popular observation 1 
 
 How extremely rare is a noisy tailor ! a mirthful and ob- 
 streperous tailor ! 
 
 "At my nativity," says Sir Thomas Browne, "my ascen- 
 dant was the earthly sign of Scorpius ; I was born in the 
 planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that 
 leaden planet in me." One would think that he were anato- 
 mizing a tailor ! save that to the latter's occupation, methinks, 
 a woollen planet would seem more consonant, and that he 
 should be born when the sun was in Aries. He goes on. 
 " I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and gal- 
 liardise of company." How true a type of the whole trade ! 
 Eminently economical of his words, you shall seldom hear a 
 jest come from one of them. He sometimes furnishes sub- 
 ject for a repartee, but rarely (I think) contributes one ore 
 proprio. 
 
 Drink itself does not seem to elevate him, or at least to 
 call out of him any of the external indications of vanity. I 
 cannot say that it never causes his pride to swell, but it never 
 breaks out. I am even fearful that it may swell and rankle 
 to an alarming degree inwardly. For pride is near of kin to 
 melancholy ; a hurtful obstruction from the ordinary outlets 
 of vanity being shut. It is this stoppage which engenders proud 
 humours. Therefore a tailor may be proud. I think he is 
 never vain. The display of his gaudy patterns in that book 
 of his which emulates the rainbow, never raises any inflations 
 of that emotion in him, corresponding to what the wigmaker 
 (for instance) evinces when he expatiates on a curl or a bit of 
 hair. He spreads them forth with a sullen incapacity for 
 pleasure, a real or affected indifference to grandeur. Cloth 
 of gold neither seems to elate, nor cloth of frieze to depress 
 him — according to the beautiful motto which formed the mod- 
 est imprese of the shield worn by Charles Brandon at his 
 marriage with the king's sister. Nay, I doubt whether he 
 Mould discover any vainglorious complacence in his colours, 
 though " Iris" herself " dipped the woof." 
 
 In further corroboration of this argument — who ever saw 
 tho wedding of a tailor announced in the newspapers, or the 
 birth of his eldest son ? 
 
 When was a tailor known to give a dance, or to be himself 
 a, good dancer, or to perform exquisitely on the tight rope, or
 
 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS. 433 
 
 to shine in any such light and airy pastimes ? to sing, or play 
 on the violin ? 
 
 Do they much care for public rejoicings, lightings up, ring- 
 ing of bells, firing of cannons, &c? 
 
 Valiant I know they can be ; but I appeal to those who 
 were witnesses to the exploits of Eliot's famous troop, 
 whether in their fiercest charges they betrayed anything of 
 that thoughtless oblivion of death with which a Frenchman 
 jigs into battle, or whether they did not show more of tho 
 melancholy valour of the Spaniard upon whom they charged ; 
 that deliberate courage which contemplation and sedentary 
 habits breathe ? 
 
 Are they often great newsmongers ? I have known some 
 few among them arrive at the dignity of speculative politi- 
 cians ; but that light and cheerful every-day interest in the 
 affairs and goings-on of the world, which makes the barber* 
 such delightful company, I think is rarely observable in them. 
 
 This characteristic pensiveness in them being so notorious, 
 I wonder none of those writers who have expressly treated 
 of melancholy should have mentioned it. Burton, whose 
 book is an excellent abstract of all the authors in that kind 
 who preceded him, and who treats of every species of this 
 malady, from the hypochondriacal or windy to the heroical or 
 love melancholy, has strangely omitted it. Shakspeare him- 
 self has overlooked it. " I have neither the scholar's melan- 
 choly, (saith Jaques,) which is emulation ; nor the courtier's, 
 which is proud ; nor the soldier's, which is politic ; nor the 
 lover's, which is all these :" and then, when you might ex- 
 pect him to have brought in, " nor the tailor's, which is so 
 and so" — he comes to an end of his enumeration, and falls to 
 a defining of his own melancholy. 
 
 Milton likewise has omitted it, where he had so fair an op- 
 portunity of bringing it in, in his Penseroso. 
 
 But the partial omissions of historians proving nothing 
 against the existence of any well-attested fact, I shall pro- 
 ceed and endeavour to ascertain the causes why this pensive 
 
 * Having incidently mentioned the barber, in a comparison of professional 
 temperaments, I hope no other trade will take offence, or look upon it as an 
 incivility done to them, if I say, that in courtesy, humanity, and all the con- 
 versational and social graces which " gladden life," I esteem no profession 
 comparable to his. Indeed, so great is the good-will which I bear to this use- 
 ful and agreeable body of men, that, residing in one of the Inns of Court, 
 (where the best specimens of them are to be found, except, perhaps, at the 
 universities,) there are seven of them to whom I am personally known, and 
 who never pass me without the compliment of the hat on either side. My 
 truly polite and urbane friend, Mr.-A m, of Flower-de-luce-court, in Fleet- 
 street, will forgive my mention of him in particular. I can truly say, that I 
 never spent a quarter of an hour under his hands without deriving some profit 
 from the agreeable discussions which are always going on there. 
 37 T
 
 434 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS. 
 
 turn should be so predominant in people of this profession 
 above all others. 
 
 And first, may it not be, that the custom of wearing ap- 
 parel being derived to us from the fall, and one of the most 
 mortifying products of that unhappy event, a certain serious- 
 ness (to say no more of it) may in the order of things have 
 been intended to be impressed upon the minds of that race ol 
 men to whom in all ages the care of contriving the human 
 apparel has been intrusted — to keep up the memory of the 
 first institution of clothes, and serve as a standing remon- 
 strance against those vanities which the absurd conversion 
 of a memorial of our shame into an ornament of our persons 
 was destined to produce 1 Correspondent in some sort to 
 this, it may be remarked, that the tailor sitting over a cave 
 or hollow place, in the cabalistic language of his order, is 
 said to have certain melancholy regions always open under his 
 feet. But waving further inquiry into final causes, whe • 
 the best of us can only wander in the dark, let us try to dis- 
 cover the efficient causes of this melancholy. 
 
 I think, then, that they may be reduced to two, omitting 
 some subordinate ones, viz. — 
 
 The sedentary habits of the tailor. 
 Something peculiar in his diet. 
 
 First, his sedentary habits. — In Doctor Norris's famous 
 narrative of the phrensy of Mr. John Dennis, the patient, 
 being questioned as to the occasion of the swelling in his 
 legs, replies that it came " by criticism ;" to which the learned 
 doctor seeming to demur, as to a distemper which he had 
 never read of, Dennis (who appears not to have been mad 
 upon all subjects) rejoins, with some warmth, that it was no 
 distemper, but a noble art ! that he had sat fourteen hours a 
 day at it : and that the other was a pretty doctor not to know 
 that there was a cummunication between the brain and the 
 
 When we consider that this sitting for fourteen hours con- 
 tinuously, which the critic probably practised only while he 
 was writing his " remarks," is no more than what the tailor, 
 in the ordinary pursuance of his art, submits to daily (Sun 
 days excepted) throughout the year, shall we wonder to find 
 the brain affected, and in a manner overclouded, from that 
 indissoluble sympathy between the noble and less noble parts 
 of the body, which Dennis hints at ? The unnatural and pain- 
 ful manner of his sitting must also greatly aggravate the evil, 
 insomuch that I have sometimes ventured to liken tailors at 
 their boards to so many envious Junos, sitting cross-legged to 
 hinder the birth of their own felicity. The legs transversed
 
 INDULGENCE OF THE PALATE. 435 
 
 thus X! crosswise, or decussated, was among the ancients 
 the posture of malediction. The Turks, who practise it at 
 this day, are noted to be a melancholy people. 
 
 Secondly, his diet. — To which purpose I find a most re- 
 markable passage in Burton, in his chapter entitled " Bad diet- 
 a cause of melancholy." " Among herbs to be eaten (he says) 
 I find gourds, cucumbers, melons, disallowed ; but especially 
 cabbage. It causeth troublesome dreams, and sends up black 
 vapours to the brain. Galen, loc. affect., lib. 3, cap. 6, of all 
 herbs condemns cabbage. And Isaack, lib. 2, cap. 1, animes 
 gravitatcm facit, it brings heaviness to the soul." I could not 
 omit so flattering a testimony from an author who, having no 
 theory of his own to serve, has so unconsciously contributed to 
 the confirmation of mine. It is well known that this last- 
 named vegetable has, from the earliest periods which we can 
 discover, constituted almost the sole food of this extraordinary 
 race of people. 
 
 Burton, Junior. 
 
 HOSPITA ON THE IMMODERATE INDULGENCE 
 OF THE PLEASURES OF THE PALATE 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector. 
 
 Mr. Reflector — My husband and I are fond of company, 
 and, being in easy circumstances, we are seldom without a 
 party to dinner two or three days in a week. The utmost 
 cordiality has hitherto prevailed at our meetings ; but there is 
 a young gentleman, a near relation of my husband, that has lately 
 come among us, whose preposterous* behaviour bids fair, un- 
 less timely checked, to disturb our tranquillity. He is too 
 great a favourite with my husband in other respects for me to 
 remonstrate with him in any other than this distant way. A let- 
 ter printed in your publication ma}' catch his eye ; for he is a 
 great reader, and makes a point of seeing all the new things 
 that come out. Indeed, he is by no means deficient in under- 
 standing. My husband says that he has a good deal of wit ; but, 
 for my part, I cannot say I am any judge of that, having seldom 
 observed him open his mouth except for purposes very foreign 
 to conversation. In- short, sir, this young gentleman's failing 
 is an immoderate indulgence of his palate. The first time he 
 dined with us he thought it necessary to extenuate the length 
 
 T 2
 
 436 INDULGENCE OF THE PALATE. 
 
 of time he kept the dinner on the table, by declaring that he 
 had taken a very long walk in the morning, and came in fast- 
 ing ; but as that excuse could not serve above once or twice 
 at most, he has latterly dropped the mask altogether, and 
 chosen to appear in his own proper colours without reserve or 
 apology. 
 
 You cannot imagine how unpleasant his conduct has be- 
 come. His way of staring at the dishes as they are brought 
 in has absolutely something immodest in it : it is like the 
 stare of an impudent man of fashion at a fine woman, when she 
 first comes into the room. I am positively in pain for the 
 dishes, and cannot help thinking they have consciousness, and 
 will be put out of countenance, he treats them so like what they 
 are not. 
 
 Then, again, he makes no scruple of keeping a joint of meat 
 on the table, after 'the cheese and fruit are brought in, till he 
 has what he calls done with it. Now how awkward this looks 
 where there are ladies, you may judge, Mr. Reflector — how it 
 disturbs the order and comfort of a meal. And yet I always 
 make a point of helping him first, contrary to all good man- 
 ners — before any of my female friends are helped — that he 
 may avoid this very error. I wish he would eat before he 
 comes out. 
 
 What makes his proceedings more particularly offensive at 
 our house is, that my husband, though out of common polite- 
 ness he is obliged to set dishes of animal food before his 
 visiters, yet himself and his whole family (myself included) 
 feed entirely on vegetables. We have a theory, that animal 
 food is neither wholesome nor natural to man ; and even veg- 
 etables we refuse to eat until they have undergone the opera- 
 tion of fire, in consideration of those numberless little living 
 creatures which the glass helps us to detect in every fibre of 
 the plant or root before it be dressed. On the same theory we 
 boil our water, which is our only drink, before we suffer it to 
 come to table. Our children are perfect little Pythagoreans : 
 it would do you good to see them in their nursery, stuffing 
 their dried fruits, figs, raisins, and milk, which is the only ap- 
 proach to animal food which is allowed. They have no notion 
 how the substance of a creature that ever had life can become 
 food for another creature. A beef-steak is an absurdity to 
 them ; a mutton-chop, a solecism in terms ; a cutlet, a word 
 absolutely without any meaning ; a butcher is nonsense, ex- 
 cept so far as it is taken for a man who delights in blood, or a 
 hero. In this happy state of innocence we have kept their 
 minds, not allowing them to go into the kitchen, or to hear of 
 any preparations for the dressing of animal food, or even to
 
 INDULGENCE OF THE PALaTC. 433 
 
 know that such things are practised. But as a state of igno- 
 rance is incompatible with a certain age, and as my eldest 
 girl, who is ten years old next midsummer, must shortly be 
 introduced into the world and sit at table with us, where she 
 will see some things which will shock all her received notions, 
 I have been endeavouring, by little and little, to break her mind 
 and prepare it for the disagreeable impressions which must be 
 forced upon it. The first hint I gave her upon the subject, 
 I could see her recoil from it with the same horror with which 
 we listen to a tale of Anthropophagism ; but she has gradually 
 grown more reconciled to it, in some measure from my telling 
 her that it was the custom of the world — to which, however 
 senseless, we must submit so far as we could do it with inno- 
 cence, not to give offence ; and she has shown so much 
 strength of mind on other occasions, which I have no doubt is 
 owing to the calmness and serenity superinduced by her diet, 
 that I am in good hopes, when the proper season for her debut 
 arrives, she may be brought to endure the sight of a roasted 
 chicken or a dish of sweetbreads for the first time without 
 fainting. Such being the nature of our little household, you 
 may guess what inroads into the economy of it — what revolu- 
 tions and turnings of things upside down, the example of such 
 a feeder as Mr. is calculated to produce. 
 
 I wonder at a time like the present, when the scarcity of 
 every kind of food is so painfully acknowledged, that shame 
 has no effect upon him. Can he have read Mr. Malthus's 
 Thoughts on the Ratio of Food to Population ? Can he 
 think it reasonable that one man should consume the suste- 
 nance of many. 
 
 The young gentleman has an agreeable air and person, 
 such as are not unlikely to recommend him on the score of 
 matrimony. But his fortune is not over large ; and what pru- 
 dent young woman would think of embarking hers with a 
 man who would bring three or four mouths (or what is equiv- 
 alent to them) into a family? She might as reasonably 
 choose a widower in the same circumstances with three or 
 four children. 
 
 I cannot think who he takes after. His father and mother 
 by all accounts were very moderate eaters ; only I have heard 
 that the latter swallowed her victuals very fast, and the form- 
 er had a tedious custom of sitting long at his meals. Per- 
 haps he takes after both. 
 
 I wish you would turn this in your thoughts, Mr. Reflector, 
 and give us your ideas on the subject of excessive eating ; 
 and particularly of animal food. 
 
 Hospita. 
 37*
 
 438 ON APPETITE. 
 
 EDAX ON APPETITE. 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector. 
 
 Mr. Reflector — I am going to lay before you a case 
 of the most iniquitous persecution that ever poor devil suf- 
 fered. 
 
 You must know, then, that I have been visited with a ca- 
 lamity ever since my birth. How shall I mention it without 
 offending delicacy ? Yet out it must. My sufferings, then, 
 have all arisen from a most inordinate appetite — 
 
 Not for wealth, not for vast possessions — then might I have 
 hoped to find a cure in some of those precepts of philoso- 
 phers or poets, those verba et voces which Horace speaks 
 of, 
 
 " Quibus hunc lenire dolorem 
 Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem ;" 
 
 not for glory, not for fame, not for applause — for against this 
 disease, too, he tells us there are certain piacula, or, as Pope 
 has chosen to render it, 
 
 "Rhymes, which fresh and fresh applied, 
 Will cure the arrant'st puppy of his pride ;" 
 
 nor yet for pleasure, properly so called ; the strict and virtu- 
 ous lessons which I received in early life from the best of pa- 
 rents, a pious clergyman of the church of England, now no 
 more, I trust have rendered me sufficiently secure on that 
 side. 
 
 No, sir, for none of these things ; but an appetite, in 
 its coarsest and least metaphorical sense — an appetite for 
 food. 
 
 The exorbitances of my arrow-root and pappish days I can- 
 not go back far enough to remember, only I have been told, 
 that my mother's constitution not admitting of my being nursed 
 at home, the woman who had the care of me for that purpose 
 used to make most extravagant demands for my pretended ex- 
 cesses in that kind ; which my parents, rather than believe 
 anything unpleasant of me, chose to impute to the known 
 covetousness and mercenary disposition of that sort of people. 
 This blindness continued on their part after I was sent for 
 home, up to the period when it was thought proper, on ac-
 
 ON APPETITE. 439 
 
 count of my advanced age, that I should mix with other boys 
 more unreservedly than I had hitherto done. I was accord- 
 ingly sent to boarding-school. 
 
 Here the melancholy truth became too apparent to be dis- 
 guised. The prying republic of which a great school con- 
 sists soon found me out: there was no shifting the blame any 
 longer upon other people's shoulders ; no good-natured maid to 
 take upon herself the enormities of which 1 stood accused in 
 the article of bread and butter, besides the crying sin of stolen 
 ends of puddings, and cold pies strangely missing. The truth 
 ■was but too manifest in my looks — in the evident signs of inan- 
 ition which 1 exhibited after the fullest meals, in spite of the 
 double allowance which my master was privately instructed 
 by my kind parents to give me. The sense of the ridiculous, 
 which is but too much alive in grown persons, is tenfold more 
 active and alert in hoys. Once detected, I was the constant 
 butt of their arrows, the mark against which every puny lev- 
 eller directed his little shaft of scorn. The very Graduses 
 and Thesauruses were raked for phrases to pelt me with by 
 the tiny pedants. Ventri natus — Ventri deditus — Vesana gu- 
 la — Escarum gurges — Dapibus indulgens — Non dans frcena 
 gulee — Sectans lautae fercula mensze, resounded wheresoever I 
 passed. I led a weary life, suffering the penalties of guilt for 
 that which was no crime, but only following the blameless 
 dictates of nature. The remembrance of those childish re- 
 proaches haunts me yet oftentimes in my dreams. My school- 
 days come again, and the horror I used to feel, when in some 
 silent corner retired from the notice of my unfeeling playfel- 
 lows, I have sat to mumble the solitary slice of gingerbread 
 allotted me by the bounty of considerate friends, and have 
 ached at heart because I could not spare a portion of it, as I 
 saw other boys do, to some favourite boy ; for, if I know my 
 own heart, I was never selfish — never possessed a luxury which 
 I did not hasten to communicate to others ; but my food, alas! 
 was none ; it was an indispensable necessary ; I could as 
 soon have spared the blood in my veins, as have parted that 
 with my companions. 
 
 Well, no one stage of suffering lasts for ever: we should 
 grow reconciled to it at length, I suppose, if it did. The 
 miseries of my school-days had their end ; I was once more 
 restored to the paternal dwelling. The affectionate solicitude 
 of my parents was directed to the good-natured purpose of 
 concealing even from myself the infirmity which haunted me. 
 1 was continually told that I was growing, and the appetite I 
 displayed was humanely represented as being nothing more 
 than a symptom and an effect of that. I used even to be
 
 440 ON APPETITE. 
 
 complimented upon it. But this temporary fiction could not 
 endure above a year or two. I ceased to grow, but alas ! I 
 did not cease, my demands for alimentary sustenance. 
 
 Those times are long since past, and with them have ceased 
 to exist the fond concealment — the indulgent blindness — the 
 delicate overlooking — the compassionate fiction. I and my 
 infirmity are left exposed and bare to the broad, unwinking 
 eye of the world, which nothing can elude. My meals are 
 scanned, my mouthfuls weighed in a balance : that which ap- 
 petite demands is set down to the account of gluttony — a sin 
 which my whole soul abhors, nay, which Nature herself has 
 put it out of my power to commit. I am constitutionally dis- 
 enabled from that vice ; for how can he be guilty of excess 
 who never can get enough 1 Let them cease, then, to watch 
 my plate ; and leave off their ungracious comparisons of it to 
 the seven baskets of fragments, and the supernaturally-replen- 
 ished cup of old Baucis ; and be thankful that their more 
 phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue, has saved them from the 
 like reproaches. I do not see that any of them desist from 
 eating till the holy rage of hunger, as some one calls it, is 
 supplied. Alas ! I am doomed to stop short of that continence. 
 
 What am I to do 1 I am by disposition inclined to convi- 
 viality, and the social meal. I am no gourmand : I require no 
 dainties : I should despise the board of Heliogabalus, except 
 for its long sitting. Those vivacious, long-continued meals of 
 the latter Romans, indeed I justly envy ; but the kind of fare 
 which the Curii and Dentati put up with I could be content 
 with. Dentatus I have been called, among other unsavory 
 jests. Double-meal is another name which my acquaintance 
 have palmed upon me, for an innocent piece of policy which 
 I put in practice for some time without being found out ; which 
 was — going the round of my friends, beginning with the most 
 primitive feeders among them, who take their dinner about 
 one o'clock, and so successively dropping in upon the next 
 and the next, till, by the time I got among my more fashionable 
 intimates, whose hour was six or seven, I had nearly made up 
 the body of a just and complete meal, (as I reckon it,) without 
 taking more than one dinner (as they account of dinners) at 
 one person's house. Since I have been found out, I endeavour 
 to make up by a damper, as I call it, at home, before I go out. 
 But alas ! with me, increase of appetite truly grows by what 
 it feeds on. What is peculiarly offensive to me at those din- 
 ner parties, is the senseless custom of cheese, and the dessert 
 afterward. I have a rational antipathy to the former ; and 
 for fruit, and those other vain vegetable substitutes for meat, 
 (meat, the only legitimate aliment for human creatures since
 
 ON APPETITE. 411 
 
 the flood, as I take it to be deduced from that permission, or 
 ordinance rather, given to Noah and his descendants,) 1 hold 
 them in perfect contempt. Hay for horses. I remember a 
 pretty apologue, which Mandevillc t< lhs very much to this 
 purpose in his Fable of the Bees : — He brings in a lion argu- 
 ing with a merchant, who had ventured to expostulate with 
 this king of beasts upon his violent methods of feeding. The 
 lion thus retorts : — " Savage I am ; but no creature can be 
 called cruel but what cither by malice or insensibility extin 
 guishes his natural pity. The lion was born without com- 
 passion ; we follow the instinct of our nature ; the gods have 
 appointed us to live upon the waste and spoil of other animals, 
 and as long as we can meet with dead ones, we never hunt 
 after the living ; 'tis only man, mischievous man, that can 
 make death a sport. Nature taught your stomach to crave 
 nothing but vegetables. (Under favour of the lion, if he 
 meant to assert this universally of mankind, it is not true. 
 However, what he says presently is very sensible.) Your 
 violent fondness to change, and greater eagerness after novel- 
 ties, have prompted you to the destruction of animals without 
 justice or necessity. The lion has a ferment within him, 
 that consumes the toughest skin and hardest bones, as well as 
 the flesh of all animals without exception. Your squeamish 
 stomach, in which the digestive heat is weak and inconsider- 
 able, won't so much as admit of the most tender parts of them, 
 unless above half the concoction has been performed by arti- 
 ficial fire beforehand ; and yet what animal have you spared, 
 to satisfy the caprices of a languid appetite ? Languid I say ; 
 for what is man's hunger if compared with the lion's ? Yours, 
 when it is at the worst, makes you faint ; mine makes me 
 mad : oft have I tried with roots and herbs to allay the vio- 
 lence of it, but in vain ; nothing but large quantities of flesh 
 can any ways appease it." Allowing for the lion's not having 
 a prophetic instinct to take in every lusus naturae that was 
 possible of the human appetite, he was, generally speaking, 
 in the right ; and the merchant was so impressed with his 
 argument that, we are told, he replied not, but fainted away. 
 Oh, Mr. Reflector, that I were not obliged to add, that the 
 creature who thus argues was but a type of me ! Miserable 
 man ! J am that lion. " Oft have I tried with roots and 
 herbs to allay that violence, but in vain ; nothing but — "' 
 
 Those tales which are renewed as often as the editors of 
 papers want to fill up a space in their unfeeling columns, of 
 great eaters — people that devour whole geese and legs of 
 mutton for imagers, are sometimes attempted to be drawn to a 
 parallel with my case. This wilful confounding of motives 
 
 T3
 
 442 ON APPETITE. 
 
 and circumstances, which make all the difference of moral or 
 immoral in actions, just suits the sort of talent which some of 
 my acquaintances pride themselves upon. Wagers ! — I thank 
 Heaven, I was never mercenary, nor could consent to prostitute 
 a gift (though but a left-handed one) of Nature, to the enlarging 
 of my worldly substance ; prudent as the necessities which 
 that fatal gift have involved me in might have made such a 
 prostitution to appear in the eyes of an indelicate world. 
 
 Rather let me say, that to the satisfaction of that talent which 
 was given me, I have been content to sacrifice no common 
 expectations ; for such I had from an old lady, a near relation 
 of our family, in whose good graces I had the fortune to stand, 
 
 till one fatal evening . You have seen, Mr. Reflector, 
 
 if you have ever passed your time much in country towns, the 
 kind of suppers which elderly ladies in those places have 
 lying in petto in an adjoining parlour, next to that where they 
 are entertaining their periodically-invited coevals with cards 
 and muffins. The cloth is usually spread some half hour be- 
 fore the final rubber is decided, whence they adjourn to sup 
 upon what may emphatically be called nothing. A sliver of 
 ham, purposely contrived to be transparent, to show the china 
 dish through it, neighbouring a slip of invisible brawn, which 
 abuts upon something they call a tartlet, as that is bravely 
 supported by an atom of marmalade, flanked in its turn by a 
 grain of potted beef, with a power of such dishlings, minims 
 of hospitality, spread in defiance of human nature, or rather 
 with an utter ignorance of what it demands. Being engaged 
 at one of these card-parties, I was obliged to go a little before 
 supper-time, (as they facetiously called the point of time in 
 which they are taking these shadowy refections,) and the old 
 lady, with a sort of fear shining through the smile of courteous 
 hospitality that beamed in her countenance, begged me to step 
 into the next room and take something before I went out in 
 the cold — a proposal which lay not in my nature to deny. 
 Indignant at the airy prospect I saw before me, I set to, and 
 in a thrice despatched the whole meal intended for eleven 
 persons, fish, flesh, fowl, pastry — to the sprigs of garnishing 
 parsley, and the last fearful custard that quaked upon the 
 board. I need not describe the consternation, when in due 
 time the dowagers adjourned from their cards. Where was 
 
 the supper ? and the servants' answer, Mr. had eat it all. 
 
 That freak, however, jested me out of a good three hundred 
 pounds a year, which I afterward was informed for a cer- 
 tainty the old lady meant to leave me. I mention it not in 
 illustration of the unhappy faculty which I am possessed of; 
 for any unluckly wag of a schoolboy, with a tolerable appetite,
 
 ON APPETITE. 443 
 
 could have done as much without feeling any hurt after it — 
 only that you may judge whether I am a man likely to set my 
 talents to sale, or to require the pitiful stimulus of a wager. 
 
 I have read in Pliny, or in some author of that stamp, of a 
 reptile in Africa, whose venom is of that hot, destructive 
 quality, that wheresoever it fastens its tooth, the whole sub- 
 stance of the animal that has been bitten in a few seconds is 
 reduced to dust, crumblas away, and absolutely disappears : 
 it is called from this quality the annilnhitor. Why am 1 forced 
 to seek, in all the most prodigious and portentous facts of 
 Natural History, for creatures typical of myself. / am that 
 snake, that annUiilalor : " wherever I fasten, in a few sec- 
 onds — " 
 
 Oli happy sick men, that are groaning under the want of that 
 very thing, the excess of which is my torment ! Oh fortunate, 
 too fortunate, if you knew your happiness, invalids! What 
 would I not give to exchange this fierce concoctive and di- 
 gestive heat — this rabid fury which vexes me, which tears 
 and torments me — for your quiet, mortified, hermit-like, sub- 
 dued, and sanctified stomachs — your cool, chastened inclina- 
 tions, and coy desires for food ! 
 
 To what unhappy figuration of the parts intestine I owe this 
 unnatural craving, I must leave to the anatomists and the phy- 
 sicians to determine : they, like the rest of the world, have 
 doubtless their eye upon me ; and as I have been cut up alive 
 by the sarcasms of my friends, so I shudder when I contem- 
 plate the probability that this animal frame, when its restless 
 appetites shall have ceased their importunity, may be cut up 
 also (horrible suggestion !) to determine in what system of 
 solids or fluids this original sin of my constitution lay lurking. 
 What work will they make with their acids and alkalines, their 
 serums and coagulums, effervescences, viscious matter, bile, 
 chyle, and acrimonious juices, to explain that cause which 
 Nature, who willed the effect to punish me for my sins, may 
 no less have determined to keep in the dark from them, to 
 punish them for their presumption. 
 
 You may ask, Mr. Reflector, to what purpose is my appeal 
 to you : what can you do for me ? Alas ! I know too well that 
 my case is out of the reach of advice — out of the reach of 
 consolation. But it is some relief to the wounded heart to 
 impart its tale of misery; and some of my acquaintance, 
 who may read my case in vour pages under a borrowed name, 
 may he induced to give it a more humane consideration than 
 I ootid ever vet obtain from them under my own. Make them, 
 if possible, to rvjicct, that an original peculiarity of constitu- 
 tion is no crime ; that not that which goes into the mouth
 
 444 
 
 ON APPETITE. 
 
 desecrates a man, but that which comes out of it — such as 
 sarcasm, bitter jests, mocks, and taunts, and ill-natured ob- 
 servations ; and let them consider, if there be such things 
 (which we have all heard of) as pious treachery, innocent 
 adultery, &c, whether there may not be also such a thing as 
 innocent gluttony. 
 
 I shall only subscribe myself 
 
 Your afflicted servant, 
 
 Edax. 

 
 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS, 
 
 EXTRACTED FROM A COMMONPLACE BOOK, WHICH BELONGED TO 
 ROBERT BURTON, THE FAMOUS AUTHOR OF THE ANATOMY OF 
 MELANCHOLY. 
 
 EXTRACT I. 
 
 I, Democritus, Junior, have put my finishing pen to a tractate 
 De Melancholia, this day, December 5, 1620. First, I blesse 
 the Trinity, which hath given me health to prosecute my 
 worthlesse studies thus far, and make supplication, with a 
 Laus Deo, if in any case these my poor labours may be found 
 instrumental to weede out black melancholy, carking cares, 
 harte-grief, from the mind of man. Scd hoc magis volo quam 
 expecto. 
 
 I turn now to my book, i nunc liber, goe forth, my brave Anat- 
 omy, child of my brain-sweat, and yee, candidi lectores, lo ! 
 here I give him up to you, even do with him what you please, 
 my masters. Some, I suppose, will applaud, commend, cry 
 him up, (these are my friends,) hee is a flos rarus, forsooth, 
 a none-such, a phoenix, (concerning whom see Plinius and 
 Mandeuille, though Fienus de monstris doubteth at large of 
 such a bird, whom Montaltus confuting argueth to have been 
 a man mala scrupulositatis, of a weak and cowardlie faith : 
 Christopherus a Vega is with him in this). Others, again, will 
 blame, hiss, reprehende in many things, cry down altogether 
 my collections, for crude, inept, putid, post ccenum scripta, 
 Coryate could write better upon a full meal, verbose, inerudite, 
 and not sufficiently abounding in authorities, dogmata, sen- 
 tences of learneder writers which have been before me, when 
 as that first-named sort clean otherwise judge of my labours 
 to bee nothing else but a mcsse of opinions, a vortex attracting 
 indiscriminate, gold, pearls, hay, straw, wood, excrement, an 
 exchange, tavern, marte, for foreigners to congregate, Danes, 
 Swedes, Hollanders, Lombards, so many strange faces, dresses, 
 salutations, languages, all which Wof/ius behelde with great 
 content upon the Venetian Rialto, as he describes diffusedly 
 in his book the world's Epitome, which Sannazar so beprais- 
 38
 
 446 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 
 
 eth, e contra our Polydore can see nothing in it ; they call me 
 singular, a pedant, fantastic, words of reproach in this age 
 which is all too meteoric and light for my humour. 
 
 One cometh to me sighing, complaining. He expected 
 universal remedies in my Anatomy ; so many cures as there 
 are distemperatures among men. I have not put his affec- 
 tion in my cases. Hear you his case. My fine sir is a lover, 
 an inamorato, a Pyramus, a Romeo ; he walks seven years 
 disconsolate, moping, because he cannot enjoy his miss, insa- 
 nus amor is his melancholy, the man is mad ; dclirat, he 
 dotes ; all this while his Glycera is rude, spiteful, not to be 
 entreated, churlish, spits at him, yet exceeding fair, gentle 
 eyes, (which is a beauty,) hair lustrous and smiling, the trope 
 is none of mine, JEneas Sylvius hath crines ridcntes — in con- 
 clusion she is wedded to his rival, a boore, a Corydon, a 
 rustic, omnino ignarus, he can scarce construe Corderius, yet 
 haughty, fantastic, opiniatre. The lover travels, goes into 
 foreign parts, peregrinates, amoris ergo, sees manners, cus- 
 toms, not English, converses with pilgrims, lying travellers, 
 monks, hermits, those cattle, pedlers, travelling gentry, Egyp- 
 tians, natural wonders, unicorns, (though Aldobrandus will 
 have them to be figments,) satyrs, semi-viri, apes, monkeys 
 baboons, curiosities artificial, j>yramides, Virgilius his tomb„, 
 relicks, bones, which are nothing but ivory as Meluncthon 
 judges, though Cornutus leaneth to think them bones of dogs, 
 cats, (why not men?) which subtill priests vouch to have 
 been saints, martyrs, lieu Pietas ! By that time he ha? ended 
 his course, fugit hora, seven other years are expired, gone 
 by, time is he should return, he taketh ship for Britaine, much 
 desired of his friends, favebant venti, Neptune is curteis, after 
 some weekes at sea he landeth, rides post to town, greets his 
 family, kinsmen, compotores, those jokers his friends that were 
 wont to tipple with him at alehouses,; these wonder now to 
 see the change, quantum mutatus, the man is quite another 
 thing, he is disenthralled, manumitted, he wonders what so 
 bewitched him, he can now both see, hear, smell, handle, con- 
 verse with his mistress, single by reason of the death of his 
 rival, a widow having children, grown willing, prompt, amor- 
 ous, showing no such great dislike to second nuptials, he 
 might have her for asking, no such thing, his mind is changed, 
 he loathes his former meat, had liever eat ratsbane, aconite, 
 Ids humour is to die a bachelour ; marke the conclusion. In 
 this humour of celibate seven other years are consumed in 
 idleness, sloth, world's pleasures, which fatigate, satiate, in- 
 duce wearinesse, vapours, tadium vita> : When upon a day, 
 behold a wonder, redit Amor, the man is as sick as ever, he
 
 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 447 
 
 is commenced lover upon the old stock, walks with his hand 
 thrust in his bosom for negligence, moping he leans his head, 
 face yellow, beard flowing and incomposite, eyes sunken, an- 
 helus, breath wheezy and asthmatual, by reason of over-much 
 sighing : society he abhors, solitude is but a hell, what shall 
 he doe ? all this while his mistresse is forward, coming, aman- 
 tissima, ready to jump at once into his mouth, her he hateth, 
 feels disgust when she is but mentioned, thinks her ugly, old, 
 a painted Jesabecl, Alecto, Megara, and Tisiphone all at 
 once, a Corinthian Lais, a strumpet, only not handsome ; that 
 which he aflecteth so much, that which drives him mad, dis- 
 tracted, phrenetic, beside himself, is no beauty which lives, 
 nothing in reritm natura, (so he might entertain a hope of a 
 cure), but something which is not, can never be, a certain fan- 
 tastic opinion or notional image of his mistresse, that which she 
 was, and that which hee thought her to be, in former times, 
 how beautiful ! torments him, frets him, follows him, makes 
 him that he wishes to die. 
 
 This Caprichio, Sir Humourous, hee cometh to me to be 
 cured. I counsel marriage with his mistresse, according to 
 Hippocrates his method, together with milk diet, herbs, aloes, 
 and wild parsley, good in such cases, though Avicenna prefer- 
 red! some sorts of wild fowl, teals, widgeons, becca ficos, 
 which men in Sussex eat. He flies out in a passion, ho ! ho ! 
 and falls to calling me names, dizzard, ass, lunatic, moper, 
 Bedlamite, Pseudo-Democritus. I smile in his face, bidding 
 him be patient, tranquil ; to no purpose, he still rages, I think 
 this man must fetch his remedies from Utopia, Fairy Land, 
 Islands in the Moone, &c. 
 
 EXTRACT II. 
 
 * * * * Much disputacyons of fierce wits amongst them- 
 selves, in logomachies, subtile controversies, many dry blows 
 given on either side, contentions of learned men, or such as 
 would be so thought, as Bodinus de Periodic saith of such an 
 one, arrident amici ridet mundus, in English, this man his cro- 
 nies they cocker him up, they flatter him, he would fayne ap- 
 pear somebody, meanwhile the world thinks him no better 
 than a dizzard, a ninny, a sophist. * * 
 
 * * * Philosophy running mad, madness philosophizing, 
 much idle-learned inquiries, what truth is ? and no issue, fruit, 
 of all these noises, only huge books are written, and who is 
 the wiser? * * * * Men sitting in the doctor's chair, we mar- 
 vel how they got there, being homines intellectus palverulenti.
 
 44S CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 
 
 as Trincauellius notes ; they care not so they may raise a 
 dust to smother the eyes of their oppugners ; homines parvu- 
 lissimi as Lemnius, whom Alcuin herein taxeth of a crude 
 Latinism ; dwarfs, minims, the least little men, these spend 
 their time, and it is odds but they lose their time and wits too 
 into the bargain, chacing of nimble and retiring Truth : her 
 they prosecute, her still they worship, libant, they make liba- 
 tions, spilling the wine, as those old Romans in their sacrifi- 
 cials, Cerealia, May-games : Truth is the game all these hunt 
 after, to the extreme perturbacyon and drying up of the mois- 
 tures, humidum radicale exsiccant as Galen, in his counsels to 
 one of these wear-wits, brain-moppers, spunges, saith. * * * * 
 and for all this nunquam metam attingunt, and how should they ? 
 they bowle awry, shooting beside the marke ; whereas it should 
 appear, that Truth absolute on this planet of ours is scarcely 
 to be found, but in her stede Queene Opinion predominates, 
 governs, whose shifting and ever mutable Lampas, me seem- 
 eth, is man's destinie to follow, she prsecurseth, she guideth 
 him, before his uncapable eyes she frisketh her tender lights, 
 which entertayne the child-man, untill what time his sight be 
 strong to endure the vision of Very Truth, which is in the 
 heavens, the vision beatifical, as Anianus expounds in his ar- 
 gument against certain mad wits which helde God to be cor- 
 poreous ; these were dizzards, fools, gothamites. **** but 
 and if Very Truth be extant indeede on earth, as some hold 
 she it is which actuates men's deeds, purposes, ye may in 
 vaine look for her in the learned universities, halls, colleges. 
 Truth is no doctoresse, she takes no degrees at Paris or Ox- 
 ford, amongst great clerks, disputants, subtile Aristotles, men 
 nodosi ingenii, able to take Lully by the chin, but oftentimes to 
 such an one as myself, an Idiota or common person, no great 
 things, melancholizing in woods where waters are, quiet 
 places by rivers, fountains ; whereas the silly man expecting 
 no such matter, thinketh only how best to delectate and re- 
 fresh his mynde continually with Natura her pleasaunt scenes, 
 woods, waterfalls, or Art her statelie gardens, parks, ter- 
 races, Belvideres, on a sudden the goddesse herself Truth has 
 appeared, with a shyning lyghte, and a sparklyng countenance, 
 so as yee may not be able lightly to resist her. * * * * 
 
 EXTRACT III. 
 
 This morning, May 2, 16G2, having first broken my fast 
 upon eggs and cooling salades, mellows, water-cresses, those 
 herbes, according to Villanovus Ins prescription, who disal-
 
 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 449 
 
 lows the use of meat in a morning as gross, fat, hebetant, 
 feral, altogether fitter for wild beasts than men, e contra com- 
 mendeth this herb-diete for gentle, humane, active, conducing to 
 contemplation in most men, I betook myselfe to the nearest 
 fields. (Being in London I commonly dwell in the suburbes, 
 as airest, quietest, loci musis propriares, free from noises of 
 caroches, waggons, mechanick, and base workes,workshoppes, 
 also sights, pageants, spectacles of outlandish birds, fishes, 
 crocodiles, Indians, mermaids, adde quarrels, lightings, wnn id- 
 lings of the common sort, plebs, the rabble, duelloes with fists, 
 proper to this island, at which the stilettoed and secrete Italian 
 laughs.) Withdrawing myselfe from these buzzing and illit- 
 erate vanities, with a bezo las manos to the city, I begin to in- 
 hale, draw in, snuff up, as horses dilatus naribus snort the 
 fresh aires, with exceeding great delight, when suddenly there 
 crosses me a procession sad, heavy, dolourous, tristfull, mel- 
 ancholick, able to change mirth into dolour, and overcast a 
 clearer atmosphere than possibly the neighbourhoods of so 
 great a citty can afford. An old man, a poore man deceased, is 
 borne on men's shoulders to a poore buriall, without solemni- 
 ties of hearse, mourners, plumes, muta persona, those person- 
 ate actors that will weep if yee shew them a piece of silver ; 
 none of those customed civilities of children, kinsfolk, depend- 
 ants,, following the coffin ; he died a poore man, his friends 
 assessores opum, those cronies of his that stuck by him so long 
 as he had a penny, now leave him, forsake him, shun him, de- 
 sert him; they think it much to follow his putrid and stinking 
 carcase to the grave ; his children, if he had any, for commonly 
 the case stands thus, this poore man his son dies before him, 
 he survives, poore, indigent, base, dejected, miserable, <fcc, or 
 if he have any which survive him, sua negotia agunt, they 
 mind their own business, forsooth, cannot, will not, find time, 
 leisure, inclination, cxtremum munus perficere, to follow to the 
 pit their old indulgent father, which loved them, stroked them, 
 caressed them, cockering them up, quantum potuit, as farre as 
 his means extended, while they were babes, chits, minims, hee 
 may rot in his grave, lie stinking in the sun for them, have no 
 buriall at all, they care not. Oh nefas ! Chiefly I noted the 
 coffin to have been without a pall, nothing but a few planks, of 
 cheapest wood that could be had, naked, having none of the 
 ordinary symtomata of a funerall, those locularii which bare 
 the body having on diversely-coloured coats, and none black : 
 (one of these reported the deceased to have been an almsman 
 seven yeares, a pauper, harboured and fed in the workhouse of 
 St. Giles-in-the-Fields, to whose proper burying-ground he was 
 now going for interment.) All which when I behelde, hardly 
 38 #
 
 450 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 
 
 I refrained from weeping, and incontinently I fell to musing : 
 " If this man had been rich, a Croesus, a Crassus, or as rich 
 as Whittington, what pompe, charge, lavish cost, expenditure, 
 of rich buriall, ceremoniall-obsequies, obsequious ceremonies, had 
 been thought too good for such an one ; what store of panegyr- 
 icks, elogies, funeral orations, &c. some beggarly poetaster, 
 worthy to be beaten for his ill rimes, crying him up, hee was 
 rich, generous, bountiful, polite, learned, a Mcecenas, while as 
 in very deede he was nothing lesse ; what weeping, sighing, 
 sorrowing, honing, complaining kinsmen, friends, relatives, 
 fourtieth cousins, poor relatives, lamenting for the deceased ; 
 hypocriticall heirs, sobbing, striking their breasts ; (they care 
 not if he had died a year ago) ; so many clients, dependants, 
 flatterers, parasites, cunning Gnathoes, tramping on foot after 
 the hearse, all their care is, who shall stand fairest with the suc- 
 cessour ; he meantime (like enough) spurns them from him, 
 spits at them, treads them under his foot, will have nought to 
 do with any such cattle. I think him in the right : Hcec sunt 
 majora gravitate Heracliti. These follies are enough to give 
 crying Heraclitus a Jit of the spleene^
 
 M R. H , 
 
 A FARCE— IN TWO ACTS, 
 
 AS IT WAS PERFORMED AT DRURY LANE THEATRE, 
 DECEMBER, 1806. 
 
 " Mr. H , thou wert damned. Bright shone the morning on the play- 
 bills that announced thy appearance, and the streets were filled with the buzz 
 of persons asking one another if they would go to see Mr. H , and answer- 
 ing that they would certainly; but before night the gayety, not of the author, 
 but of his friends and the town, was eclipsed, for thou wert damned ! Hadst 
 thou been anonymous, thou haply mightst have lived. But thou didst come 
 to an untimely end for thy tricks, and for want of a better name to pass them 
 off." — Theatrical Examiner.
 
 CHARACTERS. 
 
 Mr. H , Mr. Elliston. 
 
 Belvil, Mr. Hartley. 
 
 Landlord Pry, Mr. Wewitzen 
 
 Melesinda, Miss Mellon 
 
 Maid to Melesinda, Mrs. Harlowe 
 
 Gentlemen Ladies, Waiters, Servants, &c. 
 Scene — Bath.
 
 PROLOGUE. 
 
 SPOKEN BY MR. ELLISTON 
 
 If we have sinn'd in paring down a name, 
 
 All civil, well-bred authors do the same. 
 
 Survey the columns of our daily writers — 
 
 You'll find that some Initials are great fighters. 
 
 How fierce the shock, how fatal is the jar, 
 
 When Ensign W. meets Lieutenant R. 
 
 With two stout seconds, just of their own gizzard, 
 
 Cross Captain X. and rough old General Izzard! 
 
 Letter to letter spreads the dire alarms, 
 
 Till half the alphabet is up in arms. 
 
 Nor with less lustre have Initials shone, 
 
 To grace the- gentler annals of Crim. Con., 
 
 Where the dispensers of the public lash 
 
 Soft penance give ; a letter and a dash — 
 
 Where vice reduced in size shrinks to a failing, 
 
 And loses half her grossness by curtailing. 
 
 Faux pas are told in such a modest way — 
 
 The affair of Colonel B. with Mrs. A. — 
 
 You must forgive them — for what is there, say, 
 
 Which such a pliant vowel must not grant 
 
 To such a very pressing consonant ? 
 
 Or who poetic justice dares dispute, 
 
 When mildly melting at a lover's suit. 
 
 The wife's a liquid, her good man a mute T 
 
 Even in the homelier scenes of honest life, 
 
 The coarse-spun intercourse of man and wife, 
 
 Initials, I am told, have taken place 
 
 Of deary, spouse, and that oldfashioned race ; 
 
 And Cabbage, ask'dby Brother Snip to tea, 
 
 Replies, " I'll come — but it don't rest with me — 
 
 I always leaves them things to Mrs. C." 
 
 Oh should this mincing fashion ever spread 
 
 From names of living heroes to the dead, 
 
 How would ambition sigh, and hang the head, 
 
 As each loved syllable should melt away — 
 
 Her Alexander turned into Great A. — 
 
 A single C. her Cesar to express — 
 
 Her Scipio shrunk into a Roman S. — 
 
 And nick'd and dock'd to these new modes of speech, 
 
 Great Hannibal himself a Mr. H.
 
 M R. H . 
 
 A FARCE— IN TWO ACTS. 
 
 ACT I. 
 
 Scene. — A Public Room in an Inn. Landlord, Waiters, Gen- 
 tlemen, <$fC. 
 
 Enter Mr. H. 
 
 Mr. H. Landlord, has the man brought home my boots ? 
 
 Landlord. Yes, sir. 
 
 Mr. H. You have paid him 1 
 
 Landlord. There is the receipt, sir, only not quite filled up ; 
 no name ; only blank — " Blank, Dr. to Zekiel Spanish for one 
 pair of best hessians." Now, sir, he wishes to know what 
 name he shall put in ; who he shall say " Dr." 
 
 Mr. H. Why, Mr. H., to be sure. 
 
 Landlord. So I told him, sir ; but Zekiel has some qualms 
 about it. He says, he thinks that Mr. H. only would not stand 
 good in law. 
 
 Mr. H. Rot his impertinence, bid him put in Nebuchadnez- 
 zar, and not trouble me with his scruples. 
 
 Landlord. I shall, sir. [Exit. 
 
 Enter a Waiter. 
 
 Waiter. Sir, Squire Level's man is below, with a hare and 
 a brace of pheasants for Mr. H. 
 
 Mr. H. Give the man half a crown, and bid him return my 
 best respects to his master. Presents, it seems, will find me 
 out, with any name or no name. 
 
 Enter 2d Waiter. 
 
 2d Waiter. Sir, the man that makes up the directory is at th« 
 door.
 
 456 MR. H , A FARCE. 
 
 Mr. H. Give him a shilling, that is what these fellows come 
 for. 
 
 2d Waiter. He has sent up to know by what name your 
 honour will please to be inserted. 
 
 Mr. H. Zounds, fellow, I give him a shilling for leaving out 
 my name, not for putting it in. This is one of the plaguy 
 comforts of going anonymous. [Exit 2d Waiter. 
 
 Enter 3d Waiter. 
 
 3d Waiter. Two letters for Mr. H. [Exit. 
 
 Mr. H. From ladies (opens them.) This from Melesinda, 
 to remind me of the morning call I promised ; the pretty crea- 
 ture positively languishes to be made Mrs. H. I believe I 
 must indulge her (affeetedly.) This from her cousin to be- 
 speak me to some party, I suppose (opening it) — Oh, " this 
 evening" — " Tea and cards" — (surveying himself tvitk compla- 
 cency.) Dear H,, thou art certainly a pretty fellow. I won- 
 der what makes thee such a favourite among the ladies ; I 
 wish it may not be owing to the concealment of thy unfortu- 
 nate — pshaw ! 
 
 Enter 4th Waiter. 
 
 4th Waiter. Sir. one Mr, Printagain is inquiring for you. 
 
 Mr. H. Oh, I remember, the poet ; he is publishing by 
 subscription. Give him a guinea, and tell him to put me 
 down. 
 
 4th Waiter. What name shall I tell him, sir ? 
 
 Mr. II. Zounds, he is a poet ; let him fancy a name. 
 
 [Exit 4th Waiter. 
 
 Enter 5th Waiter. 
 
 oth Waiter. Sir, Bartlemy, the lame beggar that you sent a 
 private donation to last Monday, has by some accident dis- 
 covered his benefactor, and is at the door waiting to return 
 thanks. 
 
 Mr. II. Oh, poor fellow, who could put it into his head \ 
 Now I shall be teazed by all his tribe, when once this is 
 known. Well, tell him I am glad I could be of any service 
 to him, and send him away. 
 
 5lh Waiter. I would have done so, sir ; but the object of 
 his call now, he says, is only to know whom he is obliged to. 
 
 Mr. II. Why, me. 
 
 5lh Waiter. Yes, sir.
 
 MR. H , A FARCE. 457 
 
 Mr. H. Me, me, me ; who else, to be sure ? 
 
 5th Waiter. Yes, sir; but he is anxious to know the namo 
 of his benefactor. 
 
 Mr. II. Here is a pampered rogue of a beggar, that cannot 
 be obliged to a gentleman in the way of his profession, but he 
 must know the name, birth, parentage, and education of his 
 benefactor. I warrant you, next he will require a certificate 
 of one's good behaviour, and a magistrate's license in one's 
 pocket, lawfully empowering so and so to — give an alms. 
 Anything more ? 
 
 5th Waiter. Yes, sir: here has been Mr. Patriot, with tho 
 county petition to sign ; and Mr. Failtime, that owes so 
 much money, has sent to remind you of your promise to 
 bail him. 
 
 Mr. II. Neither of which I can do, while I have no name. 
 Here is more of the plaguy comforts of going anonymous, that 
 one can neither serve one's friend nor one's country. Damn 
 it, a man had better be without a nose than without a name. 
 I will not live long in this mutilated, dismembered state ; I 
 will to Melesinda this instant, and try to forget these vexations. 
 Melesinda ! there is music in the name ; but then, hang it, 
 there is none in mine to answer to it. [Exit. 
 
 {While Mr. H. has been speaking, two gentlemen have 
 been observing him curious-'i/-) 
 
 1st Gent. Who the devil is this extraordinary personage? 
 
 2d Gent. Who? why, 'tis Mr. H. 
 
 1st Gent. Has he no more name? 
 
 2d Gent. None that has yet transpired. No more ! why 
 that single letter has been enough to in (lame the imaginations 
 of all the ladies in Bath. He has been here but a fortnight, 
 and is already received into all the first families. 
 
 1st Gent. Wonderful ! yet nobody know who he is, or 
 where .he comes from ! 
 
 2d Gent. He is vastly rich, gives away money as if he had 
 infinity; dresses well, as you see ; and for address, the moth- 
 ers are all dying for fear the daughters should get him ; and 
 for the daughters, he may command them as absolutely as — 
 Melesinda, the rich heiress, 'tis thought, will carry him. 
 
 1st Gent. And is it possible that a mere anonymous — 
 
 2d Gent. Phoo ! that is the charm — Who is he ? and what 
 is he ? and what is his name ? The man with the great nose 
 on his face never excited more of the gaping passion of won- 
 derment in the dames of Strasburg. than this new-comer with 
 the single letter to his name has lighted up among the 
 wives and maids of Bath : his simply having lodgings here 
 
 39 U
 
 458 
 
 draws more visiters to the house than an election. Come 
 with me to the parade, and I will show you more of him. 
 
 [Exeunt. 
 
 Scene in the Street. 
 Mr. H. walking, Belvil meeting him. 
 
 Belvil. My old Jamaica schoolfellow, that. I have not seen 
 for so many years ? it must — it can be no other than Jack 
 {go'iig up to him.) My dear Ho — 
 
 Mr. H. {Stopping his month) Ho — ! the devil, hush. 
 
 Belvil. Why sure it is — 
 
 Mr. H. It is. it is your old friend Jack, that shall be name- 
 less. 
 
 Belvil. My dear Ho — 
 
 Mr. H. (Stopping him) Don't name it. 
 
 Belvil. Name what? 
 
 Mr. H. My cursed unfortunate name. I have reasons to 
 conceal it for a time. 
 
 Belvil. I understand you — creditors, Jack ? 
 
 Mr. H. No, I assure you. 
 
 Belvil. Snapp'd up a ward, peradventure, and the whole 
 chancery at your heels? 
 
 Mr. H. I don't use to travel with such cumbersome lug- 
 gage. 
 
 Belvil. You han't taken a purse ? 
 
 Mr. H. To relieve you at once from all disgraceful conjec- 
 tures, you must know,'tis nothing but the sound of my name. 
 
 Belvil. Ridiculous ! 'tis true, yours is none of the most ro- 
 mantic : but what can that signify in a man? 
 
 Mr. H. You must understand that I am in some credit with 
 the ladies. 
 
 Belvil. With the ladies ! 
 
 Mr. H. And, truly, I think not without some pretensions. 
 My fortune — 
 
 Belvil. Sufficiently splendid, if I may judge from your ap- 
 pearance. 
 
 Mr. H. My figure— 
 
 Belvil. Airy, gay, and imposing. 
 
 Mr. H. My parts — 
 
 Belvil. Bright. 
 
 Mr. II. My conversation — 
 
 Belvil. Equally remote from flippancy and taciturnity. 
 
 Mr. II. But then my name — damn my name. 
 
 Belvil. Childish! 
 
 Mr. H. Not so. Oh, Belvil, you are blessed with one
 
 MR. II , A FARCE. 459 
 
 which sighing virgins may repeat without a hlush, and fur it 
 change the paternal But what virgin of any delicacy (and I 
 
 require some in a wife) would endure to be called .Mrs. ? 
 
 Belvil. Ha — ha — ha! most absurd. Did not Clementina 
 Falconbridge, the romantic Clementina Falconbridge, fancy 
 Tommy Potts I and Rosabella Sweetlips sacrifice her mellif- 
 luous appellative to Jack Deady I .Matilda, Iter cousin, mar- 
 ried a Gubbins, and her sister Amelia a Clulterbuck. 
 
 Mr. II. Potts is tolerable, Deady is sufierable, Gubbins is 
 bearable, and Clntterbuck is endurable, but Ho — 
 
 Belvil. Hush, Jack, don't betray yourself. Cut you are 
 really ashamed of the family name? 
 
 Mr. II. Ay, and of my father that begot me, and my 
 father's father, and all their forefathers that have borne it 
 snu e the conquest. 
 
 Belvil. Put how do you know the women are so squeamish ? 
 Mr. H. I have tried them. I tell you there is neither 
 maiden of sixteen nor widow of sixty but would turn up their 
 noses at it. I have been refused by nineteen virgins, twenty- 
 nine relicts, and two old maids. 
 
 Belvil. That was hard, indeed, Jack. 
 
 Mr. H. Parsons have stuck at publishing the banns, be- 
 cause they averred it was a heathenish name ; parents have 
 lingered their consent, because they suspected it was a ficti- 
 tious name ; and rivals have declined my challenges, because 
 they pretended it was an ungentlemanly name. 
 
 Belvil. Ha — ha — ha ! but what course do you mean to 
 pursue ? 
 
 Mr. H. To engage the affections of some generous girl, 
 who will be content to take mc as Mr. H. 
 Belvil. Mr. H. ? 
 
 Mr. II Yes, that is the name I go by here ; you know one 
 likes to be as near the truth as possible. 
 
 Belvil. Certainly. But what then ? to get her to consent — 
 
 Mr. H. To accompany me to the altar without a name — in 
 
 short, to suspend the curiosity (that is all) till the moment 
 
 the priest shall pronounce the irrevocable charm, which 
 
 makes two names one. 
 
 Belvil. And that name — and then she must be pleased, ha, 
 Jack? 
 
 Mr. II. Exactly such a girl it has been my fortune to meet 
 with; hark'e (whispers) — (musing) yet hang it, 'tis cruel to 
 betray her confidence. 
 
 Belvil. But the family name, Jack. 
 
 Mr. II. As you say, the family name must be perpetuated. 
 Belvil. Though it be but a homely one. 
 U2
 
 -160 MR. H , A FARCE. 
 
 Mr. H. True, but come, I will show you the house where 
 dwells this credulous, melting fair. 
 
 Belvil. Ha — ha — my old friend dwindled down to one 
 letter. [Exeunt. 
 
 Scene. — An Apartment in Melesinda's House. 
 
 Melesinda sola, as if musing. 
 
 Melesinda. H., H., H. Sure, it must be something precious 
 by its being concealed. It can't be Homer, that is a heathen's 
 name ; nor Horatio, that, is uo surname ; what if it be Ham- 
 let ? the Lord Hamlet — pretty, and I his poor distracted 
 Ophelia ! No, 'tis none of these ; 'tis Harcourt, or Hargrave, 
 or some such sounding name, or Howard, high-born Howard, 
 that would do ; maybe it is Harlcy, methinks my H. resem- 
 bles Harley, the feeling Harley. But I hear him, and from 
 his own lips I will once for ever he resolved. 
 
 Enter Mr. H. 
 
 Mr. H. My dear Melesinda. 
 
 Melesinda. My dear H. — that is all you give me power to 
 swear allegiance to — to be enamoured of inarticulate sounds, 
 and call with sighs upon an empty letter. But I will know. 
 
 Mr. H. My dear Melesinda, press me no more for the dis- 
 closure of ibat which in the face of day so soon must be 
 revealed. Call it whim, humour, caprice in me. Suppose I 
 have sworn an oath never, till the ceremony of our marriage 
 is over, to disclose my true name. 
 
 Melesinda. Oh ! H, H., H. I cherish here a fire of rest- 
 less curiosity which consumes me. 'Tis appetite, passion, 
 call it whim, caprice in me. Suppose I have sworn I must 
 and will know it this very night. 
 
 Mr. H. Ungenerous Melesinda! I implore you to give me 
 tins one proof of your confidence. The holy vow once past, 
 your H. shall not have a secret to withhold. 
 
 Melesinda. My II. has overcome: his Melesinda shall 
 pine away and die, before she dare express a saucy inclina- 
 tion ; but what shall I call you till we are married ? 
 
 Mr. H. Call me? call me anything; call me Love, Love! 
 ay, Love ; Love will do very well. 
 
 Melesinda. How many syllables is it, Love? 
 
 Mr. II. How many ? ud, that is coming to the question 
 with a vengeance. One, two, three, four — what does it sig- 
 nify how many syllables? 
 
 Melesinda. How many syllables, Love?
 
 MR. II , A FAUCE 4G1 
 
 Mr. H. My Melesimla's mind, I had hoped, was superior 
 to this childish cariosity. 
 
 Melcsinda. How many letters are there in it? 
 
 [Exit Mr. II. followed by Mklesinda repeating the 
 qut stion. 
 
 Scene. — A Room in the Inn. 
 
 [Tiro Waiters disputing.) 
 
 1st Waiter. Sir Harbottle Hammond, you may depend upon 
 it. 
 
 2d Waiter. Sir Harry Ilardcastle, I tell you. 
 
 1st Waiter. The Hammonds of Huntingdonshire-. 
 
 2d Waiter. The Hardcastles of Hertfordshire. 
 
 1st Waiter. The Hammonds. 
 
 2d Waiter. Don't tell me : does not Hardcastle begin with 
 an H? 
 
 \st Waiter. So does Hammond, for that matter. 
 
 2d Waiter. Faith, so it does, if you go to spell it. 1 did 
 not think of that. I begin to be of your opinion ; he is cer- 
 tainly a Hammond. 
 
 1st Waiter. Here comes Susan Chambermaid, maybe she 
 can tell. 
 
 Enter Susan. 
 
 Both. Well, Susan, have you heard anything who the strange 
 gentleman is ? 
 
 Susan. Haven't you heard? it's all come out; Mrs. Guess- 
 well, the parson's widow, has been here about it. I over- 
 heard her talking in confidence to Mrs. Setter and Mrs. 
 Pointer, and she says they were holding a sort of a cummitty 
 about it. 
 
 Both. What? What? 
 
 Susan. There can't be a doubt of it, she savs, what from 
 his Jigger and the appearance he cuts, and his svmpshous 
 way of living, and, above all, from the remarkable circum- 
 stance that his surname should begin with an H., that he must 
 be— 
 
 Both. Well, well— 
 
 Susan. Neither more nor less than the prince. 
 
 Both. Prince ! 
 
 Susan. The Prince of Hessey-Cassel in disguise. 
 
 Both. Very likely, very likely. 
 
 Susan. Oh, there can't be a doubt on it. Mrs. Guesswell 
 says she knows it. 
 
 1st Waiter. Now if we could be sure that the Prince of 
 39*
 
 462 MR. H , A FARCE. 
 
 Hessey What-do-you-call-him was in England on his trav- 
 els. 
 
 2d Waiter. Get a newspaper. Look in the newspapers. 
 
 Susan. Fiddle of the newspapers ; who else can it be? 
 
 Both. That is very true (gravely.) 
 
 Enter Landlord. 
 
 Landlord. Here, Susan, James, Philip, where are you all? 
 The London coach is come in, and there is Mr. Fillaside, the 
 fat passenger, has been bawling for somebody to help him off 
 with his boots. 
 
 (The. Chambermaid and Waiters slip out.) 
 
 (Solus.) The house is turned upside down since the strange 
 gentleman came into it. Nothing but guessing and specu- 
 lating, and speculating and guessing; waiters and chamber- 
 maids getting into corners and speculating, hostlers and stable- 
 boys speculating in the yard, I believe the very horses in the 
 stable are speculating too, for there they stand in a musing pos- 
 ture, nothing for them to eat, and not seeming to care whether 
 they have anything or no ; and, after all, what does it signify ? 
 I hate such curious — odso, I must take this box up into his 
 bedroom — he charged me to see to it myself — I hate such 
 inquisitive — I wonder what is in it, it feels heavy (reads) 
 "Leases, title-deeds, wills." Here, now, a man might satisfy 
 his curiosity at once. Deeds must have names to them, so 
 must leases and wills. But I wouldn't — no, 1 wouldn't — it is a 
 pretty box too — prettily dovetailed — I admire the fashion of it 
 much. But I'd cut my fingers oft", before I'd do such a dirty 
 — what have I to do — curse the keys, how they rattle — rattle 
 in one's pockets — the keys and the halfpence (takes out 
 a bunch and plays with them.) I wonder if any of these 
 would fit; one might just try them, but I wouldn't lift up 
 the lid if they did. Oh, no, what should 1 be the richer 
 for knowing? (All this time he tries the keys one by one.) 
 What's his name to be? a thousand names begin with an H. 
 1 hate people that are always prying, poking and prying into 
 things — thrusting their linger into one place — a mighty little 
 hole this — and their keys into another. Oh Lord ! little rusty 
 fits it! but what is that to me? I wouldn't go to — no, no — but 
 it. is odd little rusty should just happen. (While he is turning 
 tip the lid of the box, Mr. II. enters behind him unper- 
 ccired.) 
 
 Mr. 11. What arc you about, you dog? 
 
 Landlord Oh Lord, sir! pardon; no thief, as I hope to 
 be saved. Little Pry was always honest.
 
 MR. 11 , A FARCE. 463 
 
 Mr. II. What else could move you to open that box ? 
 
 Landlord. Sir, don't kill me, and I will confess the whole 
 truth. This box happened to be lying — that is, I happened 
 to be carrying this box, and I happened to have my keys out, 
 and so — little rusty happened to lit — 
 
 Mr. H. So little rusty happened to fit! — and would not a 
 rope fit that rogue's neck ? [see tli< j papers have not been 
 moved: all is safe, hut it was as well to frighten him a little 
 {aside.) Come, landlord, as 1 think you are honest, and sus- 
 pect j on only intended to gratify a little foolish curiosity — 
 
 Landlord. That was all, sir, upon my veracity. 
 
 Mr. II. For this time I will pass it over. Your name is 
 Pry, 1 think. 
 
 Landlord. Yes, sir, Jeremiah Pry, at your service. 
 
 Mr. II. An apt name, you have a prying temper. I mean, 
 some little curiosity, a sort of inquisitiveness about you. 
 
 Landlord. A natural thirst after knowledge you may call it, 
 sir. When a boy I was never easy, but when I was thrust- 
 ing up the lids of some of my schoolfellows' boxes* — not 
 to steal anything, upon my honour, sir — only to see what 
 was in them ; have had pens stuck in my eyes for peeping 
 through keyholes, after knowledge ; could never see a cold 
 pie with the legs dangling out at top, but my fingers were for 
 lifting up the crust— just to try if it were pigeon or partridge 
 — for no other reason in the world. Surely I think my pas- 
 sion for nuts was owing to the pleasure of cracking the shell 
 to get at something concealed, more than to any delight I took 
 in eating the kernel. In short, sir, this appetite has grown 
 with my growth. 
 
 Mr. II. You will certainly be hanged some day for peeping 
 into some bureau or other, just to see what is in it. 
 
 Landlord. That is my tear, sir. The thumps and kicks I 
 have had for peering into parcels, and turning of letters inside 
 out — just for curiosity ! The blankets I have been made to 
 dance in for searching parish-registers for old ladies' ages — 
 just for curiosity! Once I was dragged through a horse- 
 pond, only for peeping into a closet that had glass doors to ir, 
 while my Lady Bluegarters was undressing — just for curiosity ! 
 
 Mr. II. A very harmless piece of curiosity, truly ; and now, 
 Mr. Pry, first have the goodness to leave that box with me, 
 and then do me the favour to carry your curiosity so far as to 
 inquire if mv servants are within. 
 
 Landlord. I shall, sir. Here, David, Jonathan — I think I 
 hear them coming — shall make bold to leave you. sir. [Exit. 
 
 Mr II. Another tolerable specimen of the comforts of going 
 anonymous !
 
 464 MR. H , A FARCE. 
 
 Enter two Footmen. 
 
 1st Footman. You speak first. 
 
 2d Footman. No, you had better speak. 
 
 1st Footman. You promised to begin. 
 
 Mr. H. They have something to say to me. The rascals 
 want their wages raised, I suppose ; there is always a favour 
 to be asked when they come smiling. Well, poor rogues, ser- 
 vice is but a hard bargain at the best. I think 1 must not be 
 close with them. Well, David — well, Jonathan. 
 
 1st Footman. We have served your honour faithfully — 
 
 2d Footman. Hope your honour won't take offence — 
 
 Mr. H. The old story, I suppose — wages ? 
 
 1st Footman. That's not it, your honour. 
 
 2d Footman. You speak. 
 
 1st Footman. But if your honour would just be pleased 
 to— 
 
 2d Footman. Only be pleased to — 
 
 Mr. H. Be quick with what you have to say, for I am in 
 haste. 
 
 1st Footman. Just to — 
 
 2d Footman. Let us know who it. is — 
 
 1st Footman. Who it is we have the honour to serve. 
 
 Mr. H. Why me, me, me ; you serve me. 
 
 2d Footman. Yes, sir; but we do not know who yoti are. 
 
 Mr. H. Childish curiosity ! do not you serve a rich master, 
 a gay master, an indulgent master ? 
 
 1st Footman. Ah, sir ! the figure you make is to us, your 
 poor servants, the principal mortification. 
 
 2d Footman. When we get over a pot at the public-house, 
 or in a gentleman's kitchen, or elsewhere, as poor servants 
 must have their pleasures — when the question goes round, 
 who is your master 1 and who do you serve ? and one says, I 
 serve Lord So-and-so, and another, I am Squire Such-a-one's 
 footman — 
 
 1st Footman. We have nothing to say for it, but that we 
 serve Mr. H. 
 
 2d Foofman. Or Squire H. 
 
 Mr. H. Really, you are a couple of pretty modest, reason- 
 able personages ; but I hope you will take it as no offence, 
 gentlemen, if, upon a dispassionate review of all that you have 
 said, I think fit not to tell you any more of my name than 
 I have chosen for especial purposes to communicate to the 
 rest of the world. 
 
 1st Footman. Why, then, sir, you may suit yourself.
 
 MR. H , A FARCE. 465 
 
 2d Footman. We tell you plainly, we cannot stay. 
 
 1st Footman. We don't choose to serve Mr. H. 
 
 2d Footman. Nor any Mr. or Squire in the alphabet — 
 
 \gt Footman. That lives in Christ-cross Row. 
 
 Mr. II. Ho, for a couple of ungrateful, inquisitive, sense- 
 less rascals ! (Jo hang, starve, or drown ! Rogues, to speak 
 thus irreverently of the alphabet — I shall live to see you glad to 
 serve old Q — to curl the wig of great S — adjust the dot of little 
 i — stand behind the chair of X, Y, Z — wear the livery of 
 Etcactera — and ride behind the sulky of And-by-itself-and ! 
 
 [Exit in a rage. 
 
 KND OF THE FIRST ACT. 
 
 US
 
 466 MR. H — . A FARCE. 
 
 ACT II. 
 
 Scene. — A handsome apartment well lighted, Tea, Cards, 
 Sfc. — A large party of Ladies and Gentlemen, among them 
 Melesinda. 
 
 1st Lady. I wonder when the charming man will be here. 
 
 2d Lady. He is a delightful creature ! Such a polish — 
 
 3d Lady. Such an air in all that he does or says — 
 
 4th Lady. Yet gifted with a strong understanding — 
 
 5th Lady. But has your ladyship the remotest idea of what 
 his true name is 1 
 
 1st Lady. They say his very servants do not know it. His 
 French valet, that has lived with him these two years — 
 
 2d Lady. There, madam, I must beg leave to set you right: 
 my coachman — 
 
 1st Lady. I have it from the very best authority : my foot- 
 man — 
 
 2d Lady. Then, madam, you have set your servants on — 
 
 1st Lady. No, madam, I would scorn any such little mean 
 ways of coming at a secret. For my part, I don't think any 
 secret of that consequence. 
 
 2d Lady. That's just like me ; I make a rule of troubling 
 my head with nobody's business but my own. 
 
 Melesinda. But, then, she takes care to make everybody's 
 business her own, and so to justify herself that way — (Aside.) 
 
 \st Lady. My dear Melesinda, you look thoughtful. 
 
 Melesinda. Nothing. 
 
 2d Lady. Give it a name. 
 
 Melesinda. Perhaps it is nameless. 
 
 1st Lady. As the object — come, never blush, nor deny it, 
 child. Bless me, what great ugly thing is that that dangles 
 at your bosom ? 
 
 Melesinda. This ? it is a cross : how do you like it ? 
 
 2d Lady. A cross ! Well, to me it looks for all the world 
 like a great staring H. 
 
 (Here a. general laugh.) 
 
 Melesinda. Malicious creatures ! Believe me it is a cross, 
 and nothing but a cross. 
 
 1st Lady. A cross, I believe, you would willingly hang at. 
 
 Melesinda. Intolerable spite ! 
 
 (Mr. H. is announced.)
 
 MR. H , A FARCE. 467 
 
 Enter Mr. H. 
 
 1st Lady. Oh, Mr. II., we are so glad — 
 
 2d Lady. We have been so dull — 
 
 3d Lady. So perfectly lifeless. You owe it to us, to be 
 more than commonly entertaining. 
 
 Mr. If. Ladies, this is so obliging — 
 
 AtU Lady. Oh, Mr. H., those ranunculus you said were 
 dying, pretty things, they have got up — 
 
 5th Lady. I have worked that sprig you commended — I 
 want you to come — 
 
 Mr. H. Ladies — 
 
 6lh Lady. I have sent for that piece of music from London. 
 
 Mr. H. The Mozart — {seeing Melesinda) — Melesinda ! 
 
 Several Ladies at once. Nay, positively, Melesinda, you 
 shan't engross him all to yourself. 
 
 (While the Ladies arc prrssing about. Mr. H., the 
 Gentlemen show signs of displeasure.) 
 
 1st Gent. We shan't be able to edge in a word, now this 
 coxcomb is come. 
 
 2d Gent. Damn him, I will affront him. 
 
 1st Gent. Sir, with your leave, I have a word to say to one 
 of these ladies. 
 
 2d Gent. If we could be heard — 
 
 (The Ladies pay no attention but to Mr. H.) 
 
 Mr. II. You see, gentlemen, how the matter stands. 
 (Hums an air.) I am not my own master : positively, I exist 
 and breathe but to be agreeable to these — Did you speak? 
 
 \st. Gent. And affects absence of mind, puppy ! 
 
 Mr. II. Who spoke of absence of mind ; did you, madam \ 
 How do you do, Lady Wearwell — how do? I did not see 
 your ladyship before — what was I about to say — oh — absence 
 of mind. I am the most unhappy dog in that way, sometimes 
 spurt out the strangest things — the most mal-a-propos — with- 
 out meaning to give the least offence, upon my honour — sheer 
 absence of mind — things I would have given the world not to 
 have said. 
 
 1st Gent. Do you hear the coxcomb ? 
 
 1st Lady. Great wits, they say — 
 
 2d Lady. You fine geniuses are most given — 
 
 3d Lady. Men of bright parts are commonly too vivacious — 
 
 Mr. H. But you shall hear. I was to dine the other day 
 at a great nabob's, that must be nameless, who, between our- 
 selves, is strongly suspected of — being very rich, that's all. 
 John, my valet, who knows my foible, cautioned me, while 
 he was dressing me, as he usually dooa where he thinks there's
 
 468 
 
 MB. H- 
 
 A FARCE. 
 
 a danger of my committing a lapsus, to take care in my con- 
 versation how I made any allusion direct or indirect to presents 
 — vou understand me ? I set out double charged with my fel- 
 low's consideration and my own; and, to do myself justice, 
 behaved with tolerable circumspection for the lirst half hour 
 or so — till at last a gentleman in company, who was indulg- 
 ing a free vein of raillery at the expense of the ladies, stum- 
 bled upon that expression of the poet which calls them " fair 
 defects." 
 
 )st Lady. It, is Pope, I believe, who says it. 
 Mr. H. No, madam; Milton. AYhere was I ? Oh, " fair 
 defects." This gave occasion to a crilic in company to de- 
 liver his opinion on the phrase — that led to an enumeration of 
 all the various words which might have been used instead of 
 " defects," as want, absence, poverty, deficiency, lack. This 
 moment I, (who had not been attending to the progress of the 
 argument, as the denouement will show,) starting suddenly up 
 out of one of my reveries, by some unfortunate connexion of 
 ideas, which the last fatal word had excited, the devil put it 
 into my head to turn round to the nabob, who was sitting next 
 me, and in a very marked manner (as it seemed to the com- 
 pany) to put the question to him, " Pray, sir, what may be the 
 exact value of a lack of rupees ?" You may guess the con- 
 fusion which followed. 
 
 1st Lady. What a distressing circumstance ! 
 2d Lady. To a delicate mind — 
 3d Ltidy. How embarrassing — 
 4th Latty. I declare, I quite pity you. 
 1st Gent. Puppy ! 
 
 Mr. H. A baronet at the table, seeing my dilemma, jogged 
 my elbow; and a good-natured duchess, who does everything 
 with a grace peculiar to herself, trod on my toes at that in- 
 stant : this brought me to myself, and — covered with blushes, 
 and pitied by all the ladies — I withdrew. 
 
 1*/ Lady. How charmingly he tells a story. 
 2d Lady. But how distressing! 
 
 Mr H. Lord Squandercounsel, who is my particular friend, 
 was pleased to rally me in his inimitable way upon it next 
 day. I shall never forget a sensible thing he said on the oc- 
 casion — speaking of absence of mind, my foible — says he, 
 My dear Hogs — 
 
 Several Ladies. Hogs — what — ha — 
 
 Mr. II My dear lIo<rsfiesh — my name — [here a universal 
 scream) — oh, my cursed unfortunate tongue ! II., I mean — 
 where was I ? 
 
 1st Lady* Filthy — abominable 1
 
 MR. H , A FARCE. 469 
 
 2d Lady. Unutterable ! 
 3d Lady. Hogs — foh ! 
 4th Lady. Disgusting ! 
 5th Lady. Vile ! 
 (it/i Lady. Shocking ! 
 \st Lady. Odious ! 
 2d Lad i/. Hogs — pah ! 
 
 3d Lady. A smelling-bottle — look to Miss Melesinda. Pool 
 thing ! it is no wonder. You had better keep off from her, 
 Mr. Hogsflesh, and not be pressing about her in her circum- 
 stances. 
 
 1st Gent. Good time of day to you, Mr. Hogsflesh. 
 2d Gent. The compliments of the season to you, Mr. Hogs- 
 flesh. 
 
 Mr. II This is too much — flesh and blood cannot endure 
 it. 
 
 1st Gent. What flesh ?— hog's-flesh ? 
 2d Gent. How he sets up his bristles ? 
 Mr. II. Bristles! 
 
 Is/. Gent. He looks as fierce as a hog in armour. 
 Mr. II. A hog ! — Madam ! — [here he severally accosts the 
 ladies, who by turns repel him.) 
 
 1st Lady. Extremely obliged to you for your attentions ; 
 but don't want a partner. 
 
 2d Lady. Greatly flattered by your preference ; but believe 
 I shall remain single. 
 
 3d Lady. Shall always acknowledge your politeness ; but 
 have no thoughts of altering my condition. 
 
 4th Lady. Always be happy to respect you as a friend ; 
 but you must not look for anything further. 
 
 5th Lady. No doubt of your ability to make any woman 
 happv : but have no thoughts of changing my name. 
 
 6th Lady. Must tell you, sir, that if by your insinuations 
 you think to prevail with me, you have, got the wrong sow by 
 the ear. Does he think any lady would go to pig with him. 
 
 Old Lady. Must beg you to be less particular in your ad- 
 dresses to me. Does he take me for a Jew, to long after for- 
 bidden meats. 
 
 Mr. H. I shall go mad ! to be refused by old Mother 
 Damnable — she that's so old, nobody knows whether she was 
 ever married or no, but passes for a maid by courtesy : her 
 juvenile exploits being beyond the farthest stretch of tradition I 
 — old Mother Damnable ! 
 
 [Exeunt all, either pitying or seeming to acoid him. 
 40
 
 470 MR. H , A FARCE. 
 
 Scene. — The Street. 
 Belvil and another Gentleman. 
 
 Belvil. Poor Jack, I am really sorry for him. The account 
 which you give me of his mortifying change of reception at 
 the assembly would be highly diverting, if it gave me less 
 pain to hear it. With all his amusing absurdities, and among 
 them not the least, a predominant desire to be thought well of 
 by the fair sex, he has an abundant share of good-nature, and 
 is a man of honour. Notwithstanding all that has happened, 
 Melesinda may do worse than take him yet. But did the 
 women resent it so deeply as you say? 
 
 Gent. Oh, intolerably — they fled him as fearfully when 
 'twas once blown, as a man would be avoided who was sud- 
 denly discovered to have marks of the plague, and as fast ; 
 when before they had been ready to devour the foolishest 
 thing he could say. 
 
 Belvil. Ha ! — ha ! so frail is the tenure by which these 
 women's favourites commonly hold their envied pre-emineuce. 
 Well, I must go find him out and comfort him. I suppose I 
 shall find him at the inn. 
 
 Gent. Either there or at Melesinda's. Adieu. 
 
 [Exeunt. 
 
 Scene. — Mr. H 's Apartment. 
 
 Mr. II. (solus.) Was ever anything so mortifying ? to be 
 refused by old Mother Damnable ! — with such parts and ad- 
 dress, and the little squeamish devils, to dislike me for a name, 
 a sound — oh, my cursed name ! that it was something I could 
 be revenged on ! if it were alive, that I might tread upon it, 
 or crush it, or pummel it, or kick it, or spit it out — for it 
 sticks in my throat and will choke me. 
 
 My plaguy ancestors ! if they had left me but a Van or a 
 Mac, or an Irish 0\ it had been something to qualify it — Myn- 
 heer Van Hogsflesh, or Sawney Mac Hogsflesh, or Sir Phe- 
 
 lim O'Hogaflesh, but downright blunt . If it had been 
 
 any other name in the world, I could have borne it. If it. had 
 been the name of a beast, as Bull, Fox, Kid, Lamb, Wolf, 
 Lion ; or of a bird, as Sparrow, Hawk, Buzzard, Daw, Finch, 
 .Nightingale ; or of a fish, as Sprat, Herring, Salmon ; or the 
 name of a thing, as Ginger, Hay, Wood; or of a colour, as 
 Black, Gray, White, Green ; or of a sound, as Bray ; or the 
 name of a month, as March, May ; or of a place, as Barnet, 
 Baldock, Hitchen ; or the name of a coin, as Farthing, Penny, 
 Twopenny ; or of a profession, as Butcher, Baker, Carpenter,
 
 MR. II , A FARCE. 471 
 
 Piper, Fisher, Fletcher, Fowler, Glover ; or a Jew's name, 
 as Solomons, Isaacs, Jacobs ; or a personal name, as Foot, 
 Leg, Crookshanks, Heaviside, Sidebottom, Longbottom, Rams- 
 bottom, Winterbottom ; or a long name, as Blanche nhagen, or 
 Blancheiihausen ; or a short name, as Crib, Crisp, Crips, Tag, 
 Trot, I nb, Phips, Padge, Papps, or Prig, or \\ ig, or Pip, or 
 Trip; Trip had been something, bat Ho — . ( Walks about 
 in great agitation — recovering his calmness a little, sits down.) 
 Farewell die must distant thoughts of marriage ; the ringer- 
 circling ring, the purity-figuring glove, the envy-pining bride- 
 maids, the wishing parson, and tbe simpering clerk. Fare- 
 well, the ambiguous blush-raising joke, the titter-provoking 
 pun, the morning stirring-drum. No son of mine shall exist, 
 to bear my ill-fated name. No nurse come chuckling to tell 
 me it is a boy. No midwife, leering at me from under the 
 lids of professional gravity. I dreamed of caudle — [sings in 
 a melancholy tone.) Lullaby, lullaby — hush-a-by-baby — how 
 like its papa it is ! — (makes motions as if he was nursing.) 
 And then, when grown up, "Is this your son, sir?" "Yes, 
 sir, a poor copy of me, a sad young dog— just what his father 
 was at his age — I have four at home." Oh ! oh ! oh ! 
 
 Enter Landlord. 
 
 Mr. II. Landlord, I must pack up to-night ; you will see 
 all mv things got ready. 
 
 Landlord. Hope your honour does not intend to quit the 
 Blue Boar — sorry anything has happened. 
 
 Mr. H. He has heard it all. 
 
 Landlord. Your honour has had some mortification, to be 
 sure, as a man may say ; you have brought your pigs to a fine 
 market. 
 
 Mr. II. Pigs ! 
 
 Landlord. What then? take old Pr\ 's advice, and never 
 mind it. Don't scorch your crackling for 'em, sir. 
 
 Mr. II. Scorch my crackling! a queer phrase ; but I sup- 
 pose he don't mean to affront me. 
 
 Landlord. What is done can't be undone ; you can't make 
 a silken purse out of a sow's ear. 
 
 Mr. II. As you say, landlord, thinking of a thing does but 
 augment it. 
 
 Landlord. Does but hogment it, indeed, sir. 
 
 Mr. II Hogment it ! damn it. I said augment it. 
 
 Landlord. Lord, sir, 'tis not everybody has such gift of 
 fine phrases as your honour, that can lard his discourse. 
 
 Mr. H. Lard !
 
 472 MR. H , A FARCE. 
 
 Landlord. Suppose they do smoke you — 
 
 Mr. H. Smoke me ? 
 
 Landlord. One of my phrases ; never mind my words, sir, 
 my meaning is good. We all mean the same thing, only you 
 express yourself one way, and I another, that's all. The 
 meaning's the same ; it is all pork. 
 
 Mr. II That's another of your phrases, I presume? (Bell 
 rings, and the landlord called for.) 
 
 Landlord. Anon! anon. 
 
 Mr. H. Oh, I wish i were anonymous. 
 
 [Exeunt several ways. 
 
 Scene. — Melesinda'' s Apartment. 
 
 Melesinda and Maid. 
 
 Maid. Lord, madam ! before I'd take on as you do about a 
 foolish — what signifies a name? Hogs — Hogs — what is it ? — 
 is just as good as any other for what I see. 
 
 Melesinda. Ignorant creature ! yet she is perhaps blessed in 
 the absence of those ideas which, while they add a zest to the 
 few pleasures which fall to the lot of superior natures to en- 
 joy, doubly edge the — 
 
 Maid. Superior natures ! a fig ! If he's hog by name he's 
 not hog by nature, that don't follow — his name don't make 
 him anything, does it ? He don't grunt the more for it, nor 
 squeak, that ever I hear ; he likes his victuals out of a plate, 
 as other Christians do, you never see him go to the trough — 
 
 Melesinda. Unfeeling wretch ! yet possibly her intentions — 
 
 Maid. For instance, madam, my name is Finch — Hetty 
 Finch. I don't whistle the more for that, nor long after ca- 
 nary-seed while I can get good wholesome mutton— no, nor 
 you can't catch me by throwing salt on my tail. If you come 
 to that, hadn't I a young man used to come after me, they said 
 courted me — his name was Lion — Francis Lion, a tailor; but 
 though he was fond enough of me, for all that, he never of- 
 fered to eat me. 
 
 Meleundtt. How fortunate that the discovery has been 
 made before it was too late. Had I listened to his deceits, 
 and, as the perfidious man had almost persuaded me, precip- 
 itated myself into an inextricable engagement before — 
 
 Maid. No great harm if you had. You'd only have bought 
 a pig in a poke — and what then ? Oh, here he comes creep- 
 ing — 
 
 Enter Ma. H. abject. 
 Go to her, Mr. Hogs — Hogs — Hogsbristles — what's your
 
 MR. H , A FARCE. 473 
 
 name? Don't be afraid, man — don't eive it up — she's not crying 
 — only summut has made her eyes red — she has got a sty in 
 her eye, I believe — {going.) 
 
 Melesinda. You are not going, Betty ? 
 
 Maid. Oh, madam, never mind me — 1 shall be back in the 
 twinkling of a pig's whisker, as they say. [Exit. 
 
 Mr. II. Melesinda, you behold before you a wretch who 
 would have betrayed your confidence, but it was love that 
 prompted him ; who would have tricked you by an unworthy 
 concealment into a participation of that disgrace which a su- 
 perficial world has agreed to attach to a name — but with it you 
 would have shared a fortune not contemptible, and a heart — 
 but 'tis over now. That name he is content to bear alone — 
 to go where the persecuted syllables shall be no more heard, 
 or excite no meaning — some spot where his native tongue has 
 never penetrated, nor any of his countrymen have landed, to 
 plant their unfeeling satire, their brutal wit, and national ill 
 manners — where no Englishman — {Here Melesinda, who has 
 been pouting during this speech, fetches a deep sigh). Some 
 yet undiscovered Otaheite, where witless, unapprehensive sav- 
 ages shall innocently pronounce the ill-fated sounds, and think 
 them not inharmonious. 
 
 31clesinda. Oh ! 
 
 Mr. H. Who knows but among the female natives might be 
 found — 
 
 Melesinda. Sir! {raising her head.) 
 
 Mr. H. One who would be more kind than — some Oberea 
 — Queen Oberea. 
 
 Melesinda. Oh! 
 
 Mr. H. Or what if I were to seek for proofs of recipro- 
 cal esteem among unprejudiced African maids, in Monomo- 
 topa. 
 
 Enter Servant. 
 Servant. Mr. Belvil. [Exit. 
 
 Enter Belvil. 
 
 Mr. II. Monomotopa {musing.) 
 
 BefoiL Heydav, Jack! what means this mortified face? 
 nothing has happened, I hope, between this lady and you. I 
 beg pardon, madam ; but understanding my friend was with you, 
 I took the liberty of seeking him here. Some little difference 
 possibly which a third person can adjust — not a word — will 
 you, madam, as this gentleman's friend, suffer rac to be the 
 40*
 
 474 MR. II , A FARCE. 
 
 arbitrator — strange — hark'ee, Jack, nothing lias come out, has 
 there? you understand me. Oh, I guess how it is — somebody 
 has got at your secret ; you haven't blabbed it yourself, have 
 you? ha — ha — ha! I could find in my heart — Jack, what 
 would you give me if I should relieve you. 
 
 Mr. H. No power of man can relieve me [sighs) — but it 
 must lie at the root, gnawing at the root — here it will lie. 
 
 Belvil. No power of man ? not a common man, I grant you ; 
 for instance, a subject — it's out of the power pf any subject. 
 
 Mr. H. Gnawing at the root — there it will lie. 
 
 Belvil. Such a thing has been known as a name to be 
 changed ; but not by a subject — {shows a Gazette.) 
 
 Mr. II. Gnawing at the root (suddenly snatches the paper 
 out of BelvWs hand) — ha ! pish ! nonsense ! give it me — what ! 
 (reads) promotions, bankrupts — a great many bankrupts this 
 week — there it will lie {lays it dotcn, takes it up again, and 
 reads) — " The king has been graciously pleased" — gnawing at 
 the root — " graciously pleased to grant unto John Hogsflesh" — 
 the devil — " Hogsflesh, Esq., of Sty Hall, in the county of 
 Hants, his royal license and authority" — oh Lord ! oh Lord — 
 " that he and his issue" — me and my issue — " may take and use 
 the surname and arms of Bacon" — Bacon, the surname and arms 
 of Bacon — " in pursuance of an injunction contained in the last 
 will and testament of Nicholas Bacon, Esq., his late uncle, as 
 well as out of grateful respect to his memory" — grateful re- 
 spect ! poor old soul — here's more — " and that such arms may 
 be first duly exemplified" — they shall, I will take care of that 
 — " according to the laws of arms, and recorded in the Her- 
 ald's Office."" 
 
 Belvil. Come, madam, give me leave to put my own inter- 
 pretation upon your silence, and to plead for my friend, that 
 now that oidy obstacle which seemed to stand in the way of 
 your union is removed, you will suffer me to complete the 
 happiness which my news seems to have brought him, by in- 
 troducing him with a new claim to your favour, by the name 
 of Mr. Bacon. {Takes their hands and joins them, which 
 Melesinda seems to give consent to with a smile.) 
 
 Mr. It. Generous Melesinda ! my dear friend — " he and his 
 issue," me and my issue — oh Lord ! 
 
 Belvil. I wish you joy, Jack, with all my heart. 
 Mr. It. Bacon, Bacon, Bacon — how odd it sounds. I could 
 never be tired of hearing it. There was Lord Chancellor 
 Bacon. Methinks I have some of the Verulam blood in me 
 already — methinks I could look through nature — there was 
 Friar Bacon, a conjurer — I feel as if I could conjure too —
 
 MR. II , A FARCE. 475 
 
 Enter a Servant. 
 
 Servant. Two young ladies and an old lady are at the door, 
 inquiring if you see company, madam. 
 
 Mr- //. " Surname and arms" — 
 
 Mclesinda. .Show them up. Rfy dear Mr. Bacon, moderate 
 your joy. 
 
 Enter three Ladies, being part of those who were at the 
 Assembly. 
 
 1st Lady. My dear Mclesinda, how do you do? 
 
 2d Lady. How do you do? We have been so concerned 
 for you — 
 
 Old Lady. We have been so concerned — (seeing him) — Mr. 
 IL'Ljsflesh — 
 
 Mr. If. There's no such person — nor there never was — nor 
 'tis not lit there should be — "surname and arms" — 
 
 Belvil. It is true what my friend would express ; we have 
 been all in a mistake, ladies. Very true, the name of this 
 gentleman was what you call it, but it is so no longer. The 
 succession to the Ions-contested Bacon estate is at length de- 
 cided, and with it my friend succeeds to the name of his de- 
 ceased relative. 
 
 Mr. II. " His majesty has been graciously pleased'' — 
 
 1st Lady. I am sure we all join in hearty congratulation — 
 (sighs). 
 
 2d Lady. And wish vou joy with all our hearts — (heigh- 
 ho !) 
 
 Old Lady. And hope you will enjoy the name and estate 
 many years — (cries.) 
 
 Belvil. Ha — ha — ha ! mortify them a little, Jack. 
 
 1st Lady. Hope you intend to stay — 
 
 2d Lady. With us some time — 
 
 Old Ludu. It) these parts — 
 
 Mr. H. Ladies, for your congratulations I thank you; for 
 the favours you have lavished on me, and in particular for this 
 lady's [turning to the old. lady) good opinion, I rest your debt- 
 or. As to any future favours — (accosts them severally in the 
 order in which he teas refused by them at the assembly) — mad- 
 am, shall always acknowledge yourpoliteness : but at present, 
 you see, I am engaged with a partner. Always be happy to 
 respect you as a friend, but you must not look for anything 
 further. Must beg of you to be less particular in your ad- 
 dresses to me. Ladies all, with this piece of advice, of Bath 
 and you
 
 473 MR. H , A FARCK. 
 
 Your ever grateful servant takes his leave. 
 Lay your plans surer when you plot to grieve ; 
 See while you kindly mean to mortify 
 Another, the wild arrow do not fly, 
 And gall yourself. For once you've been mistaken ; 
 Your shafts have missed their aim — Hogsflesh has saved 
 his Bacon. 
 
 THE END.
 
 60 
 
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