it > * •'V it % .'■;; IK ^ -ropt from the ruined sides of kings — but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the fore-ground — Silence — eldest of things — language of old Night — primitive Discourser — to which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression. How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, Looking tranquillity ! Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod ! convocation without intrigue ! parliament without debate ! what a lesson dost thou read to 75 A QUAKERS MEETTNO. council, and to consistoiy ! — if mv pen treat of you lightly — as haplj it will wander — ^yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out-weUing tears would rather confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the Bowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. — I have witnessed that, which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you — for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and off- scouring of church and presbytery. — I have seen the reeling sea-rufiian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remember Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and " the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet." Eeader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the Journals of Eox and the primitive Eriends. It is far more edifying and affecting than anything you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. Tou will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth), — James Naylor : what dreadful suffer- ings, with what patience, he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons, A QUAKERS' MEETING 7.*l without a murmur ; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which thej stigmatised for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still ! — so different from the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatise, apostatise all, and think they can never get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated. Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart ; and love the early Quakers. How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings. — If the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypo- crites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is heard — you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds — with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying out a few words which " she thought might suit the condition of some present," with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that anything of female vanity was mixed up^ where the tones were 74 A QUAKERS' MEETING BO 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 equipt in iron mail." His frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit — I dare not say of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable — he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail — bis joints all seemed loosening — it was a figure to set off against Paul Preaching — the words he uttered were few, and sound — he was evidently resisting his will — keeping down his own word- wisdom wdth more mighty effort, than the world's orators strain for theirs. " He had been a wit in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, ^with something like a smile, to reeal the striking incon- gruity of the confession — understanding the term in its worldly acceptation — with the frame and phy- siognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levities — the Jocos Eisus-que — faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna. — By wit, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty. More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius ; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the ToxauE, that THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 76 unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. — O when the spirit is bore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings, and nonsense-noises of the world, what u 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 a uniformity, tranquil and herd-Kke — as in the pasture — " forty feeding like one." — The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil ; and cleanliness in them to be some- thing more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily ; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones. THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaodia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in king John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia ; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions ; 76 THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. nor can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South "Wales, or Van Diem en's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first-named of these two TerrsB Incognitse. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Eear, or Charles's Wain ; the place of any star; or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Yenus only by her brightness — and if the sun on some por- tentous morn were to make his first appearance in the "West, I verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study; but T never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies ; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first, in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend Jf., with great pains- taking, got me to think I understood the first propo- sition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages ; and, like a better man than myself, have " small Latin and less Greek." I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers — not from the circumstance of my being town- born — for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it " on Devon's leafy shores," — and am no less at a loss among purely town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic pro- cesses. Not that I affect ignorance — but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious ; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 77 it can bold without acliing. I sometimes wouder, how I have passed my probation with so Httle dis- credit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company ; 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, that does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma of this sort. — In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shacklewell, the coach stopped to take up a staid- looking gentleman, about the wrong side of thirty, who was giving his parting directions (while the steps were adjusting), in a tone of mild authority, to a tall youth, who seemed to be neither his clerk, his son, nor his servant, but something partaking of all three. The youth was dismissed, and we drove on. As we were the sole passengers, he naturally enough addressed his conversation to me ; and we discussed the merits of the fare, the civility and punctuaHty of the driver ; the circumstance of an opposition coach having been lately set up, with the probabilities of its success — to all which I was enabled to return pretty satisfactory answers, having been drilled into this kind of etiquette by some years' daily practice of riding to and fro in the stage aforesaid — when he suddenly alarmed me by a startling question, whether I had seen the show of prize cattle that morning in Smitlifield ? Now as I had not seen it, and do not greatly care for such sort of exhibitions, I was obhged to return a cold negative. He seemed a little mortified, as well as astonislied, at my declaration, as (it appeared) he was just coino 78 THE OLD AND THE NEW SCH00LMA8TEB. fresh from the sightj md 'loubtless had hoped to com- pare notes on the sujjecr. However, he assured me that I had lost a fine treat, as it far exceeded the show of last year. We were now approaching Norton Eolgate, when the sight of some shop-goods ticketed freshened him up into a dissertation upon the cheap- ness of cottons this spring. I was now a little in heart, as the nature of my morning avocations had brought me into some srrt of familiarity with the raw material ; and I was surprised to find how eloquent I was becoming on the state of the India market — when, presently, he dashed my incipient vanity to the earth at once, by inquiring whether I had ever made any calculation as to the value of the rental of all the retail shops in London. Had he asked of me, what song the Siren sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, I might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have hazarded a " wide solution."* My companion saw my embarrassment, and, the alms- houses beyond Shoreditch just coming in view, with great good-nature and dexterity, shifted his conversa- tion to the subject of public charities ; which led to the comparative merits of provision for the poor in past and present times, with observations on the old monastic institutions, and charitable orders ; but, finding me rather dimly impressed with some glimmer- ing 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 * Urn Burial. THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 7? to the North Pole Expedition. While I was muttering out something about the Panorama of those strange regions (which I had actually seen), by way of parrying the question, the coach stopping relieved me from any further apprehensions. My companion getting out, left me in the comfortable possession of my ignorance ; and I heard him, as he went off, putting questions to an outside passenger, who had alighted with him, regarding an epidemic disorder, that had been rife about Diilston, and which my friend assured him had gone through five or six schools in that neighbourhood. The truth now flashed upon me, that my companion was a schoolmaster; and that the youth, whom he had parted from at our first acquaint- ance, must have been one of the bigger boys, or the usher. — He was evidently a kind-hearted man, who did not seem so much desirous of provoking discussion by the questions which he put, as of obtaining informa- tion at any rate. It did not appear that he took any interest, either, in such kind of inquiries, for their own sake ; but that he was in some way bound to seek for knowledge. A greenish-coloured coat, which he had on, forbade me to surmise that he was a clergyman. The adventure gave birth to somfe reflections on the difference between persons of his profession in past and present times. Rest to the souls of those fine old Pedagogues ; the breed, long since extinct, of the Lilys, and the Linacres : who believing that all learning was contained in the languages which they taught, and despising every other acquirement as superficial and useless, came to their task as to a sport ! Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed away all their days as in a pjrammar-school. Revolving in a perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies 80 THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTEE. renewing constantly the occupations which had charmed their studious childhood ; rehearsing continually the part of the past ; life must have slipped from them at last like one day. They were always in their first garden, reaping harvests of their golden time, among their Mori and their Spici-Jcgia ; in Arcadia still, but kings ; the ferule of their sway not much harsher, but of like dignity with that mild sceptre attributed to king Basileus ; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philoclea; with the occasional duncery of some imtoward tyro, serving for a refresh- ing interlude of a Mopsa or a clown Damoetas ! With what a savour doth the Preface to Colet's, or (as it is sometimes called) Paul's Accidence, set forth ! " To exhort every man to the learning of grammar, that intendeth to attain the understanding of the tongues, wherein is contained a great treasury of wisdom and knowledge, it would seem but vain and lost labour ; for so much as it is known, that nothing can surely be ended, whose beginning is either feeble or faulty; and no building be perfect whereas the foundation and groundwork is ready to fall, and unable to uphold the burden of the frame." How well doth this stately preamble (comparable to those which Milton commendeth as " having been the usage to prefix to some solemn law, then first promulgated by Solon, or Lycurgus ") correspond with and illustrate that pious zeal for conformity, expressed in a succeed- ing clause, w^hich would fence about grammar-rules with the severity of faith -articles ! — " as for the diversity of grammars, it is well profitably taken away by the Kings Majesties wisdom^ who foreseeing the inconvenience, and favourably providing the remedie, caused one kind of grammar by sundry learned men to be diligently drawn, and so to be set out, only THE OLD AND THE IfEW SCHOOLMASTEPw. 81 everywhere to be taught, for the use of learners, and for the hurt in changing of schoolmaisters." AVliat a gusto in that which follows : " wherein it is profitable that he [the pupil] can orderly decline his noun, and his verb." His noun ! The fine dream is fading away fast ; and the least concern of a teacher in the present dav is to inculcate grammar-rules. The modem schoolmaster ia expected to know a little of everything, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. He must bo superficially, if I may so say, omniscient. He is to know something of pneumatics ; of chemistry ; of whatever is curious, or proper to excite the attention of the youthful mind ; an insight into mechanics is desirable, with a touch of statistics ; the quality of soils, &c., botany, the constitution of his country, cu7n viultis aliis. You may get a notion of some part of his expected duties by consulting the famous Tractate on Education addressed to Mr. Haii;lib. All these things — these, or the desire of them — he is expected to instil, not by set lessons from piofessors, which he may charge in the bill, but at school-intervals, as he walks the streets, or saunters through green fields (those natural instructors), with his pupils. The least part of what is expected from him, is to be done in school-hours. He must insinuate knowledge at the mollia tempora fandi. He must seize every occasion — the season of the year — the time of the day — a passing cloud — a rainbow — a waggon of hay — a regiment of soldiers going by — to inculcate something useful. He can receive no pleasure from a casual glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an obiect of instruction. He must interpret beauty into the picturesque. He cannot relish a beggar-man, or a 82 THE OLD AND THE NEW SCPIOOLMASTER. gipsy, for tliinking of the suitable improvement. Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the sophisti- cating medium of moral uses. The Universe — that Great Book, as it has been called — is to him indeed, to all intents and purposes, a book, out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting school- boys. — Vacations themselves are none to him, he is only rather worse off than before ; for commonly he has some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him at such times ; some cadet of a great family ; some neglected lump of nobility, or gentry ; that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr. Hartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's house, or his favourite w^atering-place. Wherever he goes, this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy. Boys are capital fellows in their owti way, among their mates ; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people. The restraint is felt no less on the one side, than on the other. — Even a child, that " play- thing for an hour," tires always. The noises of children, playing their own fancies — as I now hearken to them by fits, sporting on the green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell — by distance made more sweet — inexpressibly take from the labour of my task. It is like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They ought at least to do so — for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far unlike the harsh prose-accents of man's conversation. I should but spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling in their pastime. I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very superior capacity to my own — not, if I THE OLD AND THE KEW SCHOOLMASTER. 83 know myself at all, from any considerations of jealousy or self-comparison, for the occasional communion with such minds has constituted the fortune and felicity of my life — ^but the habit of too constant intercourse with spirits above you, instead of raising you, keeps you down. Too frequent doses of original thinking from others, restrain what lesser portion of that faculty you may possess of your own. You get entangled in another man's mind, even as you lose yourself in another man's grounds. You are walking with a tall varlet, whose strides out-pace yours to lassitude. The constant operation of such potent agency would reduce me, I am convinced, to imbecility. You may derive thoughts from others ; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own. Intellect may be imparted, but not each man's intel- lectual frame. — As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged upward, as little (or rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downwards by your associates. The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility. Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a schoolmaster ? — because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place, in the society of his equals. He comes like GruUiver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours. He cannot meet you on the square. He wants a point given him, like an indifferent whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that he wants to be teaching you. One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method a 2 84 THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. by- which young gentlemen in Ms seminary were taught to compose English themes. — The jests of a schoolmaster are coarse, or thin. They do not tell out of school. He is under the restraint of a formal or 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 profession, writing to a friend respecting a youth who had quitted his school abruptly, " that your nephew was not more attached to me. But persons in my situation are more to be pitied, than can well be imagined. We are surrounded by young, and, consequently, ardently affectionate hearts, but we can never hope to share an atom of their affections. The relation of master and scholar forbids this. How pleasing this must he to you, how I envy your feelings ! my friends will sometimes say to me, when they see young men whom I have educated, return after some years' absence from school, their eyes shining with pleasure, while they shake hands with their old master, bringing a present of game to me, or a toy to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms for my care of their education. A holiday is begged for the boys ; the house is a scene of happiness ; I, only, am sad at heart. — This fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, who fancies he repays his master with gratitude for the care of his boyish years^— this young man — in the eight long years I watched over him with a parent's anxiety, never could repay me with one look ot genuine feeling. He was proud, when I praised ; he was submissive, when I reproved him ; but he did never hve me — and what he now mistakes for grati- . THE OLD i-ND THE HEW SCHOOLMASTER 85 tude and kindness for me, is but the pleasant sensa- tion, which all persons feel at re\"isiting the scenes of their boyish hopes and fears ; and the seeing on equal terms the man they were accustomed to look up to with reverence. My wife too," this interesting corres- pondent goes on to say, " my once darling Anna, is the wife of a schoolmaster. — When I married her— knowing that the wife of a schoolmaster ought to be a busy notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna would ill supply the loss of my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who never sat still, was in every part of the house in a moment, and whom I was obliged sometimes to threaten to fasten dovni in a chair, to save her from fatiguing herself to death — I expressed my fears that I was bringing her into a way of life unsuitable to her ; and she, who loved me tenderly, promised for my sake to exert herself to perform the duties of her new situation. She pro- mised, and she has kept her word. "What wonders will not woman's love perform ? — My house i; managed with a propriety and decorum unknown in other schools ; my boys are well fed, look healthy, and have every proper accommodation ; and all this per- formed with a careful economy, that never descends to meanness. But I have lost my gentle helpless Anna ! — When we sit down to enjoy an hour of repose after the fatigue of the day, I am compelled to listen to what have been her useful (and they are really useful) employments through the day, and what she proposes for her to-morrow's task. Her heart and her features are changed by the duties of her situation. To the boys, she never appears other than the master's wife, and she looks up to me as the hoy^s master ; to whom all show of love and aifection would be highly im- Droper, and unbecoming the dignity of her situation 86 IMPEBFECT SYMPATHIES and mine. Yet this mj gratitude forbids me to hint to her. Por 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. IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathiseth with all things ; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy in any thing. Those natural repugnancies do not touch me, uor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — Religio Medici. That the author of the Eeligio Medici, mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences ; in whose categories of Being the possible took the upper hand of the actual ; should have overlooked the impertinent indi- vidualities of such poor concretions as mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to be wondered at, that in the genus of animals he should have con- descended to distinguish that species at all. For myself — earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my activities, — Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky, I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. "Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste ; or when once it becomes indifferent, it begins to be dis- relishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of pre- judices — made up of likings and dislikings — the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 87 certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species. I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all equally. The more purely-English word that expresses sympathy, will better explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who upon another account cannot be my mate ot fellow. I cannot like all people alike.* I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me — and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There is something more plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under which mine must be content to rank) which in * I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of imperfect sympathies. To nations or classes of men there can be no direct antipathy. There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting: (who never saw one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting. We by proof find there should be 'Twixt man and man such an antipathy, That though he can show no just reason why For any former wrong or injury, Can neither find a blemish in his fame, Nor aught in face or feature justly blame, Can challesge or accuse him of no evil, Yet notwithstanding, hates him as a devil. T^e lines are from old Heywood's " Hierarchic of Angels," and he subjoins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who attempted to assassinate a King Ferdinand of Spain, and being put to the racl could give no other reason for the deed but an inveterate antipathy which he had taken to the first sight of the King. The cause which to that act compell'd him Was, he ne'er loved him wnc« he first beheld him. 88 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. its constitution is essentially anti- Caledonian. The owners of tlie sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them — a feature or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradventure — and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and shifting : waxing, and again waning. Their con- versation 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 w^ere upon their oath — but must be understood, speaking or writing, with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proposition, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their full development. They are no systematizers, and would but err more by at- tempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is constituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their growth — if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work. Tou never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests any- thing, but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness. He brings his total wealth into niPERFECT SlMPATIllES. 89 company, and gravelj unpacks it. His nches are always about him. He never stoops to catch a glit- tering 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-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half- intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox — he has no doubts. Is he an infidel — he has none either. Between the afiM-mative and the negative there is no border- land with him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions with him — for he sets you right. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book. His aJBfirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's country. " A healthy book ! " — said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle, — "Did I catch rightly what you said ? I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extin- guisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest 90 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES with a vein of it. Bemember you are upon your oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr. * * * *. After he had examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked my beauty (a foolish name it goes by among my friends) — when he very gravely assured me, that " he had considerable respect for my character and talents" (so he was pleased to say), "but had not given himself much thought about the degree of my personal pretensions." The misconception stag- gered me, but did not seem much to disconcert him. — Persons of this nation are particularly fond of affirming a truth — which nobody doubts. They do not 80 properly affirm, as annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to become a subject of disputation. I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son — when four of them started up at once to inform me, that " that was impos- sible, 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 then- love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the passage to the margin.* * There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit them- selves, and entertain their company, with relating facts of no conse- quence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day ; and this I have observed more frequently among the Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of tio e or place ; which kind of discourse, if it were IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 91 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 foimd that a true Scot resents your admiration of his compatriot, even more than he would your contempt of him. The latter he imputes to your " imperfect acquaintance with many of the words which he uses ; " and the same objection makes it a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire him. — Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven, for his delineation of E-ory and his companion, upon their first introduction to our metropolis. — Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume's History compared with Ms 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 vrith which Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, on the one side, — of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, must and ought, to affect the blood of the children. I cannot believe it not a little relieved by the uncoutn terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that country, would be hardly tolerable. — Hints towards an Essay on Conversation, 92 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES can run clear and kindly yet ; or tliat a few fine wordsj STjch as candour, liberality, the light of a nine- teenth century, can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He is least distasteful on 'Change — for the mercantile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If tkei/ are converted, why do they not come over to us altogether ? "Why keep up a form of separation, when the life of it is fled? If they can sit with us at table, why do they keck at our cookery ? I do not understand these half con- vertites. Jews christianizing — Christians judaizing — puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative. B would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to be of Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, " The Children of Israel passed through the Eed Sea !" The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him. B has a strong expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is sense. He sings with under- standing, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would IMPERFECT STMPAl-HIES 08 sing the Commandments, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition. His nation, in general, have not over-sensible countenances. How should they ? — but you seldom see a silly expression among them. Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's visage. I never heard of an idiot being born among them. — Some admire the Jewish female-physiognomy. I admire it — but with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes. In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces — or rather masks — that have looked out kindly upon one iu casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls — these " images of God cut in ebony." But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good nights with them — because they are black. I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I vene- rate the Quaker principles. It does me good for tlie rest of the day when I meet any of their people in my path. "When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occur- rence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) " to live with them." I am all over sophisticated — with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pic- tures, 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 »t his puisc. 94 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return to a question put to them may be explained, I think, without tlie 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 them- selves. They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. The custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth — the one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, "You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of false- hood, creeps into ordinary conversation ; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy- truth — oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinc- tion. His simple affirmation being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to use upon the most indifierent 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. IMPEHFECT SYMPATHIES. 95 He knows that his syllables are weighed — and how far a consciousness of this particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by honest means, might be illustrated, and the practice justified, by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this occasion. The admirable presence of mind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be traced to this imposed self- watchfulness — if it did not seem rather an humble and secular scion of that old stock of religious constancy, which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecution, to the violence of judge or accuser, under trials and racking examinations. "Tou will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till midnight," said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter as the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of this people is sometimes ludicrously displayed in hghter instances. — I was travelling in a stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest non- conformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My friends confined them- selves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered that she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their 98 WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT PEAKS. monej and formally tendered it — so much for tea — I, in humble imitation, tendering mine — for tlie supper which I had taken. She would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put up their silver, as did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the example of such grave and warrantable personages. "We got in. The steps went up. The coach drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or ambiguously pronounced, became after a time inaudible — and now my conscience, which the whimsical scene had for a while suspended, beginning to give some twitches, I waited, in the hope that some justification would be offered by these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their conduct. To my great surprise, not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sat as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke silence, by inquiring of his next neighbour, " Hast thee heard how indigos go at the India House ?" and the question operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as far as Exeter. WITCHES, AND OTHEK NIGHT FEARS. AVe are too hasty when we set down our ancestors m the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witch- craft. In the relations of this visible world we find then? to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an nistoric anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS- 97 the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion — of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd — could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony ? — That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire — that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed — that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest — or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful- innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring — ^were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld — has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood a priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolised by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he should come sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor. — That the intercourse was opened at all between both worlds, was perhaps the mistake — but that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised. 1 have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received witchcraft; that I could not have slept in a "village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, fi8 WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough serving, a warrant upon them — as if they should subpoena Satan! — Prospero in hii boat, with his books and wand about him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of his enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think, on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-resistance of witches to the constituted powers. — What stops the Eiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces — or who had made it a condition of his prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious bait — we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that country. From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's book- closet, the History of the Bible by Stackhouse occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds — one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot — attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes — and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I remember it consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down with the ohjection appended to each story, and WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 99 the solution of the objection regularlj tacked to that. The objection was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of ancient or modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candour. The solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were both before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But — like as was rather feared than realised from that slain monster in Spenser — from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. The habit of expecting objections to every passage, set me upon starting more objections, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and perplexed, a sceptic in long-coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many historic or chronologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but — the next thing to that — I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved tliem. Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength. O, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling !— I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with such unfit sustenance as tliese husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of ill- fortune, which about this time befel me. Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric — H 2 100 WITCHES. AND OTHEB NIGHT FEARS. driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds — the elephant, and the camel — that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. Stackhouse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With the book, the objections and solutions gradually cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me. — But there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more seriously. — That detestable picture ! I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time, solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life — so far as memory serves in things so long ago — without an assurance, which realised its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel — (0 that old man covered with a mantle !) — I owe — ^not my midnight terrors, the heU of my infancy — but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow — a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. — Parents WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 101 do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm — the hoping for a familiar voice — when they wake screaming — and find none to soothe them — what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till midnight, through candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, — would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. — That 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 other — Headless bear, black man, or ape — but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. — It ia not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition — who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story — finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ah extra^ in his own "thick-coming fancies ;" and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism w^ll start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tran- quillity. Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimseras dire — stories of Celaeno and the Harpies — may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition — but they were there before. They are transcripts, types — the archetypes 102 WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. are m us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all ? — or Names, whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not ? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury ? — 0, least of all ! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body — or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante — tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons — are they one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him — Like one that on a lonesom« 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 difiiculties, the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence. My night-fancies have long ceased to be afllictive. I confess an occasional night-mare ; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at * Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. lOtJ me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot ekide their presence, and I fight and grapple \N^th them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings — cities abroad, which I have never seen and hardly have hoped to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, E-ome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon — their churches, palaces, squares, market- places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight — a map-like distinctness of trace — and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. — I have formerly travelled among the "Westmoreland fells — my highest Alps, — but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition ; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns, Where Alph, the sacred river, runs, to solace his night solitudes — when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and pro- claiming sons born to Neptune — when my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish- wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light — it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra j and the poor plastic power. 104 WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and moimted high, with the customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,^ and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarisation of dreams) was no other than the gentle Thames, which landed me in the wafbure 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 resident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humourist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be, — " Young man, what sort of dreams have you ? " I have so much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland landing. 105 VALENTINE'S DAY. Hail to thy retumiDg festival, old Bishop Yalentine! Great is thy Dame in the rubric, thou venerable Arch- flamen of Hymen ! Immortal Go-between ; who and what manner of person art thou ? Art thou but a name, typifying the restless principle which impels poor humans to seek perfection in union ? or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, with thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, and decent lawn sleeves ? Mysterious personage ! like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other mitred father in the calendar ; not Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril ; nor the consigner of undipt infants to eternal torments, Austin, whom all mothers hate ; nor he who hated all mothers, Origen ; nor Bishop Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with thousands and ten thou- sands of little Loves, and the air is Brnsh'd with the hiss of rustling •wings. Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors ; and instead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee. In other w^ords, this is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all forspent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what an eitent 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 106 VALENTINES DAY. iiiterpretatione, no emblem is so common as the Jiea/rt^ — that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears, — the bestuck and bleeding heart ; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affecta- tions than an opera-hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for placing the head-quarters and metropolis of Grod Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system Avhich might have prevailed for anything which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, " Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal ; " or putting a delicate question, " Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow ? " But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbours wait at animal and anatomical distance. Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a hnoch at the door. It " gives a very echo to the throne where Hope is seated." But its issues seldom answer to this oracle within. It is so seldom that just the person we want to see comes. But of all the clamorous visitations the welcomest in expectation is the sound lihat ushers in, or seems to usher in, a Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that announced the fatal 9ntrance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on bhis day is light, airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth good tidings. It is less mechanical than on otlier days ; you will say, " That is not the post 1 am sure." Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymens! — delightful eternal common-places, which " having been will always be j" which no school-boy nor schoolman valentine's day. 107 cau 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 tlie sight of some well-designed allegory, some type, some youthful fancy, not without verses — Lovers all, A madrigal, or some such device, not over abundant in sense — young Love disclaims it, — and not quite silly — some- thing 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 T shall not easily forget thine, my kind friend (if 1 may have leave to call you so) E. B. — E. B. lived opposite a young maiden whom he had often seen, unseen, from his parlour window in C — e-street. She was all joyousness and innocence, and just of an age to enjoy receiving a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the disappointment of missing one with good-humour E. B. is an artist of no common powers ; in the fancy parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none ; his name is known at the bottom of many a well-executed vignette in the way of his profession, but no further ; for E. B. is modest, and the world meets nobody half- way. E. B. meditated how he could repay this young maiden for many a favour which she had done him un- known ; for when a kindly face greets us, tliough 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 i08 valentine's day work. We need not say it was on the finest gilt paper with borders — full, not of common hearts and heartless allegory, but all the prettiest stories of love from Ovid, and older poets than Ovid (for E. B. is a scholar). There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not forgot, nor Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottos and fanciful devices, such as beseemed, — a work in short of magic. Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the all-swallowing indiscriminate orifice — (0 ignoble trust !) — of the common post ; but the humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful stand, the next morning he saw the cheerfui 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 expecta- tions, for she had no lover ; or, if she had, none she knew that could have created those bright images which delighted her. It was more like some fairy present ; a Grod-send, as our familiarly pious ancestors termed a benefit received where the benefactor was unknown. It would do her no harm. It would do her good for ever after. It is good to love the unknown. I only give this as a specimen of E. B. and his modest way of doing a concealed kindness. Good morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia ; and no better wish, but with better auspices, we wish to all faithful lovers, who are not too vnise to despise old legends, but are content to rank themselves humble diocesans of old Bishop Valentiae and hifl true church. 109 MY RELATIONa I AM arrived at that point of life at which a man may account it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have not that felicity — and sometimes think feelingly of a passage in Browne's Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. "In such a compass of time," he says, "a man may have a close apprehension what it is to be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember his father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see with what a face in no long time Oblivion will look upon himself." I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single blessedness had soured to the world. She often used to say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved ; and, when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with mother's tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason cannot alto- gether approve. She was from morning till night poring over good books, and devotional exercises. Her favourite volumes were, Thomas a Kempis, in Stanhope's translation ; and a Eoman Catholic Prayer Book, with the matins and complines regularly set down, — terms which I was at that time too young to understand. She persisted in reading them, although admonished daily concerning their Papistical tendency ; and went to church every Sabbath as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied ; though, I think at one period of her life, she told me, she had read with great satisfaction the Adventures of 110 MT KELATIONS an TJiifortunate Young Nobleman. Finding the door of the chapel in Essex-street open one day — it was in the infancy of that heresy — she went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of worship, and frequented it at intervals for some time after. She came not for doctrinal points, and never missed them. "With some little asperities in her constitution, which I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine old Christian. She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd mind — extraordinary at a repartee ; one of the few occasions of her breaking silence — else she did not much value wit. The only secular employment I remember to have seen her engaged in, was, the splitting of French beans, and dropping them into a china basin of fair water. The odour of those tender vegetables to this day comes back upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it is the most delicate of culinary operations. Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none — to remember. By the uncle's side I may be said to have been born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I never had any — to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies. What a comfort, or what a care, may I not have missed in her ! — But I have cousins sprinkled abou* in Hertfordshire — besides two, with whom I have been all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, and whom I may term cousins jpar excellence. These are James and Bridget Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and ten, years ; and neither of them seems disposed, in matters of advice and guidance, to waive any of the prerogatives which primogeniture confers. May they continue still in the same mind ; and when they shall be seventy-five, and seventy-three, years old (I cannot spare them sooner), persist in treating MT RELATTONR 111 me in my grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother ! James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, which not every critic can penetrate ; or, if we feel, we cannot explain them. The pen of Torick, and of none since his, could have drawn J. E. entire — those fine Shandean lights and shades, which make up his story. I must limp after in my poor antithetical manner, as the fates have given me grace and talent. J. E. then — to the eye of a common observer at least — seemeth made up of contradictory principles. The genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosopher of prudence — the phlegm of my cousin's doctrine is invariably at war with his temperament, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new project in his brain, J. E. is the systematic opponent of innovation, and crier down of 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 every- thing, commends you to the guidance of common sense on all occasions. — With a touch of the eccentric in all which he does, or says, he is only anxious that you should not commit yourself by doing anything absurd or singular. On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to say so — for the world would think me mad. He disguises a passionate fondness for works of high art (whereof he hath amassed a choice collection), under the pretext of buying only to sell again — that his enthusiasm may give no encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were so, why does that piece of tender, pastoral Domenichino hang still by his wall ? — is the ball of his sight much 112 MY RELATIONS. 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, Jiis theories are sure to be in diametrical opposition to his constitution. He is courageous as Charles of Sweden, upon instinct ; chary of his person upon principle, as a travelling Quaker. — He has been preaching up to me, all my life, the doctrine of bowing to the great — the necessity of forms, and manner, to a man's getting on in the world. He himself never aims at either, that I can discover, — and has a spirit, that would stand upright in the presence of the Cham of Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him discourse of patience — extolling it as the truest wisdom — and to see him during the last seven minutes that his dinner is getting ready. Nature never ran up in her haste a more restless piece of workmanship than when she moulded this impetuous cousin — and Art never turned out a more elaborate orator than he can display himself to be, upon this 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 Murray's street — where you get in when it is empty, and are expected to wait till the vehicle hath completed her just freight — a trying three quarters of an hour to some people. He wonders at your fidgetiness, — "where could we be better than we are, thus 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 yowr want cf MY RELATIONS. 113 ify 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 " tht gentleman in the coach is determined to get out, if he does not drive on that instant." Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophistry, he is incapahle of attending you in any chain of arguing. Indeed he makes wild work with logic ; and seems to jump at most admirable con- clusions by some process, not at all akin to it. Con- sonantly 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 nega- tion 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 hivi — when peradventure the next moment his lungs shall crow like Chanticleer. He says some of the best things in the world — and declareth that wit is his aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play in their grounds — What a pity to tldnJc, that these fine ingenuous lads in a few years ivill 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 half-way. I am for no compromise with that inevitable spoiler. While he lives, J. E. will take his swing. — It does me good, as I walk towards the street of my daily avocation, on some fine May morning, to meet him marching in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly handsome presence, and shining sanguine face, that indicates some purchase in his eye — a Claude — or a Hobbima — for much of his enviable leisure is I 114 MY DELATIONS consumed at Christie's and Phillips's — or where not, to pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these occa- sions 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 7nust do — assureth me that he often feels it hang heavy on his hands — wishes he had fewer hoji- days — and goes off — "Westward Ho! — chanting a tune, to Pall Mall — perfectly convinced that he has con- vinced me — while I proceed in my opposite directioi'. tuneless. It is pleasant again to see this Professor of Indif- ference 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 o:f 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. Woe be to the luckless wight, who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who should drop an unseasonable intima- tion of preferring one of his anterior bargains to the present! — The last is always his best hit — his " Cynthia of the minute." — Alas! how many a mild Madonna have I known to come in — a Raphael! — keep its ascendancy for a few brief moons — then, after certain intermedial degradations, from the front drawing- room to the back gallery, thence to the dark parlour, — -adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive lowering ascriptions of filiation, mildly breaking its fall — consigned to the oblivious lumber- room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain Carlo Maratti ! — ^which things when I beheld — musing upon the chances and mutabilities of fate below, hath made MY BELATI0N8. 115 me to reflect upon tlie altered condition of great personages, or that woeful Queen of Bichard the Second — set forth in pomp, She came adorned hither like sweet May. Sent back like Hallowmass or shortest day. "With great love for you^ J. E. hath but a limited sympathy with what you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind. He never pierces the marrow of your habits. He will tell an old established play- goer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one of the theatres), is a very lively comedian — as a piece of news ! He advertised me but the other day of some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for me, knowing me to he a great walker^ in my own immediate vicinity — who have haunted the identical spot any time these twenty years ! — He has not much respect for that class of feelings which goes by the name of sentimental. He applies the definition of real evil to bodily sufferings exclusively — and rejecteth all others as imaginary. He is affected by the sight, or the bare supposition, of a creature in pain, to a degree which I have never witnessed out of womankind. A consti- tutional acuteness to this class of sufferings may in part account for this. The animal tribe in particular he taketh under his especial protection. A broken- winded or spur-galled horse is sure to find an advocate in him. An over-loaded ass is his client for ever. He is the apostle to the brute kind — the never-failing friend of those who have none to care for them. The contemplation of a lobster boiled, or eels skinned alive^ will wring him so, that " all for pity he could die." It will take the savour from his palate, and the rest from his pillow, for days and nights. With the i2 116 MY BELATIONS. intense feeling of Thomas Clarkson, lie wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that "true yoke-fellow with Time," to have effected as much for the Animal, as he hath done for the Negro Caseation. But my uncontrollable cousin is but im- perfectly formed for purposes which demand co-opera- tion. 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 com- binations for the alleviation of human sufferings. His zeal constantly makes him to outrun, and put out, his coadjutors. He thinks of relieving, — while they think of debating. He was black-balled out of a society for the Eelief of *••**•••*••*•**, because the fervour of his humanity toiled beyond the formal apprehen- sion, and creeping processes, of his associates. I shall always consider this distinction as a patent of nobility in the Elia family ! Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, or upbraid, my unique cousin? Marry, heaven, and all good manners, and the understanding that should be between kinsfolk, forbid! — "With all the strangenesses of this strangest of the JElias — 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 whicli we made a summer or two since, in search of more cousins — Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. 117 MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. "We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness ; with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy. "We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits — yet so, as " with a difference." We are generally in harmony, with occasional bicker- ings — 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 modem tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story — well, ill, or indifferently told — so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction — and almost in real life — have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinions — heads with some diverting twist in them — the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of anything that sounds odd or 116 MY BELATIONS. intense feeling of Thomas Clarkson, lie wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that "true yoke-fellow with Time," to have effected as much for the Animal, as he hath done for the Negro Ch'eation. But my uncontrollable cousin is but im- perfectly formed for purposes which demand co-opera- tion. He cannot wait. His amelioration-plans must be ripened in a day. Eor this reason he has cut but an equivocal figure in benevolent societies, and com- binations for the alleviation of human sufferings. His zeal constantly makes him to outrun, and put out, his coadjutors. He thinks of relieving, — while they think of debating. He was black-balled out of a society for the Eelief of *•••••••••**•**, because the fervour of his humanity toiled beyond the formal apprehen- sion, and creeping processes, of his associates. I shall always consider this distinction as a patent of nobility in the Elia family ! Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, or upbraid, my unique cousin? Marry, heaven, and all good manners, and the understanding that should be between kinsfolk, forbid! — With all the strangenesses of this strangest of the Mias — 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 whicli we made a summer or two since, in search of more cousins — Through tlie green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. 117 MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. Bridget Ella, has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness ; with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's ofispring, 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 bicker- ings — 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 modem tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story — well, ill, or indifferently told — so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune iu 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 118 MACKEEY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. bizarre. I^otliing goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She " holds Nature more clever." I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Eeligio Medici ; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last century but one— the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, — but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brained, generous Margaret Newcastle. It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her asso- ciates and mine, free-thinkers — leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and systems; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her understanding. We are both of us inclined to be a little too posi- tive ; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this — that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points ; upon something proper to be done, or let alone ; whatever heat of opposition, or steadiness of conviction, I set out withj. 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 kinswomar^ 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, M.A.CKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 119 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 wiR 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 garni- tui'e, which passeth by the name of accomplishments. She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not whether their chance in wedlock might not be diminished by it ; but I can answer for it, that it makes (if the worst come to the worst) most incom- parable 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, slie 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 ex- cellent to be at a play -wdth, or upon a visit ; but best, when she goes a journey with you. We made an excursion together a few summers since, into Hertfordshire, to beat up the quarters of some of our less-known relations in that fine corn country. The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End ; or Mackarel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, 120 MACKEEY E>;D, IN HEKTFORDSHIRE. in some old maps of Hertfordshire ; a farm-house, — delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheat- hampstead. I can just remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of Bridget ; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint existences ; that we might share them in equal diA^sion. But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my grandmother's sister. His name was Griadman. My grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the county, but the Fields are almost extinct. More than forty years had elapsed since the visit I speak of; and, for the greater portion of that period, we had lost sight of the other two branches also. "Who or what sort of persons inherited Mackery End — kindi-ed or strange folk — we were afraid almost to conjecture, but determined some day to explore. By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in our way from Saint Albans, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about noon. The sight of the old farm-house, though every trace of it was effaced from my recollection, affected me with a pleasure which I had not experienced for many a year. For though /had forgotten it, v;e had never forgotten being there together, and we had been talking about Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I knew^ the aspect of a place, which, when present, how unlike it was to that, which 1 bad conjured up so many times instead of it ! Still the air breathed balmily about it ; the season MACKERY END, IN HERTFOKDSHIEE. 121 was in the " heart of June," and I could say with the poet, But thou, that didst appear so fair To fond imagination, Dost rival in the light of day Her delicate creation ! Bridget's was more a waking bliss than mine, for she easily remembered her old acquaintance again — some altered features, of course, a little grudged at. At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy ; but the scene soon re-confirmed itself in her affections — and she traversed every out-post of the old mansion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house had stood (house and birds were alike flown) — ^with a breathless impatience of recognition, which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her years. The only thing left was to get into the house — and that was a difficulty which to me singly would have been insurmountable ; for I am terribly shy in making myself known to strangers and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, stronger than scruple, winged my cousin in without me ; but she soon returned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was the youngest of the Grladmans ; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had become mistress of the old mansion. A comely brood are the Brutons. Six of them, females, were noted as the handsomest young women in the county. But this adopted Bruton, in my mind, was better than they all — more comely. She was born too late to have remembered me. She just recollected in early life to have had her cousin Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing a stile. But the name of kindred, and of cousinship, 124 MY FIRST PLAY. manner from my godfatlier. He was also known to, and visited by, Sheridan. It was to his house in Holborn that young Brinsley brought his first wife on her elopement with him from a boarding-school at Bath — the beautiful Maria Linley. My parents were present (over a quadrille table) when he arrived in the evening with his harmonious charge. From eithei of these connexions it may be inferred that my god- father could command an order for the then Drury- lane theatre at pleasure — and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, in Brinsley' s easy auto- graph, I have heard him say was the sole remuneration which he had received for many years' nightly illumi- nation 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 fami- liarity — was better to my godfather than money. F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen; grandi- loquent, yet courteous. His delivery of the com- monest matters of fact was Ciceronian. He had two Latin words almost constantly in his mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an oilman's lips!), which my better knowledge since has enabled me to correct. In strict pronunciation they should have been sounded vice versa — but in those young years they impressed me with more awe than they would now do, read aright from Seneca or Yarro — in his own peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically elaborated, or Angli- cised, into something like verse verse. By an im- posing manner, and the help of these distorted syllables, he climbed (but that was little) to the highest parochial honours which St. Andrew's has to bestow. He is dead— and thus much I thought due to his memory, both for my first orders (little wondrous My FIRST PLAY. 125 talismans ! — sliglit keys, and insignificant to oat- ward sight, but opening to me more than Arabian paradises!) and moreover that by his testamentary beneficence I came into possession of the only landed property which I could ever call my own — situate near the road-way village of pleasant Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire. "When I journeyed down to take possession, and planted foot on my own ground, the stately habits of the donor descended upon me, and I strode (shall I confess the vanity ?) with larger paces over my allotment of three quarters of an acre, with its commodious mansion in the midst, with the feelLiig of an English freeholder that all betwixt sky and centre was my own. The estate has passed into more prudent hands, and nothing but an agrarian can restore it. In those days were pit orders, Beshrew the un- comfortable manager who abolished them ! — with one of these we went. I remember the waiting at the door — not that which is left — ^but between that and an inner door in shelter — O Mhen shall I be such an expectant again ! — with the cry of nonpareils, an indispensable play-house accompaniment in those days. As near as I can recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of the theatrical fruiteresses then was, " Chase some oranges, chase some numparels, chase a bill of the play ; " — chase ^ro chuse. But when we got LQ, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be dis- closed — the breathless anticipations I endured ! I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in Rowe's Shakspeare — the tent scene with Diomede — and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a measure the feeling of that evening. — The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed VZQ MY FIRST PLAY. women of quality, projected over the pit: and the pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling — a homely fancy — but I judged it to be sugar-candy — yet, to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy ! — The orchestra lights at length arose, those " fair Auroras ! " Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again — and, incapable of the anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon the maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew up — I was not past six years old and the play was Artaxerxes ! I had dabbled a little in the Universal History — the ancient part of it — and here was the court of Persia. — It was being admitted to a sight of the past. I took no proper interest in the action going on, for I understood not its import — ^but I heard the word Darius, and I was in the midst of Daniel. All feeling was absorbed in vision. Gorgeous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, passed before me. I knew not players. I was in Persepolis for the time, and the burning idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. I was awe-struck, and believed those significations to be something more than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams. — Harlequin's invasion followed ; where, I remember, the transformation of the magistrates into reverend beldams seemed to me a piece of grave historic justice, and the tailor carrying his own head to be as sober a verity as the legend of St. Denys. The next play to which I was taken was the Lady of the Manor, of which, with the exception of some scenery, very faint traces are left in my memory. It MY FIRST PLAY 1S7 was followed by a pantomime, called Lun's Ghost — a satiric touch, I apprehend, upon Eich, not long since dead — but to my apprehension (too sincere for satire), Lun was as remote a piece of antiquity as Lud — the father of a line of Harlequins — transmitting his dagger of lath (the wooden sceptre) through countless ages. I saw the primeval Motley come from his silent tomb in a ghastly vest of white patch-work, like the apparition of a dead rainbow. So Harlequins (thought I) look when they are dead. My third play followed in quick succession. It was the Way of the World. I think I must have sat at it as grave as a judge ; for, I remember, the hysteric affectations of good Lady Wishfort affected me like some solemn tragic passion. Eobinson Crusoe fol- lowed ; in which Crusoe, man Friday, and the parrot, were as good and authentic as in the story. — The clownery and pantaloonery of these pantomimes have clean passed out of my head. I believe, I no more laughed at them, than at the same age I should have been disposed to laugh at the grotesque Gothic heads (seeming to me then replete with devout meaning) that gape, and grin, in stone around the inside of the old Eound Church (my church) of the Templars. I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was from six to seven years old. After the intervention of six or seven other years (for at school all play-going was inhibited) I again entered the doors of a theatre. That old Artaxerxes evening had never done ringing in my fancy. I expected the same feelings to come again with the same occasion. But we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six. In that interval what had I not lost ! \.t the first period I knew nothing, understood nothing, 128 MY FIRST PLAT. discriminated nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered aU— 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 hghts — 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 unreasonable expectations, which might have interfered with the genuine emotions with which I was soon after enabled to enter upon the first appearance to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella. Comparison and retrospection soon yielded to the present attraction of the scene ; and the theatre became to me, upon a new stock, the most delighlfui recreations. 1^9 MODERN GALLANTRY. In comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased to compliment ourselves upon the point of gal- lantry; a certain obsequiousness, or deferential respect, which we are supposed to pay to females, as females. I shall believe that this principle actuates our con- duct, 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 coar:>est male offenders. 1 shall believe it to be influential, when I can shut my eyes to the fact, that in England women are still occasionally — hanged. I shall believe in it, when actresses are no longer subject to be hissed off a stage by gentlemen. 1 shall believe in it, when Dorimant hands a fish- wife across the kennel ; or assists the apple- woman to pick up her wandering fruit, which some unlucky dray has just dissipated. I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humbler life, who would be thought in their way notable adepts in this refinement, shall act upon it in places where they are not known, or think themselves not observed — when I shall see the traveller for some rich trades- man part with his admired box-coat, to spread it over the defenceless shoulders of the poor woman, who is passing to her parish on the roof of the same stage- coach with him, drenched in the rain — when I shall no longer see a woman standing up in the pit of a London theatre, till she is sick and faint with the 180 MODERN OVLLANTRY exertion, with men about her, seated at their ease, and jeering at her distress ; till one, that seems to have more manners or conscience than the rest, significantly declares " she should be welcome to his seat, if she were a little younger and handsomer." Place this dapper warehouseman, or that rider, in a circle of their o^ti female acquaintance, and you shall confess you have not seen a politer-bred man in Lothbury. Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such principle influencing our conduct, when more than one-half of the drudgery and coarse servitude of the world shall cease to be performed by women. Until that day comes, I shall never believe this boasted point to be anything more than a conventional fiction; a pageant got up between the sexes, in a certain rank, and at a certain time of life, in which both find their account equally. I shall be eveii disposed to rank it among the salu- tary fictions of life, when in polite circles I shall see the same attentions paid to age as to youth, to homely features as to handsome, to coarse complexions as to clear — to the woman, as she is a woman, not as she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title. I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when a well-dressed gentleman in a well-dressed com- pany can advert to the topic oi female old age without exciting, and intending to excite, a sneer : — when the phrases " antiquated virginity," and such a one has " overstood her market,'* pronounced in good company, shall raise immediate oflfence in man, or woman, that shall hear them spoken. Joseph Paice, of Bread-street-hiU, merchant, and one of the Directors of the South-Sea company — the same to wliom Edwards, the Shakspeare commentator, has addressed a fine sonnet — was the only pattern of MODERN GALLANTRY. J3l 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 nob much) in my composition. It was not his fault that I did not profit more. Though bred a Presbyterian, and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time. He had not one system of attention to females in the drawing-room, and another in the shop, or at the stall. I do not mean that he made no distinction. But he never lost sight of sex, or overlooked it in the casualties of a disadvantageous situation. I have seen him stand bareheaded — smile if you please — to a poor servant girl, while she has been inquiring of him the way to some street — in such a posture of unforced civility, as neither to embarrass her in the acceptance, nor himself in the ofier, of it. He was no dangler, in the common acceptation of the word, after women : but he reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came before him, ivomanhood. I have seen him — nay, smile not — tenderly escorting a market-woman, whom he had encountered in a shower, exalting his umbrella over her poor basket of fruit, that it might receive no damage, with as much care- fulness as if she had been a countess. To the reverend ibrm of Female Eld he would yield the wall (though it were to an ancient beggar-woman) with more ceremony than we can afford to show our grandams. He was the Preux Chevalier of Age ; the Sir Calidore, or Sir Tristan, to those who have no Calidores or Tristans to defend them. The roses, that had long faded thence, still bloomed for him in those withered and yellow cheeks. He was never married, but in his yo.uth he paid his addresses to the beautiful Susan "Winstanley — old K 2 133 MODERN GALLANTRY. Winstanley's daughter of Clapton — wlio dying in the early days of their courtship, confirmed in him the resolution of perpetual bachelorship. It was during their short courtship, he told me, that he had been one day treating his mistress with a profusion of civil speeches — the common gallantries — to which kind of thing she had hitherto manifested no repugnance — but in this instance with no effect. He could not obtain from her a decent acknowledgment in return. She rather seemed to resent his compliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown herself above that littleness. When he ventured on the following day, finding her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her coldness of yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that she had no sort of dislike to his attentions: that she could even endure some high- flown compliments ; that a young woman placed in her situation had a right to expect all sort of civil things said to her ; that she hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, short of insincerity, with as little injury to her humility as most young women : but that — a little before he had commenced his compli- ments — she had overheard him by accident, in rather rough language, rating a young woman, who had not brought home his cravats quite to the appointed time, and she thought to herself, " As I am Miss Susan Winstanley, and a young lady — a reputed beauty, and known to be a fortune,— I can have my choice of the finest speeches from the mouth of this very fine gentleman who is courting me — but if I had been poor Mary Such-a-one {naming the milliner), — and had failed of bringing home the cravats to the appointed hour — though perhaps I had sat up half the night to forward them — what sort of compliments should I MODERN GALLANTRY. 133 have received then ? — And my woman's pride came to my assistance ; and I thought, that if it were only to do me honour, a female, like myself, might have received handsomer usage : and I was determined not to accept any fine speeches, to the compromise of that sex, the belonging to which was after all my strongest claim and title to them." I think the lady discovered both generosity, and a just way of thinking, in this rebuke which she gave her lover ; and I have sometimes imagined, that the uncommon strain of courtesy, which through life regulated the actions and behaviour of my friend towards all of womankind indiscriminately, owed its happy origin to this seasonable lesson from the lips of his lamented mistress. I wish the whole female world would entertain the same notion of these things that Miss Winstauley showed. Then we should see something of the spirit of consistent gallantry ; and no longer witness the anomaly of the same man — a pattern of true polite- ness to a wife — of cold contempt, or rudeness, to a sister — the idolater of his female mistress — the disparager and despiser of his no less female aunt, or unfortunate — still female — maiden cousin. Just so much respect as a woman derogates from her own sex, in whatever condition placed — her handmaid, or 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, 184 THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPiiii. incident to individual preference, be so many pretty additaments and ornaments — as many, and as fanciful, us you please — to that main structure. Let lier first lesson be with sweet Susan Winstanley — to reverence her sex. THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. I WAS born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said— for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places ? — these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot. There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide, Till they decayed through pride. Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time — the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet-street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green recesses ! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden ; that goodly pile Of building strong, albeit of Paper bight, THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 135 confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown-office Eow (place of my kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade- poUuted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham ^Naiades ! a man would give something to have been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times ! to the astoundment of the young lu-chins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revela tions of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light ! How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep ! Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure, and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. AVhy is it almost everywhere vanished ? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have 136 THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not protracted after sun-set, of temperance, and good hours. It was the primitive clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd " carved it out quaintly in the sun ;" and, turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, for they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty delicacy. Tfiey 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 mouth do crush their wine. The nectarine, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach. Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less Withdraws into its happiness. The mind, that ocean, where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas .Annihilating all that's made To a green thought m a green shade. Here at the fountain's sliding foot, Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, Casting the body's vest aside, TOE OLD BENCEIEUS OF THE INNER TEMPLE 187 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 for longer flight, Wave? in its plumes the various light. How well the skilful gardener drew, Of flowers and herbs, this dial new Where, from above, the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodiac run : And, as it works, the industrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckon'd, but with herbs and flowers?* The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like manner, fast vanishing. Most of them are dried up, or bricked over. Tet, where one is left, as in that little green nook behind the South-Sea House, what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile ! Four little winged marble boys used to play their virgin fancies, spoiiting out ever fresh streams from their innocent-wanton lips in the square of Lincoln's-inn, when I was no bigger than they were figured. Tliey are gone, and the spring choked up. The fashion, they tell me is gone by, and these things are esteemed childish. Why not then gratify children, by letting them stand ? Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. They are awakening images to them at least. Why must everything smack of man and mannish ? Is the world all grown up ? Is childhood dead ? Or is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments ? The figures were grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged living figures, that still flitter and chatter about that area, less Gothic in appearance? ♦ From a copy of verses entiiled Tlie Garden. 138 THE OLD BENCHEES OF THE INNER TEMi'l-i;;. or is the splutter of their hot rhetoric one half so refreshing and innocent as the little cool playful streams those exploded cherubs uttered ? They have lately gothicised the entrance to the Inner Temple-hall, and the library front : to assimilate them, I suppose, to the body of the hall, which they do not at all resemble. What is become of the winged liorse that stood over the former ? a stately arms ! and who has removed those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianised the end of the Paper-buildings ? — my first hint of allegory ! They must account to me for these things, which I miss so greatly. The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade ; but the traces are passed away of the footsteps which made its pavement awful! It is become common and profane. The old benchers had it almost sacred to themselves, in the forepart of the day at least. They might not be sided or jostled. Their air and dress asserted the parade. You left wide spaces betwixt you, when you passed them. We walk on even terms with their successors. The roguish eye of J 11, ever ready to be dehvered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar durst have mated Thomas Coventry ? — whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and path-keeping, indivertible from his way as a moving column, the scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow-beater of equals and superiors, who made a solitude of children wherever he came, for they fled his insuff*erable presence, as they would have shunned an Elisha bear. His growl was as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them in mirth or in rebuke, his invitatory notes being, indeed, of aU, the most repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuft', THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 139 aggravating the natural terrors of his speech, broke from each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He took it, not by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it under the mightj flaps of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket ; his waistcoat red and angry, his coat dark rappee, tinctured by dye original, and by adjuncts, with buttons of obsolete gold. And so he paced the terrace. By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen ; the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and had nothing but that and their benchership in common. In politics Salt was a whig, and Coventry a staunch tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out — for Coventry had a rough spinous humour — at the political confederates of his associate, which rebounded from the gentle bosom of the latter like cannon-balls from wool. You could not ruffle Samuel Salt. S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, and of excellent discernment in the chamber practice of the law. I suspect his knowledge did not amount to much. When a case of difficult disposition of money, testamentary or otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily handed it over with a few instructions to his man Level, who was a quick little fellow, and would despatch it out of hand by the liglit of natural understanding, of which he had an uncommon share. It was incredible what repute for talents S. enjoyed by the mere trick of gravity. He was a shy man; a child might pose him in a minute — indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet men would give him credit for vast application, in spite of himself. He was not to be trusted with himself with impunity. He never dressed for a dinner party but he forgot his sword — they wore swords then — or some other neces- 140 THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. saiy part of liis equipage. Lovel bad his eye upon him on all these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his cue. If there was anything which he could spealc unseasonably, he was sure to do it. — He was to dine at a relative's of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on the day of her execution ; — and L. who had a wary fore- sight of his probable hallucinations, before he set out, schooled him with great anxiety not in any possible manner to allude to her story that day. S. promised faithfully to observe the injunction. He had not been seated in the parlour, where the company was expecting the dinner summons, four minutes, when, a pause in the conversation ensuing, he got up, looked out of window, and pulling down his ruffles — an ordinary motion with him — observed, " it was a gloomy day," and added, "Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose." Instances of this sort were per- petual. Yet S. was thought by some of the greatest men of his time a fit person to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the law, but in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments of conduct — from force of manner entirely. He never laughed. He had the same good fortune among the female world, — was a known toast with the ladies, and one or two are said to have died for love of him — I suppose, because he never trifled or talked gallantry with them, or paid them, indeed, hardly common attentions. He had a fine face and person, but wanted, methought, the spirit that should have shown them oft' with advantage to the women. His eye lacked lustre. — Not so, thought tSusan P ; who, at the advanced age of sixty, was seen, in the cold evening time, unaccompanied, wetting the pavement of B d How, with tears that fell in drops which might be heard, because her friend had died that day — he, whom she had pursued with a THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 141 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 un- relenting 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 parsi- monious habits which in after-life never forsook him ; so that, with one windfall or another, about the time I knew him he was master of four or five hundred thousand pounds ; nor did he look, or walk, worth a moidore less. He lived in a gloomy house opposite the pump in Serjeant' s-inn, Fleet-street. J., the counsel, is doing self-imposed penance in it, for what reason I divine not, at this day. C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where he seldom spent above a day or two at a time in the summer ; but preferred, during the hot months, standing at his window in this damp, close, well-like mansion, to watch, as he said, " the maids drawing water all day long." I suspect he had his within-door reasons for the preference. Hie currus et arma fuere. He might think his treasures more safe. His house had the aspect of a strong-box. C. was a close hunks — a hoarder rather than a miser — or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes breed, who have brought discredit upon a character, which cannot exist without certain admirable points of steadiness and unity of purpose. One may hate a true miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By taking care of the pence, he is often enabled to part with the pounds, upon a scale that leaves us careless generous fellows halting at an immeasurable distance behind. C. gave away 30,000/. 142 THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. at once in his lil'etime to a blind charity. His house- keeping was severely looked after, but he kept the table of a gentleman. He would know who came in and who went out of his house, but his kitchen chimney was never suffered to freeze. Salt was his opposite in this, as in all — never knew what he was worth in the world ; and having but a competency for his rank, which his indolent habits were little calculated to improve, might have suffered severely if he had not had honest people about him. Lovel took care of 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 anything without expecting and fearing his ad- monishing. He put himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world. He resigned his title almost to respect as a master, if L. could ever have forgotten for a moment that he was a servant. I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal, and " would strike." In the cause of the oppressed he never con- sidered 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 hiiu severely with the hilt of t. 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 concerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as gay aa G-arrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble (I THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 143 have a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed a line 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 con- ceits ; and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr. Izaak Walton would have chosen to go a fishing with. I saw him in his old age and the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of human weakness — " a remnant most forlorn of what he was," — yet even then his eye would light up upon the mention of his favourite Garrick. He was greatest, he would say, in Bayes — " was upon the stage nearly throughout the whole performance, and as busy as a bee." At intervals, too, he would speak of his former life, and how he came up a little boy from Lincoln to go to service, and how his mother cried at parting with him, and how he returned, after some few years' absence, in his smart new livery, to see her, and she blessed herself at the change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it was " her own bairn." And then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, till I have wished that sad second- childhood might have a mother still to lay its head upon her lap. But the common mother of us all in no long time after received him gently into hers. With Coventry, and with Salt, in their walks upon the teiTace, most commonly Peter Pierson would join to make up a third. They did not walk linked arm in arm in those days — "as now oui* stout iriumvii's sweep 144 THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. the streets," — but generally with both hands folded behind them for state, or with one at least behind, the other carrying a cane. P. was a benevolent, but not a prepossessing man. He had that in his face which you could net term unhappiness ; it rather implied an incapacity of being happy. His cheeks were colour- less 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. Contem- porary with these, but subordinate, was Dainea Barrington — another oddity — he walked burly and square — in imitation, I think, of Coventry — howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the strength of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother a bishop. "When the account of his year's treasurership came to be audited, the following singular charge was unanimously disallowed by the bench : " Item, disbursed Mr. Allen, the gardener, twenty shillings, for stuiF to poison the sparrows, by my orders." Next to him was old Barton — a jolly negation, who took upon him the ordering of the bills of fare for the parliament chamber, where the benchers dine — answering to the combination rooms at College — ■ much to the easement of his less epicurean brethren. I know nothing more of him. — Then Head, and Twopeny — Bead, good-humoured and personable — Twopeny, good-humoured, but thin, and felicitous in jests upon his own figure. If T. was thin, Wharry was attenuated and fleeting. Many must remember him (for he was rather of later date) and his singular gait, which was performed by three steps and a jump regularly succeeding. The steps were little eftbrts, like that of a child beginning to walk; rhe jump THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 145 comparatively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. Where ho learned this figure, or what occasioned it, I could never discover. It was neither graceful in itself, nor seemed to answer the purpose any better than common walking. The extreme tenuity of his frame, I suspect, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising. Twopeny would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail him as brother Lusty ; but W. had no relish of a joke. His features were spiteful. I have heard that he would pinch his cat's ears extremely, when 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 liow to write down edge bone of beef in his bill of commons. He was supposed to know, if any man in the world did. He decided the orthography to be — as I have given it — fortifying his authority with such anatomical reasons as dismissed the manciple (for the time) learned and happy. Some do spell it yet, perversely, aitch bone, from a fanciful resemblance between its shape and that of the aspirate so denomi- nated. 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 grappliug-hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I detected the substitute, before I was old enough to reason whether it were artificial or not. I remember the astonishment it raised in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking person ; and I reconciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an emblem of power — somewhat like the horns in the forehead of Michael 146 THE OLD BENCHEKS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. Angelo's Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or a'id till very lately) in the costume of the reign of George the Second, closes my imperfect recollections of the old benchers of the Inner Temple. Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled ? Or, if the like of you exist, why exist they no more for me ? Ye inexplicable, half-understood appearances, why comes in reason to tear away the preternatural mist, bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you ? Why make ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who made up to me — to my childish eyes — the mythology of the Temple ? In those days I saw Gods, as "old men covered with a mantle," walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish, — extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling, in the heart of child- hood, there will, for ever, spring up a well of innocent or wholesome superstition — the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital — from ever}'-day forms educing the unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light, when the growii world flounders about in the darkness of sense ana materiality. While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth. P.S. — I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt. See what it is to trust to imperfect memory, and the erring notices of childhood ! Yet I protest I always thought that he had been a bachelor! This gentleman, E. 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 (O call it by a gentler name !) of mild Sr qc.d THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 147 unravelling into beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring character ! — Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia for true records ! They are, in truth, but shadows of fact— verisimilitudes, not verities — or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history. He is no such honest chronicler as E. N., and would have done better perhaps to have consulted that gentleman, before he sent these incondite reminiscences to press. But the worthy sub- treasurer — who respects his old and his new masters — woidd but have been puzzled at the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not, peradven- ture, of the licence w^hich Magazines have arrived at in this plain-speaking age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the Gentleman's — his furthest monthly excursions in this nature haiing been long confined to the holy ground of honest Urhan's obituary. May it be long before his own name shall help to swell those columns of unenvied flattery ! — Meantime, ye New Benchers of the Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is himself the kindliest of human creatures. Should infirmities overtake him — he is yet in green and vigorous senility — make allow- ances for them, remembering that " ye yourselves are old." So may the Winged Horse, your ancient badge and cognisance, still flourish ! so may future Hookers and Seldens illustrate your church and chambers ! so may the sparrows, in default of more melodious quiristers, unpoisoned hop about your walks ! so may the fresh-coloured and cleanly nursery-maid, who, by leave, airs her playful charge in your stately gardens, drop her prettiest blushing curtsy as ye pass, reductive of juvenescent p*xiotion ! so may the younkers of this generation eyb you, pacing your stately terrace, with the same superstitious veneration, with whicli the L 2 148 GRACE BEFORE MEAT. c"hild EHa gazed on the Old Worthies that solemnised the parade before ye ! GRACE BEFORE MEAT. The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its origin in the early times of the world, and the hunter-state of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing ! when a belly-full was a wind-fall, and looked like a special providence. In the shouts and triumphal songs with which, after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky booty of deer's or goat's flesh would naturally be ushered home, existed, perhaps, the germ of the modern grace. It is not otherwise easy to be understood, why the blessing of food — the act of eating — should have had a particular expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence. I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. "Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts — a grace before Milton — a grace before Shakspeare— a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen ? — but the received ritual having prescribed these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducatiou, I shall confine my observations to the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so called; commending my new GRACE BEFORE MEAT. 149 scheme for extension to a niche in the grand philo- sophical, poetical, and perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now compiling by my friend Homo Humanus, for the use of a certain snug congregation of Utopian Kabelsesian Christians, no matter where assembled. The form, then, of the benediction before eating has its beauty at a poor man's table, or at the simple and unprovocative repast of children. It is here that the grace becomes exceedingly graceful. The indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some extreme theory, have entered. The proper end of food — the animal sustenance — is barely contemplated by them. The poor man's bread is his daily bread, literally his bread for the day. Their courses are perennial. Again the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded by the grace. That which is least stimula- tive to appetite, leaves the mind most free for foreign considerations. A man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of plain mutton with turnips, and have leisure to reflect upon the ordinance and institution of eating ; when he shall confess a pertur- bation of mind, inconsistent with the purposes of the grace, at the presence of venison or turtle. When I have sate (a varus hospes) at rich men's tables, with the savoury soup and messes steaming up the nostrils, and moistening the lips of the guests with desire and a distracted choice, I have felt the introduction of that ceremony to be unseasonable. With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a religious sentiment. It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. The 150 GRACE BEFORE MEAT. heats of epicurism put out tlie gentle flame of devotion. The incense which rises round is pagan, and the belly- god intercepts it for his own. The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and means. The giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning thanks — for what ? — for having too much, while so many starve. It is to praise the Gro^s ariiiss. I have observed this aw^kwardness felt, scarce con- sciously perhaps, by the good man who says the grace. I have seen it in clergymen and others — a sort of shame — a sense of the co-presence of circumstances which unhallow the blessing. After a devotional tone put on for a few seconds, how rapidly the speaker will fall into his common voice ! helping himself or his neighbour, as if to get rid of some uneasy sensation of hypocrisy. Not that the good man was a hypocrite, or was not most conscientious in the discharge of the duty ; but he felt in his inmost mind the incompati- bility of the scene and the viands before him with the exercise of a calm and rational gratitude. I hear somebody exclaim, — "Would you have Christians sit down at table, like hogs to their troughs, without remembering the Giver ? — no — I would have them sit down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like hogs. Or if their appetites must run riot, and they must pamper themselves Mdth delicacies for which east and west are ransacked, I would have them postpone their benediction to a fitter season, when appetite is laid ; when the still small voice can be heard, and the reason of the grace returns — with temperate diet and restricted dishes. Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving. When Jeshurun waxed fat, we read tliat he kicked. Virgil knew the harpy-nature better, when he put GRACE BEFORE MEAT. 15 J into the mouth of Celaeno 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 inferior gratitude : but the proper object of the grace is sustenance, not relishes ; daily bread, not delicacies ; the means of life, and not the means of pampering the carcass. With what frame or com- posure, I wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his benediction at some great Hall-feast, when he knows that his last concluding pious word — and that in all probability, the sacred name which he preaches — is but the signal for so many impatient harpies to commence their foul orgies, with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is temperance) as those Virgilian fowl ! It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the piu'e altar sacrifice. The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the banquet which Satan, in the Paradise Eegained, p'-ovides for a temptation in the wilderness : A table richly spread in regal mode With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort And savour ; beasts of chase, or fowl of game. In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, Gris-amber- steamed; all fish from sea or shore, Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go down without the recommendatory preface of a benediction. They are like to be short graces where the devil plays the host. — I am afraid the poet wants his usual decorum in this place. Was he thinking of the old' Homan luxury, or of a gaudy day at Cambridge ? This was a temptation fitter for a 152 GRACE BEFORE MEAT Ileliogabalus. The whole banquet is too civic aiiu culinary, and the accompaniments altogether a pro- fiination of that deep, abstracted holy scene. The mighty artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to the simple wants and plain hunger of the guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from his dreams might have been tautrht better. To the temperate fantasies of the famished Son of Grod, what sort offcasts presented themselves? — He dreamed indeed. As appetite is wont to dream, Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet. But what meats ? — Him thought, he by the brook of Cherith stood, And saw the ravens with their horny beaks Food to Elijah bringing even and morn ; Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what thoy brought : He saw the prophet also how he fled Into the desert and how there he slept Under a juniper ; then how awaked He found his supper on the coals prepared, And by the angel was bid rise and eat, A nd ate the second time after repose, The strength whereof sufficed him forty days : Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook. Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse. Nothing in Milton is fiuelier fancied than these temperate dreams of the divine Hungerer. To which of these two visionary banquets, think you, would the introduction of what is called the grace have been the most fitting and pertinent ? Theoretically I am no enemy to graces ; but prac- tically I own that (before meat especially) they seem to involve something avrkward and unseasonable. Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs GRACE BEFORE MEAT. 158 to oup 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 witli a becoming gratitude ; but the moment of appetite (the judicious reader will apprehend me) is, perhaps, the least fit season for that erercise. The Quakers, who go about their business of every description with more calmness than we, have more title to the use of these benedictory prefaces. I have always admired their silent grace, and the more because I have observed their applications to the meat and drink following to be less passionate and sensual than curs. They are neither gluttons nor wine- bibbers as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopped hay, mth indifference, calmness, and cleanly circumstances. They neither grease nor slop them- selves. 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 indifierent to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh were not made to be received with dis- passionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, aflecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical character in the tastes for food. C holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is right. With the decay of my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to imspire gentle thoughts. I am impatient and querulous under culinary disappointments, as to come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some savoury 154 GRA.CE BEFORE MEAT mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill melted — tliat commonest of kitchen failures — puts me beside my tenor. — The author of the Eambler used to make inarticulate animal noises over a favourite food. "Was this the music quite proper to be preceded by the grace ? or would the pious man have done better to postpone his devotions to a season when the blessing 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, jollity and feasting. But as these exercises, however laudable, have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man should be sure, before he ventures so to grace them, that while he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing his hand to some great fish — his Dagon — with a special consecration of no ark but the fat tureen before him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the banquets of angels and children ; to the roots and severer repasts of the Chartreuse ; to the slender, but not slenderly acknowledged, refection of the poor and humble man : but at the heaped-up boards of the pampered and the luxurious they become of dissonant mood, less timed and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than the noise of those better befitting organs would be which children hear tales of, at Hog's Norton. We sit too long at our meals, or are too curious in the study of them, or too disordered in our application to them, or engross too great a portion of those good things (which should be common) to our share, to be able with any grace to say grace. To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion, is to add hypocrisy to injustice. A lurking sense of this truth is what makes the performance of this duty so cold and spiritless a service at most tables. In houses GRACE BEFORE MEAT 155 where the grace is as indispensable as the napkin, who has not seen that never-settled question arise, as to who shall say it ? while the good man of the house and the visitor clergyman, or some other guest, belike of next authority, froin years or gravity, shall be bandying about the office between them as a matter of com- pliment, each of them not unwilling to shift the awkward burthen of an equivocal duty from his own shoulders ? I once drank tea in company with two Methodist divines of different persuasions, whom it was my fortune to introduce to each other for the first time that evening. Before the first cup was handed round, one of these reverend gentlemen put it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether he chose to say anything. It seems it is the custom with some sectaries to put up a short prayer before this meal also. His reverend brother did not at first quite apprehend him, but upon an explanation, with little less importance he made answer that it was not a custom known in his church: in which courteous evasion the other acquiescing for good manners' sake, or in compliance with a weak brother, the supple- mentary or tea-grace was waived altogether. "With what spirit might iiot Lucian have painted two priests of his religion playing into each other's hands the compliment of performing or omitting a sacrifice, — the hungry God meantime, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils hovering over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) going away in the end without his supper. A short form upon these occasions is felt to want reverence ; a long one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge of impertinence. 1 do not quite approve of the epigrammatic conciseness with which that equi- 156 dream-children; a reverie vocal wag (but my pleasant school-fellow) C. Y. L., when importuned for a grace, used to inquire, first slyly leering. down the table, " Is there no clergyman here," — significantly adding, " Thank Gr — ." Nor do I think our old form at school quite pertinent, where we were used to preface our bald bread-and- cheese-suppers with a preamble, connecting with that humble blessing a recognitioa of benefits the most awful and overwhelming to the imagination which religion has to offer. Non tunc illis erat locus. I remember we were put to it to reconcile the phrase "good creatures," upon which the blessing rested, with the fare set before us, wilfully understanding tliat expression in a low and animal sense, — till some one recalled a legend, which told how, in the golden days of Christ's, the young Hospitallers were wont to have smoking joints of roast meat upon their nightly boards, till some pious benefactor, commiserating the decencies, rather than the palates, of the children, commuted our flesh for garments, and gave us — horresco ref evens — trousers instead of mutton. DREAM-CHILDREN; A REVERIE. Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when tltey were children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great- ancle, or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in which they and papa lived) which had been the scene — so at least it DREAM CHILDIIEN ; A REVERIE. 157 was generally believed in that part of the country — of the tragic incidents vrhich 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 uucle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the Bobin Eed- breasts ; till a foolish rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, how religious and how good their great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by 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 fashionable mansion which he had purchased some- where in the adjoining county ; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house in a sort while she lived, which afterwards came to decay, and was nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if soiwe one were to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, " that would be foohsh indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the neighbourhood for many miles round, to show their respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and religious woman ; so good 158 DEEAM- children; a eeverie. indeed that slae knew all the Psaltery bj heart, av, and a great part of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-grandmother Field once was ; and how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer — here Alice's little right foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted — the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and bowed her down with pain ; but it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house; and how she believed that an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near where she slept, but she said "those innocents would do her no harm;" and how frightened I used to be, though in those days I had my maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or religious as she — and yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded all his 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 holidays, where I in particular used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve Caesars, that had been Emperors of Eome, 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 M'orn- out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken pannels, with the gilding almost rubbed out — some- times in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to mvself, unless when now and then a dream-children; a reverie. 159 solitary gardening man would cross me — and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever oft'ering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then, — and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries, and the fir-apples, which were good for nothing but to look at — or in lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells around me — or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth — or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish- pond, at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their imper- tinent friskings, — I had more pleasure in these busy- idle diversions than in all the sweet flavours of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such-like common baits of children. Here John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. Then, in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, though their great-grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, 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 comers, 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 160 DEEAM- CHILDREN ; A REVERIE. had too mucli ,spirit to be always pent up within their boundaries — and how their uncle grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to the admiration of everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field most especially ; and how lie used to carry me upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy — for he was a good bit older than me — many a mile when I could not walk for pain ; — and how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was impatient, and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed ; and how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death ; and how T bore his death as I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me ; and though I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had died, yet I missed liim aU 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 mourning which they had on was not for uncle John, and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some stories about their pretty dead mother. Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W — n ; and, as much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and denial, meant in DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. 161 maidens — when suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was ; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech : " We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice 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 arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side — but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever. DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. nr A LETTEB TO B. F., ESQ., AT SYDNEY, MEW 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 efibrt to set about a correspondence at our distance. The weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination. It is difficult to conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption to expect that one's thoughts should live 162 DISTANT OORKESPONDENTS SO far. It is like writing for posterity; and reminds me of one of Mrs. Rowe's superscriptions, " Alcander to Strephon in the shades." Cowley's Post- Angel is no more than would be expedient in such an inter- course. One drops a packet at Lombard-street, and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets it as fresh as if it came in ice. It is only like whispering through a long trumpet. But suppose a tube let down from the moon, with yourself at one end, and the man at the other ; it would be some balk to the spirit of conversation, if you knew that the dialogue exchanged with that interesting theosophist would take two or three revolutions of a higher luminary in its passage. Yet for aught I know, you may be some parasangs nigher that primitive idea — Plato's man — than we in England here have the honour to reckon ourselves. Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics ; news, sentiment, and puns. In the latter, I include all non-serious subjects ; or subjects serious in them- selves, 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, unaccount- ably turn into a lie ? Eor instance, our mutual friend P. is at this present writing — my Now — in good health, and enjoys a fair share of worldly reputation. You are glad to hear it. This is natural and friendly. But at this present reading — your Now — he may possibly be in the Bench, or going tc be hanged, which in reason ought to abate something of your transport (i.e. at hearing he was well, &c.), or at least consider- ably to modify it. I am going to the play this evening, to have a laugh with Munden. You have no theatre. DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. 163 I think you told me, in your land of d d realities. You naturally lick your lips, and envy me my felicity. Think but a moment, and you will correct the hateful emotion. "Why it is Sunday morning with you, and 1823. This confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of tico presents, is in a degree common to all postage. But if I sent you word to Bath or Devizes, that I was expecting the aforesaid treat this evening, though at the moment you received the intelligence my full feast of fun would be over, yet there would be for a day or two after, as you would well know, a smack, a relish left upon my mental palate, which would give rational encouragement for you to foster a portion at least of the disagreeable passion, which it was in part my intention to produce. But ten months hence, your envy or your sympathy would be as useless as a passion spent upon the dead. Not only does truth, in these long intervals, un-essence herself, but (what is harder) one cannot venture a crude fiction, for the fear that it may ripen into a truth upon the voyage. What a wild improbable banter I put upon you some three years since of Will Weatherall having married a servant-maid! I remember gravely consulting you how we were to receive her — for Will's wife was in no case to be rejected ; and your no less serious repli- cation in the matter; how tenderly you advised an abstemious introduction of literary topics before the lady, with a caution not to be too forward in bringing on the carpet matters more within tlie sphere of her intelligence ; your deliberate judgment, or rather wise suspension of sentence, how far jacks, and spits, and mops, could with propriety be introduced as subjects ; whether the conscious avoiding of all such matters in discourse would not have a worse look than the taking of them casually in our way; in what manner we M 2 16-4 DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS should carry ourselves to our maid Beckj, Mrs. William Weatherall being by ; whether we should show more delicacy, and a truer sense of respect for Will's wife, by treating Becky with our customary chiding before her, or by an unusual deferential civility paid to Becky as to a person of great worth, but thrown by the caprice of fate into a humble station. There were difficulties, I remember, on both sides, which you did me the favour to state with the precision of a lawyer, united to the tenderness of a friend. I laughed in mv sleeve at your solemn pleadings, when lo ! while I was valuing myself upon this flam put upon you in New South Wales, the devil in England, jealous possibly of any lie-children not his own, or working after my copy, has actually instigated our friend (not three days since) to the commission of a matrimony, which I had only conjured up for your diversion. William Weatherall has married Mrs. Cotterel's maid. But to take it in its truest sense, you will see, my dear !F., that news from me must become history to you ; which I neither profess to write, nor indeed care much for reading. jSFo person, under a diviner, can with any prospect of veracity conduct a corre- spondence at such an arm's length. Two prophets, indeed, 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 tasteless of all cold meats. I have often smiled at a conceit of the late Lord C. It seems that travelling somewhere about DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. 1 65 Geneva, he came to some pretty green spot, or nook, where a willow, or something hung so fantastically and invitingly over a stream — was it ? — or a rock ? — no matter — but the stillness and the repose, after a weary journey *tis likely, in a languid moment of his Lordship's hot restless life, so took his fancy that he could imagine no place so proper, in the event of his death, to lay his bones in. This was all very natural and excusable as a sentiment, and shows his character in a very pleasing light. But when from a passing sentiment it came to be an act ; and when, by a positive testamentary disposal, his remains were actually carried all that way from England; who was there, some desperate sentimentalists excepted, that did not ask the question. Why could not his Lordship have found a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree as green and pendent, with a stream as emblematic to his purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset, or in Devon ? Conceive the sentiment boarded up, freighted, entered at the Custom House (startling the tide-waiters with the novelty), hoisted into a ship. Conceive it pawed about and handled between the rude jests of tarpaulin ruffians — a thing of its delicate texture — the salt bilge wetting it till it became as vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some superstition about sentiments) of being tossed over in a fresh gale to some propitiatory shark (spirit of Saint Grothard, 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 magiptracy iii this district, the con- 166 DISTANT COERESPONDENTS currence of the ecclesiastics in that canton; till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk sentiment, into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless affectation. How few sentiments, my dear P., I am afraid we can set down, in the sailor's phrase, as quite sea-worthy. Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which, though contemptible in bulk, are the twinkling corpuscula which should irradiate a right friendly epistle — your puns and small jests are, I apprehend, extremely circumscribed in their sphere of action. They are so far from a capacity of being packed up and sent beyond sea, they will scarce endure to be transported by hand from this room to the next. Their vigour is as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment for their brief existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the by- standers : 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 present ear-kissing smack with it ; you can no more transmit it in its pristine flavour, than you can send a kiss. — Have you not tried in some instances to palm off a yesterday's pun upon a gentleman, and has it answered ? Not but it was new to his hearing, but it did not seem to come new from you. It did not hitch in. It was like picking up at a village ale-house a two-days' -old newspaper. You have not seen it before, but you resent the stale thing as an afiront. This sort of merchandise above aU requires a quick return. A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must be co-instantaneous. The one is the brisk lightning, the other the fierce thunder. A moment's interval, and the link is snapped. A pun is reflected from a friend's face as from a mirror. Who would consult his sweet visnomy, if the polished DISTANT CORRESPOKDENTB. 167 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 Wilkins's island comes across me. Sometimes you seem to be in the Hades of Thieves. I see Diogenes prying among you with his perpetual fruitless lantern. What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight of an honest man ! Ton must almost have forgotten how we look. And tell me, what your Sydneyites do ? are they th**v*ng all day long P 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 pick- pocket ! Marry, for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided, a priori ; but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair of hind-shifters as the expertest loco-motor in the colony. — We hear the most improbable tales at this distance. Pray is it true that the young Spartans among you are born with six fingers, which spoils their scanning ? — It must look very odd ; but use reconciles. For their scansion, it is less to be regretted, for if they take it into their heads to be poets, it is odds but they turn out, the greater part of them, vile plagiarists. — Is there much difference to see, 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 a shorter time than it will take to satisfy my scruples. — Do you grow your own hemp ? — What is your staple trade, — exclusive of the national pro- fession, I mean ? Your locksmiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists. 169 DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarly as when we used to exchange good-morrows out of our old contiguous windows, in pump-famed Hare-court in the Temple. "Why did you ever leave that quiet comer ? — Why did I ? — with its complement of four poor elms, from whose smoke-dyed barks, the theme of jesting ruralists, I picked my first lady-birds \ My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us ; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of our English letters before they can reach yon. But while I talk, I think you hear me, — thoughts dallying with vain surmise — Aye me ! while thee the seas and sounding shores Hold far away. Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall hardly know me. Come, before Bridget walks on crutches. Grirls whom you left children have become sage matrons while you are tarrying there. The blooming Miss W — r (you remember Sally "W — r) called upon us yesterday, an aged crone. Folks, whom you knew, die off every year. Formerly, I thought that death was wearing out, — I stood ramparted about with so many healthy friends. The departure of J. W., two springs back, corrected my delusion. Since then the old divorcer has been busy. If you do not make haste to return, there will be little left to greet you, of me, or mine. 109 THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. I LIKE to meet a sweep — understand me — not a grown sweeper — old chimney-sweepers are by no means attractive — but one of those tender novices, blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced from the cheek — such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the peep peep of a young sparrow ; or liker to the matin lark should I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom anticipating the sun-rise ? I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks — poor blots — innocent blacknesses — I reverence these young Africans of our own growth — these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption ; and from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys,) in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of patience to mankind. When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness their operation ! to see a chit no bigger than one's-self, enter, one knew not by what process, into what seemed the fauces Averni — to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades ! — to shuddei* with the idea that " now, surely, he must be lost for ever ! " — to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered day-light — and then (O fulness of delight !) running out of doors, to come just in time to see the sable phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished weapon of his art victorious like some flag waved over a con- quered citadel ! I seem to remember having been told 170 THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. that a bad sweep was once left iii a stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly ; not much unlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the " Apparition of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, rises." Beader, 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 occu- pation, a pair of kibed heels (no unusual accompani- ment) be superadded, the demand on thy humanity will surely rise to a tester. There is a composition, the ground-work of which I have understood to be the sweet wood 'yclept sassafras. This wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy beyond the China luxury. I know not how thy palate may relish it ; for myself, with every deference to the judicious Mr. Eead, who hath time out of mind kept open a shop (the only one he avers in London) for the vending of this " whole- some and pleasant beverage," on the south side of Fleet-street, as thou approachest Bridge-street — the only Salopian house — I have never yet ventured 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 elegancies, 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 THE PKAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 171 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, tliey will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible, seemingly no less pleased than those domestic animals — cats — when they purr over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is something more in these sympathies than philosophy can inculcate. Now albeit Mr. Eead boasteth, not without reason, that his is the onlt/ Salopian house ; yet be it known to thee, reader — if thou art one who keepest what are called good hours, thou art haply ignorant of the fact — he hath a race of industrious imitators, who from stalls, and under open sky, dispense the same savoury mess to humbler customers, at that dead time of the dawn, when (as extremes meet) the rake, reeling home from his midnight cups, and the hard-handed artisan leaving his bed to resume the premature labours of the day, jostle, not unfrequently to the manifest disconcerting of the former, for the honours of the pavement. It is the time when, in summer, between the expired and the not yet relumined kitchen-fires, the kennels of our fair metropolis give forth their least satisfactory odours. The rake, who wisheth to dissipate his o'er-night vapours in more grateful cofi*ee, curses the ungenial fume, as he passeth ; but the artisan stops to taste, and blesses the fragrant breakfast. 172 TH15 PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. This is saloop — tlie precocious herb- woman's darling — the delight of the early gardener, who transports his smoking cabbages by break of day from Hammer- smith to Covent-garden'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 butter (an added half-penny) — so may thy culinary fires, eased of the o'er-charged secretions from thy worse- placed hospitalities, curl up a lighter volume to the welkin — so may the descending soot never taint thy costly well-ingredienced soups — nor the odious cry, quick-reaching from street to street, of the Jired chimney, invite the rattling engines from ten adjacent parishes, to disturb for a casual scintillation thy peace and pocket ! I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts ; the jeers and taunts of the populace ; the low-bred triumph they display over the casual trip, or splashed stocking, of a gentleman. Yet can I endure the jocularity of a young sweep with something more than forgiveness. — In the last winter but one, pacing along Cheapside with my accustomed precipitation when I walk westward, a treacherous slide brought me upon my back in an instant. I scrambled up with pain and shame enough — yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if nothing had happened — when the roguish grin of one of these young wits encountered me. There he stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, till the tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked themselves out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 173 previous weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling through all with such a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth but Hogarth has got him already (how could he miss him ?) in the March to Finchley, grinning at the pyeman — there he stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was to last for ever — with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth — for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it — that I could have been content, if the honour of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained his butt and his mockery tUl midnight. I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine set of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must pardon me) is a casket presumably holding such jewels ; but, methinks, they should take leave to " air " them as frugally as possible. The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their teeth, show me bones. Yet must I confess, that from the mouth of a true sweep a display (even to ostentation) of those white and shining ossifications, strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It is, as when A sable cloud Turns forth her silver lining on the night. It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct j a badge of better days ; a hint of nobility : — and, doubtless, under the obscuring darkness and double night of their forlorn disguisement, oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle conditions, derived from lost ancestry, and a lapsed pedigree. The premature apprenticements of these tender victims give but too much encouragement, I fear, to clandestine and almost infantile abductions; the seeds of civility and true 174 THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS, courtesy, so often discernible in these young grafts (not otherwise to be accounted for) plainly hint at some forced adoptions ; many noble Rachels mourning for their children, even in our days, countenance the fact ; the tales of fairy-spiriting may shadow a lament- able verity, and the recovery of the young Montagu be but a solitary instance of good fortune out of many irreparable and hopeless defiliations. In one of the state-beds at Arundel Castle, a few- years since — under a ducal canopy — (that seat of the Howards is an object of curiosity to visitors, chiefly for its beds, in which the late diwke was especially a connoisseur) — encircled with curtains of delicatesfc crimson, with starry coronets inwoven — folded between a pair of sheets whiter and softer than the lap where Venus lulled Ascanius — was discovered by chance, after all methods of search had failed, at noon-day, fast asleep, a lost chimney-sweeper. The little creature, having somehow confounded his passage among the intricacies of those lordly chimneys, by some unknown aperture had alighted upon this magnificent chamber ; and, tired with his tedious explorations, was unable to resist the delicious invitement to repose, which he there saw exhibited ; so creeping between the sheets very quietly, laid his black head upon the pillow, and slept like a young Howard. Such is the account given to the 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 THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 175 between them, when the rug, or the carpet, presented an obvious couch, still far above his pretensions — is this probable, I would ask, if the great power of nature, which I contend for, had not been manifested within him, prompting to the adventure ? Doubtless this young nobleman (for such my mind misgives me tliat he must be) was allured by some memory, not amounting to full consciousness, of his condition in infancy, when he was used to be lapped by his mother, or his nurse, in just such sheets as he there found, into which he was now but creeping back as into his proper incunabula, and resting-place. — By no .other theory than by this sentiment of a pre -existent state (as I may call it), can I explain a deed so venturous, and, indeed, upon any other system so indecorous, in this tender, but unseasonable, sleeper. My pleasant friend Jem "White was so impressed with a belief of metamorphoses like this frequently taking place, that in some sort to reverse the wrongs of fortune in these poor changelings, he instituted an annual feast of chimney-sweepers, at which it was his pleasure to officiate as host and waiter. It was a solemn supper held in Smithfield, upon the yearly return of the fair of St. Bartholomew. Cards were issued a w^eek before to the master-sweeps in and about the metropolis, confining the invitation to their younger fry. Now and then an elderly stripling would get in among us, and be good-naturedly winked at ; but our main body were infantry. One unfortu- nate wight, indeed, who, relying upon his dusky suit, had intruded himself into our party, but by tokens was providentially discovered in time to be no chim- ney-sweeper, (all is not soot which looks so,) was quoited out of the presence with universal indignar tion, as not having on the wedding garment ; but in 176 THK PIUISE O^ CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 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 im- pervious to the agreeable hubbub of that vanity ; but remote enough not to be obvious to the interruption of every gaping spectator in it. The guests assembled about seven. In those little temporary parlours three tables were spread with napery, not so fine as sub- stantial, 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 Eochester in his maddest days could not have done the humours of the scene with more spirit than my friend. After some general expression of thanks for the honour the company had done him, his inaugural ceremony was to clasp the greasy waist of old dame Ursula (the fattest of the three), that stood frying and fretting, half-blessing, half-cursing " the gentleman," and imprint upon her chaste lips a tender salute, whereat the universal host would set up a shout that tore the concave, while hundreds of grinning teeth startled the night with their bright- ness. O it was a pleasure to see the sable younkers lick in the unctuous meat, with his more unctuous sayings — how he would fit the tit-bits to the puny mouths, reserving the lengthier links for the seniors — how he would intercept a morsel even in the jaws of some young desperado, declaring it " must to the pan again to be browned, for it was not fit for a gentleman's eating " — how he would recommend this elice of white bread, or that piece of kissing-cnist, to THE PRAISE OF CflIMNET-8 WEEPERS. 177 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 drink- ing. Then we had our toasts — " The King," — "the Cloth," — which, whether they understood or not, was equally diverting and flattering ; — and for a crowning sentiment, which never failed, " May the Brush super- sede the Laurel ! " All these, a»nd fifty other fancies, which were rather felt than comprehended by his guests, would he utter, standing upon tables, and prefacing every sentiment with a " Grentlemen, give me leave to propose so and so," which was a prodi- gious comfort to those young orphans; every now and then stuffing into his mouth (for it did not do to be squeamish on these occasions) indiscriminate pieces of those reeking sausages, which pleased them mightily, and was the savouriest part, you may beliere, of the entertainment. Golden lads and lasses must. As chimney-sweepers, come to dust — James "White is extinct, and with him these sup- pers have long ceased. He carried away with him half the fun of the world when he died — of my world at least. His old clients look for him among the pens ; and, missing him, reproach the altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and the glory of Smithfield departed for ever. 178 A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGAES IN THE METROPOLIS. The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation — your only modern Alcides' club to rid the time of its abuses — is uplift with many-handed sway to extir- pate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendi- city from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags — staves, dogs, and crutches — the whole mendicant fraternity with all their baggage, are fast posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh persecution. Prom the crowded crossing, from the comers of streets and turnings of alleys, the parting Grenius of Beggary is " with sighing sent." I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this impertinent crusado, or helium ad extermina- tionem, proclaimed against a species. Much good might be sucked from these Beggars. They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism. Their appeals were to our common nature ; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any fellow-creature, or set of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian. Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment. There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation ; as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go in livery. The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses ; and when Dionysius from king turned schoolmaster, do we fee] anything towards him but contempt ? Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. 179 a ferula for a sceptre, which would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the same com- passionate admiration, with which we regard his Belisarius begging for an oholum ? "Would the moral have been more graceful, more pathetic ? The Blind Beggar in the legend — the father ot pretty Bessy — whose story doggrel rhymes and ale- house signs cannot so degrade or attenuate, but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shine through the disguisements — this noble Earl of Cornwall (as indeed he was) and memorable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stript of all, and seated on the flowering green of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter by his side, illumining his rags and his beggary — would the child and parent have cut a better flgure, doing the honours of a counter, or expiating their fallen condition upon the three-foot eminence of some sempstering shop-board ? In tale or history your Beggar is ever the just antipode to your King. The poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret Newcastle would call them), when they would most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, never stop till they have brought down their hero in good earnest to rags and the wallet. The depth of the descent illustrates the height he falls from. There is no medium which can be presented to the imagination without oflence. 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 clan-dish. The Lueian wits knew this verv well ; and. witli a 180 > COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. converse policy, when they would express scorn of greatness without the pity, they show usan Alexander in tlie shades cobbling shoes, or a Semiramis getting up foul linen. How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had declined his affections upon the daughter of a baker ! yet do we feel the imagination at all violated when we read the " true ballad, "where King Cophetua woos the beggar maid ? Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity alloyed with contempt. JN o one pro- perly contemns a beggar. Poverty is a comparative thing, and each degree of it is mocked by its " neigh- bour 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. P.c^ Porrexit sociasque dapes, seu longa diei Tiedia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat. Hi mores, hsec vita fuit, dum fata sinebant, Dum nequc languebam morbis, nee inerte eenectii ; Quae tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite caecum Orbavit dominum : prisci sed gratia facti Ne tota intereat, longos delecta per annos, Exiguum hunc Irus tumulum de cespite fecit, Etsi inopis, non ingratae, munuscula dextrse ; Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque canemque Quod memoret, fidumque canem dominumque bcnignum. Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie, That wont to tend my old blind master's steps, His guide and guard : nor, while my service lasted, Had he occasion for that staff, with which He now goes picking out his path in fear Over the highways and crossings ; but would plant. Safe in the conduct of my friendly string, A firm foot forward still, till he had reach'd His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide Of passers by in thickest confluence flowed : 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 Irus reared. 184 A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGABS. 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 rohust 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 hia own level. The common cripple would despise hia own pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness, and hearty heart, of this half-limbed giant. Few but must have noticed him ; for the accident, which brought him low, took place during the riots of 1780, and he has been a groundling so long. He seemed earth- born, an Antaeus, and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured. He was a grand fragment ; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature, which should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. I heard a tremendous voice thundering and growling, as before an earth- quake, and casting down my eyes, it was this man- drake reviling a steed that had started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature to have rent the offending quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a centaur, from which the horse-half had been cloven m some dire Lapithan controversy. He moved on, as if he could have made A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. 185 shift with yet half of the body-portion which was left him. The os sublime was not wanting ; and he threw out yet a jolly countenance upon the heavens. Forty- and-two years had he driven this out-of-door trade, and now that his hair is grizzled in the service, but his good spirits no way impaired, because he is not content to exchange his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he is expiating his con- tumacy 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 desir- able ?) was there not room for one Lusus (not Naturce^ indeed, but) Accidentivm ? What if in forty-and-two years' going about, the man had scraped together enough to give a portion to his child, (as the rumour ran) of a few hundreds — whom had he injured? — whom had he imposed upon ? The contributors had enjoyed their sight for their pennies. What if after being exposed all day to the heats, the rains, and the frosts of heaven — shuffling his ungainly trunk along in an elaborate and painful motion — he was enabled to retire at night to enjoy himself at a club of his fellow cripples over a dish of hot meat and vegetables, as the charge was gravely brought against him by a clergyman deposing before a House of Commons* Committee — was this, or was his truly paternal con- sideration, which (if a fact) deserved a statue rather than a whipping-post, and is inconsistent at least with the exaggeration of nocturnal orgies which he has been J 86 A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS slandered witli — 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 vasabond ? — There was a Yorick once, whom it would not have shamed to have sate down at the cripples' feast, and to have thrown in his benediction, ay, and his mite too, for a companionable symbol. "Age, thou hast lost thy breed." — Half of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by begging are (I verily believe) misers' calum- nies. One was much talked of in the public papers some time since, and the usual charitable inferences deduced. A clerk in the Bank was surprised vnth the announcement of a five-hundred-pound legacy left him by a person whose name he was a stranger to. It seems that in his daily morning walks from Peckham (or some village thereabouts) where he lived, to his office, it had been his practice for the last twenty years to drop his halfpenny duly into the hat of some blind Bartimeus, that sate begging alms by the way-side in the Borough. The good old beggar recognised his daily benefactor by the voice only ; and, when he died, left all the amassings of his alms (that had been half a century perhaps in the accumulating) to his old Bank friend. "Was this a story to purse up people's hearts, and pennies, against giving an alms to the blind ? — or not rather a beautiful moral of well-directed charity on the one part, and noble gratitude upon the other ? I sometimes wish I had been that Bank clerk. I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creature, blinking, and looking up with his no eyes in the sun — Is it possible I could have steeled my purse against him? ▲ DI8SEETATI0N UPON ROAST PIG. 187 Perhaps I had no small change. Eeader, do not be frightened at the hard words, imposition, imposture — give^ and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have unawares (like this Bank clerk) entertained angels. Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the " seven small children," in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Bake 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, ffive, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manu- script goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or 188 A DISSERTATION UPON KOAST PIG. rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in tiie manner following. The swineherd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son. Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East, from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the labour of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wring- ing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odour assailed his nostrils, unhke any scent which he had before experienced. What could it proceed from ? — not from the burnt cottage — he had smelt that smell before — indeed this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young fire-brand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied DISSERTATION UPON KOAST PIG 189 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 bum him so much now, still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious ; and surrendering himself up to the new- bom pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail- stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure, which he experienced in his lower regions, had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something like the following dialogue ensued. "You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring ? Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you ! but you must be eating fire, and I know not what — what have you got there, I say ? " "0 father, the pig, tVe 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. 190 A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked out another pig, and fairly- rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, " Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste — Lord! " — with such-like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke. Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abominable thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavour, which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In con- clusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious) both father and son fairly set down to the mess, and never left off till they had despatched all that remained of the litter. Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbours would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches, who could think of improving upon the good meat which God had sent them. Nevertheless, strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti' s cottage was burnt down now more frequently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the night-time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze ; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 191 was given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they all handled it ; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given, — to tlie surprise of the whole court, towns- folk, strangers, reporters, and all present — vrithout leaving the box, or any manner of consultation what- ever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty. The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision : and when the court was dismissed, went privily, and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few- days his Lordship's town-house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fire in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. The insurance-offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Boasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such sJow degrees, concludes the 192 A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG manuscript do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious arts make their way among mankind Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favour of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in eoast pio. Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate — -princeps I speak not of your grown porkers — things between pig and pork — those hobbydehoys — but a young and tender suckling — under a moon old — guiltless as yet of the sty — with no original speck of the amor immunditi(B, the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest — his voice as yet not broken, but some- thing between a childish treble and a grumble — the mild forerunner, ov prceludium of a grunt. lie must le roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled — but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument ! There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over- roasted, crackling, as it is well called — the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance — with the adhee"*'"e oleaginous — O call it not fat ! but an indefinaoie 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 piu-e food the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna — or, rather, fat and Jean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both A DISSERTAT[ON UPON ROAST PIG. 103 togetlier make but one ambrosian result, or common substance. Behold him, while he is "doing" — it seemeth rathe^ a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he i^ 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 accom- pany maturer swinehood ? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal — wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation — from these sins he is happily snatched away — Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with timely care — his memory is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon — no 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. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too transcendent — a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning that really a tender- conscienced person would do well to pause — too ravish- ing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriatetli the lips that approach her — like lovers' kisses, she biteth — she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish — but she stoppeth at the palate — she meddleth not with the appetite — and the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for a mutton chop. Pig — let me speak his praise — is no less provocative J 94 A DISSERTATION UPON HOAST PIG of the appetite, tlian lie is satisfactory to the critical- ness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices. Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is — good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neighbours' fare. I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfac- tions, as in mine own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those "tame villatic fowl,") capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, "give everything." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours, to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house, slightingly, (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what) a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate — It argues an insensibility. I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweet- meat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake fresh from A DISSERTATION UrON BOAST PIG. 195 tlie oven. In my way to school (it was over London bridge) a grey-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt, at this time of day, that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, Bchoolboy-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 aimt would be taking in thinking that I — I myself, and not another — would eat her nice cake — and what should I say to her the next time I saw her — how naughty I was to part with her pretty present! — and the odour of that spicy cake can^e back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last— and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness; and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey impostor. Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacri- ficing these tender victims. "We read of pigs whi])t to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards inteneratin^ and dulcifying a substance, o 2 196 A bachelor's complaint op naturally so mild and dulcet as tlie flesh ol young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto. — I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and main- tained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, " Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by whipping {'per flag elJationem 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 banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are — but consider, he is a weakling — a flower. A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. As a single man, I have spent a good deal of my time in noting down the infirmities of Married People, to console myself for those superior pleasures, which they tell me I have lost by remaining as I am. I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE 197 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. AVhat oftenest offends me at the houses of married persons where I visit, is an error of quite a different description ; — it is that they are too loving. Not too loving neither : that does not explain my meaning. Besides, why should that offend me ? The very act of separating themselves from the rest of the world, to have the fuller enjoyment of each other's society, implies that they prefer one another to all the world. But what I complain of is, that they carry this preference so undisguisedly, they perk it up in the faces of us single people sa shamelessly, you cannot be in their company a moment without being made to feel, by some indirect hint or open avowal, that you are not the object of this preference. Now there are some things which give no offence, while implied or taken for granted merely ; but expressed, there is much offence in them. If a man were to accost the first homely-featured, or plain-dressed young woman of his acquaintance, and tell her bluntly, that she w^as not handsome or rich enough for him, and he could not marry her, he would deserve to be kicked for his ill manners ; yet no less is implied in the fact, that 6aving 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 198 A baciieloe's complaint of choice. It is enougli that I know I am not : I do not want this perpetual reminding. The display of superior knowledge or riches may be made sufficiently mortifying; but these admit of a palliative. The knowledge which is brought out to insult me, may accidentally improve me ; and in the rich man's houses and pictures, — his parks and gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least. But the display of married happiness has none of these palliatives: it is throughout pure, unrecompensed, unqualified insult. Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least invidious sort. It is the cunning of most possessors of any exclusive privilege to keep tlieir advantage as much out of sight as possible, that their less favoured neighbours, seeing little of the benefit, may the less be disposed to question the right. But these married monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of their patent into our faces. Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the coun- tenances of a new-married couple, — in that of the lady particularly : it teUs 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 sa?d before, to be taken for granted, not expressed. The excessive airs which those people give them- selves, founded on the ignorance of us unmarried people, would be more ofiensive if they were lesb 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 THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. 199 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 ucquaintance, 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 Ver, 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 alley swarms with them, — that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance, — that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains, — how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, tlie gallows, &c. — I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them. If they were young phoenixes, indeed, that were bom but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when they are so common I do not advert to the insolent merit which they assume with their husbands on these occasions. Let them look to that. But why we, who are not their natural-bom subjects, should be expected to bring our spices, myrrh, and incense, — our tribute and homage of admiration, — I do not see. " Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant even so are the young children : " so says the excellent office in our Prayer-book appointed for the churching of women. " Happy is the man that hath his quiver 200 A bachelor's complaint of full of tliem : " So say I ; but then dou't )et liim discliarge 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 unreasonable to be called upon to love themj where I see no occasion, — to love a whole family, perhaps, eight, nine, or ten, indiscriminately, — to love all the pretty dears, because children are so enj];a(^inoj ! I know there is a proverb, "Love me, love my dog:" that is not always so very practicable, parti- cularly 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 my 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 receive whatever hue fancy can THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. 201 give it. But children have a real character, and an essential being of themselves : they are amiable or unaraiable per se ; I must love or hate them as I seo cause for either in their qualities. A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded aa a mere appendage to another being, and to be loved or hated accordingly : they stand with me upon their own stock, as much as men and women do. Oh ! but you will say, sure it is an attractive age, — there is something in the tender years of infancy that of itself charms us ? That is the very reason why I am more nice about them. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them ; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy diifers not much from another in glory ; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest. — I was always rather squeamish in my wome^ and children. But this is not the worst : one must be admitted into their familiarity at least, before they can complain of inattention. It implies visits, and some kind of intercourse. But if the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage — if you did not come in on the wife's side — if you did not sneak into the house in her train, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on, — look about you — your tenure is precarious — before a twelvemonth shall roll over your head, you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship did not commence afier the period of his marriage. "With some limitations, 202 A BACHELORS COMrLAiNT OF they can endure that ; but that the good man should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friend- ship 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 brouglit 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 bom or thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in the world. You may guess what luck generally befalls such a rusty piece of metal as I am in these neio 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, hut an oddity, is one of the ways ; — they have a parti- cular kind of stare for the purpose ; — till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some excrescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a general vein of obser- vation (not quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect whether you are not altogether a humourist, — a fellow well enough to have consorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be introduced to ladies. This may be called the staring way; and is that which has oftenest been put in practice against me. Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony ; that is, where they find you an object of especial regard with their husband, who is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attachment founded on esteem which he has conceived towards TIfE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. 203 jou, by never qualified exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, till the good man, who understands well enough that it is all done in compliment to him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is due to so much candour, and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking do-\vn 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 desirable a purpose are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband fond of you. If an esteem for something excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your conversation, she will cry, " I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. , as a great wit ? " If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content for this to overlook some trifling irregularities in your moral deportment, upon the first notice of any of these she as readily exclaims, " This, my dear, is your good Mr. !" One good lady whom I took the liberty of expostulating with for not showing me quite so much respect as I thought due to her husband's old friend, had the candour to confess to me that she had often heard Mr. speak of me before marriage, and that she had conceived a great desire to be acquainted with me, but that the sight of me had very much disappointed her expectations ; for from her husband's representationa ol" me, she had 204 A bachelor's complaint. formed a notion that she was to see a fine, tall, officer- like-looking man (I use her very words), the very reverse of which proved to be the truth. This was candid ; and I had the civility not to ask her in return, how she came to pitch upon a standard of personal accomplishments for her husband's friends which differed so much from his o^vn; for my friend's dimensions as near as possible approximate to mine ; he standing five feet five in his shoes, in which I have the advantage of him by about half an inch ; and he no more than myself exhibiting any indications of a martial character in his air or countenance. These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered in the absurd attempt to visit at their houses. To enumerate them all would be a vain endeavour ; I shall therefore just glance at the very common impropriety of w^hich 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. Tes- tacea, for instance, kept me the other night two or three hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because Mr. did not come home, till the oysters were all spoiled, rather than she would be guilty of the impoliteness of touching one in his absence. This was reversing the point of good manners : for ceremony is an invention to take off" the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow- creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband's importunities to go to supper, she would have acted according to the ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 205 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 : there- fore I must protest against the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her o\vn 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 Eoman denominations. Let them amend and change their manners, or I promise to record the full-length English of their names, tc the terror of all such desperate offenders in future. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day — I know not by what chance it was preserved so long — tempts me to call to mind a few of the Players, who make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast of parts in the Twelfth Night, at the old Drury-lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago. There is something very touching in these old remem- brances. 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 smaU moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Pabian ; when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore — names of small S06 ON SOME OF 'J HE OLI) ACTORS account — had an importance, beyond what we can be content to attribute now to the time's best actors. — " Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore." — What a full Shakspearian sound it carries ! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the manner, of the gentle actor ! Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia ; Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well ; and Yiola in this play. Her voice had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts — in which her memory now chiefly lives — in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giving an account how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following line, to make up the music — yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather o^ead, not without its grace and beauty — but, when she had declared her sister's history to be a " blank," and that she " never told her love," there was a pause, as if the story had ended — and then the image of the " worm in the bud," came up as a new suggestion — and the heightened image of "Patience" still followed after that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought springing up after thought, I would almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine lines — Write loyal cantos of contemned love — Hollow your name to the reverberate hills — there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which was to follow. She used no rhef/OK c ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 207 in her passion ; or it was nature's own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law. Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Eenard), then in the pride of her beauty, made an admirable Olivia. She was particularly excellent in her unbending scenes in conversation with the Clown. I have seen some 01i\das — and those very sensible actresses too — who in these interlocutions have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to vie conceits with him in downright emulation. But she used him for her sport, like what he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, and then to be dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still. She touched the imperious fantastic humour of the character with nicety. Ser fine spacious person filled the scene. The part of Malvolio has, in my judgment, been so often misunderstood, and the general merits of the actor, who then played it, so unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix upon these points. Of all the actors who flourished in my time — a melancholy phrase if taken aright, reader — Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm — the rarest faculty among players. None that I remember possessed even a portion of that fine madness which he threw out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, or the transports of the Venetian incendiary at the vision of the fired city. His voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect, of the trumpet. His gait was uncouth and stiff*, but no way embarrassed by affectation j and the thorough-bred gentleman was Q08 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTOES. uppermost in every movement. He seized tlie moment of passion with greatest truth ; like a faithful clock, never striking before the time ; never anticipating or leading you to anticipate. He was totally destitute of trick and artifice. He seemed come upon the stage to do the poet's message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the sentiment do its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to mountebank it ; and betrayed none of that cleverness which is the bane of serious acting. Tor this reason, his lago was the only endurable one which I remember to have seen. No spectator from his action could divine more of his artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy alone put you in possession of the mystery. There were no by-intima- tions to make the audience fancy their own discern- ment so much greater than that of the Moor — who commonly stands like a great helpless mark set up for mine Ancient, and a quantity of barren spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The lago of Bensley did not go to work so grossly. There was a triumphant tone about the character, natural to a general consciousness of power ; but none of that petty vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any little successful stroke of its knavery — as is common with your small villains, and green probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow before its time. It was not a man setting his wits at a child, and winking all the while at other children who are mightily pleased at being let into the secret ; but a consummate villain entrapping a noble nature into toils, against which no discernment was available, where the manner was as fathomless as the purpose seemed dark, and without ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 209 motive. The part of Malvolio, in tlie Twelfth Night, was performed by Bensley, with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some recent castings of that character) the very tradition must be worn out from the stage. No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving it to Mr. Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons : when Bensley was occasionally absent from the theatre, John Kemble thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvolio is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident. He is cold, austere, repelling; but dignified, consistent, and, for what appears, rather of an over-stretched morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan ; and he might have worn his gold chain with honour in one of our old round-head families, in the service of a Lambert or a Lady Pairfax. 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 afiected, which latter only are the fit objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the best unlovely, but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His bearing is lofty, a little above his station, but probably not much above his deserts. We see no reason why he should not have been brave, honour- able, accomplished. His careless committal of the ring to the ground (which he was commissioned to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth and feeling. His dialect on all occasions is that of a gentleman, and a man of education. We must not confound him with the eternal old, low steward of comedy. He is master of the household to a great princess ; a dignity probably conferred upon him for other respects than age or length of service. Olivia, 210 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS at the first indication of his supposed madness, declares that she " would not have him miscarry for half of her dowry." Does this look as if the character was meant to appear little or insignificant ? Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face — of what ? — of being " sick of self-love," — ^but with a gentleness and considerateness which could not have been, if she had not thought that this particular infirmity shaded some virtues, -^^is rebuke to the linight, and his sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited ; and when we take into con- sideration the unprotected condition of his mistress, and the strict regard with which her state of real or dissembled mourning would draw the eyes of the world upon her house-afiairs, Malvolio might feel the honour of the family in some sort in his keeping ; as it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers, or kinsmen, to look to it — for Sir Toby had dropped all such nice respects at the buttery-hatch. That Malvolio was meant to be represented as possessing estimable qualities, the expression of the Duke, in his anxiety to have him reconciled, almost infers ; " Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace." Even in his abused state of chains and darkness, a sort of greatness seems never to desert him. He argues highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas, and philosophises gallantly upon his straw.* 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 Eabian and Maria could have ventured sending him upon a courting-errand to Olivia. There was some consonancy * Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl ? Mai. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion ? Mai. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 211 (as he would say) in the undertaking, or the jest would have been too bold even for that house of misrule. Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth. There was something in it beyond the coxcomb. It was big and swelling, but you could not be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see it taken down, but you felt that it was upon an elevation. He was magnificent from the outset ; but when the decent sobrieties of the character began to give way, and the poison of self-love, in his conceit of the Countess's afiection, gradually to work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood before you. How he went smiling to himself ! with what ineffable carelessness would he twirl his gold chain ! what a dream it was ! you were infected with the illusion, and did not wish that it should be removed ! you had no room for laughter ! if an unseasonable reflection of morality obtruded itself, it was a deep sense of the pitiable infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him open to such frenzies — but in truth you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it lasted — you felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with the eyes open. Who would not wish to live but for a day in the conceit of such a lady's love as Olivia ? "Why, the Duke would have given his principahty but for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to have been so deluded. The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate Hyperion. O ! shake not the castles of his pride — endure yet for a season, bright moments of confidence — " stand still, 21Ji ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. ye watches of the element," that Malvolio may be still in fancy fair Olivia's lord ! — but fate and retri- bution say no — I hear the mischievous titter of Maria — the witty taunts of Sir Toby — the still more insup- portable triumph of the foolish knight — the counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked — and " thus the whirligig of time," as the true clown hath it, "brings in his revenges." I confess that I never saw the catas- trophe of this character, while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic interest. There was good foolery too. Eew 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 gro- tesque ; but Dodd was it, as it came out of nature's hands. It might be said to remain in puris naturalihus. In expressing slowness of apprehension, this actor surpassed all others. Tou could see the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful process, till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a twilight concep- tion — its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his intellect, as some have had the power to retard their pulsation. The balloon takes less time in filling, than it took to cover the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with expression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a comer of his eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder. I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five-and-twenty years ago, that walking in the gardens of Grray's Inn — they were then far finer than they are now — the accursed Verulam Buildings had not encroached upon all the east side of them, cutting out ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 213 delicate green crankles, and shouldering away one of two of the stately alcoves of the terrace — the surviyor 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 alto- gether reverend and law-breathing — Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks taking my afternoon solace on a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely, sad personage came towards me, whom, from his grave air and deportment, I judged to be one of the old Benchers of the Inn. He had a serious thoughtful forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of mortality. As I have an in- stinctive awe of old Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of subindicative token of respect which one is apt to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger, and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than any positive motion of the body to that effect — a species of humility and will- worship which I observe, nine times out of ten, rather puzzles than pleases the person it is offered to — when the face turning full upon me, strangely identified itself with that of Dodd. Upon close inspection I was not mistaken. But could this sad, thoughtful countenance be the same vacant face of folly which I had hailed so often under circumstances of gaiety; wh/ch I had never seen without a smile, or recognised but as the usher of mirth ; tliat looked out so formally flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so impotently busy in Backbite; so blankly divested of all meaning, or resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand agreeable impertinences ? "Was thir the face — full of thought and carefulness — that had 80 often divested itself at will of every trace of either 214 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTOBS. to give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two or three hours at least of its furrows ? Was this the face — manly, sober, intelligent — which I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry with? The remembrance of the freedoms which I had taken with it came upon me with a reproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I thought it looked upon me with a sense of injury. There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actors — your pleasant fellows particularly — subjected to and suffering the common lot ; — their fortunes, their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, their actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly connect them with more awful responsibilities. The death of this fine actor took place shortly after this meeting. He had quitted the stage some months ; and, as I learned afterwards, had been in the habit of resorting daily to these gardens almost to the day of his decease. In these serious walks probably he was divesting himself of many scenic and some real vanities — weaning himself from the frivolities of the lesser and the greater theatre — doing gentle penance for a life of no very reprehensible fooleries — taking off by degrees the buffoon mask, which he might feel he had worn too long — and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part. Dying, he " put on the weeds of Dominic." * * Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice collec- tion of old English literature. I should judge him to have been a man of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu which no length of study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had Been him one evening in Aguecheek, and recognising Dodd the next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a " Save you, Si7' Andrew.'''' Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wavo of the hand, put him off with an " Away, Fool.'* ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 215 If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily forget the pleasant creature, wlio in those days enacted the part of the Clown to Dodd's Sir Andrew. — Eichard, or rather Dicky Suett — for so in his life-time he delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation — lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of Iloly Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender years were dedicated. There are who do yet remember him at that period — his pipe clear and harmonions. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was " cherub Dicky." "What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the holy for the profane state ; whether he had lost his good voice (his best recom- mendation to that office), like Sir John, "with hallooing and singing of anthems ; " or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to " commerce with the skies" — I could never rightly learn ; but we find him, after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and become one of us. I think he was not altogether of that timber out of which cathedral seats and sounding-boards are hewed. But if a glad heart — kind, and therefore glad — be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted for a surplice — his white stole and alhe. The first fruits of his secularisation was an engage- ment upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more 816 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTOBS. an imitator tliaii he was in any true sense liimself imitable. He was the Bobin Goodfellow 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 — Sa ! Ha I Sa ! — sometimes deepening to Ho ! Ho ! Ho ! with an irresistible accession, derived, perhaps, remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype of, — O La ! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling O La! of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews's mimicry. The " force of nature could no further go." He drolled upon the stock of these two syllables richer than the cuckoo. Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported himself upon those two spider's strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down ; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his Ijalance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Kobin Goodfellow, " thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet. Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest ; in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the centre ; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTOilS 217 Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The difference, I take it, was this : — Jack was more heloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Tour whole conscience stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the Children in the "Wood — but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He put us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him — not as from Jack, as from an antagonist, — but because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death ; and, when death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Eobert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquil- lity, nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph — O La! O La ! Bobby I The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity), commonly played Sir Toby in those days ; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaff which he did not quite fill out. He was as much too showy as Moody (who sometimes took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an air of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman with a slight infusion oi the footman. His brother Bob (of recenter memory), who was his shadow in everything while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow afterwards — was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter ingredient; that was all. It is amazing how a little of the more or less makes a difference in these things. When you 218 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. saw Bobby in 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 you could trace his promotion to some lady of quality who fancied the handsome fellow in his top- knot, and had bought him a commission. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable. Jack had two voices, both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating ; but his secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his common one. It was reserved for the spectator ; and the dramatis personas were supposed to know nothing at all about it. The lies of Young "Wilding, and the sentiments in Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the audience. This secret corre- spondence with the company before the curtain (which is the bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so indispensable to scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather interfere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface — the villain of artificial comedy — even while you read or see them. If you did, they would shock and not divert you. "When Ben, in Love for Love, returns from sea, the following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with his father : — Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw thee. Ben. Ey, ey, been ! Been far enough, an that be all. — Well, father, and how do all at home ? how does brother Dick, and brother Val? High Life Below Stairs. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 219 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 Bay — well, and how ? — I have a many questions to ask you — Here is an instance of insensibility wlaich in real life would be revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted temperament of the chai'acter. But when you read it in the spirit with which such playful selections and specious com- binations rather than strict metaphrases of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does, wound the moral sense at all. For what is Ben — the pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us — but a piece of satire — a creation of Congreve's fancy — a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character — his contempt of money — his credulity to women — with that necessary estrange- ment from home which it is just within the verge of credibility to suppose might produce such an halluci- nation as is here described. "We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character. But when an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom — the creature dear to half- belief — which Bannister exhibited — displays before our eyes a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor — a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar — and nothing else — when instead of investing it with a delicious confused- ness of the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose — he gives to it a downright daylight under- standing, and a fuU consciousness of its actions ; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone — we feel the discord of the thing ; the scene is disturbed ; a real man has got in among the dramatis personae, and puts them 220 ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. out. "We want tlie sailor turned out. TVe 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 extinct on our stage. Congreve and Earquhar show their heads once in seven years only, to be ex- ploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wUd speeches, an occa- sional licence of dialogue ? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not Btand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle the parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point oi strict morality), and take it all for truth. We substi- tute 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 personce, his peers. We have been spoiled with — not sentimental comedy • — but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all- devouring drama of common life ; where the moral ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDT OF THE LAST CENTURY. 221 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 afibrd our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. "What is there transacting, by no modification is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relationships of life. "We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. "We do not go thither, like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our ex- perience of it ; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. "We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue ; or which in fact was indifierent to neither, where neither properly was called in question ; that happy breathing- place from the burthen of a perpetual moral question- ing — the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry — is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. "We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. "We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we WTap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine. I confess for myself that (with no great delinquen- cies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience, — 222 ON THE ARTlPrCIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. not to live always in the precincts of tlie law-courts, — but now and then, for a dream- while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions — to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me — Secret shades Of woody Ida's inmost grove, While yet there was no fear of Jove. I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's — nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's comedies. I am the gayer at least for it ; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few excep- tions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire ; because in a modem play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure oi 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 Mirabells, the Dorimants and the Lady Touch- woods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 9.2S sense ; in fact they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws, or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land — ^what shall I call it ? — of cuckoldry — the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays — the few exceptions only are mistakes — is alike essentially vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes, — some little generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted, — not only 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 pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing — for you neither hate nor love his personages — and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations ; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we think them none. Ji24 ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURI. Translated into real life, tlie 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 vrhich, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such efiects are produced in their world. "When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. "We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings — for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated — for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained — for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted, no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder — for affection's depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong, — gratitude or its opposite, — claim or duty, — paternity or sonship. Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon, or Dapperwit, steal away Miss Martha : or who is the father of Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant' s children. The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice. But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. "We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. "We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. "We w-ould indict our very dreams. ON THE AETIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 225 Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve and "Wycherley, hut 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 bold- ness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice — to express it in a word — the downright acted viUany of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness, — the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, — which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of play- goers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother ; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are passages, — like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation, — incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other — but over these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure ; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure conaedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you Q 226 ON THE AKTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CEKTcftT. believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous; a mixture oi Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities: the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant ; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the dis- cordant elements. A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealise, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Church- yard memory — (an exhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death ; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former, — and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to be despised, — so finely contrast with the meek com- placent kissing of the rod, — taking it in like honey and butter, — with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower? — John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. Tou had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered voice was meant to you and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-fiutterer^ ON THE ARTIFICLAIi COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 227 on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. "What was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetry — or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory ? The fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle King, too, is gone in good time. His manner would scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate — acquit or condemn — censure or pity — exert our detestable coxcombry of moral judgment upon every- thing. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain — no compromise — his first appearance must shock and give horror — his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene — for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother's profes- sions of a good heart centre in downright self-satisfac- tion) must be loved, and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another. Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they w^ere meant to concern anybody on the stage, — he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury — a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged — the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villanous seducer Joseph. To realise him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life — must (or should) q2 228 ON IBE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. make you not mirtliful but uncomfortable, just as the i^tme predicament would move you in a neighbour or Oid 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 realisation into asps or amphisbaenas ; and Mrs. Candour — 0! frightful! — become a hooded serpent. Oh ! who that remembers Parsons and Dodd -the wasp and butterfly of the School for Scandal — in those two characters ; and charming natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in this latter part — would forego the true scenic delight — the escape from life — the oblivion of consequences — the holiday barring out of the pedant Reflection — those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world — to sit instead at one of our modern plays — to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals — dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be — and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the 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 Earren had succeeded to Mrs. 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 remember it was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith ; but, I thought, very unjustly. ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 229 Smith, I fancy, M'as more airy, and took the eye witl a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Eichard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good-humour. He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliv^er brilliant dialogue — the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley — because none understood it — half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to my recollec- tion, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him — the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet — the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richard — disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, his torpors — but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy — politic savings, and fetches of the breath — husbandry of the lungs, whore 280 ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. nature pointed him to be an economist — rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the eternal tormenting unap- peasable vigilance, — the "lidless dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy. ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. Not many nights ago, I had come home from seeing this extraordinary performer in Cockletop ; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of it, by conjuring up the most opposite associations. I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life ; private misery, public calamity. All would not do : There the antic sate Mocking our state his queer visnomy — his bewildering costume — all the strange things which he had raked together — his serpen- tine rod, s wagging about in his pocket — Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics — O'Keefe's wild farce, and his wilder commentary — till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance it had driven away. But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when vou have been taking opium — all the strange ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. 231 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. for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke ! A season or two since, there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety, the latter would not fall far short of the former. There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one it is !) of Liston ; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down, and call his. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unaccountable warfare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion ; not so much a comedian, as a company. If his name could be multiplied like his countenance, it might fill a play- bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faoes : applied to any other person, the phrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human counte- nance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be surprised to see him some da,y put out the head of a river-horse ; or come forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis. I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry — in old Domton — 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 excel- lence in other players. But in the grand grotesque 232 ON TH^ ACTING OF MTJNDEN. of farce, Munden stands out as single and unaccom- panied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began, and must end, with himself. Can any man wonder, like him ? can any man see gliosis, like him ? or fight with his own shadow — " SESSA " — as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Preston — where his alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a preternatural interest over the commonest daily-life objects ? A table or a joint-stool, in his conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It is invested with constellatory importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose t\ e Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooka seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the common-place materials of life, like primseval man with the sun and stars about him. THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. PREFACE. BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA, This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been m a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature. To Bay truth, it is time he wert- 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. Cinide they are, I grant you — a sort of unlicked, incondite things — villanously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than Buch J and better it is, that a writer should be natural in a self- pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know, that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another ; as in a former Essay (to save many instances) — where under the first person (his favourite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a 236 PREFACE. countiy-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and connections — in direct opposition to his own early history. If it be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another — making himself many, or reducing many tmto himself — then is the skilful novelist, who all along brings in his hero or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all j who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who, doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, and expresses his own story modestly ? My late friend was in many respects a singular character. Those who did not like him, hated him ; and some, who onco liked him, afterwards became his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time nor place, and would e'en out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionist he would pass for a free-thinker ; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood him ; and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure — irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. — He would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest ; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The informal habit of his mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be an orator ; and he seemed determined that no one else should play that part when he was present. He was petit and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have seen him PREFACE. 237 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 vmlucky 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 con- trived by this device to send away a whole company his enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his happiest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He has been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was but struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose his companions for some individuality of character which they manifested. — Hence, not many persons of science, and few professed literati, were of his councils. They were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain fortune ; and, as to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) income, he passed with most of them for a great miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake. His intimados, to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged regiment. He found them floating on the surface of society ; and the colo.ur, or something else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs stuck to him — ^but they were good and loving burrs for all that. He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalised (and offences were sure to arise), he could not help it. When he has been remonstrated with for not making more concessions to the feelings of good people, he would retort by asking, what one point did these good people ever concede to him ] He was temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. 238 PREFACE. Marry— aa the friendly vapour ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes with it ! the ligaments which tongue-tied him, were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist ! I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend is departed. His jests were beginning to grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. He felt the approaches of age ; and while he pretended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. Discoursing with him latterly on this subject, he expressed himself with a pettishness, which I thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he called it) at Shacklewell, some children belonging to a school of industry had met us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he thought, in an especial manner to Mm. " They take me for a visiting governor," he muttered earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like any- thing 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 virUis never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses ; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings. THE LAST ESSAYS OE ELIA. BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. I DO not know a pleasure more affecting than io i-ange at will over the deserted apartments of some tine old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy : and contempla- tions on the great and good, whom we fancy in suc- cession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance but some present human firailty — an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory — or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain- glory on that of the preacher — puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonising the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness ? — go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church : think of the piety that has kneeled there — the congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there — the meek pastor — the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross 240 BLAKE8MO0R IN H SHIRE. conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of tlie place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motion- less as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee. Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great house with which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner of it had lately pulled it down ; still I had a vague notion that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity with magnificence could not have been crushed all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it. The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to — an antiquity. I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood the great gates ? "What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the out-houses commence ? A few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so spacious. Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion. Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of destruction, at the plucking of every 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 store-room, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plot before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it about me — it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns : or a panel of the yellow-room. Why, every plank and panel of that house for me BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE S41 had magic in it. The tapestried bed-rooms — tapestry 80 much better than painting — not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots — at which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally — all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actaeon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana ; and the still more provoking, and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas. Then, that haunted room — in which old Mrs. Battle died — whereinto I have crept, but always in the day- time, with a passion of fear ; and a sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the past. — Sow shall they build it up again ? It w^as an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that traces of the splendour of past inmates were every^'here Apparent. Its furniture was still standing — even to the tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook and corner, w^ondered and worshipped everywhere. The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and sUence, and admiration. So strange a passion for the place pos- sessed me in those years, that, though there lay — I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion — half hid by trees what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me ; >i42 BIoAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive prospects — and those at no great distance from the house — I was told of such — ^what were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden ? — So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison ; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet — Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines ; Curl me about, ye gadding vines ; And oh so close your circles lace, That I may never leave this place ; But, lest your fetters prove too weak, Ere I your silken bondage break. Do you, O brambles, chain me too, And, courteous briars, nail me through. I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug fire-sides — the low-built roof — parlours ten feet by ten — frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home — ^these were the condition of my birth — the wholesome soil which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond; and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting accidents of a great fortune. To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors ; and the coatless antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay .a BIAKESMO0R IN H SHIRE. 243 vanity as these who do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea ? Is it trenchant to their swords ? can it be hacked off as a spur can ? or torn away like a tarnished garter ? What else were the families of the great to us ? what pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments ? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent elevation ? Or wherefore else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, Blakesmoor ! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon the mystic characters — thy emblematic supporters, with their prophetic "Resurgam" — till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Yery Gentility ? Thou wert first in my morning eyes ; and of nights hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee. This is the only true gentry by adoption ; the veritable change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion. Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not, I inquired not ; but its fading rags, and colours cobweb-stained, told that its subject was of two centuries back. And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas — feeding flocks — not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln — did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud ^gon ? repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped in hia life-time upon my poor pastoral progenitor. 3l2 ^ii BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIBE. If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. They had loug forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle ; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to soothe my vanity. I was the true descendant of those old W s ; and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places. Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one — and then another — would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to recognise the new relationship ; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity. That Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb — that hung next the great bay window — with the bright yellow H shire hair, and eye of watchet hue — so like my Alice ! — I am persuaded she was a true Elia — Mildred Elia, I take it. Mine too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars — stately busts in marble — ranged round ; of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder ; but the mild Gralba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality. Mine too thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or self-forgetful maiden — so common since, that bats have roosted in it. Mine too — whose else? — thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked southern wall ; the ampler pleasure- POOR RELATIONS. W5 garden, rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glitteriDg; 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, Grod or Goddess I wist not ; but child of Athens or old Eome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery. Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol-worship, walks and windings of Blakesmoor ! for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant places ? I sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there may be a hope — a germ to be revivified. POOR RELATIONS. A Poor Eolation — is the most irrelevant thing in natm-e, — a piece of impertinent correspondency, — an odious approximation, — a haunting conscience, — a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity, — an unwelcome remembrancer, — a perpetually recurring mortification, — a drain on your purse, a more intolerable dun upon your pride, — a drawback upon success, — a rebuke to your rising, — a stain in your blood, — a blot on your 'scutcheon, — ^^a rent in your garment, — a death's head at your ban- quet, — Agathocles' pot, — a Mordecai in your gate, a 246 POOR RELATIONS , Lazarus at your door, — a lion in your path, — a frog in your cliamber, — a fly in your ointment, — a mote in your eye, — a triumpli to your enemy, an apology to your friends, — the one thing not needful, — the hail in harvest, — the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet. He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you " That is Mr. ." A rap, between familiarity and respect ; that demands, and at the same time seems to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling and — embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and — draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time — when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have company — but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your 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 remem- bereth birth-days — and professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the turbot being small — yet suffereth himself to be importuned into a slice, against his first resolution. He sticketh by the port — yet will be prevailed upon to empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil enough, to him. The guests think " they have seen him before." Every one speculateth upon his 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 diifidence. With half the familiarity, he might pass for a casual dependant ; with more boldness, he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is POOR EELATIONS J147 too humble for a friend ; yet taketli on him more state than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent — yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, that your guests take him for one. He is asked to make one at the whist-table ; refuseth on the score of poverty, and — resents being left out. When the company break up, he proffereth to go for a coach — and lets the servant go. He recollects your grand- father; and will thrust in some mean and quite unimportant anecdote — of the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as "he is blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to institute what he calleth — favourable comparisons. With a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will inquire the price of your furniture ; and insults you with a special commendation of your window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape, but, after all, there was something more comfortable about the old tea-kettle — which you must remember. He dare say you must find a great convenience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet ; and did not know, till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the family. His memory is unseasonable; his compli- ments perverse ; his talk a trouble ; his stay perti- nacious ; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a comer, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two nuisances. There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is — a female Poor delation. 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 afiects to go 248 POOR RELATIONS. threadbare. His circumstances are better than folks would take them to be. You are fond of having a Character at your table, and truly he is one." But in the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without shuffling. "She is plainly related to the L s ; or what does she at their house ? " She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine times out of ten, at least, this is the case. — Her garb is something between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be repressed sometimes — aliquando swffiaminandus erat — but there is no raising her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped — after the gentle- men. Mr. requests the honour of taking wine with her; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former — because he does. She calls the servant Sir ; and insists on not troubling him to hold her plate. The housekeeper patronises her. The children's governess takes upon her to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for harpsichord. [Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the disadvantages, to which this chimerical notion of affinity constituting a claim to acquaintance^ may subject the spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt him and a lady with a great estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him " her son Dick." But she has where- withal 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 POOR RELATIONS. 349 temperament. T knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. PoorW was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much pride ; but its quality was inoffensive ; it was not of that sort Avhich hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a distance ; it only sought to ward off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried as far as it could go, without infringing upon that respect, which he would have every one else equally maintain for himself. He would have you to think alike with him on this topic. Many a quarrel have I had with him, when we were rather older boys, and our tallness made us more obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, because I would not thread the alleys and blind ways of the town with him to elude notice, when we have been out together on a holiday in the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. W went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness of a scholar's life, meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction, wrought in him a passionate devotion to the place, with a profound aversion from the society. The servitor's gown (worse than his school array) clung to him with Nessian venom. He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must have walked erect, and in which Hooker, in his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no discommendable vanity. In the depth of college shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from observation. He found shelter among books, which insult not ; and studies, that ask no questions of a youth's finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom cared for looking out beyond his domains. The healing influence of studious pursuits 250 POOR REIAriONS. was upon liim, to soothe and to abstract. He wae almost a healthy man ; when the waywardness of his fate broke out against him with a second and worse malignity. The father of W had hitherto exercised the humble profession of house-painter at N , near Oxford. A supposed interest with some of the heads of 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. Prom 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 unac- quainted with our universities, the distance between the gownsmen and the townsmen, as they are called — the trading part of the latter especially — is carried to an excess that would appear harsh and incredible. The temperament of W 's father was diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W was a little, busy, cringing tradesman, who, with his son upon his arm, would stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand, to any thing that wore the semblance of a gown — insensible to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose chamber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things could not last. W must change the air of Oxford, or be suffocated. He chose the former ; and let the sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as high as they can bear, censure the dereliction; he cannot estimate the struggle. I stood with W , the last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from the High-street to the back of *** college, where "W kept his rooms. He seemed thoughtful and more reconciled. I ventured to rally him — finding POOR RETATT0N8 251 liim 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 Lulte, and, like Satan, " knew his mounted sign — and fled." A letter on his father's table the next morning announced that he had accepted a commission in a regiment about to embark for Portugal. He was among the first who perished before the walls of St. Sebastian. I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently painful; but this theme of poor relationship is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic associations, that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending. The earliest impressions which I received on this matter, are certainly not attended with anything painful, or very humiliating, in the recalling. At my father's table (no very splendid one) was to be found, every Saturday, the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely appearance. His deportment was of the essence of gravity; his words few or none ; and I was not to make a noise in his presence. I had little inclination to have done so — for my cue was to admire in silence. A particular elbow-chair was appropriated to him, which was in no case to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which appeared on no other occasion, distinguished the days of his coming. I used to think him a prodigiously rich man. All I could make out of him was, that he and my father had been schoolfellows, a world ago, at Lincoln, and that he came from the 252 POOR RELATIONS. Mint. The Mint I knew to be a place where all the money was coined — and I thought he was the owner of all that money. Awful ideas of the Tower twined themselves about his presence. He seemed above human infirmities and passions. A sort of melancholy grandeur invested him. From some inexplicable doom I fancied him obliged to go about in an eternal suit of mourning ; a captive — a stately being, let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have I wondered at the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an habitual general respect which we all in common manifested towards him, would venture now and then to stand up against him in some argument, touching their youthful days. The houses of the ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers know) between the dwellers on the hill, and in the valley. This marked distinction formed an obvious division between the boys who lived above (however brought together in a common school) and the boys whose paternal residence was on the plain ; a sufficient cause of hostility in the code of these young Grotiuses. My father had been a leading Mountaineer ; and would still maintain the general superiority, in skill and hardihood, of the Above Boys (his own faction) over the Below Boys (so were they called), of which party his contemporary had been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes on this topic — the only one upon which the old gentleman was ever brought out — and bad blood bred; even sometimes almost to the recom- mencement (so I expected) of actual hostilities. But my father, who scorned to insist upon advantages, generally contrived to turn the conversation upon some adroit by-commendation of the old Minster ; in the general preference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, the dweller on the hiU, and POOR RELATIONS 263 the plain-born, could meet on a conciliating level, and lay down their less important differences. Once only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and I remem- bered with anguish the thought that came over me : " Perhaps he will never come here again." He had been pressed to take another plate of the viand, which I have already mentioned as the indispensable con- comitant of his visits. lie had refused with a resist- ance amounting to rigour — when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but who had something of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, that she would sometimes press civility out of season — uttered the following memorable application — " Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day." The old gentleman said nothing at the time — but he took occasion in the course of the evening, when some argument had intervened between them, to utter with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which chills me now as I write it — " Woman, you are super- annuated ! " John Billet did not survive long, after the digesting of this affront ; but he survived long enough to assure me that peace was actually restored ! and, if I remember aright, another pudding was discreetly substituted in the place of that which had occasioned the offence. He died at the Mint (anno 1781), where he had long held, what he accounted, a comfortable independence ; and with five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a penny, which were found in his escrutoire after his decease, left the world, blessing God that he had enough to bury him, and that he had never been obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was— a Poor Belation. 291 DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own — Lord Foppington, in the Eelapse. 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 improve- ment of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' specu- lations. 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 AVild 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 hooks which are no hooks — hihlia a-hihlia — I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket- Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large : the works of Hume, Gibbon, Bobertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally, all those volumes which " no gentleman's library should be without : " the Histories of Flavins Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. "With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding. I confess that it moves my spleen to see these DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. 255 things in hooks' clothing percbed upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuarj, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what " seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find — Adam Smith. To view a well- arranged assortment of block-headed Encyclopiedias (Ajiglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of russia, or morocco, Avhen a tithe of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering foHos ; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself again in the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils. To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desi- deratum of a volume. Magnificence comes after. This, when it can be afforded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would not dress a set of Magazines, for instance, in full suit. The disliabille, 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 them- selves 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 '* S56 DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING Tom Jones, or Vicar of "Wakefield ! How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight ! — of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, iU spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting con- tents ! Who would have them a whit less soiled ? AVhat better condition could we desire to see them in ? In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and all that class of perpetually self-reproductive volumes — Great Nature's Stereotypes — we see them individually perish with less regret, because we know the copies of them to be " eterne." But w^here a book is at once both good and rare — where the individual is almost the species, and when that perishes, We know not where is that Promethean torch That can its light relumine — such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his Duchess — no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel. Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever to be reprinted ; but old editions of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his prose works, Fuller — of whom we have reprints, yet the books themselves, though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we know, have not endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever will) in the national heart, so as to become stock jbooks — it is good to possess these in durable and costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. 257 Shakspeare. I rather prefer the common editions of Kowe and Tonson, without notes, and with platet^ which, being so execrably bad, serve as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text; and without pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are 80 much better than the Shakspeare gallery engravings^ which did. I have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his Plays, and I like those editions of him best, which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled. — On the contrary, I cannot read Beau- mont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions are painful to look at. I have no sympathy with them. If they were as much read as the current editions of the other poet, I should prefer them in that shape to the older one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding- sheet of the newest fashion to modem censure ? what hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever becoming popular ? — The wTctched Malone could not do worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him whitewash the painted ei^gj of old Shakspeare, 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 T had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire, I would have clapt both commentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets. I think I see them at their work — these sapient trouble-tombs. Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the 258 DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear — to mine, at least — than that of Milton or of Shakspeare ? It may be, that the latter are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley. Much depends upon wJien and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Pairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons ? Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears. Winter evenings — the world shut out — with less of ceremony the gentle Shakspeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale — These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud — to yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one — and it degenerates into an audience. Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness. A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some ot the Bank offices it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the clerks — who is the best scholar — to commence upon the Times, or the Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud, pro 1)0710 publico. With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In barber?' OEIACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. &59 Bhops 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 into an inn at night — ^having ordered your supper — what can be more delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left there time out of mind by the carelessness of some former guest — two or three numbers of the old Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing tete-a-tete pictures — " The Eoyal Lover and Lady G ;" "The Melting Platonic and the old Beau," — and such-like antiquated scandal? Would you exchange it — at that time, and in that place — for a better book ? Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much for the weightier kinds of reading — the Paradise Lost, or Com us, he could have read to him — but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a magazine, or a light pamphlet. I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading Candide. I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once detected — by a familiar damsel — reclined at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading Pamela. There was nothing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the L s 2 260 DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. 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. Grentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret. I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner' s-street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread- basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points. There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate without afiection — the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls — the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they " snatch a fearful joy." Martin B , in this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under STAQE ILLUSION. 361 no circumstance in his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has moralised upon thi© subject in two very touching but homely stanzas. I saw a boy with eager eye Open a book upon a stall, And read, as he'd devour it all ; Which when the stall-man did espy, Soon to the boy I heard him call, " You Sir, you never buy a book, Therefore in one you shall not look." The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh He wish'd he never had been taught to read, Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need. Of sufferings the poor have many, Which never can the rich annoy : I soon perceived another boy, Who look'd as if ho had not any Food, for that day at least — enjoy The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder. Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat: No wonder if he wish he ne'er had leam'd to eat STAGE ILLUSION. A PLA.T is said to be well or ill acted, in propor- tion to the scenical illusion produced. Whether such illusion can in any case be perfect, is not the question. The nearest approach to it, we are told, IS, when the actor appears wholly unconscious of the presence of spectators. In tragedy — in all which is to affect the feelings — this undivided attention to hi3 26a STAGE ILLUSION stage business seems indispensable. Yet it is, in fact, dispensed with every day by our cleverest tragedians ; and while these references to an audience, in the shape of rant or sentiment, are not too frequent or palpable, a sufficient quantity of illusion for the purposes of dramatic interest may be said to be produced in spite of them. But, tragedy apart, it may be inquired whether, in certain characters in comedy, especially those which are a little extravagant, or which involve some notion repugnant to the moral sense, it is not a proof of the highest skill in the comedian when, without absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a tacit understanding with them ; and makes them, unconsciously to themselves, a party in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the mode of doing this ; but we speak only of the great artists in the profession. The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. To see a coward done to the life upon a stage would produce anything but mirth. Yet we most of us remember Jack Bannister's cowards. Could anything be more agreeable, more pleasant? We loved the rogues. How was this effected but by the exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual sub- insinuation to us, the spectators, even in the extremity of the shaking fit, that he was not half such a coward as we took him for ? We saw all the common symp- toms of the malady upon him ; the quivering lip, the cowering knees, the teeth chattering; and could have sworn "that man was frightened." But we forgot all the while — or kept it almost a secret to ourselves — that he never once lost his self-possession ; that he let out by a thousand droll looks and gestures — meant at us^ and not at all supposed to be visible to his feUows STAGE ILLUSION. 26S in the scene, that his confidence in his own resources had never once deserted him. Was this a genuine picture of a coward ? or not rather a likeness, which the clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead of an original ; while we secretly connived at the delusion for the purpose of greater pleasure, than a more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility, help- lessness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to be concomitants of cowardice in real life, could have given us ? Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable on the stage, but because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub-reference, rather than direct appeal to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its odiousness, by seeming to engage our compassion for the insecure tenure by which he holds his money-bags and parchments ? By this subtle vent half of the hatefulness of the character — the self-closeness with which in real life it coils itself up from the sympathies of men — evaporates. The miser becomes sympa- thetic; i. e. is no genuine miser. Here again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very disagreeable reality. Spleen, irritability — the pitiable infirmities of old men, which produce only pain to behold in the realities, counterfeited upon a stage, divert not altogether for the comic appendages to them, but in part from an inner conviction that they are being acted before us ; that a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself. They please by being done under the life, or beside it ; not to the life. When Grattie 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 a reality ? 264 STAGE ILLUSIt . Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural. It was the case with a late actor. Nothing could be more earnest or true than the manner of Mr. Emery; this told excellently in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic cast. But when he carried the same rigid exclusiveness of attention to the stage business, and wilful blindness and oblivion of every- thing before the curtain into his comedy, it produced a harsh and dissonant effect. He was out of keeping with the rest of the Personce Dramatis. There was as little link between him and them, as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a third estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individually considered, his execution was masterly. But comedy is not this unbending thing ; for this reason, that the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to serious scenes. The degrees of credibility demanded to the two things, may be illustrated by the different sort of truth which we expect when a man tells us a mournful or a merry story. If we suspect the former of falsehood in any one tittle, we reject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a suspected imposition. But the teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth. 'Tis the same with dramatic illusion. We confess we love in comedy to see an audience naturalised behind the scenes, taken into the interest of the drama, welcomed as by-standers however. There is some- thing 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 soeak, to pit, box, and gallery. When an STAGE ILLUSION. 266 impertinent in tragedy, an Osric, for instance, breaks in upon the serious passions of the scene, we approve of the contempt with which he is treated. But when the pleasant impertinent of comedy, in a piece purely meant to give delight, and raise mirth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studious man with taking up his leisure, or making his house his home, the same sort of contempt expressed (however natural) would destroy the balance of delight in the spectators. To make the intrusion comic, the actor who plays the annoyed man must a little desert nature ; he must, in short, be thinking of the audience, and express only so much dissatisfaction and peevishness as is consistent with the pleasure of comedy. In other words, his per- plexity 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 ; bis real-life manner will destroy the whimsical and purely dramatic existence of the other character (which to render it comic demands an antagonist comicality on the part of the character opposed to it), and convert what was meant for mirth, rather than belief, into a downright piece of impertinence indeed, which would raise no diversion in us, but rather stir pain, to see inflicted in earnest upon any unworthy person. A very judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems to have fallen into an error of this sort in his playing with Mr. Wrench in the farce of Free and Easy. Many instances would be tedious ; these may suffice to show that comic acting at least does not always demand from the performer that strict abstraction from all reference to an audience which is exacted of it ; but that in some cases a sort of compromise may 266 TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. take place, and all tlie purposes of dramatic delight be attained by a judicious understanding, not too openly announced, between tbe ladies and gentlemen — on both sides of the curtain. TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. JoTOTJSEST of once embodied spirits, whither at length hast thou flown ? to what genial region are we permitted to conjecture that thou hast flitted ? Art thou sowing thy wild oats yet (the harvest time was still to come with thee) upon casual sands of Avemus? or art thou enacting Eovee (as we would gladlier think) by wandering Elysian streams ? This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics amongst us, was in truth anything but a prison to thee, as the vain Platonist dreams of this body to be no better than a county gaol, forsooth, or some house of durance vile, whereof the five senses are the fetters. Thou knewest better than to be in a hurry to cast off those gyves ; and had notice to quit, I fear, before thou wert quite ready to abandon this fleshy tenement. It was thy Pleasure-House, thy Palace of Dainty Devices : thy Louvre, or thy White- Hall. What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant now ? or when may we expect thy 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 tlie TO THK SHADE OF ELLISTON. 267 schoolmen 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 vision — a Limbo somewhere for Playees ? and that Up thither like aerial vapours fly Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame ? All the unaccomplished works of Authors' hands, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed, Damn'd upon earth, fleet thither — Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery. — There, by the neighbouring moon (by some not improperly supposed thy Eegent Planet upon earth), mayst thou not still be acting thy managerial pranks, great disembodied Lessee ? but Lessee still, and still a manager. In Green Rooms, impervious to mortal eye, the muse beholds thee wielding posthumous empire. Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump on earth) circle thee in endlessly, and still their song is Me on sinful Phantasy ! Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe of earth, Robert William Elliston ! for as yet we know not thy new name in heaven. It irks me to think, that, stript of thy regalities, thou shouldst ferry over, a poor forked shade, in crazy Stygian wherry. Methinks I hear the old boatman, paddling by the weedy wharf, with raucid voice, bawling " Sculls, Sculls :" to which, with waving hand, and majestic action, thou deignest do reply, other than in two curt monosyllables, " No : Oars.'* But the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king, and cobbler ; manager, and call-boy ; and, if haply your dates of life were con- 268 TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. terminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (0 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 denu- dations to the bone, before the surly Eerryman will admit you to set a foot within his battered lighter. Crowns, sceptres ; shield, sword, and truncheon ; thy own coronation robes (for thou hast brought the whole property-man's wardrobe with thee, enough to sink a navy) ; the judge's ermine ; the coxcomb's wig; the snuffbox a la Foppington — all must over- board, 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. Tou are just boat-weight ; pura et puta anima. But, bless me, how little you look ! So shall we all look — kings and keysars — stripped for the last voyage. But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu, pleasant, and thrice pleasant shade! with my parting thanks for many a heavy hour of life lightened by thy harmless extravaganzas, public or domestic. Bhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, leaving to his two brethren the heavy calendars — honest Ehadamanth, always partial to players, weighing their parti-coloured existence here upon earth, — making account of the few foibles, that may have shaded thy real life, as we call it, (though, substan- tially, scarcely less a vapour than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards of Drury,) as but of so many echoes, natural re-percussions, and results to be expected ELLI9T0NIANA. 269 from the assumed extravagancies of thy secondary or mock life, nightly upon a stage — after a lenient castigation, with rods lighter than of those Medusean ringlets, but just enough to "whip the offending Adam out of thee " shall courteously dismiss thee at the right hand gate — the o. p. side of Hades — that conducts to masques and merry-makings in the Theatre Eoyal of Proserpine. PLAUDITO, ET TALETO. ELLISTONIANA. Mt acquaintance with the pleasant creature, whose loss we all deplore, was but slight. My first introduction to E., which afterwards ripened into an acquaintance a little on this side of intimacy, was over a counter in the Leamington Spa Library, then newly entered upon by a branch of his family. E., whom nothing misbecame to auspicate, I suppose, the filial concern, and set it a-going with a lustre — was serving in person two damsels fair, who had come into the shop ostensibly to inquire for some new publication, but in reality to have a sight of the illustrious shopman, hoping some conference. With what an air did he reach down the volume, dispassion- ately giving his opinion of the worth of the work in question, and launching out into a dissertation on its comparative merits with those of certain publications of a similar stamp, its rivals ! his enchanted customers fairly hanging on his lips, subdued to their authoritar tive sentence. So have I seen a gentleman in comedy acting the shopman. So Lovelace sold his gloves in ^0 ELLISTONIANA King-street. I admired the histrionic art, by wliicli he contrived to carry clean away every notion of disgrace, from the occupation he had so generously submitted to ; and from that hour I judged him, with no after repentance, to be a person with whom it would be a felicity to be more acquainted. To descant upon his merits as a Comedian would be superfluous. With his blended private and profes- sional habits alone I have to do ; that harmonious fusion of the manners of the player into those of every- day life, which brought the stage boards into streets, and dining-parlours, and kept up the play when the play was ended. — "I like Wrench," a friend was saying to him one day, " because he is the same, natural, easy creature, on the stage, that he is off^ " My case exactly," retorted EUiston — with a charming forgetfulness, that the converse of a proposition does not always lead to the same conclusion — " I am the same person qf^ the stage that I am 07^." The inference, at first sight, seems identical ; but examine it a little, and it confesses only, that the one performer was never, and the other always, acting. And in truth this was the charm of Elliston's private deportment. You had 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, hecomes ipso Jhcto for that time a palace ; so where- ever EUiston w^alked, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre. He carried about with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and set up his portable playhouse at corners of streets, and in the market-places. Upon flintiest pavements he trod the boards still ; and if his theme chanced to be passionate, tlie green baize carpet of tragedy spontaneously rose beneath his feet. Now ELLISTONIANA. 271 this was heartj, and showed a love for his art. So Apelles always painted — in thought. So Gr. D. always poetises. I hate a lukewarm artist. I have known actors — and some of them of EUiston's own stamp — who shall have agreeably been amusing you in the part of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three hours of their dramatic existence ; but no sooner does the curtain fall with its leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems to seize on all their faculties. They emerge sour, morose persons, intolerable to their families, servants, &c. Another shall have been expanding your heart with generous deeds and sentiments, till it even beats with yearnings of universal sympathy ; you absolutely long to go home and do some good action. The play seems tedious, till you can get fairly out of the house, and realise your laudable intentions. At length the final bell rings, and this cordial representative of all that is amiable in human breasts steps forth — a miser. Elliston was more of a piece. Did he play Ranger ? and did E^nger fill the general bosom of the town with satisfaction? why should he not be Ranger, and difi*use the same cordial satisfaction among his private circles ? with his tem- perament, his animal spirits, his good-nature, his follies perchance, could he do better than identify himself with his impersonation ? Are we to like a pleasant rake, or coxcomb, on the stage, and give ourselves airs of aversion for the identical character, presented to us in actual life ? or what would the performer have gained by divesting himself of the impersonation ? Could the man Elliston have been essentially different from his part, even if he had avoided to reflect to us studiously, in private circles, the airy briskness, the forwardness, and 'scape-goat trickeries of his prototype ? 272 JflLLISTONIANA. *• But there is something not natural in this ever- lasting acting ; we want the real man." Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you cannot, or will not see, under some adven- titious trappings, which, nevertheless, sit not at all inconsistently upon him ? What if it is the nature of some men to be highly artificial? The fault is least reprehensible in players. Gibber was his own Foppington, with almost as much wit as Vanbrugh could add to it. "My conceit of his person," — it is Ben Jonson speaking of Lord Bacon, — "was never increased towards him by his place or honours. But I have, and do reverence him for the greatness, that was only proper to himself; in that he seemed to me ever one of the greatest men, that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that Heaven would give him strength ; for greatness he could not want." The quahty here commended was scarcely less con- spicuous in the subject of these idle reminiscences than in my Lord Verulam. Those who have imagined that an unexpected elevation to the direction of a great London Theatre affected the consequence of Elliston, or at all changed his nature, knew not the essential greatness of the man whom they disparage. It was my fortune to encounter him near St. Dunstan's Church (which, with its punctual giants, is now no more than dust and a shadow), on the morning of his election to that high ofiice. Grasping my hand with a look of significance, he only uttered, — " Have you heard the news ? " — then, with another look following up the blow, he subjoined, " I am the future Manager of Drury Lane Theatre." — Breathless as he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation or reply, but mutely stalked away, leaving me to chew upon his new-blown ELLISTONIANA 278 dignities at leisure. In fact, nothing could be said to it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was in his great style. But was he less great, (be witness, ye Powers of Equanimity, that supported in the ruins of Carthage the consular exile, and more recently transmuted, for a more illustrious exile, the barren constableship of Elba into an image of Imperial Erance,) 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, liis JSlba? He still played nightly upon the boards of Drury, but in parts, alas ! allotted to him, not magnificently distributed by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and magnificently sinking the sense of fallen material grandeur in the more liberal resentment of depreciations done to his more lofty intellectual pretensions, "Have you heard" (his customary exordium) — " have you heard," said he, " how they treat me ? they put me in comedy. ^^ Thought I — but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal interruption — " where could they have put you better? " Then, after a pause — " Where I formerly played E-omeo, I now play Mercutio," — and so again he stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses. , Vxt, Oi\/4 O, it was a rich scene, — ^but Sir A — ■ — , the best of story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as well as he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to it, — that I was a witness to, in the tarnished room (that had once been green) of that same little Olympic. There, after his deposition from Imperial Drury, he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was his "highest heaven;" himself 274 ELLISTONIANA. " Jove in his chair." There he sat in state, while before him, on complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment — how shall I describe her ? — one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the tails of choruses — a probationer for the town, in either of its senses — the pertest little drab — a dirty fringe and appendage of the lamps' smoke — who, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a " highly respect- able " audience, — had precipitately quitted her station on the boards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgust. " And how dare you," said her manager, — assuming a censorial severity, which would have crushed the confidence of a Yestris, and disarmed that beautiful Rebel herself of her professional caprices — I verily believe, he thought lier standing before him — " how dare you. Madam, withdraw yourself, without a notice, from your theatrical duties ? " "I was hissed, Sir." " And you have the presumption to decide upon the taste of the town? " "I don't know that. Sir, but I will never stand to be hissed," was the subjoinder of young Confidence — when gathering up his features into one significant mass of wonder, pity, and expostu- latory indignation — in a lesson never to have been lost upon a creature less forward than she who stood before him — his words were these : " They have hissed me.'" 'Twas the identical argument a fortiori, which the son of Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade him to take his destiny with a good grace. " I too am mortal." And it is to be believed that in both cases the rhetoric missed of its applica- tion, for want of a proper understanding with tiie faculties of the respective recipients. "Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was ELLISTONIANA. 976 30urteously conducting me over the benches of hia Surrey Theatre, the last retreat, and recess, of hia every-day waning grandeur. Those who knew Elliston, will know the mamner in which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a preliminary haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but one dish at dinner. " I too never e^i. 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 tender- nj>ss to the feelings of his scanty bat welcoming e^itertainer. Grent wert thou in thy life, Eobert William Elliston ard 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, con- necting the man with the boy, took thee back to thy latest exercise of imagination, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, under the roofs builded by the munificent and pious Colet. For thee the Pauline Muses weep. In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose, they shall celebrate thy praise. T 2 a7« THE OLD MARGATE HOT. I AM fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said so before) at one or other of the Universities. Next to these my choice would fix me at some woody spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley affords in abundance, 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 Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and are at this moment doing dreary penance at — Hastings ! — and all because we were happy many years ago for a brief week at Margate. That was our first sea-side experiment, and many circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea, and we had never been from home so long together in company. Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather-beaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough accommodations — ill exchanged for the foppery and fresh- water niceness of the modern steam-packet? To the winds and waves thou committedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling caldrons. With the gales of heaven thou wentest swimmingly; or, when it was their pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like patience. Thy course was natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed ; nor didst thou go poisoning the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke — a great sea chimera, chimneying THE OLD MAKGATE HOY. 277 and fumacing the deep; or liker to that fire-god parcbing up Scamaader. Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy reluctant responses (yet to the suppression of anything like contempt) to the raw questions, which we of the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of this or that strange naval implement ? 'Specially can I forget thee, thou happy medium, thou shade of refuge between us and them, conciliating interpreter of their skill to our simplicity, comfortable ambassador between sea and land ! — whose sailor-trousers did not more convincingly assure thee to be an adopted denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter apron over them, with thy neat-figured practice in thy culinary vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland nui'ture heretofore — a master cook of Eastcheap ? How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain: here, there, like another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations — not to assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that untried motion might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And when the o'er-washing billows drove us below deck (for it was far gone in October, and we had stiff and blowing weather), how did thy ofiScious minis- terings, 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 y78 THE OLD MARGATE HOT. made mirth and wonder abound as far as the Azores. He was a dark, Spanish-complexioned young man, remarkably handsome, with an officer-like assurance, and an insappressible volubility of assertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with then, or since. He was none of your hesitating, half story- tellers (a most painful description of mortals) who go on sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as they see you can swallow at a time — the nibbling pickpockets of your patience — but one who committed downright, daylight depredations upon his neighbour's faith. He did not stand shivering upon the brink, but was a hearty, thorough-paced liar, and plunged at once into the depths of your credulity. I partly believe, he made pretty sure of his company. Not many rich, not many wise, or learned, composed at that time the common stowage of a Margate packet. We were, I am afraid, a set of as unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies give it a worse name) as Alderman- bury, or "Watling-street, at that time of day could have supplied. There might be an exception or two among us, but I scorn to make any invidious dis- tinctions among such a jolly, companionable ship's company, as those were whom I sailed with. Some- thing too must be conceded to the Genius Loci. Had the confident fellow told us half the legends on land, which he favoured us with on the other element, I flatter myself the good sense of most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and place disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has obliterated from my memory much of his wild fablings ; and the rest would appear but dull, as written, and to be read on shore. He had been Aide-de-camp (among other rare THE OLD MARGATE HOY 87' 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 hhuself, along with his hearers, back to England, where we still found him in the confidence of great ladies. There was some story of a princess — Elizabeth, if I remember — having intrusted to his care an extra- ordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion — but, as I am not certain of the name or circumstance at this distance of time, I must leave it to the B-oyal daughters of England to settle the honour among themselves in private. I cannot call to mind half his pleasant wonders; but I perfectly remember, that in the course of his travels he had seen a phoenix; and he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar error, that there is but one of that species at a time, assuring us that they were not uncommon in some parts of Upper Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming fancies had transported us beyond the " ignorant present." But when (still hardying more and more in his triumphs over our simplicity) he went on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs of the Colossus at Ehodes, it really became necessary to make a stand. And here I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a youth, that had hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, who, from his recent reading, made bold to assure the gentleman, that there must be some mistake, as " the Colossus in question had been destroyed long since;" to whose opinion, deKvered with all modesty, our *so THE OlxD MARGATE HOT Jie was obliging enough to concede thus much, that *' the figure was indeed a little damaged." This was the only opposition he met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, for he proceeded with his fables, which the same youth appeared to swallow with still more complacency than ever, — confirmed, as it were, by the extreme candour of that concession. "With these prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the E-eculvers, which one of our own company (having been the voyage before) immediately recog- nising, 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 diflerent character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, and very patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile ; and, if he caught now and then some snatches of these wild legends, it was by accident, and they seemed not to concern him. The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one, being with us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring ; and when some of us pulled out our private stores — our cold meat and our salads — he produced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit he had laid in ; provision for the one or two days and nights, to which these vessels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer acquaintance with him, which he seemed neither to court nor decline, we learned that he was going to Margate, with the hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there for sea- bathing. His disease was a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over him. He expressed great hopes of a cure ; and when we asked him, whether he had any friends where he was going, he replied *' he had no friends." THE OLD MARGATE HOY S8l These pleasant, and some mournful passages with the first sight of the sea, co-operating with youth, and a sense of holidays, and out-of-door adventure, to me that had been pent up in populous cities for many months before, — have left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon. Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwelcome comparisons), if I endeavour to account for the dissatisfaction which I have heard so many persons confess to have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion), at the siglit of the sea for the first time ? I think the reason usually given — refer- ring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of them — scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the same person see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do not fill up that space, which the idea of them seemed to take up in his mind. But they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar 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 ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH ? I do HOt Say WO tcU 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 282 THE OLD MAKGATE HOT 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 its bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells, and the mariner For many a day, and many a dreadful night, Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape ; of fatal rocks, and the "stiU-vexed Bermoothes; " ot great whirlpools, and the water-spout ; of sunken ships, and sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths ; of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible on earth — Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal, Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral ; of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez ; of pearls, and shells ; of coral beds, and of enchanted isles ; of mermaids' grots — I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all these wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him with confused hints and shadows of all these ; and when the actual object opens first upou him, seen (in tame weather, too, most likely) from our unromantic coasts — a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him — what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment ? Or if he has come THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 283 to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening ? and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him, nothing comparable to the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily without dread or amaze- ment ? — Who, in similar circumstances, has not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir, Is this the mighty ocean ? is this alii I love town, or country ; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritions rocks ; which the amateur calls " verdure to the edge of the sea." I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland 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 Staftbrdshire. There is no home for me here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea- mews and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair, honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something — with a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, 284 THE OLD MARGATE HOY. it were something. T could abide to dwell with Meshech ; to assort with fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many of this latter occupation here. Their faces become the place. I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs nothing but the revenue, — an abstraction I never greatly cared about. I could go out with them in their mackarel boats, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfaction. I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beach, in endless progress and recur- rence, to watch their illicit countrymen — townsfolk or brethren perchance — whistling to the sheathing and unsheathing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their detestation of run hollands, and zeal for Old England. But it is the visitants from tow^n, that come here to say that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond-perch or a dace might be supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here, as for them. What can they want here ? if they had a true relish of the ocean, why have they brought all this land luggage with them? or why pitch their civilised tents in the desert ? What mean these scanty book-rooms — marine libraries as they entitle them — if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book " to read strange matter in ? " what are their foolish concert- rooms, if they come, as they would fain be thought to do, to Haten to the music of the waves ? 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, stock- THE OLD MARGATE HOY 5285 brokers ; but I have watched the better sort of them — now and then, an honest citizen (of the old stamp), in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters, to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to see it in their countenance. A day or two they go wandering on the shingles, picking up cockle-shells, and thinking them great things ; but, in a poor week, imagination slackens : they begin to discover that cockles produce no pearls, and then — then! — if I could interpret for the pretty creatures (I know they have not the courage to confess it themselves), how gladly would they exchange their sea-side rambles for a Sunday-walk on the green-sward of their accustomed Twickenham meadows ! I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants; who think they truly love the sea, with its wild usages, what would their feelings be, if some of the unsophisticated aborigines of this place, encouraged by their courteous questionings here, should venture, on the faith of such assured sympathy between them, to return the visit, and come up to see — London. I must imagine them with their fishing-taclde on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in Lothbury. What vehe- ment laughter would it not excite among The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard -street ! I am sure that no town-bred or inland-bom subjects can feel their true and natural nourishment at these sea-places. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half 80 good-natured as by the milder waters of mv natural 286 THE CONVALESCENT. river. I would exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow for ever about the banks of Thamesis. THE CONVALESCENT. A PEETTT severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of reflecting upon any topic foreign to itself. Expect no healthy conclu- sions from me this month, reader; I can oflfer you only sick men's dreams. And truly the whole state of sickness is such ; for what else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw day-light curtains about him ; and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the works which are going on under it ? To become insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse ? If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords it there ; what caprices he acts with- out control ! how king-like he sways his pillow — tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever- varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes sides oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length, then half-length, obliquely, trans- versely, head and feet quite across the bed ; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum. How siclaiess enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. TIIE CONVALESCENT 287 supreme selfisliness is inculcated upou him as his onlj" auty. 'Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not. A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of a 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 Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him understand, that things went cross-grained in the Court yesterday, and his friend is ruined. But the word "friend," and the word "ruin," disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of any- thing but how to get better. What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing consideration ! He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is wrapped in the callous hide of suffering ; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only. He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yeameth 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 I^Hleviations. ^^K He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by ^^Hl allowable fiction, into as many distinct individuals, I S88 THE CONVALESCENT. as he liath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates — as of a thing apart from him — upon his poor aching head, and that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to be removed without opening the very skull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated fingers. He compas-sionates himself all over ; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and tender heart. He is his own sympathiser ; and instinctively feels that none can so well perform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that announces his broths and his cordials. He likes it because it is so unmoved, and because he can pour forth his feverish ejaculations before it as unreservedly as to his bed-post. To the world's business he is dead. He under- stands not what the callings and occupations of mortals are ; only he has a glimmering conceit of some such thing, when the doctor makes his daily call : and even in the lines on that busy face he reads no multiplicity of patients, but solely conceives of himself as the sich man. To what other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully, for fear of rustling — is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same hour to-morrow. Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of life going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it is. He is not to know anything, not to think of anything. Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as upon veket, gently keep his ear awake, THE CONVALESCENT. 289 80 long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess at their errands. Exacter know- ledge would be a burthen to him : he can just endure the pressure of conjecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking " Who was it ? " He is flat- tered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him, but he cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general stillness, and awful liush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his sovereignty. To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is served — with the careless demeanour, the unceremonious goings in and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same attendants, when he is getting a little better — and you will confess, that from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the elbow- chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity, amounting to a deposition. How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature ! where is now the space, w^hich he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye? The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which w^as his presence chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fancies — how is it reduced to a common bed- room ! The trimness of the very bed has something petty and unmeaning about it. It is made every day. How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a service not to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when the patient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little u 290 THE CONVALESCENT. wliile out of it, to submit to tlie encroacliments of unwelcome neatness, and decencies which his shaken frame deprecated ; then to be lifted into it again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was 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 coverlid. Hushed are those mysterious sighs — those groans — so much more awful, while we knew not from w^hat caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved ; and PhUoctetes is become an ordinary personage. Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness survives in the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is he, too, changed with everything else ! Can this be he — this man of news — of chat — of anecdote — of 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 ! 'tis some old woman. Parewell 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-attention — the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon itself — world- thoughts excluded — the man a world unto himself — his own theatre — What a speck is he dwindled into ! In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb SANITY OF TKoE GENIUS. 291 of sickness, yet fur enough from the terra firm a of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting — an article. In Articulo Mortis, thouglit I; but it is something hard — and the quibble, wretched as it wap, relieved me. The summons, un- seasonable as it appeared, seemed to link me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I had lost siglit of ; a gentle call to activity, however trivial ; a whole- some weaning from that preposterous dream of self- absorption — the puffy state of sickness — in w4iich I confess to have lain so long, insensible to the maga- zines and monarchies, of the world alike ; to its laws, and to its literature. The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding ; the acres, which in imagination I had spread over — for the sick man swells in the sole con- templation of his single sufferings, till he becomes a Tityus to himself — are wasting to a span ; and for the giant of self-importance, which I was so lately, you have me once again in my natural pretensions — the lean and meagre figure of your insignificant Essayist. SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of dll the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of u 2 292 SANITY OF TRUE GENICS. anyone of them. "So strong a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend, " did Nature to him frame, As all things but his judgment overcame ; His judgment like the heavenly moon did show, Tempering that mighty sea below." The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends tlie empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay ; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos " and old night." Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a " human mind untuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that, — never letting the-i reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so, — he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward Elavius 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 subju- gates them to the law of her consistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, even wlien he appears most to betray and desert her. His SANITY OF TKDE GENIUS. 293 ideal tribes submit to policy ; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they wonder at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced ; that if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they Jose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their visions night-mares. They do not create, which implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active — for to be active is to call something into act and form— but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or something super-added to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all, and that these mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the treatment of subjects out of nature, or transcending it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonised : but even in the describing of real and every-day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature — show more of that incon- sequence, which has a natural alliance with frenzy, — ■ than a great genius in his " maddest fits," as AVithers 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, aud expelled for ever the innutritions phantoms, — whether he has not found his brain more "betossed," his memory 294 SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among the improbable events, the in- coherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no- characters, of some third-rate love-intrigue — where the persons shall be a Lord Grlendamour and a Miss Kivers, and the scene only alternate betw^een Bath and Bond-street — a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar ; the persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one ; an endless string of activities with out purpose, of purposes destitute of motive : — we meet phantoms in our known walks ; fantasgues 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 ire 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 explain, but in that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money Grod appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a w^orker of metals, and becomes the god of all the treasures of the world ; and has a daughter, Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for favours — with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream — that we sliould be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, ail at once, CAPTAIN JACKSON. 295 with the shiftiug mutations of the most rambling Jream, and our judgment yet all the time awake, ana neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy, — is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in the wildest seeming-aberrations. It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's conceptions in sleep ; it is, in some sort — but what a copy ! Let the most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his waking judgment. Tliat which appeared so shifting, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool examination shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them. CAPTAIN JACKSON. Among the deaths in our obituary for this month, I observe with concern "At his cottage on the Bath road. Captain Jackson." The name and attribution are common enougli ; but a feeling like reproacli persuades me, that this could have been no other in lact than my dear old friend, who some five-and- twenty years ago rented a tenement, which he was pleased to dignify with the appellation here used, about a mile from "Westbourn Green. Alack, how good men, and the good turns they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled but by the surprise of >296 CAPTAIN JACKSON. some such sad memento as that which now lies before us ! He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with a wife and two grown-up daughters, whom he maintained with the port and notions of gentlewomen upon that slender professional allowance. Comely girls they were too. And was I in danger of forgetting this man ? — his cheerful suppers — the noble tone of hospitality, when first you set your foot in the cottage — the anxious ministerings about you, where little or nothing (God knows) was to be ministered. — Althea's horn in a poor platter — the power of self-enchantment, by which, in liis magnificent wishes to entertain you, he multiplied his means to bounties. You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag — cold savings from the foregone meal — remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door contented. But in the copious w^ill — 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 cruse — the loaves and fishes ; carving could not lessen, nor helping diminish it — the stamina were left — the elemental bone still flourished, divested of its accidents. "Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the open-handed creature exclaim ; "while we have, let us not want," "here is plenty left ;" "want for nothing" — with many more such hospitable sayings, the spurs of appetite, and old concomitants of smoking boards, and feast-oppressed chargers. Then sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his wife's plate, or the daughters', he would convey the remanent rind CAPTAIN JACKSON. 297 into his own, with a merry quirk of "the nearer the bone," &c., and declaring that he universally preferred the outside. Por Ave had our table distinctions, you are to know, and some of us in a manner sate above the salt. None but his guest or guests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at night, the fragments were vere hospitihus sacra. But of one thing or another there was always enough, and leavings : only he would sometimes finish the remainder crust, to show that he wished no savings. AVine 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 meagre draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All the forms of good liquor were there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence ; tipsy upon words ; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Baccha- nalian 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 them m a science "so necessary to young women." But then — they could not sing "without the instrument." Sacred, and, by me, never-to-be- violated, secrets of Poverty ! Should I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your makeshift efforts of magnificence? 298 CAPTAIN JACKSON. Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant ; thrummed by a thousand ancestral thumbs ; dear, cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa ! Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin accompanier of her thinner warble ! A veil be spread over the dear delighted face of the well-deluded father, who now haply listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings of that slender image of a voice. 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 tlie cottage was a room, which tradition authen- ticated 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 discover, appeared ever to have met with the poem in question. But that was no matter. Grlover had written there, and the anecdote was pressed into the account of the family importance. It diffused a learned air through the apartment, the little side casement of which (the poet's study window), opening upon a superb view as far as the pretty spire ot 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? — 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 hospi- tality ; it was going over his grounds ; he was lord for the time of showing them, and you the implicit lookers-up to his magnificence. CAPT/r?? JACKSON. 299 He \ra3 a juggler, -wlio threw mists before your eyes — you had no time to detect his fallacies. He would say," Hand me the silver sugar tongs;" and before you could discover it was a single spoon, and that plated, he would disturb and captivate your imagination by a misnomer of "the urn" for a tea- kettle ; or by calling a homely bench a sofa. Eich 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 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 con- tinual 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 resisting 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 realised themselves ; for they both have married since, I am told, more than respectably. It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some subjects, or T should wish to convey bome 300 CAPTAIN JACKSON. notion of tlie 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 sec ; My love was clad in black velvet, And I myself in ciamasie. 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 Grlasgow came back upon his fancy, not as a humiliating contrast, but as a fair occasion for reverting to that one day's state. It seemed an "equipage etern" from which no power of fate or fortune, once mounted, had power thereafter to dislodge him. There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances. To bully and swagger away the sense of them before strangers, may not be always 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-deep in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Captain Jackson. 801 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN Sera tamen respcxit Libertas. Virgil. A Clerk I was iu London gav. 6'Kekfe. If peradventure, Eeader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life — thy shining youth — iu the irksome confinement of an oihce; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite ; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood ; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance. It is now six-and- thirty years since I took my seat at the desk in Mincing-lane. Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from the abundant playtime, and the frequently-intervening vacations of school days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours' a-day attendance at the counting-house. But time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content — doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages. It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sun- days, admirable as the institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the cheer- ful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers 30Q THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. — the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the gHttering 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 deliciously to idle over — JS'o busy faces to recreate the idle man who contemplates them ever passing by — the very face of business a charm by contrast to his temporary relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances — or half-happy at best — of emancipated 'prentices and little tradesfolks, with here and there a servant-maid that has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free hour ; and livelily express- ing 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 myself 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 glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me ? 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 illumi- THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 808 nation upon the darker side of my captivity. "Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom. Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted v^^ith a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business. This, during my latter years, had increased to such a degree, that it was visible in all the lines of my countenance. My healtli and my good spirits flagged. I had perpetually 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 imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years of age, and no prospect of eman- cipation presented itself. I had grown to my desk, as it were ; and the wood had entered into my soul. My fellows in the office wo aid sometimes rally mo 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 fifth 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 owu dismissal. A week passed in this manner, the most anxious one, I verily believe, in my whole life, when on the evening of the 12th of April, just as I was about quitting my desk to go home (it might be about B04 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. eight o'clock) I received an awful summons to attend the presence of the whole assembled firm in the formidable back parlour. I thought now my time is surely come, I have done for myself, I am going to be told that they have no longer occasion for me. L , I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was a little relief to me, — w^hen to my utter astonishment B , the eldest partner, began a formal harangue to me on the length of my services, my very meritorious conduct during the whole of the time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find out that ? I protest I never had the confidence to think as much) . He went on to descant on the expediency of retiring at a certain time of life (how my heart panted!), and asking me a few questions as to the amount of my own property, of which I have a little, ended with a proposal, to which his three partners nodded a grave assent, that I should accept from the house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my accustomed salary — a magnificent ofier! I do not know what I answered between surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted their proposal, and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I stam- mered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home — for ever. This noble benefit — grati- tude forbids me to conceal their names — I owe to the kindness of the most munificent firm in the world — the house of Boldero, Merryw^eather, Bosanquet, and Lacy. Esto perpetua ! For the first day or two I felt stunned, over- whelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity ; i was too confused to taste it sincerelv. I wandered about, THE SOPERANN GATED MAN 806 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' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity — ^for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have 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 Kfted up into a vast revenue ; I could see no end of my possessions ; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And here let me caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without weighing their own resources, to forego their cus- tomary employment 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 holidays, 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 holidays, 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 scribble (as now), just when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure : I let it come to me. I am like the man that's born, and haa his years come to him lu some green desert. "Years!" you will say; "what is this super- X I 306 THE SUPERANNUATED MAR. annuated simpleton calculating upon ? He has already told us he is past fifty." I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but - deduct out of them the hours 'w hich I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to 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 I 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 commencement of my freedom, and of which all traces are not yet gone, one was, that a vast tract of time had intervened since I quitted the Counting House. I could not conceive of it as an aftair of yesterday. The partners, and the clerks with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely associated — being suddenly removed from them — they seemed as dead to me. There is a fine passage, which may serve to illustrate this fancy, in a Tragedy by Sir Bobert Howard, speaking of a friend's death. • 'Twas but just now he 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 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 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 307 with which they received me could quite restore to me that pleasant familiarity, which I had heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked some of our old jokes, but methought they went off but faintly. My old desk ; the peg where I hung my hat were appro- priated to another. I knew it must be, but I could not take it kindly. D 1 take me, if I did not feel some remorse — beast, if I had not— at quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners of my toils for six- and-thirty years, that smoothed for me with their jokes and conundrums the ruggedness of my pro- fessional road. Had it been so rugged then, after all ? or was I a coward simply? Well, it is too late to repent ; and I also know that these suggestions are a common fallacy of the miud on such occasions. But my heart smote me. I had violently broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least not courteous. I shall be some time before I get quite reconciled to the separa- tion. Farewell, old cronies, yet not for long, for again and again I w-ill come among ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell, Ch , dry, sarcastic, and friendly ! Do , mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly ! PI , officious to do, and to volunteer, good services ! — and thou, thou dreary pile, fit mansion for a Gresham or a AVbittington of old, stately house of Merchants ; with tliy labyrinthine passages, and light-excluding, pent- up offices, where candles for one-half the year supplied the place of the sun's light ; unhealthy contributor to my weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell ! In thee remain, and not in the obscure collection cf some wandering bookseller, my "works!" There let them rest, as I do from my labours, piled on thy massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aquinas left, and full as useful! My mantle I bequeath among ye. X 2 808 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. A fortniglit has passed since the date of vaj first communication. At that period I was approaching to tranquillity, but had not reached it. I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was comparative only. Something of the first flutter w^as left; an unsettling sense of novelty ; the dazzle to w^eak eyes of unaccustomed light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline suddenly by some revolution returned upon the world. I am now as if I had never been other than my 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 years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a book-stall. Methinks I have been thirty years a collector. There is nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine picture in the morning. "Was it ever other- wise ? "What is become of Fish-street Hill ? "Where is Fenchurch-street ? Stones of old Mincing-lane, which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six- and-thirty years, to the footsteps of what toil-worn clerk are 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 ventured to compare the change in my condition to a passing into another world. Time stands still in a manner to me. I have lost all dis- tinction 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 feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations. The genius of each day was upon me TIIE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 309 distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appetite, spirits, &c. The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sate 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 holiday, 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 holiday. I have Time for everything. I can visit a sick friend. I can inter- rupt 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, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative. "Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed cotton mills ? 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 am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace, nor with any settled purpose. I walk 3J0 THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WKITING. about ; not to and from. They tell me, a certain cum dignitate 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. When I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the opera. Opus operatum 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 Shaftes- bury, and Sir William Temple, are models of the genteel style in writing. We should prefer saying — of the lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing can be more unlike, than the inflated finical rhapsodies of Shaftesbury and the plain natural chit-chat of Temple. The man of rank is 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 commoner in his elbow chair and undress. — What can be more pleasant than the way in which the retired statesman peeps out in his essays, penned by the latter in his delightful retreat at Shene ? They scent of Nimeguen, and the Hague. Scarce an authority is quoted under an ambassador. Don Erancisco de Melo, a " Portugal Envoy in England," tells him it was frequent in his country for men, spent with age and other decays, so as they could not hope for above a year or two of life, to ship themselves away in a Brazil fleet, and after their arrival there to go on a great length, sometimes of THK GEN'JEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 311 twenty or thirty years, or more, by the force of that vigour they recovered with that remove. " Whether such an efiect (Temple beautifully adds) might grow from the air, or the fruits of that climate, or by approaching nearer the sun, which is the fountain of light and heat, when their natural heat was so far decayed : or whether the piecing out of an old man's life were worth the pains ; I cannot tell : perhaps the play is not worth the caudle." Monsieur Pompone, " French Ambassador in his (Sir "William's) time at the Hague," certifies him, that in his life he had never heard of any man in France that arrived at a hundred years of age ; a limitation of life which the old gentleman imputes to the excellence of their climate, giving them such a liveliness of temper and humour, as disposes them to more pleasures of all kinds than in other countries ; and moralises upon the matter very sensibly. The " late Eobert 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 not so much (says Temple) that so many in one small county (Hertfordshire) 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 312 THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. him the use of hammocks in that complaint ; having been allured to sleep, while suifering under it himself, by the " constant motion or swinging of those airy- beds." Count Egmont, and the Ehinegrave who " was killed last summer before Maestricht," impart to him their experiences. But the rank of the writer is never more innocently disclosed, than where he takes for granted the com- pliments paid by foreigners to his fruit-trees. Eor the taste and perfection of what we esteem the best, he can truly say, that the French, who have eaten his peaches and grapes at Shene in no very ill year, have generally concluded that the last are as good as any they have eaten in France on this side Fontaine- bleau ; and the first as good as any they have eat in Gascony. Italians have agreed his white figs to be as good as any of that sort in Italy, which is the earlier kind of white fig there ; for in the later kind and the blue, we cannot come near the warm climates, no more than in the Frontignae or Muscat grape. His orange-trees, too, are as large as any he saw when he was young in France, except those of Fontaine- bleau ; or what he 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 sup- poses 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 garden pedantry with which he asserts that 'tis to little purpose to plant any of the best fruits, as peaches or grapes, hardly, he doubts, beyond Northamptonshire at the furthest northwards ; and praises the " Bishop of Munster at Cosevelt,'* for * THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. Slfli attempting nothing beyond clierriea 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 ease 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 w^hat he has chosen, which, I 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 em- ployments, I have passed five years without ever once going 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 quoties rejidt, ^c. 314 THE genjkei. stile in writino. " Me, •wlicn the cold Digentian stream revives, What does my friend believe I think or ask? Let me yet less possess, so I may live, Whate'er of life remains, unto myself. May 1 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 subordinate 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 would not be covetous, and wdth reason," he says, "if health could be purchased with gold ? 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 w^alk 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 night-cap." In a far better style, and more accordant with his own humour of plainness, are the concluding sen- tences of his " Discourse 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 modern 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 ij," he says, " that, whether the fierceness of the Gothic humours, or noise of their perpetual wars, THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WEITING. 316 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 Boman learning and empire, and have never since recovered the admiration and applauses that before attended them. Yet, such as they are amongst us, they must be confessed to be the softest and the sweetest, the most general and most innocent amuse- ments of common time and life. 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 reproaching their own temper, and bringing the goodness of their natures, 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 they cannot be quiet themselves, though nobody hurts them." " When all is done (he concludes), human life is at the 310 BARBARA S greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with, and humoured a little, to keep it quiet, till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." BAEBARA S- On" the noon of the 14th of NoTcmber, 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 remember) the Old Bath Theatre. All over the island it was the custom, and remains so I believe to this day, for the players to receive their weekly stipend on the Saturday. It was not much that Barbara had to claim. 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 application of her small earnings, had given an air of womanhood to her steps and to her behaviour. You would have taken her to have been at least five years older. Till latterly she had merely been employed in 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-consequence of the promoted Barbara. She had already drawn tears in young Arthur; had rallied Eichard with infantine BARBARA S 317 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 afterpiece to the life ; but as yet the " Children in the AVood " was not. Long after this little girl was gro\STi an aged woman, I have seen some of these small parts, each making two or three pages at most, copied out in the rudest hand of the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little more carefully and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of the establishment. But such as they w^ere, blotted and scrawled, as for a child's use, she kept them all; and in the zenith of her after reputation it was a delightful sight to behold them bound up in costliest morocco, each single — each small part making a look — with fine clasps, gilt- splashed, &c. She had conscientiously 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 afiecting 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 ? " I am in no hurry to begin my story — indeed I 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 possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by frequent repetition those feelings must become 818 BARBARA S- 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 5eZ/-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, wliich (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 disqualifications, which are often got over in that profession, did not prevent me at one time of life from adopting it. I have had the honour (I must ever call it) once to have been admitted to the tea-table of Miss Kelly. I have played at serious whist with Mr. Listen. I have chatted with ever good-humoured Mrs. Charles Kemble. I have con- versed as friend to friend witli her accomplished husband. I have been indulged with a classical con- ference with Macready; and with a sight of the Player-picture gallery, at Mr. Mathews's, when the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love of the old actors (whom he loves so much), went over it with me, supplying to his capital collection, what alone the ^^^>a BARBARA S . 3i9 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. I have supped with ; but I am growing a coxcomb. 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 infirmity 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 of 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 Barbara into his company. At the period I commenced with, her slender earnings were the sole support of the family, including two younger sisters. I must throw a veil over some mortifying 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*3 ,rt, where in her theatrical character she was to sup off a roast fowl (0 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 (0 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 820 BARBARA S- sobbed almost to breaking, till a flood of tears, which the well-fed spectators were totally unable to com- prehend, mercifully relieved her. This was the little starved, meritorious maid, who stood before old Ravenscroft, the treasurer, for her Saturday's payment. Bavenscroft 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 random, kept scarce any books, and summing up at the week's end, if he found himself a pound or so deficient, blest himself that it was no worse. Now Barbara's weekly stipend was a bare half guinea. — By mistake he popped into her hand — a whole one. Barbara tripped away. She was entirely unconscious at first of the mistake: God knows, B-avenscroft 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 w'as by nature a good child. 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 growTi-up people, men and women. She had never known temptation, or thought of preparing resistance against it. BARBAKA S . 321 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 glistened, and her mouth moistened. But then ilr. liavenscroft 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 iifty 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 indispensable 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 tliey 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 ! And that never-failing friend did step in — for at that moment a strength not her o\mi, I have heard her say, was revealed to her — a reason above reasoning — 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 S2*2 BARBARA S . had just quitted, and her hand in the old hand of Bavenscroft, who in silence took back the refunded treasure, and who had been sitting (good man) insensible to the lapse of minutes, which to her were anxious ages, and from that moment a deep peace fell upon her heart, and she knew the quality of honesty. A year or two's unrepining application to her profession brightened np 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. I have heard her say that it was a surprise, not much short of mortification to her, to see the coolness with which the old man pocketed the difference, which had caused her such mortal throes. This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, from the mouth of the late Mrs. Crawford,* then sixty-seven years of age (she died soon after) and to her struggles upon this childish occasion I have sometimes ventured to think her indebted for that power of rending the heart in the representation of conflicting emotions, for which in after years she was considered as little inferior (if at all so in the part of Lady Eandolph) even to Mrs. Siddons. * The maiden name of this lady was Street, -wbich she changed by successive marriages, for those of Dancer, Barry, and Crawford. Sh-. was Mrs. Crawford, a third time a widow, when I knew her. 59: THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. IK A UETTEB TO «t S ESQ. Though in some points of doctrine, and perhaps or discipline, I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that church which you have so worthily historijied, yet may the ill time never come to me, when with a chilled heart or a portion of irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-hallowed Edifices. Judge then of my mortification when, after attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with the tombs and antiquities there, I found myself excluded ; turned out like a dog, or some profane person, into the common street, with feelings not very congenial to the place, or to the solemn service which I had been listening to. It was a jar after that music. You had your education at Westminster; and loubtless 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. Tou 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 venerableness of your ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily lessened and called in question through these practices — to speak aloud your sense of them ; never to desist raismg your voice T 2 324 THE TOMBS IX T^HE ABBEY. 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 blameless 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 main- tained, 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 have been weighing anxiously prudence against sentiment) as when the gates stood open as those of the adjacent Park ; when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a shorter, or longer time, as that lasted ? Is the being shown over a place the same as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it ? In no part of our beloved Abbey now can a person find entrance (out of service time) under the sum of two shillings. The rich and the great will smile at the anticlimax, presumed to lie in these two short words. But you can tell them, Sir, how much SHE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 3Q5 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 metropolis, presented himself for admission to St. Paul's. At the same time a decently clothed man, with as decent a wife, and child, were bargaining for the same indulgence. The price was only two-penco each person. The poor but decent 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 impressively) ; instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces of money, these minims to their sight, may be to their humbler brethren. Shame these Sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the pretext, that an 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 ? Tt 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 school-boy. 326 AMICUS REDIVIVUS. fired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic Freedom — or the remote possibility of such a mischief occurring again, so easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within the walls, if the vergers are incom- petent to the duty — is it upon such wretched pre- tences that the people of England are made to pay a new Peter's Pence so long abrogated; or must content themselves with contemplating the ragged Exterior of their Cathedral ? The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate relic ? — AMICUS REDIVIVUS. Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas.'' I DO not know when I have experienced a stranger tiensation than on seeing my old friend Gr. D., who had been paying me a morning visit a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right-hand path by which he had entered — with staff in hand, and at Qoonday deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear. A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling enough ; but in the broad open daylight, to witness such an unreserved 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 AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 3*^7 apparitiou 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 participate in the honours of the rescue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging to communi- cate their advice as to the recovery ; prescribing variously the application, or non-application, of salt, &c., to the person of the patient. Life meantime was ebbing fast away, amidst the stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest, by a bright thought, 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 purpose. This was a moment of irresolution. MoNOCULUS — ^for so, in default of catching his true name, I choose to designate the medical gentleman who now appeared — is a grave, middle-aged person, who, without having studied at the college, or truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct, and lost for ever. He omitted no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of common surfeit suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too wilful application of the plant cannabis outwardly. But though he declinetb 328 AMICUS RFDIVIVDS not altogetlier these drier extinctions, his occupation tendeth, for the most part, to water-practice ; for the convenience of which, he hath judiciously fixed his quarters near the grand repository of the stream mentioned, where day and night, from his little watch- tower, at the Middleton's Head, he listeneth to detect the wrecks of drowned mortality — partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot — and partly, because the liquids which he useth to prescribe to himself, and his patients, on these distressing occasions, are ordinarily more conveniently to be found at these common hostelries than in the shops and phials of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is reported he can distinguish a plunge at a half furlong distance ; and can tell if it be casual or deliberate. He weareth a medal, suspended over a suit, originally of a sad brown, but which, by time and frequency of nightly divings, has been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His remedy — after a sufficient application of warm blankets, fric- tion, &c., is a simple tumbler or more, of the purest Cognac, with water, made as hot as the convalescent can bear it. Where he findeth, as in the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he condescendeth to be the taster ; and showeth, by his own example, the innocuous 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, Monocultjs is a humane, sensible man, wlio, for a slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is content to wear it out in the endeavour AMICUS REDIVIVUS S>i9 to gave the lives of others — his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty I could press a crown upon him, for the price of restoring the existence of such an invaluable creature to society as G. D. It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after notice of all the providential deli- verances he had experienced in the course of his long and innocent life Sitting up in my couch — my couch which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered, shall be honoured with costly valance, at some price, and henceforth be a state-bed at Colebrook, — he discoursed of marvellous escapes — by carelessness of nurses — by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling element, in infancy — by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs, in schoolboy frolics — by descent of tiles at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke — by studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance — by want, and 'he 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 retrospect of a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, acting upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tenderness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice ; and Shakspeare, in the latter crisis, ho- made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers. Waters oi Sir Hugh Middleton — what a spark you were like to have extinguished for ever! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now near two 330 AMICUS REDIVIVOS. centuries, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment washing away. Mockery 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 tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks? — Te have no swans — no JS'aiads — 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 ? 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 novity, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the Stream Dyeeian ? And could such spacious virtue find a grave Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a wave ? I protest, Greorge, you shall not venture out again — no, not by daylight — without a sufiicient pair of spectacles — in your musing moods especially. Tour absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can help it. Eie, 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. AMICUS KEDIVIVUS. 381 Selah." Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save. Next follow — a mournful procession — suicidal faces, saved against their will from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant 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 Gr. D. ? — in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern Grod of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharfs 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 80 lately) to their inexorable precincts. "When a soul knocks once, twice, at death's door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be considerable ; and the grim Peature, by modern science so often dis- possessed 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, llim Markland expected — him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter — him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upon earth,* with newest * Graium tantum vidit. 382 SIB PHJIJP SYDNEY'S SONNETS airs prepared to greet ; and patron of the gentle Christ's boy, — who should have been his patron through life — the mild Askew, with longing aspirations leaned foremost from his venerable ^sculapian 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. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. Sydney's Sonnets — I speak of the best of them — dre among the very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his compositions of a similar structure. They are in truth what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says of that work, (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application,) " vain and amatorious " enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be " full of worth and wit." They savour of the Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman. But Mill.on was a Courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and itill more a Courtier when he composed the Arcades. 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 emer- gency, 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 testify he could 8!« PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNEl-S :J33 speak his mind freely to Princes. The times did not call him to the scaffold. The Sonnets which we offcenest call to mind of Milton were the compositions of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written in the very hey-day of his blood. Tliey are stuck full of amorous fancies — 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-depreciating similitudes, as shadows of true amia- bilities in the Beloved. We must be Lovers — or at least the cooling touch of time, the circum prcscordia 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 fancies by. They may serve for the loves of Tibullus, or the dear Author of the Schoolmistress ; for passions that creep and whine in Elegies and Pastoral Ballads. I am sure Milton never loved at this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses {adLeonoram I mean) have rather erred on the farther side ; and that the poet came not much short of a religious indecorum, when he could thus apostrophise a singing-girl: — Aiicrclus unicuiqne buus (sic credite gcntes) Obtigit acthereis ales ab ordinibus. Quid miruni, Leonora, tibi si gloria major, Nam tua pisEsentem vox sonat ipsa Deuni ? Aut Deus, aut vacui certe mens tertia cceli, Per tua secreto guttura scrpit agens ; 334 SIR PHILIP SYDNEY S SONNETS- Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda Seusim immortali assuescere posse sono. Quod si cuncta quidem Deus est, per cunctaqoe fusus, In te una loquitur, c/etera mutus habet. This is loving in a strange fashion : and it requires some candour of construction (besides the slight darkening of a dead language) to cast a veil over the uglj appearance of something very like blasphemy in the last two verses. I think the Lover would have been staggered, if he had gone about to express the same thought in English. I am sure Sydney has no flights like this. His extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave to adopt the pale Dian into a lellowship with his mortal passions. I. With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies ; How silently ; and Mnith 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 o^ fellowship, O Moon, tell me, Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit ? Are beauties there as proud as here they be ? Do they above love to be loved, and yet Those lovers scorn, whom that love doth possess ? Do they call virtue there — ungratefulness ! The last line of this poem is a little obscured by transposition. He means, Do they call ungrateful- ness there a virtue ? II. Come, Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe, The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, Th« indifferent judge between the high and low ; sill pHrLip Sydney's sonnets. 335 With shield of proof shield me from out the preasc * Of those fierce darts despair at me doth tnrow ; maive in me those civil wars to cease : 1 will good tribute pay, if thou do so. Take thou of me sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; A rosy garland, and a 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 rist. 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. O 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 aris*- : They deem, and of their doom the rumour flies, That poison foul of bubbling Pride doth lie So m my swelling breast, that only I Fawn on myself, and others do despise ; Yet Pride, I think, doth not my soul posscie Which looks loo oft in his unflattering glass j But one woi-se fault — Ambition — I confess, That makes me oft my best friends overpass, • I'reoi. 336 SIR PHILIP Sydney's sonnets Unseen, iniheard — wliile Thought to highest place Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace. V. Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance, Guided so well that I obtained 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 I do take My blood from them, who did excel in this, Think Nature me a man of arms did make. How far they shot awry ! the true cause is, SfELLA looked on, and from her heavenly face Sen<^ 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 M-ith the people's shouts (I must confess) Youth, luck, and praise, even fill'd my veins with piiJ When Cupid having me (his slave) descried In Mars's livery, prancing in the press, '* What now, Sir Fool !" said he : " I would no le^s Look here, I say." I look'd, and Stella spied, Who hard by made a window send forth light. My heart then quaked, tlien dazzled were mine eyes . One hand forgot to rule, tli' other to fight ; Nor trumpet's sound I heard, nor friendly cries. My foo came on, and beat the air for me — Till that her blush made me my shame to «ee. VII. No mere, my dear, no more these counsels try ; O give mv passions leave to run their race ; Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace ; Let folk o'ercharged with brain against me cry : Let clouds bedim my face, break in mine eye • Let me no steps, but of lost labour, trace; TiCt all the earth with scorn recount my c.nsc— But do not will me from mv love to fly. SIB PHILIP Sydney's sonnets. 337 J do uot envy Aristotle's wit, Nor do aspire to Caesar's bleeding fume; Nor aught do care, though some above me s' i ; Nor hope, nor wisli, another course to fi-ame, But that which once may win thy cruel heart Thou art my wit, and thou my virtue art. vrii. 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 siigarM 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 nt&r Tiiose scarlet judges, threat'ning bloody pain ? heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face Anger invests with such a lovely grace, That anger's self I needs must kiss again. IX. 1 never drank of Aganippe well. Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit, And Muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell; Poor lay-man 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, I am no pick-purse of another's wit. How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please? Guess me the cause — what is it thus.'' — fye, no. Or so ? — much less. How then ? sure thus it is, My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella's kiss. X. Of all the kings that ever here did reign, Edward, named Fourth, as first in praise I name, Not for his fair outside, nor well-lined brain — Ahhough less gifts imp feathers oft on Fame. C 818 SIR PHILIP Sydney's sonnets Nor that he could, young-wise, wise-valiant, frame His sire's revenge, Join'd with a kingdom's gain; And, gain'4 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 hia crown rather than fail his love. XI. happy Thames, that didst my Stella bear, 1 saw tliyself, with many a smiling line Upon thy cheei ful 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, witli beauty so divine ilavish'd, stay'd not, till in her golden hair They did themselves (O sweetest prison) twine. And fain those yEol's youth there would their stay Have made; but, forced by nature still to fly. First did with puffing kiss those locks display. She, 80 dishevell'd, blush'd ; from window 1 With sight thereof cried out, O fair disgrace, Let honour's self to thee grant highest place ! XII. Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be ; And that my Muse, to some ears not unswect, Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet, More soft than to a chamber melody ; Now blessed You bear onward blessed Mc To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet. My Muse and I must you of duty greet With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully, Be you still fail-, 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. SIR PHILIP Sydney's sonnets. 339 Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the last sonnet, are my favourites. But the general beauty of them all is, that they are so perfectly characteristical. The spirit of " learning and of chivalry," — of which union, Spenser has entitled Sydney to have been tlie "president," — shines through them. I confess I can see nothing of the "jejune" or "frigid" in them; much less of the " stiff" ajid "cumbrous " — which I 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 " trampling horses' feet." They abound in felicitous phrases — O heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face — Sth Sonnet. Sweet pillows, sweetest bed; A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; A rosy garland, and a weary head. 2nd Son/net. That sweet enemy, — France — 5th Sonnet. But they are not rich in words only in vague and unlocalised 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 trans- cendent passion pen^ading 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 afiixes a date to them ; marks the when and where they were w ritten. I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the z2 340 SIR PHILIP Sydney's sonnets. 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. H. 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 conceived an accidental prejudice against. Milton wrote Sonnets, and was a king-hater ; and it was congenial perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a patriot. But I was unwilling to lose a fiiie idea from my mind. The noble images, passions, senti- ments, 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 thing 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. 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 jajr. SIR PHILIP SYDNEY S SONNETS ^-11 When he descended down the mount, His personage seemed most divine : A thousand graces one might count Upon his lovely cheerful eyne. To hear him speak, and sweetly sniiie, 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 hooks — I trow that count'nance cannot lye, Whose thoughts are legible in the eye. Above all others this is he, Which erst approved in his song, That love and honour might agree. And that pure love will do no wrong. Sweet saints, it is no sin or blame To love a man of virtuous name. Did never love so sweetly breathe In any mortal breast before : Did never Muse inspire beneath A Poet's brain with finer store. He wrote of Love with high conceit, And Beauty rear'd above her height. Or 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 tJiat thing wliich Lord Oxford termed him. 342 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. Dan Stitaet once told us, that lie 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 Post newspaper stood then just where it does now — we are carrying you back, Eeader, some thirty years or more — with its gilt-globe-topt 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 D. 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 w^orked for both these gentlemen. It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges ; to trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river, With holy reverence to approach the rocks, Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song. Eired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's- exploratory ramblings after the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember on one fine summer holyday (a "whole day's leave" we called it at Christ's hospital) sallying forth at rise of sun, not very well provisioned either for such an undertaking, to trace the current of the New Biver — Middletonian stream \ NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 313 — to its scaturient source, as we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell. Gallantly did we commence our solitary quest — for it was essential to the dignity of a ])iscoTERY, that no eye of schoolboy, save our own, should beam on the detection. By flowery spots, and verdant lanes skirting Hornsey, Hope trained us on in many a baffling turn ; endless, hopeless meanders, as it seemed ; or as if the jealous waters had dodged us, reluctant to have the humble spot of their nativity revealed ; till spent, and nigh famished, before set ot the same sun, we sate 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 as yet too arduous for our young shoulders. Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is the tracing of some mighty waters up to their shallow fontlet, than it is to a pleased and candid reader to go back to the inexperienced essays, the first callow flights in authorship, of some established name in literature ; from tlie Gnat which preluded to the ^neid, 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 remuneration m these cases. The chat of the day, scandal, but, above all, dress, furnished the material. The length of no paragraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant. A fashion o^ flesh, or rather ^mZ;-coloured hose for the ladies, luckily coming up at the juncture when wo were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to 344 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE TEARS AGO. S.'s Paper, establislied our reputation in that line. We were pronounced a " capital band." O 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 sitting 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 tumbling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something " not quite proper;" while, like a skilful posture-master, balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites, he keeps the line, from which a hair's-breadth deviation is destruction; hovering in the confines of light and darkness, or where "both seem either;" a hazy uncertain delicacy; Autolycus-like in the Play, still putting oft" his expectant auditory with " Whoop, do me no harm, good man!" But, above all, that conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff to remember, where, allusively to the flight of Astrsea — ultima Gcelestum terras reliquit — we pronounced — in reference to the stockings still — that Modesty, taking her eikal leave oe mortals, HER LAST Blush was visible in her ascent to THE Heavens by the tract oe the glowing INSTEP. This might be called the crowning conceit ; and was esteemed tolerable waiting in those days. But the fashion of jokes, with 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 reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female whims followed, but none methought so pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings. NEWSPAPERS THIRTY FIVE YEARS AGO. 345 Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buna daily, consecutively for a fortnight, would surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a loug 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 with anything rather than business, it follows, that the only time we could spare for this manufactory of jokes — our supplementary livelihood, that supplied us in every w^ant 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, it is that time of an hour, or an hour and a half's dui*ation, in which a man, whose occasions call him up so preposterously, has to wait for his breakfast. those head-aches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past five in summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, we were compelled to rise, having been perhaps not above four hours in bed — (for we were no go-to-beds with the lamb, though we anticipated the lark ofttimes in her rising — we like a parting cup at midnight, as all young men did before these efieminate times, and to have our friends about us — we were not constellated under Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless — we were none of your Basilian water- sponges, nor nad taken our degrees at Mount Ague — we were right toping C'»pulets, jolly companions, we and they) — 346 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. but to Lave 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 necessitated to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old hag of a domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical plea- sure in her announcement that it was " time to rise ;" and whose chappy knuckles we have often yearned to amputate, and string them up at our chamber door, to be a terror to all such unseasonable rest-breakers in future " Facil" and sweet, as Yirgil sings, had been the " descending" 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 gradus, superasque evadere ad auras — and to get up moreover to make jokes with malice prepended — there was the " labour," there the "work." JSTo Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny which this necessity exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day, (bating Sundays too,) why, it seems nothing! "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 Mahomet — Header, try it for once, only for one short twelve- month. It w'as 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 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 347 process of iugenuity could procure a scintillation. 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 Puhlic — 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 sprightlinesses for the Post, and writhing under the toil of what is called " easy writing," Bob Allen, our quondam schoolfellow, was tapping his impracticable brains in a like service for the " Oracle." Not that Eobert troubled himself much about wit. If his paragraphs had a sprightly air about them, it was sufficient. He carried this nonchalance so far at last, that a matter of intelligence, and that no very important one, was not seldom palmed upon his employers for a good jest ; for example sake — " Walking yesterday morning casually down Snow mil, who should we meet hut Mr. Deputy Humphreys ! we rejoice to add, that the worthy Deputy appeared to enjoy a good state of health. We do not ever remember 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 rencounter, which ho told with tears of satisfaction in his eyes, and chuckling at the anticipated eff"ects 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 3-lS NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. anything that morning than a Common Council Man. His services were shortly after dispensed with, on the plea that his paragraphs of late had been deficient in point. The one in question, it must be owned, had an air, in the opening especially, proper to awaken curiosity; and the sentiment, or moral, wears the aspect of humanity and good neighbourly feeling. But somehow the conclusion was not judged altogether to answer to the magnificent promise of the premises. "We traced our friend's pen afterwards in the " True Briton," the " Star," the " Traveller,"— from all which he was successively dismissed, the Proprietors having " no further occasion for his services." Nothing was easier than to detect him. "When wit failed, or topics ran low, there constantly appeared the following — " It is not generally known that the three Blue Balls at the Pawnirohers' shops are the ancient arms of Lovibardy. The Lombards were the first Quoney-hrokers in Europe.''^ Bob has done more to set the public right on this important point of blazonry, than the whole College of Heralds. The appointment of a regular wit has long ceased to be a part of the economy of a Morning Paper. Editors find their o"«ti jokes, or do as well without them. Parson Este, and Topham, brought up the set custom of "witty paragraphs" first in the " World." Boaden was a reigning paragraphist in his day, and succeeded poor Allen in the " Oracle." But, as we said, the fashion of jokes passes away ; and it would be difficult to discover in the biographer of Mrs. Siddons, any traces of that vivacity and fancy which charmed the whole town at the commencement of the present century. Even the prelusive delicacies of the present writer — the curt " Astrsean allusion " — would be thought pedantic and out of date, in these days. NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AOO. 349 From the ofEce of the Morning Post (for we maj as well exhaust our Newspaper Reminiscences at once) by change of property in the paper, we were transferred, mortifying exchange ! to the office of the Albion Newspaper, late Eackstrow's Museum, in Fleet-street. What a transition — from a handsome apartment, from rose- wood desks, and silver inkstands, to an office — no office, but a den rather, but just redeemed from the occupation of dead monsters, of which it seemed redolent — from the centre of loyalty and fashion, to a focus of vulgarity and sedition ! Here in murky closet, inadequate from its square contents to the receipt of the two bodies of Editor, and humble paragraph-maker, together at one time, sat in the discharge of his new editorial functions (the " Bigod" of Elia) the redoubted John Fenwick. F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left not many in the pockets of his friends whom he might 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 we know nothing, save that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of Wales. With this hopeless concern — for it had been sinking ever since its commencement, and could now reckon upon not more than a hundred subscribers — F. resolutely determined upon pulling down the government in the first instance, and making both our fortunes by way of corollary. For seven weeks and more did this infatuated democrat go about borrowing seven-shilling pieces, and lesser coin, to meet the daily demands of the Stamp office, which ^owed no credit to publications of that side in politics. An outcast from politer bread, we attached 850 NEWSPAPERS THIETY-FIVE TEARS AGO. our small talents to tlie forlorn fortunes of our friend. Our occupation now was to write treason. Eecollections of feelings — which were all that now remained from our first boyish heats kindled by the Trench E/Cvolution, w^hen, if we were misled, we erred in the company of some who are accounted very good men now — rather than any tendency at this time to E/cpublican doctrines — assisted us in assuming a style of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very under tone — to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to insinuate, rather than recommend, possible abdications. Blocks, axes, White- hall tribunals, were covered 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 wdth change of masters it is ever change of service. Already one paragraph, and another, as we learned afterwards from a gentleman at the Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, with a view of its being submitted at least to the attention of the proper Law Officers — when an unlucky, or rather lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J s M h, who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits of his apostacy, as F. pro- nounced it (it is hardly worth particularising), happening to offend the nice sense of Lord, or, as he tlien delighted to be called, Citizen Stanhope, deprived E. 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 somew^hat mortifying, neglect of the Crown Lawyers. It was about this time, or a little earlier, that Dan Stuart ON THF. PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 351 made that curious confession to us, that he had " never deliberately walked into an Exhibition at Somerset House in his life." BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter within the last fifty years, or since the humour of 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 points have impressed themselves so tyrannically, that he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a revelation ? Any that has imparted to his composi- tions, not merely so much truth as is enough to convey a story with clearness, but that individualising property, which should keep the subject so treated distinct in feature from every other subject, however similar, and to common apprehensions almost identical; 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 any way analogous to what Titian has effected, in that wonderful bringing together of two times in the "Ariadne," in the National G-allery? Precipitous, with his reeling satyr rout about him, re-peopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire- like flings himself at the Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the story — an artist, 352 ON THE PllODUCTIONS OF MODERN AET. and no ordinary one, miglit remain richly proud. Guido, in his harmonious version of it, saw no further. But from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and laid it contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new oifers 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 day-break to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian. Here are two points miraculously co-uniting ; fierce society, with the feeling of solitude still absolute ; noon-day revelations, with the accidents of the dull grey dawn unquenched and lingering ; the present Bacchus, with the 'past Ariadne; two stories, with double Time ; separate, and harmonising. Had the artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God ; still more, had she expressed a rapture at liis advent, where would have been the story of the mighty desolation 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 Baphael in tlie Vatican. It is the Presentation of the new-born Eve to Adam by the Almighty. A fairer mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of men since born. But these are matters subordinate to the conception of tlie situation, displayed in this extraordinary production. A tolerably modern artist would have been satisfied ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 353 with tempering certain raptures of connubial anti- cipation, with a suitable acknowledgment to the Giver of the blessing, in the countenance of the first bridegroom ; something like the divided attention of the child (Adam was here a child-man) between the given toy, and the mother who had just blest it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the first-sight view, the superficial. 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 human 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 Eaphael 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! — has had time to spring up, or to battle for indecorous mastery. — AVe 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 Hesperides. To do Mr. justice, he had painted a laudable orchard, with fitting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of which a Polypheme, by Poussin, is somjehow a fac-simile for the situation), looking over into the world shut out backwards, so that none but a " still-climbing Hercules " could hope 351 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. to catcli a peep at tlie admired Ternary of Eecluses. No conventual porter could keep his eyes better than this custos with the "lidless eyes." He not only sees that none do intrude into that privacy, but, as clear as daylight, that none but Hercules aut Diaholus by any manner of means can. So far all is well. "We have absolute solitude here or nowhere. Ah 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 comfort the irksomeness, has peopled their solitude with a bevy of fair attendants, maids of honour, or ladies of the bed-chamber, accord- ing to the approved etiquette at a court of the nineteenth century ; giving to the whole scene the air of a fete cliampetre, if we will but excuse the absence of the gentlemen. This is well, and AVatteauish. 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 designs, of a modern artist, have been urged as objections to the theory of our motto. They are of a character, we confess, to stagger it. His towered structures are of the highest order of the material sublime. Whether they were dreams, or transcripts of some elder workmanship — Assyrian ruins old — restored by this mighty artist, they satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled. On that side, the imagination of the artist halts, and appears defective. Let us examine ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODEIIN ART. 355 the point of the story in the " Belshazzar's Feast." We will introduce it by an apposite anecdote. The court historians of the day record, that at the first dinner given by the late King (then Prince Eegent) at the Pavilion, the following characteristic frolic was played off. The guests were select and admiring; the banquet profuse and admirable; the lights lustrous and oriental ; the eye was perfectly dazzled with the display of plate, among which the great gold salt-cellar, brought from the regalia in the Tower for this especial purpose, itself a tower ! stood conspicuous for its magnitude. And now the Eev. * * * *^ the then admired coui't Chaplain, was proceeding with the grace, when, at a signal given, the lights were suddenly overcast, and a huge transparency was discovered, in which glittered in gold letters — " Brighton — Earthqttake — Swallow-up- aliye ! " Imagine the confusion of the guests ; the Georges and garters, jewels, bracelets, moulted upon the occasion ! The fans dropped, and picked up the next morning by the sly court pages ! Mrs. Pitz-w^hat's-her-name 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 w^hole was nothing but a pantomime hoax^ got up by the ingenious Mr. Parley, of Covent Garden, from hints which his lioyal 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 t(? the appearance of the transparency in the anecdote aa2 356 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODEHN ART. The huddle, the flutter, the bustle, the escape, the alarm, and the mock alarm ; the prettinesses heightened bj consternation ; the courtier's fear which was flattery; and the lady's which was aflectation; all that we may conceive to have taken place in a mob of Brighton courtiers, sympathising 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 adequate exponent of a supernatural terror ? the way in which the finger of Grod, 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, eff'ortless, passive. "VYhen the spirit appeared before Eliphaz in the visions of the night, and the hair of bis 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 justify all this huddle of vulgar consternation. From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzai had made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. The golden and silver vessels are gorgeously enumerated, with the princes, the king's concubines, and his wives. Then follows — " In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace ; and the ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 357 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 otlierwise inferred, but that the appearance was solely- confined to the fancy of Belshazzar, that his single brain was troubled. Kot a word is spoken of its being seen by any else there present, not even by the queen herself, who merely undertakes for the inter- pretation 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 expressed — for it was said, " Thy kingdom is divided," — simultaneously 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 coun- tenance troubled, even so would the knees of every man in Babylon, and their countenances, as of an individual man, have been troubled; bowed, bent down, so would they have remained, stupor-fixed, with no thought of struggling with that inevitable judgment. 358 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART Not all that is optically possible to be seen, is to be shown in every picture. The eye delightedly dwells upon the brilliant individualities in a " Marriage at Cana," by Veronese, or Titian, to the very texture and colour of the wedding-garments, the ring glitter- ing 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 judgment," or in a "day of lesser horrors, yet divine," as at the impious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the actual eye of an agent or patient in the immediate scene would see, only in masses and indistinction. Not only the female attire and jewelry exposed to the critical eye of fashion, as minutely 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 sinners of Michael Angelo, — have no business in their great subjects. There was no leisure for them. By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got at their true conclusions ; by not showing the actual appearances, that is, all that was to be seen at any given moment by an indifferent eye, but only what the eye might be supposed to see in the doing or suffering of some portentous action. Suppose the moment of the swallowing up of Pompeii. There they were to be seen — houses, columns, architectural proportions, differences of public and private buildings, men and women at their standing occupations, the diversified thousand 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, wlien eight and hearing are a feeling only ? A thousand ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 359 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 Gribeon, 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 out- stretched arm, and the greater and lesser light obsequious ? 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 picture of this subject by the artist of the " Belshazzar's Feast " — no ignoble work either — the marshalling and landscape of the war is everything, the miracle sinks into an anecdote of the day ; and the eye may " dart through rank and file traverse" for some minutes, before it shall discover, among his armed followers, tvhich is Joshua! Not modern art alone, but ancient, where only it is to be found if anywhere, can be detected 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 Angersteiii'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 still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a distance, who h^ve not heard, or but 360 ON IHE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. faintly have been told of the passing miracle, admir- able as they are in design and hue — for it is a glorified work — do not respond adequately to the action — that the single figure of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater half of the interest ? IS'ow that there were not indifferent passers-by within actual scope of the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it had but famtly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to deny ; but would they see them ? or can the mind in the conception of it admit of such unconceming 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 presential miracle ? "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 recum- bent under wide-stretched oaks ? Disseat those woods, and place the same figure among fountains, and fall of pellucid water, and you have a — Naiad ! IS'ot so in a rough print we have seen after JuKo Eomano, we think — for it is long since — tliere, by no process, with mere change of scene, could the figure have reciprocated characters. Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautiful in convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural tree, co-twist- ing with its limbs her own,- till both seemed either — these, animated branches; those, disanimated mem- bers — yet the animal and vegetable lives sufiiciently kept distinct — Jiis Dryad lay — an approximation of two natures, which to conceive, it must be seen; analogous to, not the same with, the delicacies of vidian transformation s. ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 36 J To tlie lowest subjects, and, to a superficial com- prehension, the most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness. The large eye of guniua saw in the meanness of present objects their capa- bilities of treatment from their relations to some grand Past or Future. How has Eaphael — we must still linger about the Vatican — treated the humble craft of the ship-builder, in Ids "Building of the Ark?'* It is in that scriptural series, to which we have referred, and which, judging from some fine rough old graphic sketches of them which we possess, 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 modem art. As the Frenchman, of whom Coleridge's friend made the prophetic guess at Eome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of Michael Angelo collected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat and a Cornuto ; so from this subject, of mere mechanic promise, it would instinctively turn away, as from one incapable of investiture with any grandeur. The dock-yards at Woolwich would object derogatory associations. The depot at Chatham would be the mote and the beam in its intellectual eye. But not to the nautical pre- parations in the ship-yards of Civita Vecchia did Eaphael look for instructions, when he imagined the Building of the Vessel that was to be conservatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. In the intensity of the action, he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation. There is the Patriarch, in calm forethought, and with holy prescience, giving directions. And there are his agents — the solitary but suflicient Three — hewing, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of a Demiurgus; under some instinctive rather than technical guidance ! giant- 362 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART muscled ; every one a Hercules, or liker to those Vulcaniau Three, that in sounding caverns under Mongibello wrought in fire — Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyracmon. So work the M'orkmen that should repair a world ! Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with pictorial subjects. In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as nothing. Othello's colour — the infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaif — do they haunt us perpetually in the reading ? or are they obtruded upon our concep- tions one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration at the respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character ? But in a picture Othello is always a Blackamoor ; and the other only Plump Jack. Deeply corporealised, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality, 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 accompaniment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Eosinante. 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 rabble at the heels of his starved steed. We wish not to see tliat counterfeited, which we would not have wished to see in the reality. Conscious of the heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, on hearing that his withered person was passing, would have stepped over his threshold to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, and the " strange bed-fellows 0\ THE rnODUCTEONS OF MODERN ART. 363 which misery brings a man acquainted with ? " Shade of Cervantes ! who in thy Second Part could put into the mouth of thy Quixote those high aspirations of a super-chivalrous gallantry, where he replies to one of the shepherdesses, apprehensive that he would spoil their pretty net-works, and, inviting him to be a guest with them, in accents like these: "Truly, fairest Lady, Actaeon was not more astonished when he saw Diana bathing herself at the fountain, than I have been in beholding your beauty: I commend the manner of your pastime, and thank you for your kind offers ; and, if I 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, especially of the rank that your person shows you to be ; and if those nets, as they take up but a little piece of ground, should take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass through, rather than break them: and (he adds) that you may give credit to this my exag- geration, behold at least he that promiseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath come to your hearing." Illustrious Eomancer! were the " fine frenzies," which possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this Second Part, to be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving Men ? to be monstered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men ? "Was that pitiable infirmity, which in thy First Part misleads him, always from within^ into half-ludicrous, but more than half-com- passionable and admirable errors, not infliction enough from heaven, that men by studied artifices must devise and practise upon the humour, to inflame where they should soothe it ? Why, G-oneril would have blushed to practise upon the abdicated king at 364 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. tins rate, and the she-wolf Eegan not have endured to play the pranks upon his lied wits, which thou hast made thy Quixote suffer in Duchesses' halls, and at the hands of that unworthy nobleman.* In the First Adventures, even, it needed all the art of the most consummate artist in the Book way that the world hath yet seen, to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic attributes of the character with- out 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 Beading Public had received the fooleries of the man, more to their palates than the generosities of the master, in the sequel let his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the balance, and sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his contempo- raries. We know that in the present day the ICnight has fewer admirers than the Squire. Anticipating, what did actually happen to him — as afterwards it did to his scarce inferior follower, the Author of " Gruzman de Alfarache ' ' — that some less knowing liand 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 madness at second-hand — the contagion, caught from a stronger mind infected — that war between native cunning, and * Yet from this Second Part, our cried-iip pictures are mostly f elected ; the waiting- women with beards, &c. THE WEDDING 305 hereditary deference, with wliich he has hitherto accompanied his master — two for a pair almost — does he substitute a downriglit 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. THE WEDDING. I DO not know when I have be.eiL_b_etter pleased than at being invited last week to be. present at the wedding of a friend's daughter. I like to make one at these 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 youthfid disappoint- ments, in this point of a settlement. On these occasions I am sure to be in good-humour for a week or two after, and enjoy a reflected honey-moon. Being without a family, I am flattered with these temporary adoptions into a friend's family ; I feel a sort of cousin- hood, or uncleship, for the season ; I am inducted into degrees of affinity ; ajid, in the participated socialities of the little community, I lay dow^n for a brief while my solitary bachelorship. I carry this humour 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 cele- bration had been hitherto deferred, to an almost unreasonable state of suspense in the lovers, by some 8C6 THE WEDDING. 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 ot putting off the solemnity, 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 experiment. But a little wheedling on the part of his wife, who was by no means a party to these over- strained notions, joined to some serious expostulations on that of his friends, who, from the growing infirm- ities 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 daughter of my old friend. Admiral , having attained the ivomanly age of nineteen, was conducted to the church by her pleasant cousin J , who told some few years older. Before the youthful part of my female readers express their indignation at the abominable loss of time occasioned to the lovers by the preposterous notions of my old friend, they wall do well to consider the reluctance which a fond parent naturally feels at parting with his child. To this unwillingness, I believe, in most cases may be traced the difference of opinion on this point between child- and parent, what- ever pretences of interest or prudence may be held out to cover it. The hard-heartedness of fathers is a fine theme for romance writers, 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 THE WEDDING. 867 sometimes in to tear herself from the paternal stock, and commit herself to strange graftings ? The case is heightened where the lady, as in the present instance, happens to be an only child. I do not understand these matters experimentally, but I can make a shrewd guess at the wounded pride of a parent upon these occasions. It is no new observation, I believe, that a lover in most cases has no rival so much to be feared as the father. Certainly there is a jealousy in unparallel 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, liave a trembling foresight, which paints the incon- veniences (impossible to be conceived in the same degree by the other parent) of a life of forlorn celibacy, which the refusal of a tolerable match may entail upon their child. Mothers' instinct is a surer guide here, than the cold reasonings of a father on such a topic. To this instinct may be imputed, and by it alone may be excused, the unbeseeming artifices, by which some wives push on the matrimonial projects of their daughters, which the husband, however approving, shall entertain with comparative indifference. A little shamelessness on this head is pardonable. "With this explanation, forwardness becomes a grace, and maternal importunity receives the name of a virtue. — 35ut the parson stays, while I preposterously assume Lis office ; I am preaching, w^hile 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, 368 THE WEDDINa. who, it will be seen, is about to venture upon a change in her condition, at a mature and competent age, and not without the fullest approbation of all parties. I only deprecate very hasty marriages. It had been fixed that the ceremony should be gone through at an early hour, to give time for a little dejeune afterwards, to which a select party of friends had been invited. We were in church a little before the clock struck eight. Nothing could be more judicious or graceful than the dress of the bride-maids — the three charming Miss foresters — on this morning. To give the bride an opportunity of shining singly, they liad come habited all in green. I am ill at describing female apparel ; but while she stood at the altar in vestments white and candid as her thoughts, a sacrificial white- ness, they assisted in robes, such as might become Diana's nymphs — Foresters indeed — as such who had not yet come to the resolution of putting off cold virginity. These young maids, not being so blest as to have a mother living, I am told, keep single for tlieir father's sake, and live altogether so happy with their remaining parent, that the hearts of their lovers are ever broken with the prospect (so inauspicious to their hopes) of such uninterrupted and provoking home-comfort. Gallant girls ! each a victim worthy of Iphigenia ! I do not know what business I have to be present in solemn places. I cannct divest me of an unseason- able disposition to levity upon the most awful occasions. I was never cut out for a public functionary. Ceremony and I have lono^ 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 i THE WEDDING. 869 ludicrous occurred to me at this most senous 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 (»f 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 tlie ceremony, by one of the handsome Miss T 8, be accounted a solecism. She was pleased to say that she had never seen a gentleman before me give away a bride, in black. Now black has been my ordinary apparel so long — indeed I take it to be the proper costume of an author — ^the stage sanctions 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 mother, and some elderly ladies present (God bless them!) would have been ell content, if I had come in any other colour than at. But I got over the omen by a lucky apologue, hich I remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian .uthor, of all the birds being invited to the linnet's wedding, at which when all the rest came in their gayest feathers, the raven alone apologised for his cloak because " he had no other." This tolerably reconciled the elders. But with the young people all was merriment, and shaking of hands, and congratu- lations, and kissing away the bride's tears, and kissing 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 BB 370 THE WEDDING. Upon tlie bridegroom, tliat at this rate she would have "none left." My friend the Admiral was in fine wig and buckle on this occasion — a strildng 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 grey 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 hreahfast of three hours — if stores of cold fowls, tongues, hams, botargoes, dried fruits, wines, cordials, &c., can deserve so meagre an appellation — 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, w^ishing them a felicitous journey, let us return to the assembled guests. As when a •vren-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 Admiral 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 Ivuew whether to take their leaves or stay. "We seemed assembled upon a silly occasion. In this crisis, betwixt tarrying and departure, I must do justice to a foolish talent of mine, which had other- "vvise like to have brought me into disgrace in the fore- THE WELDING. 8^1 part of the day ; I mean a power, in any emergency, of thinking and giving vent to all manner of strange nonsense. In this awkward dilemma I found it sovereign. I rattled off some of my most excellent absurdities. All were willing to be relieved, at any expense of reason, from the pressure of the intolerable vacuum which had succeeded to the morning bustle. By this means I was fortunate in keeping together the better part of the company to a late hour ; and a rubber of whist (the Admiral's favourite game) with some rare strokes of chance as well as sldll, which came opportunely on his side — lengthened out till midnight — dismissed the old gentleman at last to his bed with comparatively easy spirits. I have been at my old friend's various times since. I do not know a visiting place where every guest is so perfectly at his ease ; nowhere, where harmony is so strangely the 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 ; visitors huddled up in corners ; chairs unsymmetrised ; candles disposed by chance; meals at odd hours, tea and supper at once, or the latter preceding the former; the host and the guest con- ferring, yet each upon a different topic, each understanding himself, neither trying to understand oj bear the other; draughts and politics, chess nnd 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 concord ia discors you shall meet with. Tet somehow the old house is not quite what it should be. The Admiral still enjoys his pipe, but he has no Miss Emilv to fill it for him. The' BB 2 372 REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEARS COMING OF AGE instrument stands where it stood, but she is gone, whose delicate touch could sometimes for a short minute appease the warring elements. He has learnt, as Marvel expresses it, to "make his destiny his choice." He bears bravely up, but he does not come out with his flashes of wild wit so thick as formerly. His sea songs seldomer escape him. His wife, too, looks as if she wanted some younger body to scold and set to rights. We all miss a junior presence. It is wonderful how one young maiden freshens up, and keeps green, the paternal roof. Old and young seem to have an interest in her, so long as she is not absolutely disposed of. The youthfuhiess of the house is flown. Emily is married. REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAK'S COMING OF AGE. The Old Year being dead, and the New Year comiug 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 W'hich 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 providing mirth and good cheer for mortals below ; and it was time they should have a taste of their own bounty. It was stiffly debated among them whether the Fasts should be admitted. Some said, the appearance of such lean, starved guests, with their mortified faces, would pervert the* ends of the meeting. But the objection was over- ruled by Christmas 2)«y, who had a design upon Ash REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR's COMING OF AGE. 373 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 requested to come with their lanterns, to light the gentlefolks home at night. 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 side-board for the Twenty-Ninth of Fehruary. I should have told you, that cards of invitation had been issued. The carriers were the Hours; twelve little, merry, whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire to see, that went all round, and found out the persons invited well enough, with the exception of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such 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 somewhat scornful. Yet some said. Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for she came in a tiffany suit, white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake, all royal, glittering, and Mpiphanous. 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 sun-shiny 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 Day in the year, to erect a 374 BEJOICINGS UPON THE Nf:W YEAR's COMING OF AGJC sclieme upon — good Days, bad Days were so shuffieci together, to the confounding of all sober horoscope". He had stuck the Twenty-First of June next to the Twenty- Second of December, and the former looked like a Maypole siding a marrow-bone. Asli Wednesday got wedged in (as was concerted) betwixt Christmas and Lord Mayor'' s Days. Lord ! how he laid about him ! Nothing but barons of beef and turkeys would go down with him — to the great greasing and detriment of his new sackcloth bib and tucker. And still Christmas Day was at his elbow, plying him with the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and hiccupp'd, and protested there was no faith in dried Hng, 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 he dipt his fist into the middle of the great custard that stood before his left-hand neighbour, and daubed his hungry beard all over with it, till you w^ould have taken him for the Last Day in December, it so hung in icicles. At another part of the table. Shrove Tuesday was helping the Second of September to some cock broth, — which courtesy the latter returned with the delicate thigh of a hen pheasant — so there was no love lost ibr that matter. The Last of Lent was spunging upon Shrovetides pancakes ; which April Fool per- ceiving, told him he did well, for pancakes were proper to a good fry-day. In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of January, who, it seems, being a sour puritanic 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 incon- tinently ; but as it lay in the dish March Many weathers, REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR's COMING OF AGE 075 who is a very fine lady, and subject to the meagrims, screamed out there was a " human head in the platter," and raved about Herodias' daughter to that degree, that the obnoxious viand was obliged to be removed ; nor did she recover her stomach till she had gulped do^Ti a Restorative, confected of Oah 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 dispute arose between the Twelfth of August (a zealous old "Whig gentlewoman), and the Twenty- 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 better than a Icept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, while she (the legitimate Biethdat) had scarcely a rag, &c. A^ril 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 slyly rounded the first lady in the ear, that an action might lie against the Crown for hi-geny. It beginning to grow a little duskish. Candlemas lustily bawled out for lights, which was opposed by all the Bays, who protested against burning daylight. Then fair water was handed round in silver ewers, and the same lady w-as 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 * King George IV. 876 REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW TEAr's COMING OF AGE. rest of the company) with garlands. This being done, the lordly ]^ew Year from the upper end of the table, in a cordial but somewhat lofty tone, returned thanks. He felt proud on an occasion of meeting so many of his worthy father's late tenants, promised to improve their farms, and at the same time to abate (if anything was found unreasonable) in their rents. At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days involuntarily looked at each other, and smiled ; April Fool whistled to an old tune of " New Brooms ; " and a surly old rebel at the further end of the table (who was discovered to be no other than the Fifth of Novemher') 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 better." Which rudeness of his, the guests resent- ing, unanimously voted his expulsion ; and the male- eontent was thrust out neck and heels into the cellar, as the properest place for such a houtefeu and fire- brand as he had shown himself to be. Order being restored — the young lord (who, to say truth, had been a little ruffled, 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 Twenty-Ninth of February, that had sate all this while mumehance at the side-board, begged to couple his health with that of the good company before him — which he drank accordingly ; observing, that he had not seen his honest face any time these four years — with a number of endearing expressions besides. At the same time, removing the solitary Day from the forlorn seat which had been assigned him, he stationed him at his own board, somewhere between the Qreeh Calends and Latter Lammas. REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW TEAR's COMING OF AGE. 377 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, w^hich Christmas Day had taught him for the nonce ; and was followed by the latter, who gave " Miserere " in fine style, hitting off the mumping notes and lengthened drawl of Old Mortifi- cation with infinite humour. April Fool swore they had exchanged 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. Shrove tide, Lord Mayor's I>ay, 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 ; for they had all the creditors in the world dogging their heels. But April Fool gave it in favour of the Forty Days before Faster ; because the debtors in all cases out-numbered the creditors, and they kept lent all the year. All this while Valentine's Day kept courting pretty May^ who sate next him, slipping amorous hillets-doiuc under the table, till the Dog Days (who are naturally of a warm constitution) 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 halloo'd them on; and as fast as their indignation cooled, those mad wags, the 378 EEJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR's COMING OF AGE. 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 diyerted the conversation w^th a tedions 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 Almanack. Then she rambled on to the Days that were gone, the good old Days, and so to the Days before the Flood — which plainly showed her old head to be little better than crazed and doited. Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks and great-coats, and took their leaves. Lord Mayor's Day went off in a Mist, as usual ; Shortest Day in a deep black Pog, that wrapt the little gentleman all round like a hedge-hog. Two Vigils — so watchmen are called in heaven — saw Christmas Day safe home — they had been used to the business before. Another Vigil — a stout, sturdy, patrol e, called the Eve of St. Christopher — seeing Ash Wednesday in a condition little better than he should be — e'en whipt him over his shoulders, pick-a-back fashion, and Old Mortifica- tion 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 departure together in one of the prettiest silvery twilights a Lover's Day could wish to set in. MT9 OLD CHINA. I 1 HATE an almost feminine partiality for old chiua. Wlien 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 conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination. I had no repugnance then — why should I now have ? — to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured gro- tesques, that under the notion of men and women, ^oat about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspective — a china tea-cup. I like to see my old friends — whom distance cannot diminish — figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra^firma still — for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, — which the 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 possible, 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 tea-cups — 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 fas 880 OLD CHINA. angles go in our world) must infallibly land lier in the midst of a flowery mead — a furlong off" on the other side of the same strange stream ! Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of their world — see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays. Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive — so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay. I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson, (which we are old-fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon) some of these speciosa 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 remarking, how favourable circumstances had been to us of late years, that we could afibrd to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort — when a passing sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of my companion. I am quick at detecting these summer clouds in Bridget. "I wish the good old times would come again," she said, " 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, ! 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. OLD CHINA. 881 " Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so thread-bare — 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 toojate — and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty trea- sures — 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 daybreak — 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 finical, give you half the honest vanity, with which you Haunted 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 piu-chases now. " When you came home with twenty apologies for . laying out a less number of shillings upon that print alter Lionardo, which we christened the ' Lady Blanch J ' when you looked at the purchase, and 382 OLD CHINA. thought of the money — and thought of the money, and looked again at the picture — was there no plea- sure in being a poor man ? Now, you have nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilder- ness 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 deposit our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad — and how you would pry about at noon-tide for some decent house, where we might go in and produce our store — only paying for the ale that you must call for — and speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a 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 fishing — and some- times they would prove obliging enough, and some- times they would look grudgingly upon us — ^but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall ? Now — when we go out a day's pleasur- ing, which is seldom moreover, we ride part of the way — and go into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense — which after all, never has half the relish of those chance country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a precarious welcome. " You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you remember where it was we used to sit, when we saw the Battle of Hexham, and the Surrender of Calais, and Banuister and JMra. Bland in the Children in the Wood — when we squeezed out our shillings a-piece to sit three or four OLD CHINA. 383 times in a season in the one-shilling gallery — where you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me — and more strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me — and the pleasure was the better for a little shame — and when the curtain drew up, what cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered it where we were sitting, when oiip thoughts were with Eosalind 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 general readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on, on the stage — because a word lost 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 generally 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 incon- venient staircases was bad enough, — but there was still a law of civility 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, afterwards ! 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 Bupper, a treat. Wliat treat can we have now ? If 384 OLD CHINA. we were to treat ourselves now — that is, to have dainties a little above our means, it would be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat — when two people living together, as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury, which both like ; while each apologises, and is willing to take both halves of the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making much of themselves, in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make much of others. But now — what I mean by the word — ^we never do make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons as we were, just above poverty. " I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet, — and much ado we used to have every Thirty- first night of December to account for our exceedings — many a long face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out how we had spent so much — or that we had not spent so much — or that it was impossible we should spend so much next year — and still we found our slender capital decreasing — but then, — betwixt ways, and projects, and compromises of one sort or another, aud 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 cheerful Mr. Cotton, as you called him), we used to welcome in the ' commg guest.' Now we have uo reckoning at all at the end of the old year — no OLD CHINA 385 flattering promises about the new year doing better for lis." Bridget is so sparing of ber speech on most occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt 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 tlie 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 supplementary 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 coidd you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fire-side, sitting on this luxurious sofa — be once more struggling up those inconvenient staircases, piislied about, and squeezed, and elbowed by the pooi-cst 386 THE CHILD aNGEL ) A DREA^d. rabble of poor gallery scramblers — could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours — and the delicious Thanh Ood, loe are safe, which always followed when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us — I know not the fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or the great Jew E/ is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty insipid half Madona-ish chit of a lady in that very blue summer house." THE CHILD ANGEL; A DREAM. I chajS"ced upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a dream the other night, that you shall hear of. I had been reading the " Loves of the Angels," and went to bed 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 presumption. Methought — what wild things dreams are ! — I was present — at what would you imagine ? — at an angel's gossiping. THE CHILD angel; A DKEAM. 387 "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. Sun-threads — filmy beams — ran through the celestial napery of what seemed its princely cradle. All the \\-inged 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 — the inexplicable simpleness of dreams! bowls of that cheering 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 presentf 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 instruments on earth speak oftentimes, muffled ; so to accommodate their sound the better to the weak ears of the imperfect-born. And, with the noise of those subdued soundings, the Angelet sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of pinions — but forth- with 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 c c 2 388 THE CHILD anotEl; a dream. a day — continually its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but wanting the perfect angelic nutriment, anon was shorn of its aspiring, and fell fluttering— still caught by angel hands — for oyer to put forth shoots, and to fall fluttering, because its birth was not of the unmixed vigour of heayen. And a name was giyen to the Babe Angel, and it was to be called Ge-JIrania, because its production was of earth and heayen. And it could not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into immortal palaces : but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human imbecility ; and it went with a lame gait ; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness. Then pity first sprang up in angelic bosoms; and yearnings (like the human) touched them at the sight of the immortal lame one. And with pain did then first those Intuitiye 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 intuitiye notices they could not repel (by reason that their nature is, to know all things at once), the half-heayenly novice, by the better part of its nature, aspired to receive into its understanding ; so that Humility and A spiration went on even-paced in the instruction of the glorious Amphibium. But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross to breathe the air of that super-subtile region, its portion was, and is, to be a child for ever. And because the human part of it might not press into the heart and inwards of the palace of its adoption, those full-natured angels tended it by turns in the THE CHILD angel; A DREAM. 389 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 nothing), and still it kept, and is to keep, perpetual childhood, and is the Tutelar Grenius 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 correspondency 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 beauty of the terrestrial. And this correspondency 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-irrevocable law), appeared for a brief instant in his station, and, depositing a wondrous Birth, straightway disappeared, and the palaces knew him no more. And this charge was the self-same Babe, who goeth lame and lovely — but Adah sleepeth by the river Pison. 390 CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. Dehoetation s 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, unfor- tunately 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 teU lies. Alas! the hand to pilfer, and the tongue to bear false witness, have no constitutional tendency. These are actions indifferent 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 con- traries. But when a man has commenced sot O pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout nerves and a strong head, whose liver is happily untouched, and ere thy gorge riseth at the name which I have written, first learn what the thing is; how much of compassion, how much of human allowance, thou mayest virtuously mingle with thy disapprobation. Trample not on the ruins of a man. Exact not, under so terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation from a state of death almost as real as that from which Lazarus rose not but by a miracle. Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKAKD. 3 Hi But wliat if the beginning be dreadful, tlie first steps not like climbing a mountain but going through fire ? what if the whole system must undergo a change violent as that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects ? what if a process 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, whicli have induced no constitutional necessity, no engage- ment of the whole victim, body and soul ? 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 enchant- ments, 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 getting rid of the present sensation at any rate, I have known him to scream out, to cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife within him. Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself? I have no puling apology to make to mankind. 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 woe that I have brought upon it. I believe that there are constitutions, robust heads and iron insides, whom scarce any excesses can hurt ; whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at all events whom wine, taken in ever so plentiful a measure, can do no worse injury to than just to muddle their 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 ofi" foiled from the contest, would fain persuade them that such agonistic exercises are dangerous. It 392 CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKAHD is to a very different description of persons I speak. It is to the weak, the nervous ; to those who feel the want of some artificial aid to raise their spirits in society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around them without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the convivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves for term of life. Twelve years ago I had completed my six-and- twentieth year. I had lived from the period of leaving school to that time pretty much in solitude. My companions were chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of my own book-loving and sober stamp. I rose early, went to bed betimes, and the faculties which Grod 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 diflerent 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 certainly possessed a larger share than my companions. Encouraged by their applause, I set up for a professed joker ! I, who of all men am least fitted for such an occupation, having, in addition to the greatest difficulty which I experience at all times of finding words to express my meaning, a natural nervous impediment in my speech ! Eeader, if 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 conversation, especially if you find a preternatural flow of ideas setting in upon you at the eight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid giving way CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNK.VKD. b'Jii to it as you would fly your greatest destruction. If vou cannot crush the power of fancy, or that within you which you mistake for such, divert it, give it some other play. Write an essay, pen a character or description, — but not as I do now, with tears trickling down your cheeks. To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes ; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools ; to be esteemed dull when you cannot be witty, to be applauded for witty when you know that you have been dull ; to be called upon for the extem- poraneous exercise of that faculty which no premedi- tation 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 mortgage miser- able morrows for nights of madness ; to waste whole seas of time upon those who pay it back in little inconsiderable drops of grudging applause, — are the wages of buffoonery and death. Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all connexions which have no solider fastening than this liquid cement, more 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 tliey infixed. In them my friends survive still, and exercise ample retribution for any supposed infidelity that I may have been guilty of towards them. My next more immediate companions were and are persons 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 394 CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 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 over- heated notions of companionship ; and the slightest fuel 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 tobacco. The devil could not have devised a more subtle trap to re-take a backsliding penitent. The transition, from gulping down draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous blasts of dry smoke, was so like cheating him. But he is too hard for us when we hope to commute. He beats us at barter ; and when we think to set off a new failing against an old infirmity, 'tis odds but he puts the trick upon us of two for one. That (comparatively) white devil of tobacco brought with him in the end seven worse than himself. It were impertinent to carry the reader through all the processes by which, from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took my degrees through thin wines, through stronger wine and water, through small 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 believing 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 CONFESSIONS OF A. DRUNKARD "05 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 JPiscatoribus Sacrum, has in a moment broken down the resistance of weeks. How a pipe was ever in my midnight path before me, till the vision forced me to realise it, — how then its ascending vapours curled, its fragrance lulled, and the thousand delicious ministerings conversant about it, employing every faculty, extracted the sense of pain. How from illu- minating 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 beyond the power of revocation. Bone of my bone Persons not accustomed to examine the motives of their actions, to reckon up the countless nails that rivet the chains of habit, or perhaps being bound by none so obdurate as those I have confessed to, may recoil from this as from an overcharged picture. But what short of such a bondage is it, which in spite of protesting friends, a weeping wife, and a reprobating world, chains down many a poor fellow, of no original indisposition to goodness, to his pipe and his pot ? I have seen a print after Correggio, in which three female figures are ministering to a man who sits fast bound at the root of a tree. Sensuality is soothing him, Evil Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Eepugnance 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 evil with utter 396 CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD imbecility to good, a Sybaritic effeminacy, a submission to bondage, the springs of the will gone down like a broken clock, the sin and the suffering co-instanta- neous, 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 I be heard, I would cry out to all those who have but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to whom the flavour of his first wine is delicious as the opening scenes of life or the entering upon some newly discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be made to understand what a dreary thing it is when a man shall feel himself going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive will, — to see his destruction and have no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all the way emanating from himself; to nerceive all goodness emptied out of him, and yet not to be able to forget a time when it was otherwise ; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his own self-ruins: — 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 delivered, — it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage 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 thro' 'em. Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if' sobriety be that fine thing you would have us to CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 397 understand, if the comforts of a cool brain are to be preferred to that state of heated excitement which you describe and deplore, what hinders in your instance that you do not return to those habits from which you would induce others never to swerve ? if the blessing be worth preserving, is it not worth recovering ? Recovering I — O 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 exercise had power to stir up in the blood, how gladly would I return to thee, pure element, the drink of children, and of child-like holy hermit ! In my dreams I can sometimes fancy thy cool refresh- ment purling over my burning tongue. But my waking stomach rejects it. That which refreshes innocence only makes me sick and faint. But is there no middle way betwixt total abstinence and the excess which kills you? — For your sake, reader, and that you may never attain to my experience, with pain I must utter the dreadful truth, that there is none, none that I can find. In my stage of habit (I speak not of habits less confirmed — for some of them I believe the advice to be most prudential), in the stage which I have reached, to stop short of that measure which is sufficient to draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic sleep of the 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 in that state, in which, paradoxical as it may appear, reason shall only visit him through intoxi- cation : for it is a fearful truth, that the intellectual faculties by repeated acts of intemperance may be 398 CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD driven from their orderly sphere of action, their dear daylight ministeries, until they shall be brought at last to depend, for the faint manifestation 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 imbecility and decay. Hear me count my gains, and the profits which I have derived from the mid- night cup. Twelve years ago, I was possessed of a healthy frame of mind and body. I was never strong, but I think my constitution (for a weak one) was as happily exempt from the tendency to any malady as it was possible to be. I scarce knew what it was to ail anything. Now, except when I am losing myself in a sea of drink, I am never free from those uneasy sensations in head and stomach, which are so much worse to bear than any definite 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 recumbence to their last possible extent, is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before me, with a secret wish that I could have lain on still, or never awaked. * 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 fingers owed, the comparative steadiness with which they were enabled to go through their task in an imperfect manner, to a temporary firm- ness dcrivcMi from a repetition of practices, the general effect of which bad shaken both them and him so terribly. I C(»KFESS10NS OF A DRUNKARD. S99 Life itself, my waking life, has much of the con- fusion, the trouble, aud obscure perplexity, of an ill dream- In the day time I stumble upon dark mountains. Business, which, though never very particularly adapted to my nature, yet as something of necessity to be gone through, and therefore best undertaken with cheerfulness, I used to enter upon with some degree of alacrity, now wearies, 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 perform for myself, as giving orders to a tradesman, &c., haunts me as a labour impos- sible to be got through. So much the springs of action are broken. The same cowardice attends me in all my inter- course 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 expense 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 entertain. I can do nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time kills me. This poor abstract of my condition was penned at long intervals, with scarcely any attempt at connexion of thought, wliich is now difficult to me. The noble passages wliich formerly delighted me in history or poetic liction, now only draw a few weak tears, allied to dotage. My broken and dispiritei nature seems to sink before anything great ana admirable. I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause 400 POrULAR FALLACIES. or none. It is inexpressible liow 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 ? I am a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to consult by these Confessions. I know not whether I shall be laughed at, or heard seriously. Such as they are, I commend them to the reader's attention, if he find his own case any way touched. I have told him what I am come to. Let him stop in time. 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 Irutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour in the same voca- bulary. The comic writers, with their poetical justice, have contributed not a little to mislead us upon this point. To see a hectoring fellow exposed and beaten upon the stage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some people's share of animal spirits is notoriously low and defective. It has not strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a toler- able bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no POPULAR FALLACIES. 40 part of valour. The truest courage with them is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. But confront one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his confidence in the theory quickly vanislies. Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-perform- ance. A modest inoffensive deportment does not necessarily imply valour ; neither does the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hickman wanted modesty — we do not mean him of Clarissa — but who ever doubted his courage ? Even the poets — upon whom this equitable distribution of qualities should be most binding — have thought it agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the " Agonistes," is indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies singly before him — and does it. Tom BrowTi had a shrewder insight into this kind of character than either of his predecessors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a sort of dimidiate pre-eminence : — " Bully Dawson kicked by half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was true distributive justice. THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS. The weakest part of mankind have this sayir.^; commonest in their mouth. It is the trite consv latiou administered to the easy dupe, when he hiA been tricked out of his money or estate, that tho acquisition of it will do the owner no good. But tiro rogues of this world — the prudenter part of them, at least — know better ; and if the observation had be Psotxbb. LONDON: EDWAKD MOXON AND CO., 44, DOVEB STRKET. 1867. rHEFACE Sir Thomas More, in the dedicatory epistle of the Utopia addressed to his friend Peter Giles, says, speaking of the readers of books in his day, " There be some so unkind and ungenteel, that though they take great pleasure and delectation in the work, yet, for all that, they cannot find in their hearts to lore the author thereof, nor to afford him a good word ; being much like un courteous, unthankful, and churlish guests, which, when they have with good and dainty meat well filled their bellies, depart home, giving no tlianks to the feast-maker." This, and indeed all that the wise, witty, and learned Lord High Chancellor says of the reading public in the times of Henry VIII., — a literary San Marino,— is true of tlje reading public of the present day. If, however, it is the misfortune of most authors to bo perused by such unkind and unthankful readers as those Sir Thomas speaks of, there are a few favourite and fortu- nate penmen that not only obtain their readers' admiration, but also win their readers love. Such a one is Charles Lamb. Other writers may have more readers ; but none have so many true, hearty, enthu- siastic admirers as he. If to the public at large — the miscellaneous rabble of whom Milton speaks so scornfully in Paradise Rtgained — he is but little known, by the truest and most intelligent lovers of literature he is read with unusual pleasure and delight. If ordinary readers — those who " Distinguish not rare peacock from vile swan Nor Mareotic juice from Ccecuban" — find but little in him to praise or to admire, with all lovers and appreciators of true wit, genuine humour, fine fancy, beautiful imagination, and exquisite pathos, he is a pro- IV PEEFACB digious favourite. Indeed there is something — a nameless, indescribable charm — about this author's productions, which captivates and enravishes his readers. By those whose mental palate is fine enough to taste and aj)preciate the exquisite flavour of his style, and to relish and enjoy his rich, peculiar, delicious humour, the Essays of Ella are read with extraordinary satisfaction, and prized as highly as the curate in Don Quixote prized the Diana of Gil Polo. And though Lamb found many admiring readers in his lifetime, since his death his fame and popularity have in- creased greatly. Then he was generally looked upon as a mere eccentric, — a person of more quaintness than hu- mour, of more oddity than genius. Now he is acknowledged to be a most beautiful and original genius, — one of the *' fixed stars of the literary system," whose light will never pale or grow dim, and whose peculiar brightness and beauty will long be the wonder and delight of a choice and select number of men and women. Yet, despite all their love and admiration of Charles Lamb, — nay, rather in consequence of it, — his admirers must blame him for what Mr. Barron Field was pleased to eulogise him for — writing so little. LTndoubtcdly, in most authors, suppression in writing would be a virtue. In Lamb it was a fault. Instead of writing only two volumes of essays, Elia should have written a dozen. He Jiad read, heard, thought, and seen enough to furnish matter for twice that number. He himself confesseth, in a letter written a year or two before his death, that he felt as if he had a thousand essays swelling within him. Oh that Elia, like Mr. Spectator, had printed himself out before he died ! But notwithstanding Lamb's fame and popularity, not- withstanding all readers of his inimitable Essays lament that one who wrote so delightfully as Elia did should have written so little, there has not yet been published a com- plete collection of his writings. The standard edition of his works, edited by Talfourd, is far from being complete. Surely the author o? Ion was unwise in not publishing all of Lamb's productions. Carlyle said he wanted to know all about Margaret Fuller, even to the colour of her stock- ings ; and the admirers of Elia want to possess everj scrap and fragment of his inditing. They cannot let ob PBEFACE. V livlon hare the least " notclet" or ** essaykin" of his. For, however inferior to his best productions these uncollected articles may be, they must contain more or less of Lamb's humour, sense, and observation. Somewhat of his delight- ful individuality must be stamped upon them. In brief, they cannot but contain much that would amuse and en- tertain all admirers of their author. For myself, I would rather read the poorest of these uncollected Essays of Elia than the best productions of some of the most popu- lar of modern authors. " The king's chafT is as good as other's people's corn," saith the old proverb. " There is a pleasure arising from the very bagatelles of men re- nowned for their knowledge and genius," says Goldsmith ; " and we receive with veneration those pieces, after they are dead, which would lessen them in our estimation while living: sensible that we shall enjoy them no more, we treasure up, as precious relics, everj^ saying and word that has escaped them ; but their writings of every kind we deem inestimable." For years I have been hopefully and patiently waiting for somebody to collect and publish these scattered and all but forgotten articles of Lamb's ; but at last, seeing no likelihood of its being done at present, if ever in my day, and fearing that I might else never have an oppor- tunity of perusing these strangely neglected writings of my favourite author, I commenced the task of searching out and discovering them myself for mine own delectation. And after a deal of fruitless and aimless labour, (for un- like Johannes Scotus Erigcna, in his quest of a treatise of Aristotle, I had no oracle to consult,) after spending nearly as many weeks in turning over the leaves of I know not how many volumes of old, dusty, musty, fusty periodicals, as Mr. Vernon ran miles after a butterfly, I was amply re- warded for all my pains ; for I not only found all, or nearly all, of Lamb's uncollected writings that are spoken of in his Lifa and Letters, but a goodly number of articles from his "^cn which neither he nor his biographer has ever alluded to. As I read these (to me) new essays, poems, and letters of Elia, I could not but feel somewhat indig- nant that such excellent productions of so excellent a writer should have been " undcrkept and down supprest" so long. I was as much ravished with these new-found VI PEEFACE. Essays of Lamb's as good old Nicholas G-erbelius (see Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy^ partition ii., section 2, mem- ber 4) was with a few Greek authors restored to lia^ht. If I had had one or two loving, enthusiastic admirers of Charles Lamb to enjoy with me the delight of perusing these uncollected Elias, I should have been " all felicity up to the brim." For with me, as with Michael de Montaigne and Hans Andersen, there is no pleasure without commu- nication ; and therefore, partly to please myself, and partly to please the admirers of Elia, I have collected and pub- lished all of Charles Lamb's writings that I found '' sleep- ing" in out-of-fashion books and out-of-date periodicals. To ninety-nine hundredths of their author's readers the contents of this volume will be as good as manuscript; and not only will the contents of EUana be new to most readers, but tliey will be found to be not wholly unworthy of him who wrote the immortal dissertation on "Eoast Pig." Albeit not to be compared with Elia's best and most finished productions, many of the articles in this collection contain some of the finest qualities and pecu- liarities of his genius ; and most of them — especially the essays and sketches — are, as good old Bishop Hall would say, flowered with the blossoms of learning and observa- tion. Though the generality of readers may not find much to amuse or entertain them in this volume, without doubt all genuine admirers, all true lovers of the gentle, genial, delightful Elia, to whom almost every word of their fa- vourite author's inditing is— " Parsed with pleasaunce," will be mightily pleased with these productions of his inimitable pen, now first collected together. CONTENTS. ESSAYS AND SKETCHES. TABLE TALK THE GENTLE GIANTESS THE REYNOLDS GALLERY . GUY FAUX A VLSION OP HORNS . f- JOHN KEMBLE, AND GODWIn's TRAGEDY OF '* ANTONIO THE GOOD CLERK, A CHARACTER; WITH SOME ACCOUNT OP "THE COMPLETE ENGLISH TRADESMAN*' REMINISCENCE OF SIR JEFFERY DUNSTAN ON A PASSAGE IN "THE TliJU'ESr" . THE MONTHS BIOORAI'IIICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP MR. MUNDEN, IN A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OP THE "LONDON MAGAZINE" THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNri' THE RELIGION OP ACTORS THE ASS IN RE SQUIRRELS ..... ESTIMATE OP DE FOES SECONDARY NOVELS POSTSCRIPT TO THE " CHAPTER ON EARS " BLIA TO HIS COltRESPONDENTS . ^ UNITARIAN PROTESTS, IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND OP THAT PERSUASION NEWLY MARRIED ON THE CUSTOM OP HISSING AT THE THEATRES ; WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB OF DAMNED AUTHORS / CHARLES lamb's AUTOBIOGRAPHY ^ ON THE DEATH OP COLERIDGE . THE OLD ACTORS CAPTAIN STAUKEY A POPULAR FALLACY, THAT A DEFORMED PERSON IS A LORD LETTER TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN WHOSE EDUCATION HAS BEEN NEGLECTED ON THE AMBIGUITIES ARISING PROM PROPER NAMES ^ ELIA ON " THE CONFESSIONS OP A DRUNKARD " THE LAST PEACH REFLECTIONS IN THE PILLORY .... ^ A Saturday's dinner A CHARACTER OP THE LATE BLIA BY A FfllBND Vlll CONTENTS. PAGB THE PAWNBROKEK'S DAUGHTER. A Farce. . 161 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES 191 TALES. ESQ. OF BimriNGlIAM REMINISCENCES OP JUKE JUDKINS, CUPId's REVENGE THE DEFEAT OP TIME; OR, A TALE OP THE FAIRIES MARIA HOWE; OR THE EFFECTS OF WITCH STORIES SUSAN YATES ; OR, FIRST GOING TO CHURCH ARABELLA HARDY J OR, THE SEA VOYAGE . POEMS. EXISTENCE, CONSIDERED IN ITSELF, NO BLESSING, FROM THE LATIN OP PALINGENIUS THE PARTING SPEECH OP THE CELESTIAL MESSENGER TO THE POET. FROM THE LATIN OF PALINGENIUS, IN THE ZODIACUS \ITM HERCULES PACIFICATUS. A TALE FROM SUIDAS . A FRAGMENT FOR THE ALBUM OP MISS , FRENCH TEACHER AT BIRS. GISBORn's SCHOOL, ENFIELD TO C. ADERS, ESQ., ON HIS COLLECTION OF PAINTINGS BY THE OLD GERMAN MASTERS ..... 295 303 322 329 337 344 353 354 356 359 362 362 LETTERS. TO A B00KSELLEI5 . . 367 TO JANE PAYNE COLLIE! t . . 368 TO JOSEPH COTTLE . TO THE SAME . TO THE SAME . . • • • . 369 . 369 . 371 TO A FARMER AND HIS WIFE 372 TO S. T. COLERIDGE . . 373 TO THOMAS HOOD . ^ * 375 TO THE SAME . . 377 TO LEIGH HUNT . 377 TO MRS. SHELLEY . 379 TO THE EDITOR OP THE TO THE SAME . " TABLE BOOK " . 381 382 TO P. G. PATMORE . • • 1 383 ESSAYS AND SKETCHES. TABLE TALK.* It is a desideratum in works that treat de re culinmid, that we have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavours : as to show why cabbage is rej)rehen- sible with roast beef, laudable with bacon ; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it ; why loin of veal (a pretty problem), being itself unctious, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of melted butter, — and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, ab- horreth from it ; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer ; why salt fish points to parsnip, brawn makes a dead-set at mustard ; why cats prefer valerian to heart's-ease, old ladies vice versa, — though this is rather travelling out of the road of the dietetics, and may be thought a question more curious than relevant ; why salmon (a strong sapor jf?er se) for- tifieth its condition with the mighty lobster sauce, whose embraces are fatal to the delicater relish of the turbot ; why oysters in death rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour maingo and the sweet jam by turns court and are accepted by the compilable mutton hash, — she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We feed ♦ From the AtheruBum, 1834. Z TABLE TALK. ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us ; so that, if Nature should furnish us with a new meat, or be prodigally pleased to restore the phoenix, upon a given flavour, we might be able to pronounce instantly, on philosophical principles, what the sauce to it should be, — what the curious adjuncts. The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good ac- tion by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. 'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him ; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket. Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy ; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it, — how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all. These I call furniture wives ; a§ men buy furniture picttiresj because they suit this or that niche in their dining parlours. Your universally cried-up beauties are the very last choice which a man of taste would make. What pleases all cannot have that individual charm which makes this or that countenance engaging to you, and to you only perhaps, you know not why. What gained the fair Gunnings titled husbands, who, after all, turned out very sorry wives ? Po- pular repute. It is a sore trial when a daughter shall marry against her father's approbation. A little hard- heartedness, and aversion to a reconcilement, is almost pardonable. After all. Will Dookwray's way TABLE TALK. S is, perhaps, the wisest. His best-loved daughter made a most imprudent match ; in fact, eloped with the last man in the world that her father would have wished her to marry. All the world said that he would never speak to her again. For months she durst not write to him, much less come near him. But, in a casual rencounter, he met her in the streets of Ware, —Ware, that will long remember the mild virtues of William Dockwray, Esq. What said the parent to his disobedient child, whose knees faltered under her at the sight of him ? '* Ha, Sukey ! is it you ?" with that benevolent aspect with which he paced the streets of Ware, venerated as an angel : " come and dine with us on Sunday." Then turning away, and again turning back, as if he had forgotten something, he added, "And, Sukey, (do you hear ?) bring your husband with you." This was all the reproof she ever heard from him. Need it be added, that the match turned out better for Susan than the world expected. The vices of some men are magnificent. Compare the amours of Henry the Eighth and Charles the Second. The Stuart had mistresses : the Tudor kept wives. "We read the Paradise Lost as a task," says Dr. Johnson. Nay, rather as a celestial recreation, of which the dullard mind is not at all hours alike recipient. " Nobody ever wished it longer," nor the moon rounder, he might have added. Why, 'tis the perfectness and completeness of it which makes us imagine that not a hne could be added to it, or diminished from it, with advantage. Would we have a cubit added to the stature of the Medi- cean Venus ? Do we wish her taller ? Amidst the complaints of the wide spread of in- fidelity among us, it is consolatory that a sect has 4 TABLE TALK. sprung np in the heart of the metropolis, and is daily on the increase, of teachers of that healing doctrine which Pope upheld, and against which Voltaire directed his envenomed wit : we mean those practical preachers of optimism, or the belief that whatever is is best ; the cads of omnibuses, w^ho from their little back pulpits, not once in three or four hours, as those proclaimers of *' God and his prophet" in Mussulman countries, but every minute, at the entry or exit of a brief passenger, are heard, in an almost prophetic tone, to exclaim (Wisdom crying out, as it were, in the streets), " All's eight !" Advice is not so commonly thrown away as is ima- gined. We seek it in difficulties ; but in common speech we are apt to confound with it admonition ; as when a friend reminds one that drink is preju- dicial to the health, &c. We do not care to be told of that which we know better than the good man that admonishes. M sent to his friend L , who is no water-drinker, a twopenny tract " Against the Use of Fermented Liquors." L acknow- ledged the obligation, as far as to tivojyence. Peno- tier's advice was the safest, after all : — '' I advised him" — But I must tell you. The dear, good-meaning, no- thinking creature had been dumfounding a com- pany of us with a detail of inextricable difficulties, in which the circumstances of an acquaintance of his were involved. No clew of light offered itself. He grew more and more misty as he proceeded. We pitied his friend, and thought, — " God help the man so rapt in Error's endless maze ! " when, suddenly brightening up his placid coun- tenance like one that had found out a riddle, and looked to have the solution admired, — "At last," said he, " I advised him "— TABLE TALE. O Here he paused, and here we were again inter- minably thrown back. By no possible guess could any of us aim at the drift of the meaning he was about to be dehvered of. '*I advised him," he repeated, "to have some advice upon the subject." A general approbation followed ; it was unani- mously agreed, that, under all the circumstances of the case, no sounder or more judicious council could have been given. A laxity pervades the popular use of words. Parson W is not quite so continent as Diana, yet prettily dissembleth his frailty. Is Parson W , therefore, a hypocrite ? I think not. Where the concealment of a vice is less pernicious than the barefaced publication of it would be, no additional delinquency is incurred in the secresy. Parson W is simply an immoral clergyman. But if Parson W were to be for ever haranguing on the opposite virtue ; choosing for his perpetual text, in preference to all other pulpit-topics, the remarkable resistance recorded in the 39th of Exodus [Genesis ?j ; dwelling, moreover, and dilating upon it, — then Parson W might be reasonably suspected of hypocrisy. But Parson W rarely diverteth into such line of argument, or toucheth it briefly. His ordinary topics are fetched from *' obedience to the powers that are," '' submission to the civil magistrate in all commands that are not absolutely unlawful;" on which he can deHght to expatiate with equal fervour and sincerity. Again : to despise a person is properly to look down upon him with none or the least possible emotion ; but when Clementina, who has lately lost her lover, with bosom heaving, eyes flashing, and her whole frame in agitation, pronounces with a pecuhar emphasis that she " despises the fellow," 6 TABLE TALK. depend upon it he is not quite so despicable in her eyes as she would have us imagine. One more instance : If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example : A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and 80 necessarily involved that by no possible concep- tion they can be separated, then it becomes a truism ; as to say, " A good name is a proof of a man's esti- mation in the world." We seem to be saying some- thing, when we say nothing. I was describing to F some knavish tricks of a mutual friend of ours. "If he did so and so," was the reply, "he cannot be an honest man." Here was a genuine truism, truth upon truth, inference and proposition identical, or proposition identical, or rather a dic- tionary definition usurping the place of an inference. We are ashamed at a sight of a monkey, — some- how as we are shy of poor relations. imagined a Caledonian compartment in Hades, where there should be fire without sulphur. Absurd images are sometimes irresistible. I will mention two, — an elephant in a coach- ofiice gravely coming to have his trunk booked ; a mermaid over a fish-kettle cooking her own tail. It is the praise of Shakspeare, with reference to the play writers his contemporaries, that he has so few revolting characters. Yet he has one that is singularly mean and disagreeable, — the King in Hamlet. Neither has he characters of insignifi- TABLE TALK. 7 cance, unless the phantom that stalks over the stage as Julius Caesar, in the play of that name, may be accounted one. Neither has he envious characters, excepting the short part of Don John, in M^ich Ado about Nothing. Neither has he unentertaining characters, if we except Parolles, and the little that there is of the Clown, in AWs Well that Ends Well. It is possible that Shakspeare should never have read Homer, in Chapman's version at least ? If he had read it, could he mean to travesty it in the parts of those big boobies, Ajax and Achilles ? Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon are true to their parts in the Iliad: they are gentlemen at least. Thersites, though unamusing, is fairly deducible from it. Troilus and Cressida are a fine graft upon it. But those two big bulks — It would settle the dispute as to whether Shak- speare intended Othello for a character, to consider how differently we are affected towards him and for Leontes in the Winter's Tale. Leontes is that character. Othello's fault was simply credulity. •' Lear. Who are you ? Mine eyes are not o' the best. I'll tell you straight. Are you not Kent ? Kent. The same ; your servant Kent. Where is your servant Caius ? Lear. He's a good fellow, I can tell you that ; He'd strike, and quickly too: he's dead and rotten. Kent. No, my good lord : I am the very man — Lear. I'll see that straight — Kent. That from your first of difference and decay. Have foUow'd your sad steps. Lear. You are welcome hither. Albany. He knows not what he says ; and vain is it That we present us to him. Edgar. Look up, my lord. [him, Kent. Vex not his ghost. Oh ! let him pass. He hates That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer." 8 TABLE TALK. So ends King Lear, the most stupendous of the Shakspearian dramas ; and Kent, the noblest feature of the conceptions of his divine mind. This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer, having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence. What a pudder would a common dramatist have raised here of a reconciliation scene, a perfect recognition, between the assumed Caius and his master ! — to the suffusing of many fair eyes, and the moistening of cambric handkerchiefs. The old dying king partially catching at the truth, and immediately lapsing into obliviousness, with the high-minded carelessness of the other to have his services appreciated, — as one that — ♦' Served not for gain, " Or follow'd out of form,"— are among the most judicious, not to say heart- touching, strokes in Shakspeare. Allied to this magnanimity it is, where the pith and point of an argument, the amplification of which might compromise the modesty of the speaker, is delivered briefly, and, as it were, parenthetically ; as in those few but pregnant words, in which the man in the old ** Nut-brown Maid" rather intimates than reveals his unsuspected high birth to the woman : — "Now understand, to Westmoreland, *' Which is my heritage, " I will you bring, and with a ring, " By way of marriage, " I will you take, and lady make." Turn we to the version of it, ten times diluted, of dear Mat. Prior, — in his own way unequalled, and a poet now-a-days too much neglected. *' In me," THE GENTLE GIANTESS. 9 qnoth Henry, addressing the astounded Emma, — with a flourish and an attitude, as we may conceive, — ♦' In me behold the potent Edgar's heir, " Illustrious earl ! him terrible in war, " Let Loire confess." And with a deal of skimble-skamble stuff, as Hot- spur would term it, more, presents the lady with a full and true enumeration of his papa's rent-roll in the fatal soil by Deva. But, of aU parentheses, (not to quit the topic too suddenly,) commend me to that most significant one, at the commencement of the old popular ballad of ** Fair Bosamond : " — ** When good King Henry ruled this land, " The second of that name," Now mark, "A There is great virtue in this besides. (Besides the queen) he dearly loved A fair and comely dame." THE GENTLE GIANTESS.* The Widow Blacket, of Oxford, is the largest female I ever had the pleasure of beholding. There may be her parallel upon the earth ; but surely I never saw it. I take her to be lineally descended from the maid's aunt of Brainford, who caused Master Ford such uneasiness. She hath Atlantean shoulders ; and, as she stoopeth in her gait, — with as few offences to answer for in her own particular as any of Eve's daughters, — her back seems broad enough to bear the blame of all the peccadilloes that have ♦ From the London Magazine, 1822. 10 THE GENTLE GIANTESS. been committed since Adam. She girdeth her waist — or what she is pleased to esteem as such — nearly up to her shoulders ; from beneath which, that huge dorsal expanse, in mountainous declivity, emergeth. Eespect for her alone preventeth the idle boys, who follow her about in shoals, whenever she cometh abroad, from getting up, and riding. But her presence infallibly commands a reverence. She is indeed, as the Americans would express it, some- thing awful. Her person is a burthen to herself no less than to the ground which bears her. To her mighty bone, she hath a pinguitude withal, which makes the depth of winter to her the most desirable season. Her distress in the warmer solstice is pitiable. During the months of July and August she usually renteth a cool cellar, where ices are kept, whereinto she descendeth when Sirius rageth. She dates from a hot Thursday, — some twenty-five years ago. Her apartment in summer is pervious to the four winds. Two doors, in north and south direction, and two windows, fronting the rising and the setting sun, never closed, from every cardinal point, catch the contributory breezes. She loves to enjoy what she calls a quadruple draught. That must be a shrewd zephyr that can escape her. I owe a painful face-ache, which oppresses me at this moment, to a cold caught, sitting by her, one day in last July, at this receipt of coolness. Her fan, in ordinary, resembles a banner spread, which she keepeth continually on the alert to detect the least breeze. She possesseth an active and gadding mind, totally incommensurate with her person. No one delighteth more than herself in country exercises and pastimes. I have passed many an agreeable holy- day with her in her favourite park at Woodstock. She performs her part in these delightful ambulatory excursions by the aid of a portable garden chair. She setteth out with you at a fair foot-gallop, which THE GENTLE GIANTESS. 11 she keepeth up till you are both well breathed, and then she reposeth for a few seconds. Then she is up again for a hundred paces or so, and again resteth ; her movement, on these sprightly occasions, being something between walking and flying. Her great weight seemeth to propel her forward, ostrich- fashion. In this kind of relieved marching I have traversed with her many scores of acres on those well- wooded and well- watered domains. Her delight at Oxford is in the public walks and gardens, where, when the weather is not too oppressive, she passeth much of her valuable time. There is a bench at Maudhn, or rather situated between the frontiers of that and 's College, (some litigation, latterly, about repairs, has vested the property of it finally in 's,) where, at the hour of noon, she is ordinarily to be found sitting, — so she calls it by courtesy, — but, in fact, pressing and breaking of it down with her enormous settlement, as both those foimdations, who, however, are good-natured enough to wink at it, have found, I believe, to their cost. Here she taketh the fresh air, principally at vacation times, when the walks are freest from interruption of the younger fry of students. Here she passeth her idle hours, not idly, but generally accompanied with a book, — blessed if she can but intercept some resi- dent Fellow (as usually there are some of that brood left behind at these periods) or stray Master of Arts, (to most of whom she is better known than their dinner-bell,) with whom she may confer upon any curious topic of literature. I have seen these shy gownsmen, who truly set but a very slight value upon female conversation, cast a hawk's eye upon her from the length of Maudlin Grove, and warily glide off into another walk, — true monks as they are, and ungently neglecting the delicacies of her polished converse for their own perverse and im- 12 THE GENTLE GIANTESS. communicating solitariness ! Within doors her principal diversion is music, vocal and instrumental ; in both which she is no mean professor. Her voice is wonderfully fine; but, till I got used to it, I confess it staggered me. It is, for aU the world, like that of a piping bullfinch ; while, from her size and stature, you would expect notes to drown the deep organ. The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unac- countable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition ; so that her time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth, — running the primary circuit of the tune, and still revolving upon its own axis. The effect, as I said before, when you are used to it, is as agreeable as it is altogether new and surpris- ing. The spacious apartment of her outward frame lodgeth a soul in all respects disproportionate. Of more than mortal make, she evinceth withal a trembling sensibility, a yielding infirmity of purpose, a quick susceptibiHty to reproach, and all the train of diffident and blushing virtues, which for their habitation usually seek out a feeble frkme, an at- tenuated and meagre constitution. With more than man's bulk, her humours and occupations are eminently feminine. She sighs, — being six foot high. She languisheth, — being two feet wide. She worketh slender sprigs upon the delicate muslin, — her fingers being capable of moulding a Colossus. She sippeth her wine out of her glass daintily, — her capacity being that of a tun of Heidelberg. She goeth mincingly with those feet of hers, whose solidity need not fear the black ox's pressure. Softest and largest of thy sex, adieu ! By what parting attribute may I salute thee, last and best of the Titanesses, — Ogress, fed with milk instead of blood ; not least, or least handsome, among Oxford's THE REYNOLDS GALLERY. 13 stately structures, — Oxford, who, in its deadest time of vacation, can never properly be said to be empty, having thee to fill it.* THE EEYNOLDS GALLERY.f The Reynolds Gallery has, upon the whole, disap- pointed me. Some of the portraits are interesting. They are faces of characters whom we (middle-aged gentlemen) were born a little too late to remember, but about whom we have heard our fathers tell stories till we almost fancy to have seen them. There is a charm in the portrait of a Eodney or a Keppel, which even a picture of Nelson must want for me. I should turn away after a slight inspec- tion from the best likeness that could be made of Mrs. Anne Clarke ; but Kitty Fisher is a consider- able personage. Then the dresses of some of the women so exactly remind us of modes which we can just recall ; of the forms under which the venerable * Lamb, in the following extract from a letter to Miss Words- worth, gives the original sketch of " The Gentle Giantess :" •' Ask any body you meet who is the biggest woman in Cam- bridge, and I'll hold you a wager they'll say Mrs. . She broke down two benches in Trinity Gardens ; one on the con- fines of St. John's, which occasioned a litigation between the societies as to repairing it. In warm weather, she retires into an ice-cellar (literally), and dates from a hot Thursday some twenty years back. She sits in a room with opposite doors and windows, to let in a thorough draught, which gives her slenderer friends toothaches. She is to be seen in the market every morning at ten, cheapening fowls ; which I observe the Cam- bridge poulterers are not sufficiently careful to stump." The reader will observe, that, in the essay, Elia has changed the locality of the stout woman, and places her in Oxford, instead of Cambridge. — Editor. + From the Examiner, 1813. 14 THE REYNOLDS GALLERY. relationship of aunt or mother first presented them- selves to our young eyes ; the aprons, the coifs, the lappets, the hoods. Mercy on us ! what a load of head ornaments seem to have conspired to hury a pretty face in the picture of Mrs. Long, yet could not! Beauty must have some ''charmed life" to have been able to surmount the conspiracy of fashion in those days to destroy it. The portraits which least pleased me were those boys, as infant Bacchuses, Jupiters, &c. But the artist is not to be blamed for the disguise. No doubt the parents wished to see their children deified in their lifetime. It was but putting a thunderbolt (instead of a squib) into young master's hands ; and a whey-faced chit was transformed into the infant ruler of Olympus, — ^him who was after- ward to shake heaven and earth with his black brow. Another good boy pleased his grandmamma so well, and the blameless dotage of the god of the good old woman imagined in him an adequate re- presentative of the awful Prophet Samuel. But the great historical compositions^ where the artist was at liberty to paint from his own idea, — tJie Beaufort and the TJgo- lino : why then, I must confess, pleading the liberty of table talk for my presumption, that they have not left any very elevating impressions on my mind. Pardon a ludicrous comparison. I know, madam, you admire them both ; but placed opposite to each other as they are at the gallery, as if to set the one work in competition with the other, they did remind me of the famous contention for the prize of de- formity, mentioned in the 173d Number of the Spectator. The one stares, and the other grins ; but is there common dignity in their countenances ? Does any thing of the history of their life gone by peep through the ruins of the mind in the face, like the unconquerable grandeur that surmounts the distortions of the Laocoon ? The figures which THE REYNOLDS GALLERY. 15 stand by the bed of Beaufort are indeed happy re- presentations of the plain unmannered old nobility of the English historical plays of Shakspeare ; but, for any thing else, give me leave to recommend those macaroons. After leaving the Keynolds Gallery, (where, upon the whole, I received a good deal of pleasure,) and feeling that I had quite had my fill of paintings, I stumbled upon a picture in Piccadilly, (No. 22, I think,) which purports to be a portrait of Francis the First, by Leonardo da Vinci. Heavens, what a difference ! It is but a portrait, as most of those I had been seeing ; but, placed by them, it would kill them, swallow them up as Moses's rod the other rods. Where did these old painters get their models ? I see no figures, not in my dreams, as this Francis, in the character, or rather with the attributes, of John the Baptist. A more than martial majesty in the brow and upon the eyelid ; an arm muscular, beauti- fully formed ; the long, graceful, massy fingers com- pressing, yet so as not to hurt, a lamb more lovely, more sweetly shrinking, than we can conceive that milk-white one which followed Una; the picture altogether looking as if it were eternal, — combining the truth of flesh with a promise of permanence like marble. Leonardo, from the one or two specimens we have of him in England, must have been a stupendous genius. I can scarce think he has had his full fame, — he who could paint that wonderful personifi- cation of the Logos, or second person of the Trinity, grasping a globe, late in the possession of Mr. Tro- ward of Pall Mall, where the hand was, by the boldest license, twice as big as the truth of drawing warranted ; yet the effect, to every one that saw it, by some magic of genius was confessed to be not monstrous, but miraculous and silencing. It could not be gainsaid. 16 GUY FAUX. GUY FAUX.* A VERY ingenious and subtle writer,f whom there is good reason for suspecting to be an ex-Jesuit, not unknown at Douay some five and twenty years since, (he will not obtrude himself at M th again in a hurry,) about a twelvemonth back set himself to prove the character of the Powder-Plot conspirators to have been that of heroic self-devotedness and true Christian martyrdom. Under the mask of Protes- tant candour, he actually gained admission for his treatise into a London weekly paper | not parti- cularly distinguished for its zeal towards either re- ligion. But, admitting Cathohc principles, his arguments are shrewd and incontrovertible. He says — ** Guy Faux was a fanatic ; but he was no hypo- crite. He ranks among good haters. He was cruel, bloody-minded, reckless of all considerations but those of an infuriated and bigoted faith ; but he was a true son of the Catholic Church, a martyr, and a confessor, for all that. He who can prevail upon himself to devote his life for a cause, however we may condemn his opinions or abhor his actions, vouches at least for the honesty of his principles and the disinterestedness of his motives. He may be guilty of the worst practices ; but he is capable of the greatest. He is no longer a slave, but free. The contempt of death is the beginning of virtue. The hero of the Gunpowder Plot was, if you will, a fool, * From the London Magazine, 1823. + William Hazlitt. i The Examiner, then edited by Leigh Hunt. GUY FAUX. 17 a madman, an assassin ; call him what names you please ; still he was neither knave nor coward. He did not propose to blow up the Parliament, and come off, scot-free, himseK: he showed that he valued his own life no more than theirs in such a cause, where the integrity of the Catholic faith and the salvation of perhaps millions of souls was at stake. He did not call it a murder, but a sacrifice, which he was about to achieve : he was armed with the Holy Spirit and with fire ; he was the Church's chosen servant and her blessed martyr. He com- forted himself as * the best of cut-throats.' How many wretches are there that would have under- taken to do what he intended, for a sum of money, if they could have got off with impunity ! How few are there who would have put themselves in Guy Faux's situation to save the universe ! Yet, in the latter case, we affect to be thrown into greater con- sternation than at the most unredeemed acts of vil- lany ; as if the absolute disinterestedness of the motive doubled the horror of the deed ! The cowardice and selfishness of mankind are in fact shocked at the consequences to themselves if such examples are held up for imitation ; and they make a fearful outcry against the violation of every principle of morahty, lest they, too, should be called on for any such tremendous sacrifices ; lest they, in their turn, should have to go on the forlorn hope of extra-official duty. Charity begins at home is a maxim that prevails as well in the courts of conscience as in those of prudence. We would be thought to shudder at the consequences of crime to others, while we tremble for them to ourselves. We talk of the dark and cowardly assassin; and this is well, when an individual shrinks from the face of an enemy, and purchases his own safety by striking a blow in the dark : but how the charge of cowardly can be appHed to the pubUc assassin, who, o 18 GUY FAUX. in the very act of destroying another, lays down his life as the pledge and forfeit of his sincerity and boldness I am at a loss to devise. There may be barbarous prejudice, rooted hatred, unprincipled treachery, in such an act ; but he who resolves to take all the danger and odium upon himself can no more be branded with cowardice, than Eegulus de- voting himself for his country, or Codrus leaping into the fiery gulf. A wily Father Inquisitor, coolly and with plenary authority condemning hundreds of helpless, unoffending victims to the flames, or to the horrors of a living tomb, while he himself would not suffer a hair of his head to be hurt, is, to me, a character without any qualifying trait in it. Again : the Spanish conqueror and hero, the favourite of his monarch, who enticed thirty thousand poor Mexicans into a large open building under promise of strict faith and cordial good-will, and then set fire to it, making sport of the cries and agonies of these de- luded creatures, is an instance of uniting the most hardened cruelty with the most heartless selfishness. His plea was, keeping no faith with heretics ; this too was Guy Faux's : but I am sure at least that the latter kept faith with himself ; he was in earnest in his professions. His was not gay, wanton, un- feeling depravity ; he did not murder in sport : it was serious work that he had taken in hand. To see this arch-bigot, this heart-whole traitor, this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulking in his retreat with his cloak and dark lantern, moving cautiously about among his barrels of gunpowder loaded with death, but not yet ripe for destruction, regardless of the lives of others, and more than indifferent to his own, presents a picture of the strange infatuation of the human understanding, but not of the depravity of the human will, without an equal. There were thousands of pious Papists privy to and ready to applaud the deed when done : there was no one but GUY FAUX. 19 our old Fifth of November friend, who still flutters in rags and straw on the occasion, that had the courage to attempt it. In him stern duty and un- shaken faith prevailed over natural frailty."* It is impossible, upon Catholic principles, not to admit the force of this reasoning : we can only not help smiling (with the writer) at the simplicity of the gulled editor, swallowing the dregs of Loyola for the very quintessence of sublimated reason in England at the commencement of the nineteenth century. We will just, as a contrast, show what we Protestants (who are a party concerned) thought upon the same subject at a period rather nearer to the heroic project in question. The Gunpowder Treason was the subject which called forth the earliest specimen which is left us of the pulpit eloquence of Jeremy Taylor. When he preached the sermon on that anniversary, which is printed at the end of the foHo edition of his Sermons, he was a young man, just commencing his ministry under the auspices of Archbishop Laud. From the learning and mature oratory which it manifests, one should rather have conjectured it to have pro- ceeded from the same person after he was ripened by time into a Bishop and Father of the Church. " And, really, these Bomano-harhari could never pretend to any precedent for an act so barbarous as * In Hazlitt's delightful report of the conversation at one of Charles Lamb's Wednesday evening parties, (it is to be regretted that he did not report the conversation at all of these assem- blages of wits, humourists, and good fellows,) Elia thus speaks in defence of the hero of the Gunpowder Plot : " I cannot but think that Guy Faux, that poor fluttering annual scarecrow of straw and rags, is an ill-used gentleman. I would give something to see him sitting pale and emaciated, surrounded by his matches and his barrels of gunpowder, and expecting the moment that was to transport him to Paradise for his heroic self-devotion. But if I say any more, there is that fellow Godwin will make something out of it." — Editor. o 2 20 GUY FAUX. theirs. Adrammelech, indeed, killed a king ; but he spared the people. Haman would have killed the people, but spared the king ; but that both king and people, princes and judges, branch and rush and root, should die at once, (as if Caligulas were actuated, and all England upon one head,) was never known till now, that all the malice of the world met in this, as in a centre. The Sicilian evensong, the matins of St. Bartholomew, known for the pitiless and damned massacres, were but Kdiruov (tkIus ovap, 'the dream of the shadow of smoke,' if compared with this great fire. In turn occupato sacuh fahulas vul- garis nequitia non invenit. This was a busy age. Erostratus must have invented a more sublimed malice than the burning of one temple, or not have been so much as spoke of since the discovery of the powder treason. But I must make more haste ; I shall not else climb the sublimity of this impiety. Nero was sometimes the populare odium, was popu- larly hated, and deserved it too : for he slew his master, and his wife, and all his family, once or twice over ; opened his mother's womb ; fired the city, laughed at it, slandered the Christians for it : but yet all these were but principia malorum, the very first * rudimencs of evil.' Add, then, to these, Herod's master-piece at Eamah, as it was deciphered by the tears and sad threnes of the matrons in an universal mourning for the loss of their pretty infants ; yet this of Herod wiU prove but an infant wickedness, and that of Nero the evil but of one city. I would willingly have found out an example, but I see I cannot, should I put into the scale the extract of all the old tyrants famous in antique stories, — • Bistonii stabulum regis, Busiridis aras, • Antiphatae mensas, et Taurica regna Thoantis ; ' — should I take for true story the highest cruelty as it was fancied by the most hieroglyphical Egyptian, — GUY FAUX. 21 this alone would weigh them down, as if the Alps were put in scale against the dust of a balance. For, had this accursed treason prospered, we should have had the whole kingdom mourn for the inestim- able loss of its chiefest glory, its life, its present joy, and all its very hopes for the future. For such was their destined malice, that they would not only have inflicted so cruel a blow, but have made it incurable, by cutting off our supplies of joy, the whole succession of the Line Koyal. Not only the vine itself, but all the gemmulcsj and the tender ohve branches, should either have been bent to their intentions, and made to grow crooked, or else been broken. ** And now, after such a sublimity of malice, I will not instance in the sacrilegious ruin of the neigh- bouring temples, which needs must have perished in the flame ; nor in the disturbing the ashes of our entombed kings, devouring their dead ruins like sepulchral dogs ; these are but minutes in respect of the ruin prepared for the living temples. * Stragem sed istam non tulit * Christus cadentum principum • Impune, ne forsan sui • Patris periret fabrica. • Ergo quaB poterit lingua retexere • Laudes, Christe, tuas, qui domitum struis • Infidum populum cum Duce perfido? ' " In such strains of eloquent indignation did Jeremy Taylor's young oratory inveigh against that stupend- ous attempt, which he truly says had no parallel in ancient or modem times. A century and a half of European crimes has elapsed since he made the assertion, and his position remains in its strength. He wrote near the time in which the nefarious project had like to have been completed. Men's minds still were shuddering from the recentness of the escape. It must have been within his memory, 22 GUY FAUX. or have been sounded in his ears so young by his parents, that he would seem, in his maturer years, to have remembered it. No wonder, then, that he describes it in words that burn. But to us, to whom the tradition has come slowly down, and has had time to cool, the story of Guido Vaux sounds rather like a tale, a fable, and an invention, than true history. It supposes such gigantic audacity of daring, combined with such more than infantile stupidity in the motive,^ — such a combination of the fiend and the monkey, — that credulity is almost swallowed up in contemplating the singularity of the attempt. It has accordingly, in some degree, shared the fate of fiction. It is famiUarized to us in a kind of serio-ludicrous way, like the story of Guy of Warwick, or Valentine and Orson. The way which we take to perpetuate the memory of this deliverance is well adapted to keep up this fabular notion. Boys go about the streets annually with a beggarly scare-crow dressed up, which is to be burnt indeed, at night, with holy zeal ; but, meantime, they beg a penny for poor Guy. This periodical petition, which we have heard from our infancy, combined with the dress and appearance of the effigy, so well calculated to move compassion, has the effect of quite removing from our fancy the horrid circumstances of the story which is thus com- memorated ; and in poor Guy vainly should we try to recognize any of the features of that tremendous madman in iniquity, Guido Vaux, with his horrid «rew of accomplices, that sought to emulate earth- quakes and bursting volcanoes in their more than mortal mischief. Indeed, the whole ceremony of burning Guy Faux, or the Pope, as he is indifferently called, is a sort of Treason Travestie, and admirably adapted to lower our feehngs upon this memorable subject. The printers of the little duodecimo Prayer Book, printed GUY FAUX. 23 by T. Baskett,* in 1749, which has the effigy of his sacred majesty George II. piously prefixed, have illustrated the service (a very fine one in itself) which is appointed for the anniversary of this day, with a print, which it is not very easy to describe ; but the contents appear to be these : The scene is a room, I conjecture, in the king's palace. Two per- sons — one of whom I take to be James himself, from his wearing his hat, while the other stands bare- headed — are intently surveying a sort of speculum, or magic mirror, which stands upon a pedestal in the midst of a room, in which a little figure of Guy Faux with his dark lantern, approaching the door of the Parliament House, is made discernible by the light proceeding from a great eye which shines in from the topmost corner of the apartment, by which eye the pious artist no doubt meant to designate Providence. On the other side of the mirror is a figure doing something, which puzzled me when a child, and continues to puzzle me now. The best I can make of it is, that it is a conspirator busy laying the train ; but, then, why is he represented in the king's chamber ? Conjecture upon so fantastical a design is vain ; and I only notice the print as being one of the earliest graphic representations which woke my chUdhood into wonder, and doubtless com- bined, with the mummery before mentioned, to take off the edge of that horror which the naked historical mention of Guido's conspiracy could not have failed of exciting. Now that so many years are past since that abo- minable machination was happily frustrated, it will * The same, I presume, npon whom the clergyman in the song of the " Vicar and Moses," not without judgment, passes this memorable censure : — '* Here, Moses the king: 'Tis a scandalous thing That this Baskett should print for the Cro-wn.** 24 GUY FAUX. not, I hope, be considered a profane sporting with the subject, if we take no very serious survey of the consequences that would have flowed from this plot if it had had a successful issue. The first thing that strikes us, in a selfish point of view, is the material change which it must have produced in the course of the nobility. All the ancient peerage being ex- tinguished, as it was intended, at one blow, the Red Book must have been closed for ever, or a new race of peers must have been created to supply the defi- ciency. As the first part of this dilemma is a deal too shocking to think of, what a fund of mouth- watering reflections does this give rise to in the breast of us plebeians of A.D. 1823 ! Why, you or I, reader, might have been Duke of , or Earl of . I particularize no titles, to avoid the least suspicion of intention to usurp the dignities of the two noblemen whom I have in my eye ; but a feeling more dignified than envy sometimes excites a sigh, when I think how the posterity of Guido's Legion of Honour (among whom you or I might have been) might have rolled down, " dulcified," as Burke ex- presses it, *'by an exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of generations, from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the spring."" What new orders of merit think you this English Napoleon would have chosen ? Knights of the Barrel, or Lords of the Tub, Grand Almoners of the Cellar, or Ministers of Explosion? We should have given the train couchant, and the fire rampant, in our arms ; we should have quartered the dozen white matches in our coats : the Shallows would have been nothing to us. Turning away from these mortifying reflections, let us contemplate its effects upon the other house; for they were all to have gone together, — ^king, lords, commons. * Letter to a Noble Lord. GUY FAUX. 25 To assist our imagination, let us take leave to suppose (and we do it m the harmless wantonness of fancy) — to suppose that the tremendous explosion had taken place in our days. "We better know what a House of Commons is in our days, and can better estimate our loss. Let us imagine, then, to our- selves, the united members sitting in full conclave above ; Faux just ready with his train and matches below, — in his hand a '' reed tipp'd with fire." He applies the fatal engine. To assist our notions still further, let us suppose some lucky dog of a reporter, who had escaped by miracle upon some plank of St. Ste]3hen's benches, and came plump upon the roof of the adjacent Ab- bey ; from whence descending, at some neighbouring coifee-house, first wiping his clothes and calling for a glass of lemonade, he sits down and reports what he had heard and seen {quorum pars magna fuil) for the Morning Post or the Courier. We can scarcely imagine him describing the event in any other words but some such as these : — " A motion was put and carried, that this house do adjourn ; that the Speaker do quit the chair. The house rose amid clamours for order." In some such way the event might most techni- cally have been conveyed to the public. But a poetical mind, not content with this dry method of narration, cannot help pursuing the effects of this tremendous blowing up, this adjournment in the air, sine die. It seems the benches mount, — the chair first, and then the benches ; and first the treasury bench, hui-ried up in this nitrous explosion, — the members, as it were, pairing off; Whigs and Tories taking their friendly apotheosis together (as they did their sandwiches below in Bellamy's room). Fancy, in her flight, keeps pace with the aspiring legislators : she sees the awful seat of order mounting, till it becomes finally fixed, a constellation, next to Cas- 26 GUY FAUX. siopeia's chair, — ^the wig of him that sat in it taking its place near Berenice's curls. St. Peter, at hea- ven's wicket, — no, not St. Peter, — St. Stephen, with open arms, receives his own. While Fancy beholds these celestial appropria- tions, Eeason, no less pleased, discerns the mighty benefit which so complete a renovation must produce below. Let the most determined foe to corruption, the most thorough-paced redresser of abuses, try to conceive a more absolute purification of the house than this was calculated to produce. Why, Pride's purge was nothing to it. The whole borough-mon- gering system would have been got rid of, fairly exploded; with it the senseless distinctions of Party must have disappeared, faction must have vanished, corruption have expired in air. From Hundred, Tything, and Wapentake, some new Alfred would have convened, in all its purity, the primitive Witenagemote, — fixed upon a basis of property or population, permanent as the poles. From this dream of universal restitution, Eeason and Fancy with difficulty awake to view the real state of things. But (blessed be Heaven !) St. Ste- phen's walls are yet standing, all her seats firmly secured ; nay, some have doubted (since the Septen- nial Act) whether gunpowder itself, or any thing short of a committee above stairs, would be able to shake any one member from his seat. That great and final improvement to the Abbey, which is all that seems wanting, — the removing of Westminster Hall and its appendages, and letting in the view of the Thames, — must not be expected in our days. Dismissing, therefore, all such speculations as mere tales of a tub, it is the duty of every honest English- man to endeavour, by means more wholesome than Guido's, to ameliorate, without extinguishing, par- liaments ; to hold the lantern to the dark places of corruption ; to apply the match to the rotten parts of A VISION OP HORNS. 27 the system only ; and to wrap himself up, not in the muffling mantle of conspiracy, but in the warm, honest cloak of integrity and patriotic intention. A VISION OF HOENS.* My thoughts had been engaged last evening in solv- ing the problem, why in all times and places the horn has been agreed upon as the symbol, or honour- able badge, of married men. Moses's horn, the horn of Ammon, of Amalthaea, and a cornucopia of legends besides, came to my recollection, but afforded no satisfactory solution, or rather involved the question in deeper obscurity. Tired with the fruitless chase of inexplicant analogies, I fell asleep, and dreamed in this fashion : — Methought certain scales or films fell from my eyes, which had hitherto hindered these little tokens from being visible. I was somewhere in the Corn- hill (as it might be termed) of some Utopia. Busy citizens jostled each other, as they may do in our streets, with care (the care of making a penny) written upon their foreheads ; and something else, which is rather imagined than distinctly imaged * From the London Magazine, 1825. In a letter to Miss Hutchinson, Lamb thus speaks of this article : " The • Horns ' is in a poor taste, resembling the most laboured papers in the Spectator. I had signed it ' Jack Homer : but Taylor and Hessey said it would be thought an offensive article, unless I put my known signature to it ; so they wrung from me my slow consent." It seems that the " Vision " (" the foolish Vision," Lamb calls it) displeased Bernard Barton's daughter ; but Elia hoped she would receive, in atone- ment for the " Horns," (as no doubt the " quiet Quakeress " gladly did,) his beautiful story, " Barbara S." But despite the disparaging words of its writer, and the wounded sensibihty of Miss Lucy Barton, I venture to say that " The Vision of Horns" is a pleasant and entertaining paper. — Editor. 28 A VISION OP HOENS. upon the brows of my own friends and fellow- townsmen. In my first surprise, I supposed myself gotten into some forest, — Arden, to be sure, or Sherwood ; but the dresses and deportment, all civic, forbade me to continue in that delusion. Then a scriptural thought crossed me (especially as there were nearly as many Jews as Christians among them), whether it might not be the children of Israel going up to besiege Jericho. I was undeceived of both errors by the sight of many faces which were familiar to me. I found myself strangely (as it will happen in dreams) at one and the same time in an unknown country with known companions. I met old friends, not with new faces, but with their old faces oddly adorned in front, with each man a certain corneous excrescence. Dick Mitis, the little cheesemonger in St. 's Passage, was the first that saluted me, with his hat off, (you know Dick's way to a customer,) and, I not being aware of him, he thrust a strange beam into my left eye, which pained and grieved me exceedingly ; but, instead of apology, he only grinned and fleered in my face, as much as to say, " It is the custom of the country," and passed on. I had scarce time to send a civil message to his lady, whom I have always admired as a pattern of a wife, and do indeed take Dick and her to be a model of conjugal agreement and harmony, when I felt an ugly smart in my neck, as if something had gored it behind; and, turning round, it was my old friend and neighbour. Dulcet, the confectioner, who, meaning to be pleasant, had thrust his protuberance right into my nape, and seemed proud of his power of offending. Now I was assailed right and left, till in my own defence I was obliged to walk sideling and wary, and look about me, as you guard your eyes in London streets : for the horns thickened and came A VISION OF HORNS. 29 at me like the ends of umbrellas poking in one's face. I soon found that these towns-folk were the civilest, best-mannered people in the world ; and that, if they had offended at all, it was entirely owing to their blindness. They do not know what dangerous, weapons they protrude in front, and will stick their best friends in the eye with provoking complacency. Yet the best of it is, they can see the beams on their neighbours' foreheads, if they are as small as motes ; but their own beams they can in no wise discern. There was little Mitis, that I told you I just encountered. He has simply (I speak of him at home in his own shop) the smoothest forehead in his own conceit. He will stand a quarter of an hour or more contemplating the serenity of it in the glass, before he begins to shave himself in a morning ; yet you saw what a desperate gash he gave me. Desiring to be better informed of the ways of this extraordinary people, I applied myself to a fellow of some assurance, who (it appeared) acted as a sort of interpreter to strangers : he was dressed in a military uniform, and strongly resembled Col. of the Guards. And '' Pray, sir," said I, '' have all inha- bitants of your city these troublesome excrescences ? I beg pardon : I see you have none. You perhaps are single." — " Truly, sir," he replied with a smile, "for the most part we have, but not all alike. There are some, like Dick, that sport but one tumescence. Their ladies have been tolerably faithful, have con- fined themselves to a single aberration or so : these we call Unicorns. Dick, you know, is my Unicorn. [He spoke this with an air of invincible assurance.] Then we have Bicorns, Tricorns, and so on up to Millecorns. [Here methought I crossed and blessed myself in my dream.] Some again we have, — there goes one : you see how happy the rogue looks, — how 80 A VISION OF HOENS. he walks, smiling and perking up Lis face, as if he thought himself the only man. He is not married yet ; but on Monday next he leads to the altar the accomplished widow Dacres, relict of our late sheriff." " I see, sir," said I, '* and observe that he is happily free from the national goitre (let me call it) which distinguishes most of your countrymen." " Look a Httle more narrowly," said my conductor. I put on my spectacles ; and, observing the man a little more diligently, above his forehead I could mark a thousand little twinkling shadows dancing a hornpipe ; Uttle hornlets, and rudiments of horn, of a soft and pappy consistence (for I handled some of them), but which, like coral out of water, my guide informed me would infalhbly stiffen and grow rigid within a week or two from the expiration of his bachelorhood. Then I saw some horns strangely growing out behind ; and my interpreter explained these to be married men, whose wives had conducted themselves with infinite propriety since the period of their mar- riage, but were thought to have antedated their good men's titles, by certain liberties they had indulged themselves in, prior to the ceremony. This kind of gentry wore their horns backwards, as has been said, in the fashion of the old pig-tails : and, as there was nothing obtrusive or ostentatious in them, nobody took any notice of it. Some had pretty little budding antlers, like the first essays of a young fawn. These, he told me, had wives, whose affairs were in a hopeful way, but not quite brought to a conclusion. Others had nothing to show : only by certain red angry marks and swellings in their foreheads, which itched the more they kept rubbing and chafing them, it was to be hoped that something was brewing. I took notice that every one jeered at the rest, only none took notice of the sea captains ; yet theso A VISION OF HORNS. 81 were as well provided with their tokens as the besfe among them. This kind of people, it seems, taking their wives upon so contingent tenures, their lot was considered as nothing but natural : so they wore their marks without impeachment, as they might carry their cockades ; and nobody respected them a whit the less for it. I observed that the more sprouts grew out of a man's head, the less weight they seemed to carry with them ; whereas a single token would now a: d then appear to give the wearer some uneasiness. This shows that use is a great thing. Some had their adomings gilt, which needs no explanation ; while others, like musicians, went sounding theirs before them, — a sort of music which I thought might well have been spared. It was pleasant to see some of the citizens en- counter between themselves ; how they smiled in their sleeves at the shock they received from their neighbour, and none seemed conscious of the shock which their neighbour experienced in return. Some had great corneous stumps, seemingly torn off and bleeding. These, the interpreter warned me, were husbands who had retaliated upon their wives, and the badge was in equity divided between them. While I stood discerning these things, a slight tweak on my cheek unawares, which brought tears into my eyes, introduced to me my friend Placid, between whose lady and a certain male cousin some idle flirtations I remember to have heard talked of ; but that was all. He saw he had somehow hurt me, and asked my pardon with that round, unconscious face of his ; and looked so tristful and contrite for liis no-offence, that I was ashamed for the man's panitence. Yet I protest it was but a scratch. It was the least Httle hornet of a horn that could be framed. ** Shame on the man," I secretly ex- claimed, ** who could thrust so much as the value of 32 A VISION OF HORNS. a hair into a brow so unsuspecting and inoffensive ! What, then, must they have to answer for, who plant great, monstrous, timber-hke, projecting antlers upon the heads of those whom they call their friends, when a puncture of this atomical tenuity made my eyes to water at this rate ! All the pincers at Sur- geons' Hall cannot pull out for Placid that little hair." I was curious to know what became of these frontal excrescences when the husbands died; and my guide informed me that the chemists in their country made a considerable profit by them, extracting from them certain subtile essences : and then I remembered that nothing was so efficacious in my own country for restoring swooning matrons and wives troubled with the vapours as a strong sniff or two at the composition appropriately called hartshorn, — far beyond sal volatile. Then also I began to understand why a man, who is the jest of the company, is said to be the butt, — as much as to say, such a one butteth with the horn. I inquu'ed if by no operation these wens were ever extracted ; and was told that there was indeed an order of dentists, whom they call canonists in their language, who undertook to restore the fore- head to its pristine smoothness ; but that ordinarily it was not done without much cost and trouble ; and, when they succeeded in plucking out the offending part, it left a painful void, which could not be filled up ; and that many patients w^ho had submitted to the excision were eager to marry again, to supply with a good second antler the baldness and deformed gap left by the extraction of the former, as men losing their natural hair substitute for it a less becoming periwig. Some horns I observed beautifully taper, smooth, and (as it were) flowering. These I understand were A VISION OF HORNS. 33 the portions brought by handsome women to their spouses ; and I pitied the rough, homely, unsightly deformities on the brows of others, who had been deceived by plain and ordinary partners. Yet the latter I observed to be by far the most common ; the solution of which I leave to the natural philosopher. One tribe of married men I particularly admired, who, instead of horns, wore ingrafted on their forehead a sort of horn book. " This," quoth my guide, *'is the greatest mystery in our country, and well worth an explanation. You must know that all infidelity is not of the senses. We have as well intellectual as material wittols. These, whom you see decorated with the Order of the Book, are triflers, who encourage about their wives' presence the society of your men of genius, (their good friends, as they call them,) literary disputants, who ten to one out- talk the poor husband, and commit upon the under- standing of the woman a violence and estrangement in the end, little less painful than the coarser sort of alienation. Wliip me these knaves, — [my conductor here expressed himself with a becoming warmth,] — • whip me them, I say, who, with no excuse from the passions, in cold blood seduce the minds, rather than the persons, of their friends' wives ; who, for the tickling pleasure of hearing themselves prate, dehonestate the intellects of married women, dis- honouring the husband in what should be his most sensible part. If I must be — [here he used a plain word] let it be by some honest sinner hke myself, and not by one of these gad-flies, these debauchers of the understanding, these flattery-buzzers." He was going on in this manner, and I was getting insensibly pleased with my friend's manner (I had been a httle shy of him at first), when the dream suddenly left me, vanishing, as Virgil speaks, through the gate of Horn. 84 JOHN KEMBLE, JOHN KEMBLE, AND GODWIN'S TRAGEDY OF ** ANTONIO."* The story of his swallowing opium-pills to keep him lively upon the first night of a certain tragedy, we may presume to be a piece of retaliatory pleasantry on the part of the suffering author. But, indeed, John had the art of diffusing a complacent equable dulness (which you knew not where to quarrel with) ever a piece which he did not like, beyond any of his contemporaries. John Kemble had made up his mind early, that all the good tragedies which could be written had been written ; and he resented any new attempt. His shelves were full. The old standards were scope enough for his ambition. He ranged in them absolute ; and *' fair in Otway, full in Shakspeare shone." He succeeded to the old lawful thrones, and did not care to adventure bottomry with a Sir Edward Mortimer, or any casual speculator that offered. I remember, too acutely for my peace, the deadly extinguisher which he put upon my friend G.'s ''An- tonio." G., satiate with visions of political justice, (possibly not to be realized in our time,) or willing to let the sceptical worldlings see that his anticipa- tions of the future did not preclude a warm sympathy for men as they are and have been, wrote a tragedy. * From the London Magazine, 1822. To Elia's essay on " The Artificial Comedy of the Last Cen- tury," as originally published in the London Magazine, this circumstantial account of the cold and stately manner in which John Kemble performed the part of Antonio, in Godwin's un- fortunate play of that name, was the conclusion. In reprinting the article, Lamb omitted this part of it. AND Godwin's tragedy of "antonio." 85 He chose a story, affecting, romantic, Spanish ; the plot simple, without being naked ; the incidents uncommon, without being overstrained. Antonio, who gives the name to the piece, is a sensitive young Castilian, who, in a fit of his country honour, immo- lates his sister. But I must not anticipate the catastrophe. The play, reader, is extant in choice English ; and you will employ a spare half-crown not injudiciously in the quest of it. The conception was bold ; and the denouement, the time and place in which the hero of it existed, was considered not much out of keeping : yet it must be confessed that it required a dehcacy of handling, both from the author and the performer, so as not much to shock the prejudices of a modern English audience. G., in my opinion, had done his part. John, who was in familiar habits with the philoso- pher, had undertaken to play Antonio. Great expec- tations were formed. A philosopher's first play was a new era. The night arrived. I was favoured with a seat in an advantageous box, between the author and his friend M. G. sat cheerful and confident. In his friend M.'s looks, who had perused the manu- script, I read some terror. Antonio, in the person of John Philip Kemble, at length appeared, starched out in a ruff which no one could dispute, and in most irreproachable mustachios. John always dressed most provokingly correct on these occasions. The first act swept by, solemn and silent. It went off, as G. assured M., exactly as the opening act of a piece — the protasis — should do. The cue of the spectators was to be mute. The characters were but in their introduction. The passions and the incidents would be developed hereafter. Ax)plause hitherto would be impertinent. Silent attention was the effect all desirable. Poor M. acquiesced ; but in his honest, friendly face I could discern a 86 JOHN KEMBLB, working which told how much more acceptable the plaudit of a single hand (however misplaced) would have been than all this reasoning. The second act (as in duty bound) rose a little in interest ; but still John kept his forces under, — in poHcy, as G. would have it, — and the audience were most complacently attentive. The protasis, in fact, was scarcely un- folded. The interest would warm in the next act, against which a special incident was provided. M. wiped his cheek, flushed with a friendly perspiration, — 'tis M.'s way of showing his zeal, — ''from every pore of him a perfume falls." I honour it above Alexander's. He had once or twice during this act joined his palms in a feeble endeavour to ehcit a sound; they emitted a solitary noise without an echo : there was no deep to answer to his deep. G. repeatedly begged him to be quiet. The third act at length brought on the scene which was to warm the piece progressively to the final flaming- forth of the catastrophe. A philosophic calm settled upon the clear brow of G. as it approached. The lips of M. quivered. A challenge was held forth upon the stage, and there was promise of a fight. The pit roused themselves on this extraordinary occasion, and, as their manner is, seemed disposed to make a ring ; when suddenly Antonio, who was the challenged, turning the tables upon the hot challenger, Don Gusman, (who, by the way, should have had his sister,) balks his humour, and the pit's reasonable expectation at the same time, with some speeches out of the new philosophy against dueUing. The audience were here fairly caught ; their courage was up, and on the alert ; a few blows, ding dong, as R s, the dramatist, afterwards expressed it to me, might have done the business, — when their most exquisite moral sense was suddenly called in to assist in the mortifying negation of their own pleasure. They could not applaud, for disappoint- AND Godwin's tragedy of "antonio." 37 ment ; they would not condemn, for morality's sake. The interest stood stone-still ; and John's manner was not at all calculated to unpetrify it. It was Christmas time, and the atmosphere furnished some pretext for asthmatic affections. One begat. to cough : his neighbour sympathized with him, till a cough became epidemical. But when, from being haK artificial in the pit, the cough got frightfully naturalized among the fictitious persons of the drama, and Antonio himseK (albeit it was not set down in the stage directions) seemed more intent upon relieving his own lungs than the distresses of the author and his friends, then G. '* first knew fear," and, mildly turning to M., intimated that he had not been aware that Mr. Kemble laboured under a cold, and that the performance might possibly have been postponed with advantage for some nights further, — still keeping the same serene coun- tenance, while M. sweated like a bull. It would be invidious to pursue the fates of this ill-starred evening. In vain did the plot thicken in the scenes that followed, in vain did the dialogue wax more passionate and stin*ing, and the progress of the sentiment point more and more clearly to the arduous development which impended. In vain the action was accelerated, while the acting stood still. From the beginning John had taken his stand, — had wound himself up to an even tenor of stately declamation, from which no exigence of dialogue or person could make him swerve for an instant. To dream of his rising with the scene (the common trick of tragedians) was preposterous ; for from the onset he had planted himself, as upon a ten-ace, ou an eminence vastly above the audience, and he kept that sublime level to the end. He looked from his throne of elevated sentiment upon the under-world of spectators with a most sovereign and becoming contempt. There was excellent pathos delivered 88 JOHN kemble: Godwin's tragedy of *'antonio." out to them : and they would receive it, so ; and they would not receive it, so. There w^as no offence against decorum in all this ; nothing to condemn, to damn : not an irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would come of it ; when, towards the winding-up of the latter, Antonio, with an irrele- vancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself, — for she had been coolly arguing the point of honour with him, — suddenly whips out a poniard, and stabs his sister to the heart. The effect was as if a murder had been committed in cold blood. The whole house rose up in clamorous indignation, demanding justice. The feeling rose far above hisses. I be- lieve at that instant, if they could have got him, they would have torn the unfortunate author to pieces. Not that the act itself was so exorbitant, or of a complexion different from what they themselves would have applauded upon another occasion in a Bruins or an Appius ; but, for want of attending to Antonio's words, which palpably led to the expecta- tion of no less dire an event, instead of being seduced by his manner, which seemed to promise a sleep of a less alarming nature than it was his cue to inflict upon Elvira, they found themselves be- trayed into an accompliceship of murder, a perfect misprision of parricide, while they dreamed of nothing less. M., I believe, was the only person who suffered acutely from the failure ; for G. thenceforward, with a serenity unattainable but by the true philosopher, abandoning a precarious popularity, retired into his fast hold of speculation, — the drama in which the world was to be his tiring-room, and remote pos- terity his applauding spectators at once and actors. THE GOOD CLEEK. 89 THE GOOD CLERK, A CHARACTER ; WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF " THE COMPLETE ENGLISH TRADESMAN."* The Good Clerk. — He writeth a fair and swift hand, and is competently versed in the first four rules of arithmetic, in the Rule of Three, (which is sometimes called the Golden Rule,) and in Practice. "We mention these things that we may leave no room for cavillers to say that any thing essential hath been omitted in our definition ; else, to speak the truth, these are hut ordinary accomplishments, and such as every understrai^per at a desk is commonly furnished with. The character we treat of soareth higher. He is clean and neat in his person, not from a vain-glorious desire of setting himself forth to ad- vantage in the eyes of the other sex, with which vanity too many of our young sparks now-a-days are infected; but to do credit, as we say, to the office. For this reason, he evermore taketh care that his desk or his books receive no soil ; the which things he is commonly as solicitous to have fair and unblemished, as the owner of a fine horse is to have him appear in good keep. He riseth early in the morning ; not because early rising conduceth to health, (though he doth not al- together despise that consideration,) but chiefly to the intent that he may be first at the desk. There is his post, there he delighteth to be, unless when his meals or necessity call him away ; which timo * From the Refector, No. 4. 40 THE GOOD CLEEK. he alway esteemeth as lost, and maketli as short as possible. He is temperate in eating and drinldng, that he may preserve a clear head and steady hand for his master's service. He is also partly induced to this observation on the rules of temperance by his re- spect for religion and the laws of his country; which things, it may once for all be noted, do add special assistances for his actions, but do not and cannot furnish the main spring or motive thereto. His first ambition, as appeareth all along, is to be a good clerk ; his next, a good Christian, a good patriot, &c. Correspondent to this, he keepeth himself honest, not for fear of the laws, but because he hath observed how unseemly an article it maketh in the day-book or ledger when a sum is set down lost or missing ; it being his pride to make these books to agree and to tally, the one side or the other, with a sort of architectural symmetry and correspon- dence. He marrieth, or marrieth not, as best suiteth with his employer's views. Some merchants do the rather desire to have married men in their counting- houses, because they think the married state a pledge for their servants' integrity, and an incitement to them to be industrious ; and it was an observation of a late Lord Mayor of London, that the sons of clerks do generally prove clerks themselves, and that merchants encouraging persons in their employ to marry, and to have families, was the best method of securing a breed of sober, industrious young men attached to the mercantile interest. Be this as it may, such a character as we have been describing will wait till the pleasure of his employer is known on this point ; and regulateth his desires by the custom of the house or firm to which he belongeth. He avoideth profane oaths and jesting, as so much THE GOOD CLERK. 41 time lost from his employ. What spare time he hath for conversation, which, in a counting-house such as we have been supposing, can be but small, he spendeth in putting seasonable questions to those of his fellows (and sometimes respectfully to the master himself) who can give him information re- specting the price and quality of goods, the state of exchange, or the latest improvements in book- keeping ; thus making the motion of his lips, as well as of his fingers, subservient to his master's interest. Not that he refuseth a brisk saying, or a cheerful saUy of wit, when it comes unforced, is free of offence, and hath a convenient brevity. For this reason, he hath commonly some such phrase as this in his mouth : — Or, " 'Tis a slovenly look " To blot your book." *' Red ink for ornament, black for use : " The best things are open to abuse. So upon the eve of any great holy- day, of which he keepeth one or two at least every year, he will merrily say, in the hearing of a confidential friend, but to none other, — Or, All work and no play • Makes Jack a duU boy.' *• A bow always bent must crack at last." But then this must always be understood to be spoken confidentially, and, as we say, under the rose. Lastly, his dress is plain, without singularity ; with no other ornament than the quill, which is the badge of his function, stuck behind the dexter 42 *' THE COMPLETE ENGLISH TKADESMAN." ear, and this rather for convenience of having it at hand, when he hath been called away from his desk, and expecteth to resume his seat there again shortly, than from any dehght which he taketh in foppery or ostentation. The colour of his clothes is generally noted to be black rather than brown, brown rather than blue or green. His whole deportment is staid, modest, and civil. His motto is " Begularity." This character was sketched in an interval of business, to divert some of the melancholy hours of a counting-house. It is so little a creature of fancy, that it is scarce any thing more than a recol- lection of some of those frugal and economical maxims, which, about the beginning of the last century, (England's meanest period,) were endea- voured to be inculcated and instilled into the breasts of the London Apprentices" by a class of instructors who might not inaptly be termed " The Masters of Mean Morals." The astonishing narrowness and illiberality of the lessons contained in some of those books is inconceivable by those whose studies have not led them that way, and would almost induce one to subscribe to the hard censure which Drayton has passed upon the mercantile spirit : — " The gripple merchant, born to be the curse "Of the brave isle." I have now lying before me that curious book by Daniel Defoe, " The Complete English Trades- man." The pompous detail, the studied analysis of every little mean art, every sneaking address, every trick and subterfuge, short of larceny, that is necessary to the tradesman's occupation, with the hundreds of anecdotes, and dialogues (in Defoe's live- liest manner) interspersed, all tending to the same * This term designated a larger class of young men than that to which it is now confined. It took in the articled clerks of merchants and bankers, the George Bamwells of the day. **TEE COMPLETE ENGLISH TRADESMAN." 43 amiable purpose, — namely, the sacrificing of every honest emotion of the soul to what he calls the main chance, — if you read it in an ironical sense, and as a piece of covered satire, make it one of the most amusing books which Defoe ever writ, as much so as any of his best novels. It is difficult to say what his intention was in writing it. It is almost im- possible to suppose him in earnest. Yet such is the bent of the book to narrow and to degrade the heart, that if such maxims were as catching and in- fectious as those of a licentious cast, which happily IS not the case, had I been living at that time, I certainly should have recommended to the Grand Jury of Middlesex, who presented " The Fable of the Bees," to have presented this book of Defoe's in preference, as of a far more vile and debasing ten- dency. I will give one specimen of his advice to the young tradesman on the government of his temper : *' The retail tradesman in especial, and even every tradesman in his station, must furnish himself with a competent stock of patience. I mean that sort of patience which is needful to bear with all sorts of impertinence, and the most provoking curiosity that it is possible to imagine the buyers, even the worst of them, are, or can be, guilty of. A trades- man behind his counter must have no flesh and blood about him, no 2Jassions, no resentment; he must never be angry, no, not so much as seem to be so, if a cus- tomer tumbles him five hundred pounds' worth of goods, and scarce bids money for any thing ; nay, though they really come to his shop with no intent to buy, as many do, only to see what is to be sold, and though he knows they cannot be better pleased than they are at some other shop where they intend to buy, 'tis all one ; the tradesman must take it ; he must place it to the account of his calling, that 'tis his business to be ill-used, and resent nothing ; and so must answer as obligingly to those that give him an 44 " THE COMPLETE ENGLISH TEADESMAN." hour or two's trouble, and buy nothing, as he does to those, who, in half the time, lay out ten and twenty pounds. The case is plain ; and if some do give him trouble, and do not buy, others make amends, and do buy ; and as for the trouble, 'tis the business of the shop." Here follows a most admirable story of a mercer, who by his indefatigable meanness, and more than Socratic patience under affronts, overcame and reconciled a lady, who, upon the report of another lady that he had behaved saucily to some third lady, had determined to shun his shop, but, by the over- persuasions of a fourth lady, was induced to go to it ; which she does, declaring beforehand that she will buy nothing, but give him all the trouble she can. Her attack and his defence, her insolence and his persevering patience, are described in colours worthy of a Mandeville ; but it is too long to recite. " The short inference from this long discourse," says he, '* is this, — that here you see, and I could give you many examples like this, how and in what manner a shop-keeper is to behave himself in the way of his business ; what impertinences, wha! taunts, flouts, and ridiculous things, he must bear in his trade ; and must not show the least return, or the least signal of disgust : he must have no passions, no fire in his temper ; he must be all soft and smooth ; nay, if his real temper be naturally fiery and hot, he must show none of it in his shop ; he must be a perfect complete hypocrite if he will be a complete tradesman.''^ It is true, natural tempers are not to be always counterfeited : the man cannot easily be a lamb in his shop, and a lion in himself; but, let it be easy or hard, it must be done, and is done. There are men who have by custom and * As no qualification accompanies this maxim, it must be understood as the genuine sentiment of the author 1 ** THE COMPLETE ENGLISH TRADESMAN." 4.5 usage brought tliemselves to it, that nothing could be meeker and milder than they when behind the counter, and yet nothing be more furious and raging in every other part of life : nay, the provocations they have met with in their shops have so irritated their rage, that they would go up stairs from their shop, and fall into frenzies, and a kind of madness, and beat their heads against the wall, and perhaps mischief themselves, if not prevented, till the violence of it had gotten vent, and the passions had abated and cooled. I heard once of a shopkeeper that behaved himself thus to such an extreme, that, when he was provoked by the impertinence of the customers beyond what his temper could bear, he would go up stairs and beat his wife, kick his children about like dogs, and be as furious for two or three minutes as a man chained down in Bedlam ; and again, when that heat was over, would sit down, and cry faster than the children he had abused ; and, after the fit, he would go down into the shop again, and be as humble, courteous, and as calm, as any man what- ever ; so absolute a government of his passions had he in the shop, and so little out of it : in the shop, a soulless animal that would resent nothing ; and in the family, a madman : in the shop, meek like a lamb ; but in the family outrageous, like a Libyan lion. The sum of the matter is, it is necessary for a tradesman to subject himself, by all the ways possible, to his business ; his ciistomers are to he his idols : so far as he may worship idols by allowance, he is to bow down to them, and worship them ; at least, he is not in any way to displease them, or show any disgust or distaste, whatsoever they may say or do. The bottom of all is, that he is intending to get money by them ; and it is not for him that gets money to offer the least inconvenience to them by whom he gets it. He is to consider that, as Solomon says, ** the borrower is servant to the lender;'" so 40 KEMINISCENCE OF SIR JEFFEEY DUNSTAN. the seller is servant to the buyer. What he says on the head of " Pleasures and Recreations " is not less amusing : " The tradesman's pleasures should be in his business ; his companions should be his books (he means his ledger, waste-book, &c.) ; and, if he has a family, he makes his excursions up stairs, and no further. None of my cautions aim at restraining a tradesman from diverting himself, as we call it, with his fireside, or keeping company with his wife and children." Liberal allowance ! nay, almost licen- tious and criminal indulgence ! But it is time to dismiss this Philosopher of Meanness. More of this stuff would illiberalize the pages of the Reflector. "Was the man in earnest, when he could bring such powers of description, and all the charms of natural eloquence, in commendation of the meanest, vilest, wretchedest degradations of the human character ? or did he not rather laugh in his sleeve at the doctrines which he inculcated ; and, retorting upon the grave citizens of London their own arts, palm upon them a sample of disguised satire under the name of wholesome instruction ! EEMINISCENCE OF SIR JEFFERY DUNSTAN. To the Editor of the Every-Day Book. To your account of Sir Jeffery Dunstan, in columns 829-30, (where, by an unfortunate erratum, the effi- gies of two Sir Jefferys appear, when the uppermost figure is clearly meant for Sir Harry Dimsdale,) you may add that the writer of this has frequently met him in his latter days, about 1790 or 1791, returning in an evening, after his long day's itineracy, to his domicile, — a wretched shed in the most beggarly purlieu of Bethnal Green, a little on this side the REMINISCENCE OP SIS JEFFEHY DUNSTAN. 4.7 Mile-End Turnpike. The lower figure in that leaf most correctly describes his then appearance, except that no graphic art can convey an idea of the general squalor of it, and of his bag (his constant concomi- tant) in particular. Whether it contained " old wigs" at that time, I know not ; but it seemed a fitter repository for bones snatched out of kennels than for any part of a gentleman's dress, even at second-hand. The ex-member for Garrat was a melancholy instance of a great man whose popularity is worn out. He still carried his sack ; but it seemed a part of his identity rather than an implement of his profession ! a badge of past grandeur. Could any thing have divested him of that, he would have shown a ''poor forked animal" indeed. My life upon it, it contained no curls at the time I speak of. The most decayed and spiritless remnants of what was once a peruke would have scorned the filthy case ; would absolutely have *' burst its cerements." No : it was empty, or brought home bones, or a few cinders possibly. A strong odour of burnt bones, I remember, blended with the scent of horse-flesh seething into dog's meat, and only relieved a little by the breathings of a few brick-kilns, made up the atmosphere of the delicate suburban spot which this great man had chosen for the last scene of his earthly vanities. The cry of "old wigs" had ceased with the possession of any such fripperies : his sack might have contained not unaptly a little mould to scatter upon that grave to which he was now advancing ; but it told of vacancy and desolation. His quips were silent too, and his brain was empty as his sack : he slunk along, and seemed to decline popular observation. If a few boys followed him, it seemed rather from habit than any expectation of fun. " Alas ! how chnnged from him, " The life of humour, and the soul of whim, " Gallant and gay on Garrat's hustings proud!'* 48 KEMINISCENCE OF SIR JEFFEEY DUN STAN. But it is thus that the world rewards its favourites in decay. What faults he had, I know not. I have heard something of a peccadillo or so. But some little deviation from the precise line of rectitude; might have been winked at in so tortuous and stig- matic a frame. Poor Sir Jeffery ! it were well if some M.PJs in earnest have passed their parlia^ mentary existence with no more offences against integrity than could be laid to thy charge ! A fair dismissal was thy due, not so unkind a degradation ; some little snug retreat, with a bit of green before thine eyes, and not a burial alive in the fetid beg- garies of Bethnal, Thou wouldst have ended thy days in a manner more appropriate to thy pristine dignity, installed in munificent mockery (as in mock honours you had lived), — a poor knight of Windsor I Every distinct place of public speaking demands an oratory peculiar to itself. The forensic fails within the walls of St. Stephen. Sir Jeffery was a living instance of this ; for, in the flower of his popularity an attempt was made to bring him out upon the stage (at which of the winter theatres I forget, but I well remember the anecdote) in the part of Doctor Last,''' The announcement drew a crowded house ; but, notwithstanding infinite tutor- ing, — by Foote or Garrick, I forget which, — when the curtain drew up, the heart of Sir Jeffery failed, and he faltered on, and made nothing of his part, till the hisses of the house at last, in very kindness, dismissed him from the boards. Great as his parlia- mentary eloquence had shown itself, brilliantly aa his off-hand sallies had sparkled on a hustings, they here totally failed him. Perhaps he had an aversion to borrowed wit, and, like my Lord Foppineton, disdained to entertain himself (or oti erg) with the * It was at the Haymarket Theatre. — Editor cj " Everrj-Bay Book:' ON A PASSAGE IN "THE TEMPEST." 49 forced products of another man's brain. Your man of quality is more diverted with the natural sprouts of his own. ON A PASSAGE IN *'THE TEMPEST."* As long as I can remember the play of The Teni' pest, one passage in it has always set me upon wondering. It has puzzled me beyond measure. In vain I strove to find the meaning of it. I seemed doomed to cherish infinite, hopeless curiosity. It is where Prosper o, relating the banishment of Sycorax from Algier, adds, — *' for one thing that she did, *■'- They would not take her life." How have I pondered over this when a boy ! How have I longed for some authentic memoir of the witch to clear up the obscurity ! Was the story ex- tant in the chronicles of Algiers ? Could I get at it by some fortunate introduction to the Algerine am- bassador ? Was a voyage thither practicable ? The Spectator, I knew, went to Grand Cairo only to measure the pyramid. Was not the object of my quest of at least as much importance ? The blue- eyed hag ! could she have done any thing good or meritorious ? might that succubus relent ? then might there be hope for the Devil. I have often wondered since, that none of the commentators have boggled at this passage ; how they could swallow this camel, — such a tantalizing piece of obscurity, such an abortion of an anecdote. At length, I think I have lighted upon a clew which may lead to show what was passing in the • From the London Magazine for 1823. 60 ON A PASSAGE IN '* THE TEMPEST.'* mind of Shakspeare when he dropped this imperfect rumour. In the " Accurate Description of Africa, by John Ogilby (foHo), 1670," page 230, I find written as follows. The marginal title to the narrative is, *' Charles the Fifth besieges Algier." *' In the last place, we will briefly give an account of the emperour, Charles the Fifth, when he besieg'd this city ; and of the great loss he suffer'd therein. *' This prince, in the year one thousand five hun- dred forty-one, having embarqued upon the sea an army of twenty-two thousand men aboard eighteen gallies, and an hundred tall ships, not counting the barques and shallops, and other small boats, in which he had engaged the principal of the Spanish and Itahan nobility, with a good number of the Knights of Malta ; he was to land on the coast of Barbary, at a cape call'd Matifou. From this place unto the city of Algier, a flat shore or strand ex- tends itself for about four leagues, the which is ex- ceeding favorable to gaUies. There he put ashore with his army, and in a few days caused a fortress to be built, which unto this day is call'd the castle of the Emperour. " In the meantime the city of Algier took the alarm, having in it at that time but eight hundred Turks, and six thousand Moors, poor-spirited men, and unexercised in martial affairs ; besides it was at that time fortifi'd only with walls, and had no out-works : insomuch that by reason of its weakness, and the great forces of the Emperour, it could not in appearance escape taking. In fine, it was at- tempted with such order, that the army came up to the very gates, where the Chevalier de Sauiguac, a Frenchman by nation, made himself remarkable above all the rest, by the miracles of his valor. For having repulsed the Turks, who, having made a sally at the gate call'd Babason, and there desiring to enter along with them, when he saw that they ON A PASSAGE IN jhut the gate upon him, he ran his pon yard into the same, and left it sticking deep therein. They next fell to battering the city by the force of cannon ; which the assailants so weakened, that in that great extremity the defendants lost their courage, and resolved to surrender. *' But as they were thus intending, there was a witch of the town, whom the history doth not name, which went to seek out Assam Aga, that commanded within, and pray'd him to make it good yet nine days longer, with assurance, that within that time he should infallibly see Algier delivered from that siege, and the whole army of the enemy dispersed, so that Christians should be as cheap as birds. In a word, the thing did happen in the manner as fore- told ; for upon the twenty-first day of October, in the same year, there fell a continual rain upon the land, and so furious a storm at sea, that one might have seen ships hoisted into the clouds, and in one instant again precipitated into the bottom of the water ; insomuch that that same dreadful tempest was followed with the loss of fifteen gallies, and above an hundred other vessels ; which was the- cause why the Emperour, seeing his army wasted by the bad weather, pursued by a famine, occasioned by wrack of his ships, in which was the greatest part of his victuals and ammunition, he was constrain'd to raise the siege, and set sail for Sicily, whither he retreated with the miserable rehques of his fleet. " In the meantime that witch being acknowledged the deliverer of Algier, was richly remunerated, and the credit of her charms authorized. So that ever since, witchcraft hath been very freely tolerated ; of which the chief of the town, and even those who are esteem'd to be of greatest sanctity among them, such as are the Marabous, a religious order of their sect, do for the most part make profession of it, under a 62 ON A PASSAGE IN ** THE TEMPEST." goodly pretext of certain revelations which they say they have had from their prophet, Mahomet. " And hereupon those of Algier, to palliate the shame and the reproaches that are thrown upon them for making use of a witch in the danger of this siege, do say that the loss of the forces of Charles V. was caused hy a prayer of one of their Marabous, named Cidy Utica, which was at that time in great credit, not under the notion of a magitian, hut for a person of a holy life. Afterwards in remembrance of their success, they have erected unto him a small mosque without the Babason gate, where he is buried, and in which they keep sundry lamps burning in honor of him : nay they sometimes repair thither to make their sala, for a testimony of greater venera- tion." Can it be doubted, for a moment, that the dra- matist had come fresh from reading some older narrative of this deliverance of Algier by a witch, and transferred the merit of the deed to his Sycorax, exchanging only the ''rich remuneration," which did not suit his purpose, to the simple pardon of her life ? Ogilby wrote in 1670 ; but the authorities to which he refers for his account of Barbary are Johannes de Leo or Africanus, Louis Marmol, Diego de Haedo, Johannes Gramaye, Braeves, Cel. Curio, and Diego de Torres, names totally unknown to me, and to which I beg leave to refer the curious reader for his fuller satisfaction. THE MONTHS. 58 THE MONTHS.* Rummaging over the contents of an old stall at a half book, half old-iron slwp, in an alley leading from Wardour Street to Soho Square, yesterday, I lit upon a ragged duodecimo which had been the strange delight of my infancy, and which I h&d lost sight of for more than forty years, — the '' Queen-like Closet, or Eich Cabinet;" written by Hannah Woolly, and printed for R. C. and T. S., 1681 ; being an abstract of receipts in cookery, confectionery, cosmetics, needlework, morality, and all such branches of what were then considered as female accomplishments. The price demanded was sixpence, which the owner (a little squab duodecimo of a character himself) enforced with the assurance that his ** own mother should not have it for a farthing less." On my demmTing at this extraordinary assertion, the dirty little vender re -enforced his assertion with a sort of oath, which seemed more than the occasion demanded : *' And now," said he, **I have put my soul to it." Pressed by so solemn an asseveration, I could no longer resist a demand which seemed to set me, however unworthy, upon a level with his dearest relations ; and, depositing a tester, I bore away the tattered prize in triumph, I remembered a gorgeous description of the twelve months of the year, which I thought would be a fine substitute for those poetical descriptions of them which your Every-Day Book had nearly exhausted out of Spenser. " This will be a treat," thought I, " for friend Hone." To memory they seemed no less * From Hone's Every-Day Book. 54 THE MONTHS. fantastic and splendid than tlie other. But what are the mistakes of childliood ! On reviewing them, they turned out to be only a set of commonplace receipts for working the seasons, months, heathen gods and goddesses, &c., in samplers ! Yet, as an instance of the homely occupations of our great- grandmothers, they may be amusing to some readers. " I have seen," says the notable Hannah Woolly, *' such ridiculous things done in work, as it is an abomination to any artist to behold. As for example : You may find, in some pieces, Abraham and Sarah, and many other persons of old time, clothed as they go now-a-days, and truly sometimes worse ; for they most resemble the pictures on ballads. Let all ingenious women have regard, that when they work any image, to represent it aright. First, let it be drawn well, and then observe the directions which are given by knowing men. I do assure you, I never durst work any Scripture story without informing myself from the ground of it ; nor any other story, or single person, without informing myself both of the visage and habit ; as followeth : — " If you work Jupiter, the imperial feigned God, he must have long, black, curled hair, a purple garment trimmed with gold, and sitting upon a golden throne, ■with bright yellow clouds about him." THE TWELVE MONTHS OF THE YEAR. March is drawn in tawny, with a fierce aspect ; a helmet upon his head, and leaning on a spade ; and a basket of garden seeds in his left hand, and in his right hand the sign of Aries ; and winged. April : A young man in green, with a garland of myrtle and hawthorn-buds ; winged ; in one hand primroses and violets, in the other the sign Taurus, THE MONTHS. 55 May : With a sweet and lovely countenance ; clad in a robe of white and green, embroidered with several flowers; upon his head a garland of all manner of roses ; on the one hand a nightingale, in the other a lute. His sign must be Gemini. June : In a mantle of dark grass-green ; upon his head a garland of bents, kings-cups, and maiden- hair ; in his left hand an angle, with a box of can- tharides ; in his right, the sign Cancer ; and upon his arms a basket of seasonable fruits. July : In a jacket of light yellow, eating cherries; with his face and bosom sun-burnt ; on his head a wi*eath of centaury and wild thyme ; a scythe on his shoulder, and a bottle at his girdle ; carrying the sign Leo. August: A young man of fierce and choleric aspect, in a flame-coloured garment ; upon his head a garland of wheat and rye ; upon his arm a basket of all manner of ripe fruits ; at his belt a sickle : his sign Virt/o. Sejjtemher : A merry and cheerful countenance, in a purple robe ; upon his head a wreath of red and white grapes ; in his left hand a handful of oats ; withal carrying a horn of plenty, full of all manner of ripe fruits ; in his right hand the sign Libra. October : In a garment of yellow and carnation ; upon his head a garland of oak leaves with acorns ; in his right hand the sign Scorpio ; in his left hand a basket of medlars, services, and chestnuts, and any other fruits then in season. November : In a gannent of changeable green and black ; upon his head a garland of olives, with the fruit in his left hand ; bunches of parsnips and turnips in his right ; his sign Sagittarius. December: A horrid and feai-ful aspect, clad in Irish rags, or coarse frieze girt upon him ; upon his head three or four night -caps, and over them a 66 THE MONTHS. Turkish turban ; his nose red, his mouth and beard clogged with icicles ; at his back a bundle of holly, ivy, or misletoe ; holding in furred mittens the sign of Capricornus. January : Clad all in white, as the earth looks with the snow, blowing his nails ; in his left arm a billet ; the sign Aquarius standing by his side. February : Clothed in a dark sky colour, carrying in his right hand the sign Pisces, The following receipt, '* To dress up a chimney very fine for the summer time, as I have done many, and they have been liked very well," may not be unj)rofitable to the housewives of this century : — *' First, take a pack-thread, and fasten it even to the inner part of the chimney so high as that you can see no higher as you walk up and down the house. You must diive in several nails to hold up all your work. Then get good store of old green moss from trees, and melt an equal proportion of beeswax and rosin together ; and, while it is hot, dip the wrong ends of the moss in it, and presently claj) it upon your pack-thread, and press it down hard with your hand. You must make haste, else it will cool before you can fasten it, and then it will fall down. Do so all around where the pack- thread goes ; and the next row you must join to that, so that it may seem all in one : thus do till you have finished it down to the bottom. Then take some other kind of moss, of a whitish colour and stiff, and of several sorts or kinds, and place that upon the other, here and there carelessly, and in some x^laces put a good deal, and some a little ; then any kind of fine snail-shells, in which the snails are dead, and little toad-stools, which are very old, and look like velvet, or any other thing that ivas old and prettij : place it here and there as your fancy serves, and fasten all with wax and rosin. Then, for the hearth of your chimney, you may lay some THE MONTHS. 57 orpan- sprigs in order all over, and it will grow as it lies ; and, according to the season, get what flowers you can, and stick in as if they grew, and a few sprigs of sweet-briar. The flowers you must renew every week ; but the moss will last all the Summer, till it will be time to make a fire ; and the orpan will last near two months. A chimney thus done doth grace a room exceedingly."* One phrase in the above should particularly re- commend it to such of your female readers as, in the nice language of the day, have done growing some time, — "little toad-stools, &c., and any thing that is old and pretty.'' Was ever antiquity so smoothed over ? The culinary recipes have nothing remarkable in them, except the costliness of them. Every thing (to the meanest meats) is sopped in claret, steeped in claret, basted with claret, as if claret were as cheap as ditch-water. I remember Bacon recommends opening a turf or two in your garden walks, and pouring into each a bottle of claret, to recreate the sense of smelling, being no less grateful than beneficial. We hope the Chancellor of the Exchequer will attend to this in his next re- duction of French wines, that we may once more water our gardens with right Bordeaux. The medical recipes are as whimsical as they are cruel. Our ancestors were not at all effeminate on this head. Modern sentimentalists would shrink at a cock plucked and bruised in a mortar alive to make a cullis, or a live mole baked in an oven (he sure it he alive) to make a powder for consumption. But the whimsicalest of all are the directions to ser- vants, (for this little book is a compendium of all duties.) The footman is seriously admonished not to stand lolling against his master's chair while he * Yes, in those days of stoves and furnaces ; but we have now no such chimneys or fireplaces to " dress up " in the beautiful manner Mistress Woolly describes. — Editor. 68 BIOGEAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. waits at table ; for " to lean on a chair when they wait is a particular favour shown to any superior ser- vant, as the chief gentleman, or the waiting woman when she rises from the table." Also he must not *' hold the plates before his mouth to be defiled with his breath, nor touch them on the right [inner] side." Surely Swift must have seen this little treatise. Hannah concludes with the following address, by which the self-estimate which she formed of her use- fulness may be calculated : — ^'Ladies, I hope you're pleas'd; and so shall I If what I've writ you may be gainers by : If not ; it is your fault, it is not mine, Your benefit in this I do design. Much labour and much time it hath me cost, Therefore I beg, let none of it be lost. The money you shall pay for this my book. You'll not repent of, when in it you look. No more at present to you I shall say, But wish you all the happiness I may." BIOGEAPHICAL MEMOIE OF ME. LISTON.* The subject of our Memoir is lineally descended from Johan de L'Estonne, (see Domesday Book, where he is so written,) who came in with the Con- queror, and had lands awarded him at Lupton Magna, in Kent. His particular merits or services, Fabian, whose authority I chiefly follow, has for- gotten, or perhaps thought it immaterial, to specify. Fuller thinks that he was standard-bearer to Hugo de Agmondesham, a powerful Norman baron, who was slain by the hand of Harold himself at the battle of Hastings. Be this as it may, we find a family of that name flourishing some centuries later in that * From the London Magazine^ 1825. BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. 59 county. John Delliston, knight, was high sheriff for Kent, according to Fabian, quinto Henrici Sexti; and we trace the lineal branch flourishing down- wards, — the orthography varying, according to the unsettled usage of the times, from Delleston to Lestonor Liston, between which it seems to have alter- nated, till in the latter end of the reign of James I. it finally settled into the determinate and pleasing dis- syllabic arrangement which it still retains. Amina- dab Liston, the eldest male representative of the family of that day, was of the strictest order of Puritans. Mr. Foss, of Pall Mall, has obligingly com- municated to me an undoubted tract of his, which bears the initials only, A. L., and is entitled, *' The Grinning Glass, or Actor's Mirrour ; where in the vituperative Visnomy of Vicious Players for the Scene is as virtuously reflected back upon their mimetic Monstrosities as it has viciously (hitherto) vitiated with its vile Vanities her Votarists." A strange title, but bearing the impress of those absurdities with which the title-pages of that pam- phlet-spawning age abounded. The work bears date 1617. It preceded the *'Histriomastix" fifteen years ; and, as it went before it in time, so it comes not far short of it in virulence. It is amusing to find an ancestor of Listen's thus bespattering the players at the commencement of the seventeenth century : — "Thinketh He" (the actor), "with his costive countenances, to wry a sorrowing soul out of her anguish, or by defacing the divine denotement of destinate dignity (daignely described in the face humane and no other) to reinstamp the Paradice- plotted similitude with a novel and naughty approxi- mation (not in the first intention) to those abhorred and ugly God-forbidden correspondences, with flout- ing Apes' jeering gibberings, and Babion babbling- 60 BIOGRAPHIOAIi MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. like, to hoot out of countenance all modest measure, as if our sins were not sufficing to stoop our backs without He wresting and crooking his members to mistimed mirth (rather mahce) in deformed fashion, leering when he should learn, prating for praying, goggling his eyes (better upturned for grace), whereas in Paradice (if we can go thus high for His profes- sion) that devilish Serpent appeareth his undoubted Predecessor, first induing a mask like some roguish roistering Koscius (I spit at them all) to beguile with Stage shows the gaping Woman, whose Sex hath still chiefly upheld these Mysteries, and are voiced to be the chief Stage-haunters, where, as I am told, the custom is commonly to mumble (between acts) apples, not ambiguously derived from that pernicious Pippin (worse in effect than the Apples of Discord), whereas sometimes the hissings sounds of displeasure, as I hear, do lively reintonate that snake -taking-leave, and diabolical goings -off, in Paradice." The Puritanic effervescence of the early Presbyte- rians appears to have abated with time, and the opinions of the more immediate ancestors of our subject to have subsided at length into a strain of moderate Calvinism. Still a tincture of the old leaven was to be expected among the posterity of A. L. Our hero was an old son of Habakkuk Liston, settled as an Anabaptist minister upon the patri- monial soil of his ancestors. A regular certificate appears, thus entered in the Church book at Lupton Magna : " Johannes, filius Habakkuk et Bebeccce ListoUy Dissentientium, natus quinto Decembri, 1780, baptizatus sexto Februarii sequentis ; Sponsoribus J. et W. Wool- laston, una cum. Maria Merry weather.'' The singularity of an Anabaptist minister conforming to the child- rites of the Church would have tempted me to doubt the authenticity of this entry, had I not been obliged BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. 61 with the actual sight of it hy the favour of Mr. Minns, the intelligent and worthy x^arish clerk of Lupton. Possibly some exx^ectation in point of worldly advantages from some of the sponsors might have induced this unseemly deviation, as it must have appeared, from the practice and principles of that generally rigid sect. The term Dissentientium was possibly intended by the orthodox clergyman as a slur upon the supposed inconsistency. What, or of what nature, the expectations we have hinted at may have been, we have now no means of ascer- taining. Of the WooUastons no trace is now disco- verable in the village. The name of Merryweather occurs over the front of a grocer's shop at the western extremity of Lupton. Of the infant Liston we find no events recorded before his fourth year, in which a severe attack of the measles bid fair to have robbed the rising gene- ration of a fund of innocent entertainment. He had it of the confluent kind, as it is called ; and the child's life was for a week or two despaired of. His recovery he always attributes (under Heaven) to the humane interference of one Dr. Wilhelm Richter, a German empiric, who, in this extremity, prescribed a copious diet of sauer-kraut, which the child was observed to reach at with avidity, when other food repelled him ; and from this change of diet his restoration was rapid and complete. We have often heard him name the circumstance with grati- tude ; and it is not altogether surprising that a relish for this kind of aliment, so abhorrent and harsh to common Enghsh palates, has accompanied him through life. When any of Mr. Liston's inti- mates invite him to supper, he never fails of finding, nearest to his knife and fork, a dish of saner-kraut. At the age of nine, we find our subject under the tuition of the Rev. Mr. Goodenough (his father's health not permitting him probably to instruct him 62 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. himself), by whom he was inducted into a competent portion of Latin and Greek, with some mathematics, till the death of Mr. Goodenough, in his own seven- tieth, and Master Liston's eleventh year, put a stop for the present to his classical progress. We have heard our hero, with emotions which do his heart honour, describe the awful circumstances attending the decease of this worthy old gentleman. It seems they had been walking out together, master and pupil, in a fine sunset, to the distance of three-quarters of a mile west of Lupton, when a sudden curiosity took Mr. Goodenough to look down upon a chasm, where a shaft had been lately sunk in a mining speculation (then project- ing, but abandoned soon after, as not answering the promised success, by Sir Ealph Shepperton, knight, and member for the county). The old clergyman leaning over, either with incaution or sudden giddiness (probably a mixture of both), sud- denly lost his footing, and, to use Mr. Liston's phrase, disappeared, and was doubtless broken into a thousand pieces. The sound of his head, &c., dashing successively upon the projecting masses of the chasm, had such an effect upon the child, that a serious sickness ensued; and, even for many years after his recovery, he was not once seen so much as to smile. The joint death of both his parents, which hap- pened not many months after this disastrous ac- cident, and which was probably (one or both of them) accelerated by it, threw our youth upon the protec- tion of his maternal great-aunt, Mrs. Sittingbourn. Of this aunt we have never heard him speak but with expressions amounting almost to reverence. To the influence of her early counsels and manners he has always attributed the firmness with which, in maturer years, thrown upon a way of life com- monly not the best adapted to gravity and self- BIOGBAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. 63 retirement, he has been able to maintain a serious character, nntinctured with the levities incident to his profession. Ann Sittingbourn (we have seen her portrait by Hudson) was stately, stiff, tall, with a cast of features strikingly resembling the subject of this memoii'. Her estate in Kent was spacious and well wooded ; the house one of those venerable old mansions which are so impressive in cliildliood, and so hardly forgotten in succeeding years. In the venerable solitudes of Charnwood, among thick shades of the oak and beech, (this last his favourite tree,) the young Liston cultivated those contempla- tive habits which have never entirely deserted him in after years. Here he was commonly in the summer months to be met with, with a book in his hand, — not a play-book, — meditating. Boyle's "Eeflec- tions " was at one time the darling volume ; which, in its turn, was superseded by Young's "Night Thoughts," which has continued its hold upon him through life. He carries it always about him ; and it is no uncommon thing for him to be seen, in the refreshing intervals of his occupation, leaning against a side scene, in a sort of Herbert -of- Cher bury posture, turning over a pocket edition of his favourite author. But the solitudes of Charnwood were not destined always to obscure the path of our young hero. The premature death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, at the age of seventy, occasioned by the incautious burning of a pot of charcoal in her sleeping chamber, left him in his nineteenth year nearly without resources. That the stage at all should have presented itself as an eligible scope for his talents, and, in particular, that he should have chosen a line so foreign to what appears to have been his turn of mind, may require some explanation. At Charnwood, then, we behold him thoughtful, grave, ascetic. From his cradle averse to flesh 64 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. meats and strong drink ; abstemious even beyond tlie genius of the place, and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his great-aunt, who, though strict, was not rigid, — water was his habitual drink, and his food little beyond the mast and beech-nuts of his favourite groves. It is a medical fact, that this kind of diet, however favourable to the contemplative powers of the primitive hermits, &c., is but ill adapted to the less robust minds and bodies of a later generation. Hypochondria almost constantly ensues. It was so in the case of the young Liston. He was subject to sights, and had visions, v Those arid beech-nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust, mounted into an occiput already prepared to kindle by long seclusion and the fervour of strict Calvinistic notions. In the glooms of Charnwood he was assailed by illusions similar in kind to those which are related of the famous Anthony of Padua. Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude themselves upon his sensorium. Whether he shut his eyes, or kept them open, the same illusions operated. The darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ears, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace ; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his future destiny. On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn we find him received into the family of Mr. Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in Birchin Lane, London. We lose a little while here the chain of his history, — by what inducements this gentleman was determined to make him an inmate of his house. Probably he had had some personal kind- BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. G5 ness for Mrs. Sittingbourn formerly ; but, however it was, the young man was here treated more like a son than a clerk, though he was nominally but the latter. Different avocations, the change of scene, with that alternation of business and recreation which in its greatest perfection is to be had only in London, aj)pear to have weaned him in a short time from the hypochondriacal affections which had beset him at Charnwood. In the three years which followed his removal to Birchin Lane, we find him making more than one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr. Willoughby at the Porte. We could easily fill our biography with the pleasant passages which we have heard him relate as having happened to him at Constantinople ; such as his having been taken up, on suspicion of a design of penetrating the seraglio, &c. : but, with the deepest convincement of this gentleman's own veracity, we think that some of the stories are of that whimsical, and others of that romantic nature, which, however diverting, would be out of place in a narrative of this kind, which aims not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the very appearance of the contrary. We will now bring him over the seas again, and Bui^pose him in the counting-house in Birchin Lane, his protector satisfied with the returns of his factorage, and all going on so smoothly, that we may expect to find Mr. Liston at last an opulent merchant upon 'Change, as it is called. But see the turns of destiny ! Upon a Summer excursion into Norfolk, in the year 1801, the accidental sight of j)retty Sally Parker, as she was called, (then in the Nonvich company,) diverted his inclinations at once from commerce ; and he became, in the lan- guage of common-place biography, stage-struck. Happy for the lovers of mirth was it that our hero took this turn; he might else have been to this hour C6 EIOGEAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. that tinentertaining character, a plodding London merchant. We accordingly find him shortly after making his debut, as it is called, upon the Norwich boards, in the season of that year, being then in the twenty- second year of his age. Having a natm-al bent to tragedy, he chose the part of Pyrrhus, in the Dis- tressed Mother, to Sally Parker's Hermione. We find him afterwards as BarnweU, Altamont, Clia- mont, &c. ; but, as if Nature had destined him to the sock, an unavoidable infirmity absolutely disca- pacitated him for tragedy. His person, at this latter period of which I have been speaking, was graceful, and even commanding ; his countenance set to gravity : he had the power of arresting the attention of an audience at first sight almost beyond any other tragic actor. But he could not hold it. To under- stand this obstacle, we must go back a few years to those appalling reveries at Charnwood. Those illu- sions, which had vanished before the dissipation of a less recluse life and more free society, now in his sohtary tragic studies, and amid the intense calls upon feeling incident to tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold vividness. In the midst of some most pathetic passage (the parting of Jaffier vdth his dying friend, for instance,) he would sud- denly be surprised with a fit of violent horse -laughter. While the spectators were all sobbing before him with emotion, suddenly one of those grotesque faces would peep out upon him, and he could not resist the impulse. A timely excuse once or twice served his purpose ; but no audiences could be expected to bear repeatedly this violation of the continuity of feeling. He describes them (the illusions) as so many demons haunting him, and paralyzing every effort. Even now, I am told, he cannot recite the famous sohloquy in Hamlet, even in private, without immoderate bursts of laughter. How^ever, BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. 67 what he had not force of reason sufficient to over- come he had good sense enough to turn into emolu- ment, and determined to make a commodity of his distemper. He prudently exchanged the buskin for the sock, and the illusions instantly ceased ; or, if they occurred for a short season, by their very co- operation added a zest to his comic vein, — some of his most catching faces being (as he expresses it) little more than transcripts and copies of those ex- traordinary phantasmata. We have now di-awn out our hero's existence to the period when he was about to meet, for the first time, the sympathies of a London audience. The particulars of his success since have been too much before our eyes to render a circumstantial detail of them expedient. I shall only mention, that Mr. Willoughby, his resentments having had time to subside, is at present one of the fastest friends of his old renegado factor ; and that Mr. Liston's hopes of Miss Parker vanishing along with his unsuccessful suit to Melpomene, in the Autumn of 1811 he mar- ried his present lady, by whom he has been blessed with one son, Phihp, and two daughters, Ann and Angustina.* * Lamb once said, of all the lies he ever put off, — and he put off a good many, — indeed he valued himself on being " a matter-of-lie man," believing truth to be too precious to be wasted upon every body, — of all the lies he ever put off, he valued his "Memoir of Listen" the most. "It is," he con- fessed to Miss Hutchinson, "from top to toe, every paragraph, pure invention, and has passed for gospel, — has been repub- lished in the newspapers, and in the penny play-bills of the night, as an authentic account." And yet, notwithstanding its incidents are all imaginary, its facts all fictions, is not Lamb's "Memoir of Listen" a truer and more trustworthy work than any of the productions of those contemptible biographers, un- fortunately not yet extinct, so admirably ridiculed in the thirty- fifth Number of the FreeJwlder ? In fact, is not this " lying Life of Listen " a very clever satire on those biographers, who, like the monkish historians mentioned by Fuller in his Church ( G8 ) AUTOBIOGEAPHY OF ME. MUNDEN,* IN A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE " LONDON MAGAZINE."' -j- Hark'ee, Mr. Editor! — a word in your ear. They tell me you are going to put me in print, — in print, sir; to publish my life. What is my life to you, sir ? What is it to you whether I ever lived at all ? My life is a very good life, sir. I am insured at the Pelican, sir. I am threescore years and six, — six ; mark me, sir : but I can play Polonius, which, I believe, few of your corre — correspondents can do, sir. I suspect tricks, sir : I smell a rat ; I do, I do. You would cog the die upon us ; you would, you would, sir. But I will forestall you, sir. You would History of Britain, swell the bowels of their books with empty wind, in default of sufficient solid food to fill them ; who, ac- cording to Addison, ascribe to the unfortunate persons, whose lives they pretend to write, works which they never wrote, and actions which they never performed ; celebrated virtues which they were never famous for, and excuse faults they were never guilty of ? And does not Lamb, in this work, very happily ridicule the pedantry and conceit of certain grave and dignified biographers whose works are to be found in most gentlemen's libraries ? — Editor. * From the London Magazine, 1825. + This is another of Lamb's " lie -children." Leigh Hunt, in his Autobiography, speaking of some of Elia's contributions to the London Magazine thus mentions the mock Memoirs of Liston and Munden : " He [Lamb] wrote in the same maga- zine two Lives of Liston and Munden, which the public took for serious, and which exhibit an extraordinary jumble of ima- ginary facts and truth of by-painting. Munden he made born at Stoke Pogis ; the very sound of which was like the actor's speaking and digging his words." — Editor. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MR. MXJNDEN. 69 be deriving me from William the Conqueror, with a murrain to you. It is no such thing, sir. The town shall know better, sir. They begin to smoke your flams, sir. Mr. Liston may be born where he pleases, sir ; but I will not be born at Lup — Lupton Magna for any body's pleasure, sir. My son and I have looked over the great map of Kent together, and we can find no such place as you would palm upon us, sir ; palm upon us, I say. Neither Magna nor Parva, as my son says, and he knows Latin, sir ; Latin. If you write my life true, sir, you must set down, that I, Joseph Munden, comedian, came into the world upon AllhaUows Day, Anno Domini 1759 — 1759 ; no sooner nor later, sir : and I saw the first light — the first light, remember, sir, at Stoke Pogis — Stoke Pogis, comitatu Bucks, and not at Lup — Lup Magna, which I believe to be no better than moonshine — moonshine ; do you mark me, sir ? I wonder you can put such flim-flams upon us, sir ; I do, I do. It does not become you, sir ; I say it, — I say it. And my father was an honest tradesman, sir : he dealt in malt and hops, sir ; and was a coi*poration-man, sir ; and of the Church of Eng- land, sir, and no Presbyterian ; nor Ana — Anabap- tist, sir; however you may be disposed to make honest people beheve to the contrary, sir. Your bams are found out, sir. The town wiU bear your stale **puts" no longer, sir; and you must not send U3 jolly fellows, sir, — we that are comedians, sir, — you must not send us into groves and char — charnwoods a moping, sir. Neither charns, nor charnel-houses, Bir. It is not our constitution, sir : I tell it you — I tell it you. I was a di'oll dog from my cradle. I came into the world tittering, and the midwife tittered, and the gossips spilt their caudle with tittering ; and, when I was brought to the font, the parson could not christen me for tittering. So I was never more than half baptized. And, when I 70 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MR. MUNDEN. was little Joey, I made 'em all titter ; there was not a melancholy face to be seen in Pogis. Pure nature, sir. I was born a comedian. Old Screwup, the- undertaker, could tell you, sir, if he were liviDg. Why, I was obliged to be locked up every time there was to be a funeral at Pogis. I was — I was, sir. I used to grimace at the mutes, as he called it, and put 'em out with my mops and my mows, till they couldn't stand at a door for me. And when I was locked up, with nothing but a cat in my company, I followed my bent with trying to make her laugh ; and sometimes she would, and sometimes she would not. And my schoolmaster could make nothing of me : I had only to thrust my tongue in my cheek — in my cheek, sir, and the rod dropped from his fingers ; and so my education was limited, sir. And I grew up a young fellow, and it was thought convenient to enter me upon some course of life that should make me serious ; but it wouldn't do, sir. And I was apprenticed to a dry-salter. My father gave forty pounds premium with me, sir. I can show the indent — dent — denture, sir. But I was born to be a comedian, sir : so I ran away, and listed with the players, sir ; and I topt my parts at Amersham and Gerrard's Cross, and played my own father to his face, in his own town of Pogis, in the part of Gripe, when I was not full seventeen years of age ; and he did not know me again, but he knew me afterwards ; and then he laughed, and I laughed, and, what is better, the dry-salter laughed, and gave me up my indenture for the joke's sake : so that I came into court afterwards with clean hands — with clean hands — do you see, sir ! [Here the manuscript becomes illegible for two or three sheets onwards, which we presume to be occa- sioned by the absence of Mr. Munden, Jun., who clearly transcribed it for the press thus far. The AUIOBIOGRAPHT OP ME. MUNDEN. 71 rest (with the exception of the concluding paragraph, which is seemingly resumed in the first handwriting,) appears to contain a confused account of some law- suit, in which the elder Munden was engaged ; with a circumstantial history of the proceedings of a case of breach of promise of marriage, made to or by (we cannot pick out which) Jemima Munden, spinster ; probably the comedian's cousin, for it does not appear he had any sister ; with a few dates, rather better preserved, of this great actor's engage- ments, — as *' Cheltenham (spelt Cheltnam), 1776 ;" *'Bath, 1779;" '^ London, 1789;" together with stage anecdotes of Messrs. Edwin, Wilson, Lee, Lewis, &c. ; over which we have strained our eyes to no purpose, in the hope of presenting something amusing to the public. Towards the end, thoi manuscript brightens up a little, as we said, and concludes in the following manner.] stood before them for six and thirty years, [we suspect that Mr. Munden is here speaking of his final leave-taking of the stage], and to be dis- missed at last. But I was heart-whole to the last, sir. What though a few drops did course themselves down the old veteran's cheeks : who could help it, sir ? I was a giant that night, sir : and could have played fifty parts, each as arduous as Dozy. My faculties were never better, sir. But I was to be laid upon the shelf. It did not suit the public to laugh with their old servant any longer, sir. [Here some moisture has blotted a sentence or two.] But I can play Polonius still, sir ; I'can, I can. Your servant, sir, Joseph Munden. ( 72 ) THE ILLUSTEIOUS DEFUNCT.* •' Nought but a blank remains, a dead void space, A step of life that promised such a race." — Dr-jden. Napoleon has now sent us back from the grave suf- ficient echoes of his living renown : the twilight of posthumous fame has lingered long enough over the spot where the sun of his glory set ; and his name must at length repose in the silence, if not in the darkness, of night. In this busy and evanescent scene, other spirits of the age are rapidly snatched away, claiming our undivided sympathies and re- grets, until in turn they yield to some newer and more absorbing grief. Another name is now added to the list of the mighty departed, — a name whose influence upon the hopes and fears, the fates and fortunes, of our countrymen, has rivalled, and perhaps eclipsed, that of the defunct *' child and champion of Jacobinism," while it is associated with all the sanctions of legitimate government, all the sacred authorities of social order and our most holy religion. We speak of one, indeed, under whose warrant heavy and incessant contributions * From the '• New Monthly Magazine,'" 1825. Since writing this article, we have been informed that the object of our funeral oration is not definitively dead, but only moribund. So much the better : we shall have an opportunity of granting the request made to Walter by one of the children in the wood, and " kill him two times." The Abbe de Vertot having a siege to write, and not receiving the materials in time, composed the whole from his invention. Shortly after its completion, the expected documents arrived, when he threw them aside, exclaiming, "You are of no use to me now: I have carried the town." THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNCT. 73 were imposed upon our fellow- citizens, but who exacted nothing without the signet and the sign- manual of most devout Chancellors of the Ex- chequer. Not to dally longer with the sympathies of our readers, we think it right to premonish them that we are composing an epicedium upon no less distinguished a personage than the Lottery, whose last breath, after many penultimate puflfs, has been sobbed forth by sorrowing contractors, as if the world itself were about to be converted into a blank. There is a fashion of eulogy, as well as of vitupera- tion ; and though the Lottery stood for some time in the latter predicament, we hesitate not to assert that multis ille bonis Jiehilis occidit. Never have we joined in the senseless clamour which condemned the only tax whereto we became voluntary contributors ; the only resource which gave the stimulus without the danger or infatuation of gambling ; the only alembic which in these plodding days sublimized our imaginations, and filled them with more delicious dreams than ever flitted athwart the sensorium of Alnaschar. Never can the writer forget, when, as a child, he was hoisted upon a servant's shoulder in Guildhall, and looked down upon the installed and solemn pomp of the then drawing Lottery. The two awful cabinets of iron, upon whose massy and mysterious portals the royal initials were gorgeously emblazoned, as if, after having deposited the unfulfilled prophecies within, the kiog himself had turned the lock, and still retained the key in his pocket ; the blue-coat boy, with his naked arm, first converting the invisible wheel, and then diving into the dark recess for a ticket ; the grave and reverend faces of the commis- sioners eying the announced number; the scribes below calmly committing it to their huge books ; the anxious countenances of the surrounding popu- lace ; while the giant figures of Gog and Magog, 74 THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNCT. like presiding deities, looked down with a grim silence upon j the whole proceeding, — constituted altogether a scene, which, combined with the sudden wealth supposed to be lavished from those inscru- table wheels, was well calculated to impress the imagination of a boy with reverence and amazement. Jupiter, seated between the two fatal urns of good and evil, the blind goddess with her cornucopia, the Parcse wielding the distaff, the thread of life, and the abhorred shears, seemed but dim and sha- dowy abstractions of mythology, when I had gazed upon an assemblage exercising, as I dreamt, a not less eventful power, and all presented to me in palpable and living operation. Keason and expe- rience, ever at their old spiteful work of catching and destroying the bubbles which youth delighted to follow, have indeed dissipated much of this illu- sion : but my mind so far retained the influence of that early impression, that I have ever since conti- nued to deposit my humble offering at its shrine, whenever the ministers of the Lottery went forth with type and trumpet to announce its periodical dispensations ; and though nothing has been doled out to me from its undiscerning coffers but blanks, or those more vexatious tantalizers of the spirit, denominated small prizes, yet do I hold myself largely indebted to this most generous diffuser of universal happiness. Ingrates that we are ! are we to be thankful for no benefits that are not palpable to sense, to recognise no favours that are not of marketable value, to acknowledge no wealth unless it can be counted with the five fingers ? If we admit the mind to be the sole depository of genuine joy, where is the bosom that has not been elevated into a temporary Elysium by the magic of the Lot- tery ? Which of us has not converted his ticket, or even his sixteenth share of one, into a nest-egg of Hope, upon which he has sate brooding in the THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNCT. 75 secret roosting-places of his heart, and hatched it into a thousand fantastical apparitions ? What a startling revelation of the passions if all the aspirations engendered by the Lottery could be made manifest ! Many an impecuniary epicure has gloated over his locked-up warrant for future wealth, as a means of realizing the dream of his namesake in the '* Alchemist :" — " My meat shall all come in in Indian shells, — Dishes of agate set in gold, and studded With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and ruhies ; The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels' heels, Boil'd i' the spirit of Sol, and dissolved in per li, (Apicius' diet 'gainst the epilepsy.) And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber, Headed with diamant and carbuncle. My footboy shall eat pheasants, calver'd salmons, I Knots, gotwits, lampreys ; I myself will have The beards of barbels served, instead of salads ; Oiled mushrooms, and the swelling unctuous paps Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off, Dress'd with an exquisite and poignant sauce, For which I'll say unto my cook, ' There's gold : Go forth, and be a knight.' " Many a doting lover has kissed the scrap of paper whose promissory shower of gold was to give up to him his otherwise unattainable Danae. Nimrods have transformed the same narrow symbol into a saddle, by which they have been enabled to bestride the backs of peerless hunters ; while nymphs have metamorphosed its Protean form into — *' Rings, gauds, conceits, Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats," and all the braveries of dress, to say nothing of the obsequious husband, the two-footmaned carriage, and the opera-box. By the simple charm of this numbered and printed rag, gamesters have, for a time at least, recovered their losses ; spendthrifts have cleared off mortgages from their estates ; the 76 THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNCT. imprisoned debtor has leaped over his lofty boundary of circumscription and restraint, and revelled in all the joys of liberty and fortune ; the cottage walls have swelled out into more goodly proportion than those of Baucis and Philemon ; poverty has tasted the luxuries of competence ; labour has lolled at ease in a perpetual arm-chair of idleness ; sickness has been bribed into banishment ; life has been invested with new charms ; and death deprived of its former terrors. Nor have the affections been less gratified than the wants, appetites, and ambi- tion of mankind. By the conjurations of the same potent spell, kindred have lavished anticipated benefits upon one another, and charity upon aU. Let it be termed a delusion, — a fool's paradise is better than the wise man's Tartarus ; be it branded as an ignis-fatuus, — it was at least a benevolent one, which, instead of beguiling its followers into swamps, caverns, and pitfalls, allured them on with all the blandishments of enchantment to a garden of Eden, — an ever-blooming Elysium of delight. True, the pleasures which it bestowed were evan- escent : but which of our joys are permanent ? and who so inexperienced as not to know that anticipa- tion is always of higher relish than reality, which strikes a balance both in our sufferings and enjoy- ments ? " The fear of ill exceeds the ill we fear ;" and fruition, in the same proportion, invariably falls short of hope. " Men are but children of a larger growth," who may amuse themselves for a long time in gazing at the reflection of the moon in the water ; but, if they jump in to grasp it, they may grope for ever, and only get the farther from their object. He is the wisest who keeps feeding upon the future, and refrains as long as possible from undeceiving himself by converting his pleasant speculations into disagreeable certainties. The true mental epicure always purchased his THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNCT. 77 ticket early, and postponed inquiry into its fate to the last possible moment, during the whole of which intervening period he had an imaginary twenty thousand locked up in his desk ; and was not this well worth all the money ? Who would scruple to give twenty pounds interest for even the ideal enjoyment of as many thousands during two or three months ? Crede quod habes, et habes ; and the usufruct of such a capital is surely not dear at fiuch a price. Some years ago, a gentleman in passing along Cheapside saw the figures 1,069, of which number he was the sole proprietor, flaming on the window of a lottery office as a capital prize. Somewhat flurried by this discovery, not less wel- come than unexpected, he resolved to walk round St. Paul's that he might consider in what way to communicate the happy tidings to his wife and family ; but, upon repassing the shop, he observed that the number was altered to 10,069, and, upon inquiry, had the mortification to learn that his ticket was a blank, and had only been stuck up in the v/indow by mistake of the clerk. This effectually calmed his agitation; but he always speaks of himself as having once possessed twenty thousand pounds, and maintains that his ten minutes' walk round St. Paul's was worth ten times the purchase money of the ticket. A prize thus obtained, has, moreover, this special ad- vantage, — it is beyond the reach of fate ; it cannot be squandered ; bankruptcy cannot lay siege to it ; friends cannot pull it down, nor enemies blow it up ; it bears a charmed life, and none of woman born can break its integrity, even by the dissipation of a single fraction. Show me the property in these perilous times that is equally compact and im- pregnable. We can no longer become enriched for a quarter of an hour ; we can no longer succeed in such splendid failures : all our chances of making 78 THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNCT, sucli a miss have vanished with the last of the Lotteries. Life will now become a flat, prosaic routine of matter-of-fact ; and sleep itself, erst so prolific of numerical configurations and mysterious stimulants to lottery adventure, will be disfurnished of its figures and figments. People will cease to harp upon the one lucky number suggested in a dream, and which forms the exception, while they are scrupulously silent upon the ten thousand falsified dreams which constitute the rule. Morpheus will stifle Cocker with a handful of poppies, and our pillows will be no longer haunted by the book of numbers. And who, too, shall maintain the art and mystery of puffing, in all its pristine glory, when the lottery professors shall have abandoned its cultivation ? They were the first, as they will assuredly be the last, who fully developed the resources of that in- genious art ; who cajoled and decoyed the most suspicious and wary reader into a perusal of their advertisements by devices of endless variety and cunning ; who baited their lurking schemes with midnight murders, ghost stories, crim-cons, bon- mots, balloons, dreadful catastrophes, and every diversity of joy and sorrow, to catch newspaper gudgeons.* Ought not such talents to be en- *"0f all the puffs," says Hazlitt, "lottery puffs are the most ingenious." He thinks a collection of them would be an amusing vade-mecum. Byron, you know, was accused of writing lottery puffs : and Lamb, in his younger days, to eke out " a something contracted income," essayed to write them ; but he did not succeed very well in the task. His samples were re- turned on his hands, as " done in too severe and terse a style." Some Grub Street hack — a nineteenth-century Tom Brown or Mr. Dash — succeeded in composing these popular and ingenious productions ; but the man who wrote the Essays of Elia could not write a successful lottery puff ! At this, exult, medi- ocrity ! and take courage, man of genius ! — Editor. THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNCT. 79 couraged ? Verily the abolitionists have much to answer for! And now, having established the felicity of all those who gained imaginary prizes, let us proceed to show that the equally numerous class who were pre- sented with real blanks have not less reason to con- sider themselves happy. Most of us have cause to be thankful for that which is bestowed ; but we have all, probably, reason to be still more grateful for that which is withheld, and more especially for our being denied the sudden possession of riches. In the Litany, indeed, we call upon the Lord to dehver us ** in all time of our wealth ;" but how few of us are sincere in deprecating such a calamity ! Mas- singer's Ijuke, and Ben Jonson's Sir Epicure Mammon, and Pope's Sir Balaam, and our own daily observation, might convince us that the Devil " now tempts by making rich, not making poor." We may read in the Guardian a circumstantial account of a man who was utterly ruined by gaining a capital prize ; we may recollect what Dr. Johnson said to Garrick, when the latter was making a display of his wealth at Hampton Court, — *'Ah, David, David! these are the things that make a death-bed terrible." We may recall the Scripture declaration, as to the difficulty a rich man finds in entering into the king- dom of Heaven ; and combining all these denuncia- tions against opulence, let us heartily congratulate one another upon our lucky escape from the calamity of a twenty or thirty thousand pound prize ! The fox in the fable, who accused the unattainable grapes of sourness, was more of a philosopher than we are generally willing to allow. He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy which turns every thing to gold, and converts disappointment itself into a ground of resignation and content. Such we have shown to be the great lesson inculcated by the Lottery, when rightly contemplated; and, if we 80 THE RELIGION OF ACTORS. might parody M. de Chateaubriand's jingling ex- pression, — '' le Roiest mort: vive le Hoi /" — we should be tempted to exclaim, " The Lottery is no more : long live the Lottery !" THE EELIGION OF ACTOES.* The world has hitherto so little troubled its head with the points of doctrine held by a community which contributes in other ways so largely to its amusement, that, before the late mischance of a celebrated tragic actor, it scarce condescended to look into the practice of any individual player, much less to inquire into the hidden and abscondite springs of his actions. Indeed, it is with some violence to the imagination that we conceive of an actor as belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage. How oddly does it sound, when we are told that the late Miss Pope, for instance, — that is to Bay, in our notion of her Mrs. Candour, — was a good daughter, an affectionate sister, and exemplary in all the parts of domestic life ! With still greater difficulty can we carry our notions to church, and conceive of Liston kneeling upon a hassock, or Munden uttering a pious ejaculation, — '* making mouths at the invisible event." But the times are * From the New Monthly Magazine, 1826. Writing to Bernard Barton in the Spring of 1826, Lamb Bays, speaking of his literary projects, "A little thing without name will also be printed on the 'Beligion of the Actors ;' but it is out of your way; so I recommend you, with true author's hypocrisy, to skip it." I wonder if *' good B.B." read the article ; and, if he did, how he liked it. Quaker though he was, he could not but have been pleased with it. — ^Editok. THE EELIGION OP ACTORS. 81 fast improving ; and, if the process of sanctity begun under the happy auspices of the present licenser go on to its completion, it will be as necessary for a comedian to give an account of his faith as of his conduct. Fawcett must study the five points ; and Dicky Suett, if he were ahve, would have had to rub up his catechism. Already the effects of it begin to appear. A celebrated performer has thought fit to oblige the world with a confession of his faith, — • or Br 's Religio Dramatici. This gentleman, in his laudable attempt to shift from his person the obloquy of Judaism, with the forwardness of a new convert, in trying to prove too much, has, in the opinion of many, proved too little. A simple decla- ration of his Christianity was sufficient ; but, strange to say, his apology has not a word about it. We are left to gather it from some expressions which imply that he is a Protestant ; but we did not wish to inquire into the niceties of his orthodoxy. To his friends of the old persuasion the distinction was impertinent ; for what cares Kabbi Ben Kimchi for the differences which have split our novelty ? To the great body of Christians that hold the Pope's supremacy — that is to say, to the major part of the Christian world — his religion will appear as much to seek as ever. But perhaps he conceived that all Christians are Protestants, as children and the com- mon people call all, that are not animals, Christians. The mistake was not very considerable in so young a proselyte, or he might think the general (as logi- cians speak) involved in the particular. All Pro- testants are Christians ; but I am a Protestant ; ergo, &c. : as if a marmoset, contending to be a man, overleaping that term as too generic and vulgar, ahould at once roundly proclaim himself to be a gentleman. The argument would be, as we say, ex ahundanti. From whichever cause this excessus in Urminis proceeded, we can do no less than congra- 82 THE RELIGION OF ACTORS, tulate the general state of Christendom upon the accession of so extraordinary a convert. Who was the happy instrument of the conversion, we are yet to learn : it comes nearest to the attempt of the late pious Dr. Watts to Christianize the Psalms of the Old Testament. Something of the old Hebrew raciness is lost in the transfusion ; but much of its asperity is softened and pared down in the adap- tation. The appearance of so singular a treatise at this conjuncture has set us upon an inquiry into the present state of religion upon the stage generally. By the favour of the Church-wardens of St. Martin's in the Fields, and St. Paul's, Covent Garden, who have very readily, and with great kindness, assisted our pursuit, we are enabled to lay before the public the following particulars. Strictly speaking, neither of the two great bodies is collectively a reli- gious institution. We expected to find a chap- lain among them, as at St. Stephen's and other Court establishments ; and were the more surprised at the omission, as the last Mr. Bengough at the one house, and Mr. Powell at the other, from a gravity of speech and demeanour, and the habit of wearing black at their first appearances in the beginning of the fifth or the conclusion of fourth act, so eminently pointed out their qua- lifications for such office. These corporations, then, being not properly congregational, we must seek the solution of our question in the tastes, attainments, accidental breeding, and education of the individual members of them. As we were prepared to expect, a majority at both houses ad- here to the religion of the Church Established, — only that at one of them a strong leaven of Koman Catholicism is suspected; which, considering the notorious education of the manager at a foreign seminary, is not so much to be wondered at. Some THE RELIGION OP ACTORS. 83 have gone so far as to report that Mr. T y, in inirticular, belongs to an order lately restored on the ( •ontinent. We can contradict this : that gentleman is a member of the Kirk of Scotland ; and his name is to be found, much to his honour, in the list of seceders from the congregation of Mr. Fletcher. While the generaUty, as we have said, are content to jog on in the safe trammels of national orthodoxy, symptoms of a sectarian spirit have broken out in quarters where we should least have looked for it. Some of the ladies at both houses are deep in con- troverted points. Miss F e, we are credibly in- formed, is a Siib- and Madame V a /Swjom-Lap- sarian. Mr. Pope is the last of the exploded sect of the Banters. Mr. Sinclair has joined the Shakers. Mr. Grimaldi, sen., after being long a Jumper, has lately fallen into some whimsical theories respecting the fall of man ; which he understands, not of an allegorical, but a real tumble, by which the whole body of humanity became, as it were, lame to the performance of good works. Pride he will have to be nothing but a stiff neck ; irresolution, the nerves shaken ; an inclination to sinister paths, crookedness of the joints ; spiritual deadness, a paralysis ; want of charity, a contraction in the fingers ; despising of government, a broken head ; the plaster, a ser- mon ; the lint to bind it up, the text ; the probers, the preachers ; a pair of crutches, the old and new law; a bandage, religious obligation : a fanciful mode of illustration, derived from the accidents and habits of his past calling spiritualized, rather than from any accurate acquaintance with the Hebrew text, in which report speaks him but a raw scholar. Mr. Elliston, from all that we can learn, has his religion yet to choose ; though some think him a Muggletonian. ( 84 ) THE ASS.* Mr. Collier, in his ** Poetical Decameron** (Third Conversation) notices a tract printed in 1595, with the author's initial only, A. B., entitled " The Noble- nesse of the Asse ; a work rare, learned, and ex- cellent." He has selected the following pretty pas- sage from it : *' He (the ass) refuseth no burden : he goes whither he is sent, without any contradiction. He lifts not his foote against any one ; he bytes not ; he is no fugitive, nor malicious affected. He doth aU things in good sort, and to his liking that hath cause to employ him. If strokes be given him, he cares not for them ; and, as our modem poet singeth, — •• ♦ Thou wouldst (perhaps) he should become thy foe, And to that end dost beat him many times : He cares not for himself, much less thy blow.' "+ Certainly Nature foreseeing the cruel usage which this useful servant to man would receive at man's hand did prudently in furnishing him with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child or a weak hand can make only feeble impres- sions on him. His back offers no mark to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an absolute insensibihty. You might as well pretend to scourge a school-boy with a tough * From Hone's Every-Bay Booh. + "Who this modern poet was," says Mr. Collier, " is a secret worth discovering," The wood-cut on the title of the pamphlet is — an ass, with a wreath of laurel round his neck. THE ASS. 85 pair of leather breeches on. His jerkin is well fortified ; and therefore the costermongers, ''between the years 1790 and 1800," did more politicly than piously in lifting up a part of his upper garment. I well remember that beastly and bloody custom. I have often longed to see one of those refiners in discipline himself at the cart's tail, with just such a convenient spot laid bare to the tender mercies of the whipster. But, since Nature has resumed her rights, it is to be hoped that this patient creature does not suffer to extremities ; and that, to the savages who still belabour his poor carcass with theii- blows, (considering the sort of anvil they are laid upon,) he might in some sort, if he could speak, exclaim with the philosopher, " Lay on : you beat but upon the case of Anaxarchus." Contemplating this natural safeguard, this forti- fied exterior, it is with pain I view the sleek, foppish, combed, and curried person of this animal as he is disnaturalised at watering-places, &c., where they affect to make a paKrey of him. Fie on all such sophistications ! It will never do, master groom. Something of his honest, shaggy exterior will still peep' up in spite of you, — ^his good, rough, native, pine-apple coating. You cannot '' refine a scorpion into a fish, though you rinse it and scour it with ever so cleanly cookery.'"^ The modern poet quoted by A. B. proceeds to celebrate a virtue for which no one to this day had been aware that the ass was remarkable : — " One other gift this beast hath as his owne, Wherewith the rest could not be furnished ; On man himself the same was not bestowne : To wit, on him is ne'er engendered The hateful vermin that doth teare the ekin, And to the bode [body] doth make his passage in." * Milton, from memory. 86 THE ASS. And truly, when one thinks on the suit of im- penetrable armour with which Nature (like Vul- can to another Achilles) has provided him, these subtle enemies to our repose would have shown some dexterity in getting into Ms quarters. As the bogs of Ireland by tradition expel toads and reptiles, he may well defy these small deer in his fastnesses.. It seems the latter had not arrived at the exquisite policy adopted by the human vermin *' between 1790 and 1800." But the most singular and delightful gift of the ass, according to the writer of this pamphlet, is his voice, the " goodly, sweet, and continual brayings " of which, ** whereof they forme a melodious and pro- portionable kinde of musicke,"seem to have affected him with no ordinary pleasure. *'Nor thinke I," he adds, '* that any of our immoderate musitians can deny but that their song is full of exceeding pleasure to be heard ; because therein is to be dis- cerned both concord, discord, singing in the meane, the beginning to sing in large compasse, then fol- lowing into rise and fall, the haLfe note, whole note, musicke of five voices, firme singing by four voices, three together, or one voice and a halfe. Then their variable contrarieties amongst them, when one delivers forth a long tenor or a short, the pausing for time, breathing in measure, breaking the minim or very least moment of time. Last of all, to heare the musicke of five or six voices chaunged to so many of asses is amongst them to heare a song of world without end." There is no accounting for ears, or for that laudable enthusiasm with which an author is tempted to invest a favourite subject with the most incompatible perfections : I should otherwise, for my own taste, have been inclined rather to have given a place to these extraordinary musicians at that banquet of nothing-less-than-sweet-sounds, IN RE SQUIRRELS. 87 imagined by old Jeremy Collier (Essays, 1698, part ii. on Music), where, after describing the in- spirating effects of martial music in a battle, he hazards an ingenious conjecture, whether a sort of anti-music might not be invented, which should have quite the contrary effect of ** sinking the spirits, shaking the nerves, curdling the blood, and in- spiring despair and cowardice and consternation. *''Tis probable," he says, '* the roaring of lions, the warbling of cats and screech-owls, together with a mixture of the howling of dogs, judiciously imitated and compounded, might go a great way in this in- vention." The dose, we confess, is pretty potent, and skilfully enough prepared. But what shall we say to the Ass of Silenus, who, if we may trust to classic lore, by his own proper sounds, without thanks to cat or screech-owl, dismayed and put to rout a whole army of giants ? Here was anti-music with a vengeance ; a whole Pan-D'is-Harmonicon in a single lungs of leather. But I keep you trifling too long on this asinine subject. I have already passed the Pons Asinorum,y and will desist, remembering the old pedantic pun of Jem Boyer, my schoolmaster : — " A.SS in prcBsenti seldom makes a wise man in futuro" IN RE SQUIRRELS.* What is gone with the cages with the climbing squirrel, and bells to them, which were formerly the indispensable appendage to the outside of a tin- man's shop, and were, in fact, the only live signs ? One, we believe, still hangs out on Holborn ; but they are fast vanishing with the good old modes of • From Hone's Every-'Day Book. 88 IN RE SQUIRRELS. our ancestors.* They seem to have been superseded by that still more ingenious refinement of modern humanity, — the tread-mill; in which human squir- rels still perform a similar round of ceaseless, im- progressive clambering, which must be nuts to them. We almost doubt the fact of the teeth of this creature being so purely orange-coloured as Mr. Urban's correspondent gives out. One of our old poets — and they were pretty sharp observers of Natm-e — describes them as brown.f But perhaps the naturalist referred to meant *' of the colour of a Maltese orange," which is rather more obfuscated * Lamb not only had a passionate fondness for old books and — " The old familiar faces," but be loved tbe old associations. He was no admirer of your modern improvements. Unlike Dr. Johnson, be did not go into tbe "most stately sbops," but purchased bis books and engravings at tbe stalls and from second-band dealers. In bis eyes, tbe old Inner-Temple Cburcb was a bandsomer and statelier structure tban tbe finest cathedral in England ; and to bis ear, as well as to tbe ear of Will Honeycomb, tbe old familiar cries of tbe peripatetic London merchants were more musical tban tbe songs of larks and nightingales. It grieved bim sorely to see an old building demolished, whicb be bad passed and repassed for years, in bis daily walks to and from bis business ; or an old custom abolished, the observance of which be bad witnessed when a child. " Tbe disappearance of tbe old clock from St. Dunstan's Cburcb," says Moxon in bis pleasant tribute to Lamb's memory in Leigh Hunt's Journal, "drew tears from bis eyes ; nor could be ever pass without emotion tbe place where Exeter 'Change once stood. Tbe removal bad spoiled a reality in Gay. ' Tbe passer-by,' be said, ' no longer saw tbe combs dangle in bis face.' This almost broke bis heart." — Editor. + rietcber in tbe Faithful Shepherdess. Tbe satyr offers to Gloria — " Grapes whose lusty blood Is tbe learned poet's good : Sweeter yet did never crown Tbe bead of Bacchus : nuts more brown Than the squirrels' teeth that crack them." DE foe's secondary NOVELS. 89 than the fruit of Seville or St. Michael's, and may help to reconcile the difference. We cannot speak from observation ; but we remember at school getting our fingers into the orangery of one of these little gentry (not having a due caution of the traps set there), and the result proved sourer than lemons. The author of the ** Task" somewhere speaks of their anger as being ** insignificantly fierce;" but we found the demonstration of it on this occasion quite as significant as we desired, and have not since been disposed to look any of these ** gift horses" in the mouth. Maiden aunts keep these '* small deer," as they do parrots, to bite people's fingers, on purpose to give them good advice "not to adventure so near the cage another time." As for their " six quavers divided into three quavers and a dotted crotchet," I suppose they may go into Jeremy Bentham's next budget of fallacies, along with the " melodious and proportionable kinde of musicke" recorded, in your last Number, of an highly gifted animal. ESTIMATE OF DE FOE'S SECONDARY NOVELS.* It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcendently surpassed in execution the rest of his compositions, that the world has agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in this not to suffer the contemplation of excellences of a lower standard to abate or stand in the way of the pleasure it has agreed to receive from the masterpiece. • From Walter Wilson's Life of De Foe. 90 DE foe's secondaey novels. Again : it has happened, that from no inferior merit of execution in the rest, but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some single work shall have been suffered to eclipse, and cast into shade, the deserts of its less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more or less injustice in the case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in which the beautiful and scriptural image of a pilgrim or wayfarer (we are all such upon earth), addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly to the bosoms of all, has silenced, and made almost to be forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the "■ Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus," of the same author, — a romance less happy in its subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary im- mortality. But in no instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than against what may be termed the secondary novels or romances of Be Foe. While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the " Adventures of Eobinson Crusoe," and will continue to do so, we trust, while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told that there exist other fictitious nar- ratives by the same writer, — four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation ! *' Roxana," ** Singleton," ''Moll Flanders," " Colonel Jack," are all genuine offspring of the same father. They bear the veritable impress of Be Foe. Even an unpractised midwife would swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye of every one of them ! They are, in their way, as full of incident, and some of them every bit as romantic ; only they want the unin- habited island, and the charm (that has bewitched the world) of the striking solitary situation. But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert ? or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds DE foe's SECONDABY NOVELS. 91 feel frightfully alone? Singleton on the world of waters, prowling about with pirates less merciful than the creatures of any howling wilderness, — is he not alone, with the faces of men about him, but without a guide that can conduct him through the mists of educational and habitual ignorance, or a fellow-heart that can interpret to him the new-born yearnings and aspirations of unpractised penitence ? Or when the boy Colonel Jack, in the loneliness of his heart, (the worst solitude,) goes to hide his ill- purchased treasure in the hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses it, and miraculously finds it again, whom hath he there to sympathize with him ? or of what sort are his associates ? The narrative manner of De Foe has a natural- ness about it beyond that of any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true stories. It is impossible to beheve, while you are reading them, that a real person is not narrating to you everywhere anything but what really happened to himself. To this the extreme homeliness of their style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest sense, — that which comes home to the reader. The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it : therefore they tell their own tales (Mr. Coleridge has antici- pated us in this remark) as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition, and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or have forgotten, some things that had been told before. Hence the emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type ; and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial parenthesis, " I say," " Mind," and the like, when the story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, might appear to have been sufficiently insisted upon before : which made an ingenious critic observe, that his works, in this 92 POSTSCRIPT TO THE " CHAPTER ON EARS." kind, were excellent reading for the kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of De Foe can never again hope to be popular with a much higher class of readers than that of the servant-maid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough prescription. Singleton, the pirate ; Colonel Jack, the thief ; Moll Flanders, both thief and harlot ; Eoxana, harlot and something worse, — would be startling ingredients in the bill-of-fare of modem literary delicacies. But, then, what pirate, what thief, and what harlot, is the pirate^ the thief, and the harlot of De Foe ! We should not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is the guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation upon the rude and uninstructed soul more meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the tenderness of Bunyan ; while the livelier pictures and incidents in them, as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish that fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life, which an unrestrained passion for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing. POSTSCEIPT TO THE "CHAPTEE ON EAES."* A WRITER, whose real name, it seems, is Boldero, but who has been entertaining the town for the last twelve months with some very pleasant lucubrations * From the London Magaziney 1821. ^ POSTSCEIPT TO THE " CHAPTER ON EARS." 93 under the assumed signature of Leigh Hunt,-'' in his Indicator of the 31st of January last, has thought fit to insinuate that I, Elia, do not write the little sketches which bear my signature in this magazine, but that the true author of them is a Mr. L b. Observe the critical period at which he has chosen to impute the calumny, — on the very eve of the pub- lication of our last Number, — affording no scope for explanation for a full month ; during which time I must needs lie writhing and tossing under the cruel imputation of nonentity. Good Heavens ! that a plain man must not be allowed to be. They call this an age of personaHty ; but surely this spirit of anti-personality (if I may so express it) is something worse. Take away my moral reputation, — I may live to discredit that calumny ; injure my literary fame, — I may write that up again ; but when a gentleman is robbed of his identity, where is he ? Other murderers stab only at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle at the best : but here is an assassin who aims at our very essence ; who not only forbids us to be any longer, but to have been at all. Let our ancestors look to it. Is the Parish Kegister nothing ? Is the house in Princes Street, Cavendish Square, where we saw the light six and forty years ago, nothing ? Were our progenitors from stately Genoa, where we flourished four centuries back, before the barbarous name of Bolderof was known to a European mouth, nothing? Was the goodly scion of our name, transplanted into England in the reign of the seventh Henry, nothing ? Are the archives of the Steelyard, in suc- ceeding reigns, (if haply they survive the fury of our * Clearly a fictitious appellation ; for if we admit the latter of these names to be in a manner English, what is Leigh Christian nomenclature knows no such. + It is clearly of trans-Atlantic origin. 94 ELIA TO HIS COBBESPONDENTS. envious enemies,) showing that we flourished in prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the Commonwealth, nothing ? "Why, then the world, and all that's in't, is nothing; *' The covering sky is nothing ; Bohemia nothing." I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move me so. ELIA TO HIS COBBESPONDENTS.* A coREESPONDENT, who WTites himself Peter Ball, or Bell, — for his handwriting is as ragged as his man- ners, — admonishes me of the old saying, that some people (under a courteous periphrasis, I slur his less ceremonious epithet) had need have good memories. In my '' Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," I have delivered myself, and truly, a templar born. Bell clamours upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox. It seems that in a former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called my good identity in question, (see Postscript to my *'■ Chapter on Ears",) I profess myself a native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my remoter origin from Italy. But who does not see, except this tinkling cymbal, that, in that idle fiction of Genoese ancestry, I was answering a fool accor- ding to his folly, — that Elia there expresseth himself ironically as to a proved slanderer, who hath no right to the truth, and can be no fit recipient of it ? Such a one it is usual to leave to his delusions ; or, leading him from error still to contradictory error, * From the London Magazine, 1821. ELIA TO HIS COBRESPONDENTS. 95 to plunge him (as we say) deeper in the mire, and give him hne till he suspend himself. No under- standing reader could be imposed upon by such obvious rodomontade to suspect me for an alien, or believe me other than English. To a second correspondent, who signs himself " A Wiltshire Man," and claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in my " Christ's Hospital," a more mannerly reply is due. Passing over the Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely detects a more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too obtuse to strike upon. Referring to the passage, I must confess that the term " native town," applied to Calne, prhnd facie seems to bear out the construction which my friendly correspondent is willing to put upon it. The context too, I am afraid, a little favours it. But where the words of an author, taken literally, compared with some other passage in his writings, admitted to be authentic, involve a palpable contradiction, it hath been the custom of the ingenuous commentator to smoothe the difficulty by the supposition that in the one case an allegorical or tropical sense was chiefly intended. So, by the word '* native," I may be supposed to mean a town where I might have been born, or where it might be desirable that I should have been born, as being situated in wholesome air, upon a dry, chalky soil, in which I delight ; or a town with the inhabitants of which I passed some weeks, a Summer or two ago, so agreeably, that they and it became in a manner native to me. Without some such latitude of interpretation in the present case, I see not how we can avoid falling into a gross error in physics, as to conceive that a gentleman may be born in two places, from which all modern and ancient testi- mony is ahke abhorrent. Bacchus cometh the nearest to it, whom I remember Ovid to have 93 ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS. honoured with the epithet " twice born.'"'' But, not to mention that he is so called (we conceive) in reference to the places whence rather than the places where he was dehvered, — for, by either birth, he may probably be challenged for a Theban, — in a strict way of speaking, he was a Jilius femoris by no means in the same sense as he had been before a films alvi; for that latter was but a secondary and tralatitious way of being born, and he but a denizen of the second house of his geniture. Thus much by way of explanation was thought due to the courteous ''Wiltshire Man." To "Indagator," "Investigator," "Incertus," and the rest of the pack, that are so importunate about the true localities of his birth, — as if, forsooth, Elia were presently about to be passed to his parish, — to all such church-warden critics he answereth, that, any explanation here given notwithstanding, he hath not so fixed his nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot, but that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall demand it, he will be born again, in future papers, in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him. " Modd me Thebis, modd Athenis." * " Imperfeclus adhuc infans genetricis ab alyo Eripitur, patrioque tener (si credere dignmn) Insuitur femori. . . . Tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Baccbi." Metamorph.f lib. iiL ( 07 ) UNITARIAN PROTESTS * IN A LEITEB TO A FRIEND OF THAT PERSUASION NEWLY MARRIED. Dear M , — Tliougli none of your acquaintance can with greater sincerity congratulate you upon this happy conjuncture than myseK, one of the oldest of them, it was with pain I found you, after the ceremony, depositiug in the vestry-room what is called a Protest. I thought you superior to this little sophistry. What ! after submitting to the service of the Church of England ; after consenting to receive a boon from her, in the person of your amiable consort, — was it consistent with sense, or common good manners, to turn round upon her, and flatly taunt her with false worship ? This language is a Httle of the strongest in your books and from your pulpits, though there it may well enough be excused from religious zeal and the native w^armth of nonconformity. But at the altar, — the Church- of-England altar, — adopting her forms, and com- plying with her requisitions to the letter, — to be consistent, together with the practice, I fear, you must drop the language of dissent. You are no longer sturdy noncons : you are there occasional conformists. You submit to accept the privileges communicated by a form of words, exceptionable, and perhaps justly, in your view ; but, so submitting, you have no right to quarrel with the ritual which you have just condescended to owe an obhgation cO. * From the London Magazine, 1825, UO UNITARIAN PROTESTS. They do not force you into their churches. You come voluntarily, knowing the terms. You marry in the name of the Trinity. There is no evading this by pretending that you take the formula with your own interpretation : (and, so long as you can do this, where is the necessity of protesting ?} for the meaning of a vow is to be settled by the sense of the imposer, not by any forced construction of the taker : else might all vows, and oaths too, be eluded with impunity. You marry, then, essentially as Trinitarians ; and the altar no sooner satisfied than, hey, presto ! with the celerity of a juggler, you shift habits, and proceed pure Unitarians again, in the vestry. You cheat the church out of a wife, and go home smiling in your sleeves that you have so cunningly despoiled the Egyptians. In plain English, the Church has married you in the name of so and so, assuming that you took the words in her sense : but you outwitted her ; you assented to them in your sense only, and took from her what, upon a right understanding, she would have declined giving you. This is the fair construction to be put upon all Unitarian marriages, as at present contracted ; and, so long as you Unitarians could salve your con- sciences with the equivoque, I do not see why the Established Church should have troubled herself at all about the matter. But the protesters necessarily see further. They have some glimmerings of the deception ; they apprehend a flaw somewhere ; they would fain be honest, and yet they must marry not- withstanding ; for honesty's sake, they are fain to dehonestate themselves a little. Let me try the very words of your own protest, to see what con- fessions we can pick out of them. '' As Unitarians, therefore, we " (you and your newly espoused bride) " most solemnly i)rotest against the service " (which yourselves have just UNITARIAN PE0TE3TS. 99* demanded,) "because we are thereby called upon not only tacitly to acquiesce, but to profess a belief, in a doctrine which is a dogma, as we believe, totally unfounded." But do you profess that belief during the ceremony ? or are you only called upon for the profession, but do not make it ? If the latter, then you fall in with the rest of your more consistent brethren who waive the protest ; if the former, then, I fear, your protest cannot save you. Hard and grievous it is, that, in any case, an institution so broad and general as the union of man and wife should be so cramped and straitened by the hands of an imposing hierarchy, that, to plight troth to a lovely woman, a man must be necessitated to compromise his truth and faith to Heaven ; but so it must be, so long as you choose to marry by the forms of the Church over which that hierarchy presides. "Therefore," say you, "we protest." Oh poor and much-fallen word. Protest ! It was not so that the first heroic reformers protested. They departed out of Babylon once for good and all ; they came not back for an occasional contact with her altars, — a dallying, and then a protesting against dalli- ance ; they stood not shuffling in the porch, with a Popish foot within, and its lame Lutheran fellow without, halting betwixt. These were the true Pro- testants. You are — ^protesters. Besides the inconsistency of this proceeding, I must think it a piece of impertinence, unseasonable at least, and out of place, to obtrude these papers upon the officiating clergyman ; to offer to a public functionary an instrument which by the tenour of his function he is not obhged to accept, but rather he is called upon to reject. Is it done in his clerical capacity ? He has no power of redressing the grievance. It is to take the benefit of his ministry, and then insult him. If in his capacity of fellow- 100 UNITARIAN PROTESTS. Cliristian only, what are your scruples to him, so long as you yourselves are able to get over them, and do get over them by coming to require his services ? The thing you call a Protest might with just as good a reason be presented to the church- warden for the time being, to the parish clerk, or the pew-opener. The Parliament alone can redress your grievance, if any. Yet I see not how with any grace your people can petition for relief, so long as, by the very fact of your coming to church to be married, they do hondjide and strictly relieve themselves. The Upper House, in particular, is not unused to these same things, called Protests, among themselves. But how would this honourable body stare to find a noble lord conceding a measure, and in the next breath, by a solemn protest, disowning it ! In a pro- test there is a reason given for non-compliance, not a subterfuge for an equivocal occasional compliance. It was reasonable in the primitive Christians to avert from their persons, by whatever lawful means, the compulsory eating of meats which had been offered unto idols. I dare say the Roman prefects and exarchates had plenty of petitioning in their days. But what would a Festus or Agrippa have replied to a petition to that effect, presented to him by some evasive Laodicean, with the very meat between his teeth, which he had been chewing voluntarily, rather than abide the penalty ? Eelief for tender consciences means nothing, where the conscience has previously relieved itself; that is, has complied with the injunctions which it seeks preposterously to be rid of. Eehef for conscience there is properly none but what by better informa- tion makes an act appear innocent and lawful with which the previous conscience was not satisfied to comply. All else is but relief from penalties, from scandal incurred by a complying practice, where the conscience itself is not fully satisfied. UNITARIAN PROTESTS. 101 ** But,*' say you, " we have hard measure : the Quakers are indulged with the liberty denied to us." They are ; and dearly have they earned it. You have come in (as a sect at least) in the cool of the evening, — at the eleventh hour. The Quaker character was hardened in the fires of persecution in the seventeenth century ; not quite to the stake and fagot, but little short of that : they grew up and thrived against noisome prisons, cruel beatings, whippings, stockings. They have since endured a century or two of scoffs, contempts ; they have been a by-word and a nay-word ; they have stood un- moved : and the consequence of long conscientious resistance on one part is invariably, in the end, re- mission on the other. The legislature, that denied you the tolerance, which I do not know that at that time you even asked, gave them the liberty, which, without granting, they would have assumed. No penalties could have driven them into the churches. This is the consequence of entire measures. Had the early Quakers consented to take oaths, leaving a protest with the clerk of the court against them in the same breath with which they had taken them, do you in your conscience think that they would have been indulged at this day in their ex- clusive privilege of affirming ? Let your people go on for a century or so, marrying in your own fashion, and I will warrant them, before the end of it, the legislature will be willing to concede to them more than they at present demand. Either the institution of marriage depends not for its validity upon hypocritical compliances with the ritual of an alien Church, (and then I do not see why you cannot marry among yourselves, as the Quakers, without their indulgence, would have been doing to this day,) or it does depend upon such ritual compliance. And then, in your protests, you offend against a divine ordinance. I have read in 102 UNITABIAN PROTESTS. the Essex Street Liturgy a form for the celebration of marriage. Why is this become a dead letter ? Oh ! it has never been legalized ; that is to say, ' in the law's eye, it is no marriage. But do you take upon you to say, in the view of the gospel it would be none ? Would your own people, at least, look upon a couple so paired to be none ? But the case of dowries, alimonies, inheritances, &c., which de- pend for their validity upon the ceremonial of the Church by law established, — are these nothing? That our children are not legally Filii Nullius, — is this nothing ? I answer. Nothing ; to the preser- vation of a good conscience, nothing ; to a consistent Christianity, less than nothing. Sad worldly thorns they are indeed, and stumbling-blocks well worthy to be set out of the way by a legislature calling itself Christian ; but not likely to be removed in a hurry by any shrewd legislators who perceive that the petitioning complainants have not so much as bruised a shin in the resistance, but, prudently declining the briers and the prickles, nestle quietly down in the smooth two-sided velvet of a protesting occasional conformity. I am, dear sir, With much respect, yours, &c., ( 103 ) THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE THEATRES ; WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB OF DAMNED AUTHORS.* Mr. Reflector, — I am one of those persons whom the world has thought proper to designate by the title of Damned Authors. In that memorable season of dramatic failures, 1806-7, — in which no fewer, I think, than two tragedies, four comedies, one opera, and three farces, suffered at Drury-Lane Theatre, — I was found guilty of constructing an afterpiece, and was damned. Against the decision of the public in such in- stances there can be no appeal. The clerk of Chat- ham might as well have protested against the decision of Cade and his followers, who were then the public. Like him, I was condemned because I could write. Not but it did appear to some of us that the measures of the popular tribunal at that period savoured a httle of harshness and of the summum jus. The public mouth was early in the season fleshed upon the ** Vindictive Man," and some pieces of that nature ; and it retained, through the remainder of it, a relish of blood. As Dr. Johnson would have said, " Sir, there was a habit of sibilation in the house." Still less am I disposed to inquire into the reason of the comparative lenity, on the other hand, with • From the Reflector, No. 3. 104 HISSING AT THE THEATBES. which some pieces were treated, which, to indifferent judges, seemed at least as much deserving of con- demnation as some of those which met with it. I am willing to put a favourable construction upon the votes that were given against us ; I believe that there was np bribery or designed partiality in the case : only " our nonsense did not happen to suit their nonsense ; " that was all. But against the manner in which the public, on these occasions, think fit to deliver their disappro- bation, I must and ever will protest. Sir, imagine — but you have been present at the damning of a piece (those who never had that felicity, I beg them to imagine) — a vast theatre, like that which Drury Lane was before it was a heap of dust and ashes (I exult not over its fallen greatness ; let it recover itself when it can for me ; let it lift up its towering head once more, and take in poor authors to write for it ; hie castiis artemqtie reponoy) — a theatre like that, filled with all sorts of disgust- ing sounds, — shrieks, groans, hisses, but chiefly the last, like the noise of many waters, or that which Don Quixote heard from the fuhing-mills, or that wilder combination of devilish sounds which St. Anthony hstened to in the wilderness. Oh Mr. Eeflector, is it not a pity, that the sweet human voice, which was given man to speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of love in, to express compliance, to confer a favour, or to grant a suit, — that voice, which in a Siddons or a Braham rouses us, in a siren Catalani charms and captivates us, — that the musical, expressive human voice should be converted into a rival of the noises of silly geese, and irrational, venomous snakes ! I never shall forget the sounds on my night. I never before that time fully felt the reception which the Author of All 111, in the ''Paradise Lost," m.eets with from the critics in the pitf at the final close of HISSING AT THE THEATRES. 105 his "Tragedy upon the Human Eace," — ^though that, alas ! met with too much success : — •'From innumerable tongues A dismal universal hiss, the sound Of public scorn. Dreadful was the din Of hissing through the hall, thick swariiiing now With complicated monsters, head and tail, Scorpion and ass, and Amphisbaena dire, Cerastes horn'd, Hydras, and Elops drear, And Dipsas." For hall substitute theatre, and you have the very image of what takes place at w^hat is called the damnation of a piece, — and properly so called ; for here you see its origin plainly, whence the custom was derived, and what the first piece was that so suffered. After this, none can doubt the propriety of the appellation. But, sir, as to the justice of bestowing such appalling, heart-withering denunciations of the popular obloquy upon the venial mistake of a poor author, who thought to please us in the act of filling Aiis pockets, — for the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than that, — it does, I own, seem to me a species of retributive justice far too severe for the offence. A culprit in the pillory (bate the eggs) meets with no severer exprobration. Indeed, I have often wondered that some modest critic has not proposed that there should be a wooden machine to that effect erected in some convenient part of the proscenium, which an un- successful author should be required to mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and oranges of the pit. This amende honorable would well suit with the meanness of some authors, who, in their prologues, fairly prostrate their skulls to the audience, and seem to invite a pelting. Or why should they not have their pens publicly broke over their heads, as the swords of recreant 106 HISSING AT THE THEATEES. knights in old times were, and an oath administered to them that they should never -write again ? Seriously, Messieui's the Public, this outrageous way which you have got of expressing your dis- pleasure is too much for the occasion. When I was deafening under the effects of it, I could not help asking what crime of great moral turpitude I had committed : for every man about me seemed to feel the offence as personal to himself ; as something which public interest and private feelings alike called upon him, in the strongest possible maimer, to stigmatize with infamy. The Eomans, it is well known to you, Mr. Eeflector, took a gentler method of marking their disapprobation of an author's work. They were a humane and equitable nation. They left the furca and the patibulum, the axe and the rods, to great offenders : for these minor and (if I may so term them) extra-moral offences, the bent thumb was con- sidered as a sufficient sign of disapprobation, — vertere pollicem; as the pressed thumb, premere pollicerrif was a mark of approving. And really there seems to have been a sort of fitness in this method, a correspondency of sign in the punishment to the offence. For, as the action of writing is performed by bending the thumb forward, the retroversion or bending back of that joint did not unaptly point to the opposite of that action ; implying that it was the will of the audience that the author should write no more : a much more significant as well as more humane way of expressing that desire than our custom of hissing, which is altogether senseless and indefensible. Nor do we find that the Eoman audiences deprived themselves, by this lenity, of any tittle of that supremacy which audiences in all ages have thought themselves bound to maintain over such as have been candidates for their applause. On the contrary, HISSING AT THE THEATRES. 107 by this method they seem to have had the author, as we should express it, completely under finger and thumb. The provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public are so much the more vexatious as they are removed from any possibility of retaliation, the hope of which sweetens most other injuries ; for the public never writes itself. Not but something very like it took place at the time of the O.P. differences. The placards which were nightly exhibited were, properly speaking, the com- position of the public. The pubHc wrote them, the public applauded them ; and precious morceaux of wit and eloquence they were, — except some few, of a better quality, which it is well known were furnished by professed dramatic writers. After this specimen of what the pubUc can do for itself, it should be a little slow in condemning what others do for it. As the degrees of malignancy vary in people ac- cording as they have more or less of the Old Serpent (the father of hisses) in their composition, I have sometimes amused myself with analysing this many-headed hydra, which calls itself the public, into the component parts of which it is ''complicated, head and tail," and seeing how many varieties of the snake kind it can afford. First, there is the Common English Snake. This is that part of the auditory who are always the majority at damnations ; but who, having no critical venom in themselves to sting them on, stay till they hear others hiss, and then join in for com- pany. The Blind Worm is a species very nearly allied to the foregoing. Some naturalists have doubted whether they are not the same. The Eattlesnake. — These are your obstreperous talking critics, — the impertinent guides of the pit, — who will not give a plain man leave to enjoy an 108 HISSING AT THE THEATRES. evening's entertainment ; "but, with their frothy jargon and incessant finding of faults, either drown his pleasure quite, or force him, in his own defence, to join in their clamorous censure. The hiss always originates with these. When this creature springs his rattle, you would think, from the noise it makes, there was something in it ; but you have only to examine the instrument from which the noise pro- ceeds, and you will find it typical of a critic's tongue, — a shallow membrane, empty, voluble, and seated in the most contemptible part of the crea- ture's body. The Whipsnake. — This is he that lashes the poor author the next day in the newspapers. The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Linnasus. — Under this head may be classed all that portion of the spectators, (for audience they properly are not,) who, not finding the first act of a piece answer to their preconceived notions of what a first act should be, like Obstinate, in John Bunyan, positively thrust their fingers in their ears, that they may not hear a word of what is coming, though perhaps the very next act may be composed in a style as different as possible, and be written quite to their own taste. These adders refuse to hear the voice of the charmer, because the tuning of his instrument gave them offence. I should weary you, and myself too, if I were to go through all the classes of the serpent kind. Two qualities are common to them all. They are crea- tures of remarkably cold digestions, and chiefly haunt 'pits and low grounds. I proceed with more pleasure to give you an ac- count of a club to which I have the honour to belong. There are fourteen of us, who are all authors that have been once in our hves what is called damned. We meet on the anniversaries of HISSING THE THEATRES. 109 our respective nights, and make ourselves merry at the expense of the public. The chief tenets which distinguish our society, and which every man among us is bound to hold for gospel, are — That the public, or mob, in all ages, have been a set of blind, deaf, obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius, in his senses, would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful rabble. That the only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick their pockets ; and, that failing, we are at full liberty to vilify and abuse them as much as ever we think fit. That authors, by their affected pretences to humility, which they made use of as a cloak to in- sinuate their writings into the callous senses of the multitude, obtuse to every thing but the grossest flattery, have by degrees made that great beast their master ; as we may act submission to children, till we are obliged to practise it in earnest. That authors are and ought to be considered the masters and preceptors of the public, and not vice versa. That it was so in the days of Orpheus, Linus, and Musseus ; and would be so again, if it were not that writers prove traitors to themselves. That, in particular, in the days of the first of those three great authors just mentioned, audiences appear to have been perfect models of what audiences should be ; for though, along with the trees and the rocks and the wild creatures which he drew after him to listen to his strains, some serpents doubtless came to hear his music, it does not appear that any one among them ever lifted up a dissentient voice. They knew what was due to authors in those days. Now every stock and stone turns into a serpent, and has a voice. That the terms " courteous reader " and " candid auditors," as having given rise to a false notion in those to whom they were apphed, as if they con- 110 HISSING AT THE THEATRES ferred upon them some right which they cannot have, of exercising their judgments, ought to be utterly banished and exploded. These are our distinguishing tenets. To keep up the memory of the cause in which we suffered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed unhealthy animal, to iEsculapius, on our feast nights we cut up a goose, an animal typical of the popular voice, to the deities of Candour and Patient Hearing. A zealous member of the society once proposed that we should revive the obsolete luxury of viper-broth ; but, the stomachs of some of the company rising at the proposition, we lost the benefit of that highly salutary and antidotal dish. The privilege of admission to our club is strictly limited to such as have been fairly damned. A piece that has met with ever so little applause, that has but languished its night or two, and then gone out, will never entitle its author to a seat among us. An exception to our usual readiness in confer- ring this privilege is in the case of a writer who, having been once condemned, writes again, and becomes candidate for a second martyrdom. Simple damnation we hold to be a merit ; but to be twice damned we adjudge infamous. Such a one we utterly reject, and blackball without a hearing : — " The common damned shun his society." Hoping that your publication of our regulations may be a means of inviting some more members into our society, I conclude this long letter. I am, sirs, yours, Semel-Damnatus.* * The germ of this article is contained in the folio vving pas- sage from a letter to Manning, (then sojourning among the Mandarins,) in which Lamb, half humorously, half pathetically, ( 111 ) CHAELES LAMB'S AUTOBIOGKAPHY.* Charles Lamb, bom in the Inner Temple, 10th of February, 1775 ; educated in Christ's Hospital ; describes the reception the town gave his famous and unfortu- nate farce, " Mr. H." : — " So I go creeping on since I was lamed with that cursed fall from off the top of Drury Lane Theatre into the pit, some- thing more than a year ago. However, I have been free of the house ever since, and the house was pretty free with me upon that occasion. Hang 'em, how they hissed ! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese ; with roaring sometimes like bears ; mows and mops like apes ; sometimes snakes, that hissed me into mad- ness. 'Twas like Saint Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us! that God should give his favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like dis- tillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vUify the innocent labours of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them ! Heaven therefore be pleased to make the teeth rot out of them all! Make them a reproach, and all that pass by them to loll out their tongue at them ! Blind mouths ! as Milton somewhere calls them." — Editob. * This, the briefest, and perhaps the wittiest and most truthful, autobiography in the language, was published in the New Monthly Magazine a few months after its author's death, with the following preface or introduction from the pen of some unknown admirer of Elia : — " We have been favoured, by the kindness of Mr. Upcott, with the following sketch, written in one of his manuscript collections by Charles Lamb. It will be read with deep interest by all, but with the deepest interest by those who had the honour and the happiness of knowing the writer. It is so singularly characteristic, that we can scarcely persuade our- selves we do not hear it, as we read, spoken from his living Ups. Slight as it is, it conveys the most exquisite and perfect notion of the personal manner and habits of our friend. For the intellectual rest, we lift the veil of its noble modesty, and 112 CHAKLES lamb's AUTOBIOGRA-PHY. afterwards a clerk in the Accountants' Office, East- India House ; pensioned off from that service, 1825, after thirty-three years' service ; is now a gentleman at large ; can remember few specialities in his life worth noting, except that he once caught a swallow flying {teste sua manu). Below the middle stature ; cast of face slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in his complexional rehgion ; stammers abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism, or a poor quibble, than in set and edifying speeches ; has consequently been libelled as a person always aiming at wit; which, as he told a dull fellow that charged him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dul- ness. A small eater, but not drinker ; confesses a partiality for the production of the juniper-berry ; was a fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to a volcano burnt out, emitting only now and then a casual puff. Has been guilty of obtruding upon the public a tale, in prose, called " Rosamund Gray ;" a dramatic sketch, named *' John Woodvil;" a ''Farewell Ode to Tobacco," with sundry other poems, and hght prose matter, collected in two slight crown octavos, and pompously christened his works, though in fact they were his recreations. His true works may be found on the shelves of Leadenhall Street, filling some hundred folios. He is also the true Elia, whose Essays are extant in a little volume, published a year or two since, and rather better known from that name without a mean- ing than from any thing he has done, or can hope to do, in his own name. He was also the first to draw the public attention to the old English dramatists, in a can even here discern them. Mark its humour, crammed into a few thinking words — its pathetic sensibility in the midst of con- trast — its wit, truth, and feeling, — and, above all, its fanciful retreat at the close, under a phantom cloud of death." — ESDITOB. ON THE DEATH OP COLEEIDGE. 113 work called '* Specimens of English Dramatic "Writers who lived about the Time of Shakspeare," published about fifteen years since. In short, all his merits and demerits to set forth would take to the end of Mr. Upcott's book, and then not be told truly. He died 18 , much lamented.* Witness his hand, Chables Lamb. 18th April, 1827. ON THE DEA.TH OF COLERIDGE.j When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was with- out grief. It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next world, — that he had a • To any body. — Please to fill up these blanks. + Disraeli wrote a book on the Quarrels of Authors. Some- body should write one on the Friendships of Literary Men, Should such a work be ever written, Charles Lamb and Samu9l Taylor Coleridge will be honourably mentioned therein. Among all the friendships celebrated in tale or history, theie is none more admirable than that which existed between these two eminent men. The, " golden thread that tied their hearts together was never broken. Their friendship was nevei " chipp'd or diminished ;" but, the longer they lived, the stronger it grew. Death could not destroy it. Lamb, after Coleridge's death, as if weary of " this green earth," as if not caring if " sun and sky and breeze, and soli- lary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests and irony itself ," went out with life, willingly sought " Lavinian shores." ♦' Lamb," as Mr. John Forster says in his beautiful tribute to his memory, " never fairly recovered the death of Coleridge. He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of himself) until his own great spirit joined his friend. He had 114 ON THE DEATH OP COLERIDGE, hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve. But, since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or hooks, without an ineffectual turning and refer- ence to him. He was the proof and touchstone of all my cogitations. He was a Grecian (or in the first form) at Christ's Hospital, where I was Deputy- Grecian ; and the same subordination and deference to him I have preserved through a life-long acquaint- ance. Great in his writings, he was greatest in his conversation. In him was disproved that old maxim, that we should allow every one his share of talk. He would talk from morn to '* dewy eve," nor cease till far midnight ; yet who ever would interrupt him ? who would obstruct that continuous flow of converse, fetched from Helicon or Zion ? He had the tact of making the unintelligible seem plain. Many who read the abstruser parts of his *' Friend " would complain that his works did not answer to his spoken wisdom. They were identical. But he had a tone in oral delivery which seemed to convey sense to those who were otherwise imperfect recipients. He was my fifty-years- old friend without a dissension. a habit of venting his melancholy in a sort of mirth. He would, with nothing graver than a pun, • cleanse his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighed ' upon it. In a jest, or a few light phrases, he would lay open the last recesses of his heart. So in respect of the death of Coleridge. Some old friends of his saw him two or three weeks ago, and remarked the con- stant turning and reference of his mind. He interrupted him- Belf and them almost every instant with some play of affected wonder or astonishment, or humorous melancholy, on the words ' Coleridge is dead.'' Nothing could divert him from that ; for the thought of it never left him. About the same time, we wrote to him to request a few lines for the lite- rary album of a gentleman who entertained a fitting admiration of his genius. It was the last request we were destined to make, the last kindness we were allowed to receive. He wrote in Mr. Keymer's volume — and wrote of Coleridge." — Editor. THE OLD ACTOES. • 115 Never saw I his likeness, nor probably can the world Bee it again. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he Hved. I love the faithful Gilmans more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. What was his mansion is con- secrated to me a chapel. Edmonton, Nov. 21, 1834. THE OLD ACTOES.* I DO not know a more mortifying thing than to be conscious of a foregone delight, with a total oblivion of the person and manner which conveyed it. In dreams I often stretch and strain after the counte- nance of Edwin whom I once saw in ** Peeping Tom." I cannot now catch a feature of him. He is no more to me than Nokes or Pinkethman. Parsons, and, still more, Dodd, were near being lost to me till I was refreshed with their portraits (fine treat) the other day at Mr. Matthews's gallery at Highgate ; which, with the exception of the Hogarth pictures a few years since exhibited in Pall Mall, was the most delightful collection I ever gained admission to. There hang the players, in their single persons and in grouped scenes, from the Eestoration, — Bettertons, Booths, Garricks, — ^justifying the pre- judices which we entertain for them ; the Brace- girdles, the Mountforts, and the Oldfields, fresh as Gibber has described them ; the Woffington (a true Hogarth) upon a couch, dallying and dangerous ; the screen scene in Brinsley's famous comedy ; with Smith and Mrs. Abingdon, whom I have not seen ; and the rest, whom, having seen, I see still there. * From the London Magazine^. 1822. 116 THE OLD ACTORS. There is Henderson, unrivalled in Comiis, whom I saw at second-hand in the eder Harley ; Harley, the rival of Holman, in Horatio; Holman, with the bright glittering teeth, in Lothario, and the deep paviour's sighs in Romeo, the jolliest person (" our son is fat ") of any Hamlet I have yet seen, with the most laudable attempts (for a personable man) at looking melancholy ; and Pope, the abdicated monarch of tragedy and comedy, in Harry the Eighth, and Lord Townley. There hang the two Aickins, brethren in mediocrity ; Wroughton, who, in Kitely, seemed to have forgotten that in prouder days he had personated Alexander ; the specious form of John Palmer, with the special effrontery of Bobby ; Bensley, with the trumpet-tongue ; and little Quick (the retired Dioclesian of Islington), with his squeak like a Bart'Iemew fiddle. There are fixed, cold as in life, the immovable features of Moody, who, afraid of o'erstepping Nature, sometimes stopped short of her : and the restless fidgetimes of Lewis, who, with no such fears, nor seldom leaped o' the other side. There hang Farren and Whitfield, and Burton and Phillimore, names of small account in those times, but which, remembered now, or casually recalled by the sight of an old play-bill, with their associated recordations, can "drown an eye unused to flow." There too hangs, not far removed from them in death, the graceful plainness of the first Mrs. Pope, with a voice unstrung by age, but which in her better days must have competed with the silver tones of Barry himself, so enchanting in decuy do I remember it, — of all her lady parts, exceeding herself in the Lady Quakeress (there earth touched heaven) of O'Keefe, when she played it to the Merry Cousin of Lewis ; and Mrs. Mat- tocks, the sensiblest of viragos ; and Miss Pope, a gentlewoman ever, to the verge of gentility, with Churchill's compliment still burnishing upon hor CAPTAIN SrARKEY. 117 gay honeycomb lips. There are the two Bannisters, and Sedgwick, and Kelly, and Dignum (Diggy), and the by-gone features of Mrs. Ward, matchless in Lady Loverule ; and the collective majesty of the whole Kemble family; and (Shakspeare's woman) Bora Jordan ; and, by her, two antics, who, in former and in latter days, have chiefly beguiled us of our griefs ; whose portraits we shall strive to recall, for the sympathy of those who may not have had the benefit of viewing the matchless Highgate col- lection,* CAPTAIN STARKEY. To the Editor of the Evenj-Day Book : — Dear Sir, — ^I read your account of this unfortu- nate being, and his forlorn piece of self-history ,t with that smile of half-interest which the annals of insignificance excite, till I came to where he says, " I was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathe- matics," &c. ; when I started as one does in the re- cognition of an old acquaintance in a supposed stranger. This, then, was that Starkey of whom I have heard my sister relate so many pleasant anec- * Here foUovrs, in the article as originally published, the well-known masterly pen-and-ink portraits of Suett and Mun- den. The article on Suett, Lamb incorporated inta the " Essay on some of the old Actors :" that on Munden, he re- printed as a separate chapter in the first series of the Essays of Elia. — Editob. + " Memoirs of the Life of Benjamin Starkey, late of Lon- don, but now an inmate of the Freemen's Hospital in New- castle. Written by himself. With a portrait of the author, and a fac- simile of his handwriting. Printed and sold by William Hall, Great Market, Newcastle." 1818. 12mo, pp. li. 118 CAPTAIN STAEKEY. dotes ; and whom, never having seen, I yet seem almost to remember. For nearly fifty years she had lost all sight of him ; and, behold ! the gentle usher of her youth, grown into an aged beggar, dubbed with an opprobrious title to which he had no pre- tensions ; an object and a May-game! To what base purposes may we not return ! What may not have been the meek creature's sufferings, what his wanderings, before he finally settled down in the comparative comfort of an old hospitaller of the almonry of Newcastle ? And is poor Starkey dead ? I was a scholar of that " eminent writer " that he speaks of ; but Starkey had quitted the school about a year before I came to it. Still the odour of his merits had left a fragrancy upon the recollection of the elder pupils. The schoolroom stands where it did, looking into a discoloured, dingy garden in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings. It is still a school, though the main prop, alas ! has fallen so ingloriously ; and bears a Latin inscription over the entrance in the lane, which was unknown in our humbler times. Heaven knows what " languages" were taught in it then ! I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it but a little of our native English. By " mathematics," reader, must be understood " ci- phering." It was, in fact, an humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys" in the morning; and the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, &c., in the evening. Now, Starkey presided, under Bird, over both establishments. In my time, Mr. Cook, now or lately a respectable singer and performer at Lrury Lane Theatre, and nephew to Mr. Bird, had succeeded to him. I well remember Bird. He was a squat, corpulent, middle-sized man, with something of the gentleman about him, and that peculiar mild CAPTAIN STAKKEY. 119 tone — especially while he was inflicting punishment — which is so much more terrible to children than the angriest looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent ; but, when they took place, the cor- rection was performed in a private room adjoining, where we could only hear the plaints but saw nothing. This heightened the decorum and the solemnity. But the ordinary chastisement was the bastinado, a stroke or two on the palm with that almost obsolete weapon now, — the ferule. A ferule was a sort of fiat ruler, widened, at the inflicting end, into a shape resembling a pear, — but nothing like so sweet, with a delectable hole in the middle to raise blisters, like a cupping-glass. I have an intense recollection of that disused instrument of torture, and the malig- nancy, in proportion to the apparent mildness, with which its strokes were applied. The idea of a rod is accompanied with something ludicrous ; but by no process can I look back upon this blister-raiser with any thing but unmingled horror. To make him look more formidable, — if a pedagogue had need of these heightenings, — Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns formerly in use with school-masters, the strange figures upon which we used to interpret into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering. But, boyish fears apart, Bn-d, I believe, was, in the main, a humane and judicious master. Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those uncomfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each other ; and the injunctions to attain a free hand, unattainable in that position ; the first copy I wrote after, with its moral lesson, " Art improves Nature ;" the still earlier pot-hooks and the hangers, some traces of which I fear may yet be apparent in this manuscript ; the truant looks side-long to the garden, which seemed a mockery of our imprison- ment ; the prize for best spelling which had almost turned my head, and which, to this day, I cannot 12Q CAPTAIN STAEKEY. reflect iipon without a vanity, whieh I onght to be ashamed of ; our little leaden inkstands, not sepa- rately subsisting, but sunk into the desks ; the bright, punctually- washed morning fingers, darkening gi-a- dually with another and another ink- spot ! What a world of little associated circumstances, pains, and pleasures, mingling their quotas of pleasure, arise at the reading of those few simple words, — "Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics in Fetter Lane, Hol- born!" Poor Starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in his face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predicate any par- ticular age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven and thirty. This antique cast always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems he was not always the abject thing he came to. My sister, who well remembers him, can hardly forgive Mr. Thomas Eanson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him when he was a youthful teacher at Mr. Bird's school. Old age and poverty — a life-long poverty, she thinks — could at no time have so effaced the marks of native gentility which were once so visible in a face other- wise strikingly ugly, thin, and care-worn. From her recollection of him, she thinks that he would have wanted bread before he would have begged or bor- rowed a halfpenny. " If any of the girls," she says, *' who were my school-fellows, should be reading, through their aged spectacles, tidings, from the dead, of their youthful friend Starkey, they will feel a pang, as I do, at having teased his gentle spirit." They were big girls, it seems, too old to attend his in- struction with the silence necessary ; and, however old age and a long state of beggary seem to have reduced his writing faculties to a state of imbecility, in those days his language occasionally rose to the CAPTAIN STARKE Y. 121 bold and figurative : for, when he was in despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase was, *' Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven can make you." Once he was missing for a day or two : he had run away. A little, old, unhappy-looking man brought him back, — it was his father, — and he did no business in the school that day, but sat moping in a corner, with his hands before his face ; and the girls, his tor- mentors, in pity for his case, for the rest of that day forbore to annoy him, ** I had been there but a few months," adds she, " when Starkey, who was the chief instructor of us girls, communicated to us a profound secret, — that the tragedy of Cato was shortly to be acted by the elder boys, and that we were to be invited to the representation." That Starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors, she remembers; and, but for his unfortunate per- son, he might have had some distinguished part in the scene to enact. As it was, he had the arduous task of prompter assigned to him ; and his feeble voice was heard clear and distinct, repeating the text during the whole performance. She describes her recollection of the cast of characters, even now, with a rehsh. Martia by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa, and of whom she never afterwards heard tidings ; Lucia, by Master Walker, whose sister was her particular friend ; Cato, by John Hunter, a masterly Reclaimer , but a plain boy, and shorter by the head than his two sons in the scene, &c. In conclusion, Starkey appears to have been one of those mild spirits, which, not originally deficient in understanding, are crushed by penury into dejection and feebleness. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament, to society, if Fortune had taken him into a very little fostering ; but, wanting that, he became a captain, — a by-word, — and hved and died a broken bukush. ( 122 ) A POPULAE FALLACY,* THAT A DEFORMED PEESON IS A LORD. After a careful perusal of the most approved works that treat of nobility, and of its origin in these realms in particular, we are left very much in the dark as to the original patent in which this branch of it is recognised. Neither Camden, in his "Ety- mologie and Original of Barons," nor Dugdale, in his ''Baronage of England," nor Selden, (a more exact and laborious inquirer than either,) in his "Titles of Honour," affords a glimpse of satisfaction upon the subject. There is an heraldic term, indeed, which seems to imply gentility, and the right to coat- armour, (but nothing further,) in persons thus quali- fied. But the sinister bend is more probably inter- preted, by the best writers on this science, of some irregularity of birth than of bodily conformation. Nobility is either hereditary, or by creation, com- monly called a patent. Of the former kind, the title in question cannot be, seeing that the notion of it is limited to a personal distinction which does not necessarily follow in the blood. Honours of this kind, as Mr Anstey very well observes, descend, moreover, in a right line. It must be by patent, then, if any thing. But who can show it ? How comes it to be dormant ? Under what king's reign is it patented ? Among the grounds of nobility cited by the learned Mr. Ashmole, after " Services in the Field or in the Council Chamber," he judi- ciously sets down " Honours conferred by the Sove- * I'rom the Neio Monthly Magazine, 1826. A POPULAE FALLACY. 123 reign out of mere benevolence, or as favouring one subject rather than another for some likeness or con- formity observed (or but supposed) in him to the royal nature ;" and he instances the graces showered upon Charles Brandon, who, "in his goodly person being thought not a little to favour the port and bearing of the king's own majesty, was by that sove- reign, King Henry the Eighth, for some or one of these respects, highly promoted and preferred." Here, if anywhere, we thought we had discovered a clew to our researches. But after a painful in- vestigation of the rolls and records under the reign of Kichard the Third, or "Kichard Crouchback," as he is more usually designated in the chronicles, — from a traditionary stoop or gibbosity in that part, — we do not find that that monarch conferred any such lordships as are here pretended, upon any subject or subjects, on a simple plea of *' conformity " in that respect to the " royal nature." The posture of affau's, in those tumultuous times preceding the battle of Bosworth, possibly left him at no leisure to attend to such niceties. Further than his reign, w^e have not extended our inquiries ; the kings of Eng- land who preceded or followed him being generally described by historians to have been of straight and clean limbs, the ** natural derivative," says Daniel,-'' *' of high blood, if not its primitive recommendation to such ennoblement, as denoting strength and martial prowess, — the qualities set most by in that fighting age." Another motive, which inclines us to scruple the vahdity of this claim, is the remark- able fact that not one of the persons in whom the right is supposed to be vested does ever insist upon it himself. There is no instance of any of them *' suing his patent," as the law-books call it ; much less of his having actually stepped up into his * History of England, " Temporibus Edwardi Primi et ee- . 129 — starting from an equal post — the difference of the clownish and the gentle blood. A private education, then, or such a one as I have been describing, being determined on, we must in the next place look out for a preceptor ; for it will be some time before either of you, left to yourselves, will be able to assist the other to any great pui-pose in his studies. And, now, my dear sir, if, in describing such a tutor as I have imagined for you^ I use a style a little above the familiar one in which I have hither- to chosen to address you, the nature of the subject must be my apology. Difficile est de scientiis in- scienter loqui; which is as much as to say, that, "in treating of scientific matters, it is difficult to avoid the use of scientific terms." But I shall endeavou'i- to be as plain as pos ible. I am not going to present you with the ideal of a pedagogue as it may exist in my fancy, or has possibly been realized in the persons of Buchanan and Busby. Something less than perfection will serve our turn. The scheme which I propose in this first or introductory letter has reference to the first four or five years of your education only ; and, in enumerating the qualifica- tions of him that should undertake the direction of your studies, I shall rather point out the minimum^ or least, that I shall require of him, than trouble you in the search of attainments neither common nor necessary to our immediate purpose. He should be a man of deep and extensive know- ledge. So much at least is indispensable. Some- thing older than yourself, I could wish him, because years add reverence. To his age and great learning, he should be blessed with a temper and a patience wiUing to accommodate itself to the imperfections of the slowest and meanest capacities. Such a one, in former days, Mr. Hartlib appears to have been ; and such, in our days, I take 180 ' LETTER TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN. Mr. Grierson to be : but our friend, you know, unhappily has other engagements. I do not demand a consummate grammarian ; but he must he a thorough master of vernacular orthography, with an insight into the accentualities and punctualities of modern Saxon or English. He must be competently instructed (or how shall he instruct you ?) in the tetralogy, or four first rules, upon which not only arithmetic, but geometry, and the pure mathematics themselves, are grounded. I do not require that he should have measured the globe with Cook or OrteHus ; but it is desirable that he should have a general knowledge (I do not mean a very nice or pedantic one) of the great division of the earth into four parts, so as to teach you readily to name the quarters. He must have a genius capable in some degree of soaring to the upper element, to deduce from thence the not much dissimilar computation of the cardinal points, or hinges, upon which those invisible phenomena, which naturalists agree to term ivinds, do perpetually shift and turn. He must instruct you, in imitation of the old Orphic fragments, (the mention of which has possibly escaped you,) in numeric and harmonious responses, to deliver the number of solar revolutions within which each of the twelve periods of the Annus Vulgaris, or common year, is divided, and which doth usually complete and terminate itself. The inter calaries, and other subtle problems, he will do well to omit, till riper years, and course of study, shall have rendered you more capable thereof. He must be capable of em- bracing all history, so as, from the countless myriads of individual men who have peopled this globe of earth,-^or it is a globe, — by comparison of their respective births, lives, deaths, fortunes, conduct, prowess, &c., to pronounce, and teach you to pro- nounce, dogmatically and catechetically, who was the richest, who was the strongest, who was the wisest*- AMBIGUITIES FROM PROPER NAMES, 131 who was the meekest, man that ever lived ; to the fa- cihtation of which solution, you will readily conceive, a smattering of biography would in no inconsiderable degree conduce. Leaving the dialects of men, (in one of which I shall take leave to suppose you by tliis time at least superficially instituted,) you will learn to ascend with him to the contemplation of that un- articulated language which was before the written tongue ; and, with the aid of the elder Phrygian or ^sopic key, to interpret the sounds by which the animal tribes communicate their minds, evolving moral mstruction with delight from the dialogue of cocks, dogs, and foxes. Or, marrying theology with verse, fi'om whose mixture a beautiful and healthy off- spring may be expected, in your own native accents, (but purified,) you will keep time together to the profound harpings of the more modern or Wattsian hymnics. Thus far I have ventured to conduct you to a " hill- side, whence you may discern the right path of a vir- tuous and noble education ; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospects and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming."* "With my best respects to Mr. Grierson, when you pee him, I r main, dear sir, your obedient servant, Elia. ON THE AMBIGUITIES AKISING FKOM PROPEE NAMES.! How oddly it happens that the same sound shall suggest to the minds of two persons hearing it ideas * Milton's Tractate on Education, addressed to Mr. Hartlib. t From The Reflector, No. 2. All the facts (and fictions too, if there be any,) in this article will be found in one of Lamb's early letters to "Wordsworth. — Editor. 132 AMBIGUITIES FROM PROPER NAMES. the most opposite ! I was conversing, a few years since, with a young friend upon the subject of poetry, and particularly that species of it which is known by the name of the Epithalamium. I ventured to assert that the most pefect specimen of it in our language was the " Epithalamium " of Spenser upon his own marriage. My young gentleman, who has a smattering of taste, and would not willingly be thought ignorant of any thing remotely connected with the heUes-lettres, expressed a degree of surprise, mixed with mortifica- tion, that he should never have heard of this poem ; Spenser being an author with whose writings he thought himself peculiarly conversant. I offered to show him the poem in the fine folio copy of the poet's works which I have at home. He seemed pleased with the offer, though the mention of the folio seemed again to puzzle him. But, presently after, assuming a grave look, he compassionately muttered to himself, *' Poor Spencer !" There was something in the tone with which he spoke these words that struck me not a little. It was more like the accent with which a man bemoans some recent calamity that has happened to a friend, than that tone of sober grief with which we lament the sorrows of a person, however excellent and how- ever grievous his afflictions may have been, who has been dead more than two centuries. I had the curiosity to inquire into the reasons of so uncom- mon an ejaculation. My young gentleman, with a more solemn tone of pathos than before, repeated, *'Poor Spencer!" and added, ''He has lost his wife !" My astonishment at this assertion rose to such a height, that I began to think the brain of my young friend must be cracked, or some unaccountable reverie had gotten possession of it. But upon further explanation, it appeared that the word " Spenser, ' ELIA ON ** CONFESSIONS OP A DRUNKARD." 133 which to you or me, reader, in a conversation upon doetry too, would naturally have called up the idea of an old poet in a ruff, one Edmund Spenser, that flourished in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and wrote a poem called " The I'airy Queen," with " The Shepherd's Calendar," and many more verses besides, did, in the mind of my young friend, excite a very different and quite modern idea ; namely, that of the Honourable "William Spencer, one of the living ornaments, if I am not misinformed, of this present poetical era, a.d. 1811. ELIA ON "THE CONFESSIONS OF A DEUNKAED."* Many are the sayings of Elia, painful and frequent his lucubrations, set forth for the most part (such his modesty !) without a name ; scattered about in obscure periodicals and forgotten miscellanies. From * From the London Magazine, 1822. Willis, in his Pencillings hy the Waij, describing his in- terview with Charles and Mary Lamb, says, " Nothing could be more delightful than the kindness and affection between the brother and the sister ; though Lamb was continually taking ad- vantage of her deafness to mystify her with the most singular gravity upon every topic that was started. * Poor Mary !' said he : ' she hears all of an epigram but the point.' — ' What are you saying of me, Charles ?' she asked. ' Mr. Willis,' said he, raising his voice, ' admires your Confessions of a Drunkard very much, and I was saying it was no merit of yours that you understood the subject.' We had been speaking of this ad- mirable essay (which is his own) half an hour before." That essay has been strangely and purposely misunderstood. Elia, albeit he loved the cheerful glass, was not a drunkard. The " poor nameless egotist " of the Confessions is not Charles Lamb. In printing the article in the London Magazine, (it was originally contributed to a collection of tracts published 134 ELIA ON " CONFESSIONS OP A DRUNKA.RD." the dust of some of these it is our intention occa- sionally to revive a tract or two that shall seem worthy of a better fate, especially at a time like the present, when the pen of our industrious contributor, engaged in a laborious digest of his recent Conti- nental tour, may haply want the leisure to expatiate in more miscellaneous speculations. We have been induced, in the first instance to reprint a thing which he put forth in a friend's volume some years since, entitled The Confessions of a Drunkard, seeing that Messieurs the Quarterly Eeviewers have chosen to embellish their last dry pages with fruitful quotations therefrom ; adding, from their peculiar brains, the gratuitous affirmation, that they have reason to believe that the describer (in his delinea- tion of a drunkard, forsooth !) partly sat for his own picture. The truth is, that our friend had been reading among the essays of a contemporary, who has perversely been confounded with him, a paper in which Edax (or the Great Eater) humorously com- plaineth of an inordinate appetite ; and it struck him that a better paper — of deeper interest and wider usefulness — might be made out of the imagined expe- riences of a Great Drinker. Accordingly he set to work, and, with that mock fervour and counterfeit earnest- ness with which he is too apt to over-realize his descrip- tions, has given us — a frightful picture indeed, but no more resembling the man Elia than the fictitious Edax may be supposed to identify itself with Mr. L. hj Basil Montagu,) Elia introduced it to the readers of that periodical in the above explanatory paragraphs. They should be printed in all editions of Elia as a note to the article they explain and comment on ; for many persons, like the writer in the Quarterly Revieio, believe, or profess to believe that this " fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance" is a true tale. " How far it was from actual truth," says Talfourd, " the Essays of Elia, the production of a later day, in which the maturity of his feeling, humour, and reason, is exhibited, may sufficiently show." — Editoe. THE LAST PEACH. 185 its author. It is, indeed, a compound extracted out of his long observations of the effects of drinking upon all the world about him ; and this accumulated mass of misery he hath centred (as the custom is with judicious essayists) in a single figure. We deny not that a portion of his own experiences may have passed into the picture ; (as who, that is not a washy fellow, but must at some times have felt the after- operation of a too-generous cup ?) but then how heightened ! how exaggerated ! how little within the sense of the Review, where a part, in its slanderous usage, must be understood to stand for the whole ! But it is useless to expostulate with this Quarterly slime, brood of Nilus, watery heads with hearts of jelly spawned under the sign of Aquarius, incapable of Bacchus, and therefore cold, washy, spiteful, bloodless. Elia shall string them up one day, and show their colours, — or, rather, how colourless and vapid the whole fry, — when he putteth forth his long-promised, but unaccountably hitherto delayed, Confessions of a Water-Dnnker, THE LAST PEACH.* I AM the miserablest man living. Give me counsel, dear Editor. I was bred up in the strictest prin- ciples of honesty, and have passed my hfe in punctual adherence to them. Integrity might be said to be ingrained in our family. Yet I live in constant fear of one day coming to the gallows. Till the latter end of last Autumn I never ex- perienced these feelings of self- mistrust, which ever since have imbittered my existence. From the ap- prehension of that unfortunate manf whose story • From the London Magazine, 1825. + Fauntleroy. 186 THE LAST PEACH. began to make so great an impression upon the public about that time, I date my horrors. I never can get it out of my head that I shall some time or other commit a forgery, or do some equally vile thing. To make matters worse, I am in a banking- house. I sit surrounded with a cluster of bank- notes. These were formerly no more to me than meat to a butcher's dog. They are now as toads and aspics. I feel all day like one situated amidst gins and pitfalls. Sovereigns, which I once took such pleasure in counting out, and scraping up with my little tin shovel, (at which I was the most expert in the banking-house,) now scald my hands. When I go to sign my name, I set down that of another person, or write my own in a counterfeit character. I am beset with temptations without motive. I want no more wealth than I possess. A more contented being than myself, as to money matters, exists not. What should I fear ? When a child, I was once let loose, by favour of a nobleman's gardener, into his lordship's magni- ficent fruit garden, with full leave to pull the currants and the gooseberries ; only I was interdicted from touching the wall fruit.* Indeed, at that season, * This garden belonged to " Blakesmoor," the fine old famil./ mansion of the Plummers of Hertfordshire, in whose family Lamb's maternal grandmother — the " grandame " of his poem of that name, and the "great grandmother Field" of Elia's "Dream Children " — was housekeeper for many years. About this great house, where he passed so many happy holidays when a boy, and of which he writes so beautifully in two of the Essays of Elia, Lamb thus speaks in one of his letters to Barton : — " You have well described your old, fashionable, grand, pa- ternal hall. Is it not odd that every one's earliest recollections are of some such place ? I had my Blakesware (Blakesmoor in the London). Nothing fills a child's mind like a large old mansion : better if un — -or partially— occupied, peopled with the spirits of deceased members for the county, and jus- tices of the quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled THE LAST PEACH. 137 (it was the end of Autumn,) there was little left. Only on the south wall (can I forget the hot feel of the brick- work ?) lingered the one last peach. Now, peaches are a fruit which I always had, and still have, an almost utter aversion to. There is some- thing to my palate singularly harsh and repulsive in the flavour of them. I know not by what demon of contradiction inspired ; but I was haunted with an ii-resistible desire to pluck it. Tear myself as often as I would from the sp; t, I found myself still recurring to it ; till, maddening with desire, (desire I cannot call it,) with wilfulness rather, — without appetite, — against appetite, 1 may call it, — in an evil hour I reached out my hand, and plucked it. Some few raindrops just then fell ; the sky (from a bright day) became overcast ; and I was a type of our first parents, after the eating of that fatal fruit. I felt myself naked and ashamed, stripped of my virtue, spiritless. The downy fruit, the sight of which rather than its savour had tempted me, di-opped from my hand, never to be tasted. All the commentators in the world cannot persuade me but that the Hebrew word, in the second chapter of Genesis, translated " apple," should be rendered " peach." Only this way can I reconcile that mysterious story. Just such a cluid at thirty am I among the cash and valuables, longing to pluck, without an idea of enjoyment further. I cannot reason myseK out of solitude of one, with my feelings at seven years old ! Those marble busts of the emperors — they seemed as if they were to stand for ever, as they had stood from the living ages of Kome, in that old marble hall, and 1 to partake of their permanency. Eternity was, while I thought not of Time. But he thought of me, and they are toppled down, and com covers the spot of the noble old dwelling and its princely gardens. I feel like a grasshopper, that, chirping about the ground, escapes his scythe only by my littleness. Even now he is whetting one of his smallest razors to clean wipe me out, perhaps. Well I " — Editob. 188 THE LAST PEACH. these fears : I dare not laugh at them. I was ten- derly and lovingly brought up. What then ? Who that in life's entrance had seen the babe F , from the lap stretching out his little fond mouth to catch the maternal kiss, could have predicted, or as much as imagined, that life's very different exit? The sight of my own fingers torments me ; they seem so admirably constructed for — pilfering. Then that jugular vein, which I have in common ; in an emphatic sense may I say with David, I am " fearfully made." All my mirth is poisoned by these unhappy suggestions. If, to dissipate reflec- tion, I hum a tune, it changes to the "Lamenta- tions of a Sinner." My very dreams are tainted. I awake with a shocking feeling of my hand in some pocket. Advise me, dear Editor, on this painful heart- malady. Tell me, do you feel any thing allied to it in yourself? Do you never feel an itching, as it were, — a dactylomania, — or am I alone ? You have my honest confession. My next may appear from Bow Street. SUSPENSURUS.* * The day after the execution of Fauntleroy, and some months before the publication of this little sketch, Lamb thus solemnly, yet humorously withal, writes to the Quaker poet : "And now, my dear sir, trifling apart, the gloomy catastrophe of yesterday morning prompts a sadder vein. The fate of the unfortunate Fauntleroy makes me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes around on such of my friends, as, by a parity of situation, are exposed to a similarity of temptation. My very style seems to myself to become more impressive than usual with the charge of them. Who that standeth knoweth but he may yet fall ? Your hands as yet, I am most willing to believe, have never deviated into others' pi-operty. Yoi: think it impossible that you could ever commit so heinous ar offence : but so thought Fauntleroy once ; so have thought many besides him, who at last have expiated as he hath done, You are as yet upright ; but you are a banker, or, at least, th( next thing to it. I feel the delicacy of the subject ; but cash must pass through your hands, sometimes to a great amount ( 139 ) REFLECTIONS IN THE PILLOEY.* About the year 18 — , one E d, a respectable London mer- chant, (since dead,) stood in the pillory for some alleged fraud upon the revenue. Among his papers were found the follow- ing " Keflections," which we have obtained by favour of our friend Elia, who knew him well, and had heard him describe the train of his feelings, upon that trying occasion, almost in the words of the manuscript. Elia speaks of him as a man (with the exception of the peccadillo aforesaid) of singular in- tegrity in all his private dealings, possessing great suavity of manner, with a certain turn for humour. As our object is to present human nature under every possible circumstance, we do not think that we shall sully our pages by inserting it. — Editob of the London Magazine. Scene, — Opposite the Royal Exchange, Time, — Twelve to One, Noon. Ketch, my good fellow, you have a neat hand. Prithee, adjust this new collar to my neck gingerly. I am not used to these wooden cravats. There, If in an ungarded hour — but I will hope better. Consider the scandal it will bring upon those of your persuasion ! Thou- sands would go to see a Quaker hanged that would be indifferent to the fate of a Presbyterian or an Anabaptist. Think of the effect it would have on the sale of your poems alone, not to mention higher considerations ! I tremble, I am sure, at my- self, when I think that so many poor victims of the law, at one time of their life, made as sure of never being hanged as I, in my own presumption, am ready, too ready, to do myself. What are we better than they ? Do we come into the world with different necks ? Is there any distinctive mark under our left ears ? Are we unstrangulable, I ask you ? Think on these things. I am shocked sometimes at the shape of my own fingers ; not for their resemblance to the ape tribe, ^which is something,) but for the exquisite adaptation of them to the purposes of picking, fingering, &c." — Editob. • From the London Magazine^ 1825. 140 REFLECTIONS IN THE PILLOEY. softly, softly. That seems the exact point between ornament and strangulation. A thought looser on this side. Now it will do. And have a care in turning me, that I present my aspect due vertically. I now face the Orient. In a quarter of an hour I shift Southward, — do you mind ? — and so on till I face the East again, travelling with the sun.. No half-points, I beseech you, — N. N. by W., or any such elaborate niceties. They become the shipman's card, but not this mystery. Now leave me a little to my own reflections. Bless us, what a company is assembled in honour of me ! How grand I stand here ! I never felt so sensibly before the effect of solitude in a crowd. I muse in solemn silence upon that vast miscellaneous rabble in the pit there. From my private box I contemplate, with mingled pity and wonder, the gaping curiosity of those underlings. There are my Whitechapel supporters. Eosemary Lane has emptied herself of the very flower of her citizens to grace my show. Duke's place sits desolate. What is there in my face, that strangers should come so far from the East to gaze upon it ? [Here an egg narrowly misses him.] That offering was well meant, but not so cleanly executed. By the tricklings, it should not be either myrrh or frankincense. Spare your presents, my friends : I am noways mercenary. I desire no missive tokens of your approbation. I am past those valentines. Bestow these coffins of untimely chickens upon mouths that water for them. Comfort your addle spouses with them at home, and stop the mouths of your brawling brats with such • OUa Podridas : they have need of them. [A hrick is let fly.] Disease not, I pray you, nor dismantle your rent and ragged tenements , to furnish me with architectural decorations, which I can excuse. This fragment might have stopped a flaw against snow comes. [A coal flies.] Cinders are dear, gentlemen. EEFLECTIONS IN THE PILLORY. 141 This nubbling might have helped the pot boil, when your dirty cuttings from the shambles at three- ha'pence a pound shall stand at a cold simmer. Now, Bouth about, Ketch ! I would enjoy Australian popularity. What, my friends from over the water! Old benchers — flies of a daj^ — ephemeral Eomans — wel- come ! Doth the sight of me draw souls from limbo ? can it dispeople purgatory ? — Ha ! What am I, or what was my father's house, that I should thus be set up a spectacle to gentlemen and others ? W^hy are all faces, like Persians at the sunrise, bent singly on mine alone ? It was wont to be esteemed an ordinary visnomy, a quotidian merely. Doubtless these assembled myriads discern some traits of nobleness, gentility, breeding, which hitherto have escaped the common observation, — some intimations, as it were, of wisdom, valour, piety, and so forth. My sight dazzles; and, if I am not deceived by the too-faiailiar pressure of this strange neckcloth that envelops it, my countenance gives out lambent glories. For some painter now to take me in the lucky point of expression ! — the pos- ture so convenient ! — the head never shifting, but standing quiescent in a sort of natural frame ! But these artisans require a Westerly aspect. Ketch, turn me. Something of St. James's air in these my new friends. How my prospects shift and brighten ! Now, if Sir Thomas Lawrence be anywhere in that group, his fortune is made for ever. I think I see some one taking out a crayon. I will compose my whole face to a smile, which yet shall not so pre- dominate but that gravity and gayety shall contend, as it were, — you understand me ? I will work up my thoughts to some mild rapture, — a gentle enthu- siasm, — which the artist may transfer, in a manner, 142 EEFLECTIONS IN THE PILLORY. warm to the canvass. I will inwardly apostrophise my tabernacle. Delectable mansion, hail ! House not made of every wood ! Lodging that pays no rent ; airy and commodious ; which, owing no window tax, art yet all casement, out of which men have such pleasure in peering and overlooking, that they will sometimes stand an hour together to enjoy thy prospects ! Cell, recluse from the vulgar ! Quiet retirement from the great Babel, yet affording sufficient glimpses into it ! Pulpit, that instructs without note or sermon book ; into which the preacher is inducted without tenth or first fruit ! Throne, unshared and single, that dis- dainest a Brentford competitor ! Honour without co-rival ! Or hearest thou, rather, magnificent theatre, in which the spectator comes to see and to be seen ? From thy giddy heights I look down upon the common herd, who stand with eyes up- turned, as if a winged messenger hovered over them ; and mouths open, as if they expected manna. I feel, I feel the true episcopal yearnings. Behold in me, my flock, your true overseer ! What though I cannot lay hands, because my own are laid ; yet I can mutter benedictions. True otium cum dignitate ! Proud Pisgah eminence ! pinnacle sublime ! Pillory ! 'tis thee I sing ! Thou younger brother to the gallows, without his rough and Esau palms, that with ineffable contempt surveyest beneath thee the grovelling stocks, which claim presumptuously to be of thy great race ! Let that low wood know that thou art far higher born. Let that domicile for groundling rogues and base earth-kissing varlets envy thy preferment, not seldom fated to be the wanton baiting-house, the temporary retreat, of poet and of patriot. Shades of Bastwick and of Prynne hover over thee. Defoe is there, and more greatly daring Shebbeare. From their (little more elevated) stations they look down with recognitions. Ketch, turn me 1 REFLECTIONS IN THE PILLORY. 143 I now veer to the North. Open thy widest gates, thou proud Exchange of London, that I may look in as proudly ! Gresham's wonder, hail ! I stand upon a level with all your kings. They and I, from equal heights, with equal superciliousness, o'erlook the plodding, money-hunting tribe below, who, busied in their sordid speculations, scarce elevate their eyes to notice your ancient, or my recent grandeur. The second Charles smiles on me from three pedestals !* He closed the Exchequer : I cheated the Excise. Equal our darings ; equal be our lot ! Are those the quarters ? 'tis their fatal chime. That the ever- winged hours would but stand still ! but I must descend, — descend from this dream of greatness. Stay, stay, a little while, importunate hour-hand ! A moment or two, and I shall walk on foot with the undistinguished many. The clock speaks one. I return to common life. Ketch, let me out. • A statue of Charles II., by the elder Gibber, adorns the front of the Exchange. He stands also on high, in the train of his crowned ancestors, in his proper order, within that building ; and the merchants of London, as a further proof of their loyalty, have, within a few years, caused to be erected another effigy of him on the ground in the centre of the interior. ( 144 ) A SATUEDAY'S DINNEE.* •* When a man keeps a constant table, he may be allowed sometimes to serve up a cold dish of meat, or toss up the fragments of a feast into a rarjout. I have sometimes, in a scarcity of provisions, been obliged to take the same kind of liberty, and to entertain my reader with the leavings of a former treat. I must this day have recourse to the same method, and beg my guests to sit down to a kind of Saturday's dinner."— Taii^r, No. 258. The different way in which the same story may be told by different persons was never more strikingly illustrated than by the manner in which the cele- brated Jeremy Collier has described the effects of Timotheus's music upon Alexander, in the second part of his Essays. We all know how Dryden has treated the subject. Let us now hear his great con- temporary and antagonist: "Timotheus, a Grecian," says Collier, *' was so great a master, that he could make a man storm and swagger like a tempest ; and then, by altering the notes and the time, he could take him down again, and sweeten his humour in a trice. One time, when Alexander was at dinner, the man played him a Phrygian air. The prince immediately rises, snatches up his lance, and puts * Under this heading, I have placed sundry scraps and fragments of Lamb's inditing, which are too short to be printed ill distinct chapters, and too good (I think) to be left out of this collection. Mr. Moxon says that Elia had a strong aver- sion to roast beef and to fowl, and to any wines but port or sherry. " Tripe and cow-heel were to him delicacies, — rare dainties !" And I suspect, that, to a true lover of Lamb, our ♦' Saturday's Dinner " will he better and more satisfactory than the costly and splendid banquets of some of the popular and fashionable literarycaterers of the day. — Editor. A Saturday's dinner. 145 himself into a posture of fighting ; and the retreat was no sooner sounded by the change of the harmony than his arms were grounded and his fire extinct ; and he sat down as orderly as if he had come from one of Aristotle's lectures. I warrant you, Demosthenes would have been flourishing about such business a long hour, and may be not have done it neither. But Timotheus had a nearer cut to the soul : he could neck a passion at a stroke, and lay it asleep. Pythagoras once met with a parcel of drunken fellows, who were likely to be troublesome enough. He presently orders music to play grave, and chops into a Dorian. Upon this they all threw away their garlands, and were as sober and as shamefaced as one would wish." It is evident that Dryden in his inspired ode, and Collier in all this pudder of prose, meant the same thing. But what a work does the latter make with his ** necking a passion at a stroke," " making a man storm and swagger like a tempest," and then "taking him down and sweetening his humour in a trice " ! What in Dryden is " softly sweet in Lydian measures," Collier calls " chopping into a Dorian." This Collier was the same, who, in his Biographical Dictionary, says of Shakspeare, that '* though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining to festivity, yet he could when he pleased be as serious as any body.'* Oh the comfort of sitting down heartily to an old folio, and thinking surely that the next hour or two will be your own ! — and the misery of being defeated by the useless call of somebody, who is come to tell you that he has just come from hearing Mr. Irving ! What is that to you? Let him go home, and digest what the good man has said. You are at your chapel, in your oratory. My friend Hume (not M.P.) has a curious manu- 146 4 satueday's dinneb. • script in his possession, the original draught of the celebrated *' Beggar's Petition," (who cannot say by heart the *' Beggar's Petition " ?) as it was written by some school-usher, (as I remember,) with cor- rections interlined from the pen of Oliver Goldsmith. As a specimen of the doctor's improvement, I re- collect one most judicious alteration ; — •♦ A pamper'd menial drove me from the door." It stood originally, — *• A livery servant drove me," &c. ■ Here is an instance of poetical or artificial lan- guage properly substituted for the phrase of common conversation ; against Wordsworth. There is something to me repiignant, at any time, in a written hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty, — as springing up with all its parts absolute, — till, in an evil hour, I was shown the original copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the library of Trinity, kept like something to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them, after the later cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore ! — interlined, corrected, as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasui-e ; as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good ; as if inspiration were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent ! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture, till it is fairly off the easel ; no, not if Eaphael were to be ahve again, and painting another Galatea. A Saturday's dinner. 147 Our ancestors, the noble old Puritans of Crom- well's day, could distinguish between a day of reUgious rest and a day of recreation ; and while they exacted a vigorous abstinence from all amuse- ments (even to the walking out of nursery maids with their charges in the fields) upon the Sabbath, in lieu of the superstitious observance of the Saints' Days, which they abrogated, they humanely gave to the apprentices and poorer sort of people every alternate Thursday for a day of entu-e sport and recreation : a strain of piety and policy to be commended above the profane mockery of the Stuarts and their Book of Sports. I was once amused — there is a pleasure in effecting affectation — at the indignation of a crowd that was justling in with me at the pit door of Covent Garden Theatre to have a sight of Master Betty (then at once in his dawn and in his meridian) in Hamlet. I had been invited quite unexpectedly to join a party whom I met near the door of the play-house ; and I happened to have in my hand a large octavo of Johnson and Stevens's Shakspeare, which, the time not admitting of my carrying it home, of course went with me to the theatre. Just in the very heat and pressure of the doors opening, — the rush, as they term it, — I deliberately held the volume over my head, open at the scene in which the young Koscius had been most cried up, and quietly read by the lamplight. The clamour became universal. "The affectation of the fellow! " cried one. ** Look at that gentleman reading y papa ! " squeaked a young lady, who, in her admiration of the novelty, almost forgot her fears. I read on. "He ought to have his book knocked out of his hand ! " exclaimed a pursy cit, whose arms were too fast pinioned to his side to suffer him to execute his kind intention. Still I read on, and, 148 A Saturday's dinner. till the time came to pay my money, kept as unmoved as Saint Anthony at his holy offices, with the satyrs, apes, and hobgoblins moping, and making mouths at him, in the picture ; while the good man sits as undisturbed at the sight as if he were sole tenant of the desert. The individual rabble (I recognized more than one of their ugly faces) had damned a slight piece of mine but a few nights since ; and I was determined the culprits should not a second time put me out of countenance. Samuel Johnson, whom, to distinguish from the doctor, we may call the Whig, was a very remark- able writer. He may be compared to his con- temporary. Dr. Fox, whom he resembled in many points. He is another instance of King William's discrimination, which was so superior to that of any of his ministers. Johnson was one of the most formidable of the advocates for the Exclusion Bill ; and he suffered by whipping and imprisonment under James accordingly. Like Asgill, he argues with great apparent candour and clearness till he gets his opponent within reach ; and then comes a blow as from a sledge-hammer. I do not know where I could put my hand on a book containing so much sense and constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's Works ; and what party in this country would read so severe a lecture in it as our modern Whigs ? A close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by his pertinent use of connections. Eead any page of Johnson, you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense : it is a linked chain throughout. In our mo- dern books, for the most pai*t, the sentences in a page have the same connection with each other that mar- bles have in a bag : they touch without adhering.* * This criticism was -written by Lamb on the fly-leaf of bis copy of The Works of Mr. Samuel Johnson. — ^Editor. A SATURDAY S DINNEB. 149 "We are too apt to indemnify ourselves for some characteristic excellence we are kind enough to con- cede to a great author by denying him every thing else. Thus Donne and Cowley, by happenmg to pos- sess more wit and faculty of illustration' than other men, are supposed to have been incapable of natural feehng ; they are usually opposed to such writers as Shenstone and Parnell ; whereas, in the very thickest of their conceits, — ^in the bewildering mazes of tropes and figures, — a warmth of soul and generous feeling shines through, the ** sum " of which, '* forty thou- sand " of those natural poets, as they are called, ** with all their quantity," could not make up. D.* commenced life, after a course of hard study, in the " House of pure Emanuel," as usher to a knavish, fanatic schoolmaster at , at a salary of eight pounds per annum, with board and lodging. Of this poor stipend he never received above half in all the laborious years he served this man. He tells a pleasant anecdote, that when povei-ty, staring out at his ragged knees, has sometimes compelled him, against the modesty of his nature, to hint at arrears. Dr. would take no immediate notice ; but after supper, when the school was called together to even- song, he would never fail to introduce some instruc- tive homily against riches, and the corruption of the heart occasioned through the desire of them, — ending with, *' Lord, keep thy servants, above all things, from the heinous sin of avarice. Having food and raiment, let us therewithal be content. Give me Agur's wish," — and the like, — which, to the Httle auditory, sounded like a doctrine full of Christian prudence and simplicity, but, to poor D., was a receipt in full for that quarter's demands at least. And D. has been under-working for himself ever since, — drudging at low rates for unappreciating * George Dyer. 150 A Saturday's dinner. booksellers, — wasting his fine erudition in silent cor- rections of the classics, and in those unostentatious hut solid services to learning which commonly fall to the lot of laborious scholars who have not the art to sell themselves to the best advantage. He has pub- lished poems which do not sell, because their cha- racter is inobtrusive, like his own ; and because he has been too much absorbed in ancient literature to know what the popular mark in poetry is, even if he could have hit it. And therefore his verses are pro- perly what he terms them, — crotchets ; voluntaries ; odes to Liberty and Spring ; effusions ; little tributes and offerings, left behind him upon tables and win- dow seats, at parting from friends' houses, andfromall the inns of hospitality, where he has been courteously (or but tolerably) received in his pilgrimage. If his Muse of kindness halt a little behind the strong lines in fashion in this excitement -craving age, his prose is the best of the sort in the world, and exhibits a faithful transcript of his own healthy, natural mind, and cheerful, innocent tone of conversation. ** Pray God, your honour relieve me," said a poor beads-woman to my friend L one day : " I have seen better days." — " So have I, my good woman," retorted he, looking up at the welkin, which was just then threatening a storm ; and the jest (he will have it) was as good to the beggar as a tester. It was, at all events, kinder than consigning her to the stocks or the parish beadle. But L has a way of viewing things in a para- doxical light on some occasions. I have in my possession a curious volume of Latin verses, which I believe to be unique. It is entitled, AJexandri Fultoni Scotl E}ngrammatorum libri quinque. It purports to be printed at Perth, and bears date 1679. By the appellation which the author gives A SATUEDAY*S DINNEB. 161 himseH in the preface, hypodidaseuhis, I suppose liim to have been an usher at some school. It is no uncommon thing now-a-days for persons concerned in academies to affect a literary reputation in the way of their trade. The " master of a seminary for a Hmited number of pupils at Islington " lately put forth an edition of that scarce tract, " The Elegy in a Country Churchyard," (to use his own words,) with notes and head-lines f But to our author : These epigrams of Alexander Fulton, Scotchman, have little remarkable in them besides extreme dul- ness and insipidity ; but there is one, which, by its being marshalled in the front of the volume, seems to have been the darling of its parent, and for its exquisite flatness, and the surprising strokes of an anachronism with which it is pointed, deserves to be rescued from oblivion. It is addressed, like many of the others, to a fair one : — AD MARIULAM SUAM AUTOR. •* Movenmt bella olina Helense decor atque vennstaB Europam inter frugiier atque Asiam. Tarn bona, quam tu, tarn pnidens, sin ilia fuisset. Ad lites issent Africa et America !" Which, iniiumble imitation of mine author's peculiar poverty of style, I have ventured thus to render into English :— THB ATJTHOB TO HIS MOOGT. " For Love's illnstrions cause, and Helen's charms. All Europe and all Asia rush'd to arms. Had she with these thy polish'd sense combined. All Afric and America had join'd I" The happy idea of an American war undertaken in the cause of beauty ought certainly to recommend the author's memory to the countrymen of Madison and Jefferson ; and the bold anticipation of the dis- 152 A CHAEAOTER OF THE LATE ELIA. covery of that continent in the time of the Trojan War is a flight beyond the Sibyl's books. A CHAEACTEE OF THE LATE ELIA.* BY A FRIEND. This gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to Nature. He just lived long enough (it was what he wished) to see his papers collected into a volume. The pages of the London Magazine will henceforth know him no more. Exactly at twelve, last night, his queer spirit departed ; and the bells of Saint Bride's rang him out with the old year. The mournful vibrations were caught in the dining-room of his friends T. and H. ;f and the company, assembled there to welcome in another 1st of January, checked their carousals in mid-earth, and were silent. Janus wept. The gentle P v,l in a whisper, signified his intention of devoting an elegy ; and Allan C.,§ nobly forgetful of his countrymen's wrongs, vowed a memoir to his manes, full and friendly, as a Tale of Lyddalci'oss, To say truth, it is' time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if there was ever much in it, was pretty well exhausted ; and a two years and a half's existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom. * From the London Magazine, 1823. A part of this article was republislied by its author, as a Preface to The Last Essays of Eli a. — Editor. + Taylor and Hessey, the publishers of the London Maga- zine.'' I Procter, better known as Barry Cornwall. § Cunningham. A CHARACTER OP THE LATE ELIA. 153 I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's wiitings was well founded. Crude they are, I grant you, — a sort of unlicked, incondite things, — villanously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been his if they had been other than such ; and better it is that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a natural- ness (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 his Third Essay, (to save many instances,) where, under the first person, (his favourite figure,) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and connections, — in direct opposition to his own early history. If it be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another, — making himself many, or reducing many unto himself, — then is the skilful novelist, who all along brings in his hero or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all ; who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blame- less vent to his most inward feelings, and expresses his own story modestly ? My late Mend was in many respects a singular character. Those who did not like him hated him ; and some, who once liked him, afterwards became his bitterest- haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little concern about what he uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time nor place, and would ever out with what came uppermost. With the severe rehgionist he would pass for a free-thinker; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or »ersuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. 154 A CHAKACTEE OF THE LATE ELIA. Few nnderstood him ; and I am not certain that at all times he quite nnderstood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure, — irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. He would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest ; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The informal habit of his mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be an orator; and he seemed determined that no one else should play that part when he was present. He was petit and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have seen him some- times in what is called good company, but, where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd fellow, till (some unlucky occasion provoking it) he would stutter out some senseless pun, (not altogether senseless perhaps, if rightly taken,) which has stamped his character for the evening. It was hit or miss with him ; but, nine times out of ten, he contrived by this device to send away a whole com- pany his enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his happiest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He has been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was but struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He ehose his companions for some individuality of character which they manifested. Hence not many persons of science, and few professed literati, were of Ms councils. They were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain fortune ; and as to such people, com- monly, nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) income, he passed with most of them for a great miser. To my knowledge, this was a mistake. His intimados, to confess a truth, were, in the world's eye, a ragged regiment. He found them floating on the surface of society ; and the colour, or something else, in the weed, A OHABAOTEB OF THE LATE EUA. 165 pleased him. The hurs stuck to him ; but they were good and loving burs for all that. He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalised, (and offences were sure to arise,) he could not help it. When he has been remonstrated with for not making more concessions to the feelings of good people, he would retort by asking, What one point did these good people ever concede to him ? He was temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry — as the friendly vapour ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes with it ! the ligaments, which tongue-tied him, were loosened, and the stam- merer proceeded a statist ! I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or re- joice 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 him- self with a pettishness which I thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he called it) at Shacklewell, some children belong- ing to a School of Industry met us, and bowed and courtesied, as he thought, in an especial manner to him. " They take me for a visiting governor,'* he muttered earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking Hke any thing impor- tant and parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general aver- sion 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 him- 156 A CHAEACTER OP THE LATE ELIA. seK. He did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His mannerp 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 man- hood. These were weaknesses ; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings. He left Httle property behind him. Of course, the little that is left (chiefly in India bonds) devolves upon his cousin Bridget. A few critical disserta- tions were found in his escritoire, which have been handed over to the editor of this magazine, in which it is to be hoped they will shortly appear, retaining his accustomed signature. He has himseK not obscurely hinted that his em- ployment lay in a public office. The gentlemen in the export department of the East-India House will forgive me if I acknowledge the readiness with which they assisted me in the retrieval of his few manu- scripts. They pointed out in a most obliging manner the desk at which he had been planted for forty years ; showed me ponderous tomes of figures, in his own remarkably neat hand, which, more pro- perly than his few printed tracts, might be called his " Works." They seemed affectionate to his memory, and universally commended his expertness in book-keeping. It seems he was the inventor of gome ledger which should combine the precision and certainty of the Italian double entry (I think they called it) with the brevity and facility of some newer German system ; but I am not able to appreciate the worth of the discovery. I have often heard him express a warm regard for his associates in office, and how fortunate he considered himself in having his lot thrown in amongst them. There is more sense, more discourse, more shrewdness, and even talent, among these clerks, (he would say,) than in A CHARACTER OP THE LATE ELIA. 157 twice the number of authors by profession that I have conversed with. He would brighten up some- times upon the " old days of the India House," when he consorted with Woodroflfe and Wissett, and Peter Corbet (a descendant and worthy representative, bating the point of sanctity, of old facetious Bishop Corbet) ; and Hoole, who translated Tasso ; and Bartlemy Brown, whose father (God assoil him therefore !) modernized Walton ; and sly, warm- hearted old Jack Cole, (King Cole they called him in those days,) and Campe andFombelle, and a world of choice spmts, more than I can remember to name, who associated in those days with Jack Burrell (the bon vivant of the South- Sea House) ; and little Eyton, (said to be b> facsimile of Pope, — ^he was a miniature of a gentleman,) that was cashier under him ; and Dan Voight of the Custom House, that left' the famous Ubrary. Well, EHa is gone, — ^for aught I know, to be re- united with them, — and these poor traces of his pen are all we have to show for it. How little survives of the wordiest authors ! Of all they said or did in their lifetime, a few glittering words only! His Essays found some favourers, as they appeared separately. They shuffled their way in the crowd well enough singly : how they will read^ now they are brought together, is a question for the pub- lishers, who have thus ventured to draw out into one piece his " weaved-up follies." Phil-Elia. THE PAWNBROKER'S DAUGHTER. ▲ PABC£. CHAEACTEES. Flint, a Pawnbroker . Davenport, in love with Marian. Pendulous, a Reprieved Gentleman, Cutlet, a Sentimental Butcher. GoLDiNG, a Magistrate. William, Apprentice to Flint. Ben, Cutlet's Boy. Miss Flyn. Betty, her Maid. Marian, Daughter to Flint, Lucy, her Maid. THE PAWNBROKER'S DAUGHTER. A FARCE. ACT I. Scene I. — An Apartment at Flint's Home, FiiiNX. William. Flint. Carry those umbrellas, cottons, and wear- ing apparel, up stairs. You may send that chest of tools to Robins's. WUUam. That which you lent six pounds upon to the journeyman carpenter that had the sick wife? Flint. The same. William. The man says, if you can give him till Thursday — Flint. Not a minute longer. His time was out yesterday. These improvident fools I * •' For literary news, in my poor way," writes Lamb to Southey, in August, 1825, " I have a one-act farce, going to be acted at the Haymarket ; but when ? is the question. 'Tis an extravaganza, and like enough to foUow Mr. H. Talfourd says that the farce thus referred to was founded upon Lamb's essay On the Inconvenience of being Hanged; and therefore it must be The Pawnbroker's Daughter. But The Pawnbroker's Daughter is in two acts : and according to the letter to Mrs. Shelley, published in this volume, it was not finished in July, 1827 ; and consequently could not have been ready for the stage in the Summer of 1825. The piece, however, was never performed, but was published, 1830, in Blackwood's Magazine. — Edixok. 162 THE pawnbroker's daughter. William. Tlie finical gentleman has been here about that seal that was his grandfather's. Flint. He cannot have it. Truly, our trade would be brought to a fine pass if we were bound to humour the fancies of our customers. This man would be taking a liking to a snuff-box that he had inherited, and that gentlewoman might conceit a favourite chemise that had descended to her. William. The lady in the carriage has been here crying about those jewels. She says, if you cannot let her have them at the advance she offers, her husband will come to know that she has pledged them. Flint. I have use for those jewels. Send Marian to me. [Exit William.] I know no other trade that is expected to depart from its fair advantages but ours. I do not see the baker, the butcher, the shoe- maker, or, to go higher, the lawyer, the physician, the divine, give up any of their legitimate gains, even when the pretences of their art had failed ; yet we are to be branded with an odious name, stigma- tised, discountenanced even by the administrators of those laws which acknowledge us, — scowled at by lower sort of people, whose needs we serve ! Enter Maeian. Come hither, Marian. Come, kiss your father. The report runs that he is full of spotted crime. What is your belief, child ? Marian. That never good report went with our calling, father. I have heard you say, the poor look only to the advantages which we derive from them, and overlook the accommodations which they receive from us. But the poor are the poor, father, and have little leisure to make distinctions. I wish we could give up this business. Flint. You have not seen that idle fellow, Daven- port ? fHE pawnbroker's dauohter, 163 Marian, No, indeed, father, since your injunc- tion. Flint. I take but my lawful profit. The law is not over-favourable to us. Marian. Marian is no judge of these things. Flint. They call me oppressive, grinding — I know not what — Marian. Alas ! Flint, Usurer, extortioner. Am I these things ? Marian. You are Marian's kind and careful father. That is enough for a child to know. Flint. Here, girl, is a little box of jewels, which the necessities of a foolish woman of quality have transferred into our true and lawful possession. Go, place them with the trinkets that were your mother's. They are all yours Marian, if you do not cross me in your marriage. No gentry shall match into this nouse to flout their wife hereafter with her parentage. I will hold this busiuess with convulsive grasp to my dying day. I will plague these poor^ whom you speak so tenderly of. Marian. You frighten me, father. Do not frighten Marian. Flint. I have heard them say, ** There goes Flint! Flint, the cruel pawnbroker!" Marian. Stay at home with Marian. You shall hear no ugly words to vex you. Flint. You shall ride in a gilded chariot upon the necks of these poory Marian. Their tears shall drop pearls for my girl. Their sighs shall be good wind for us. They shall blow good for my girl. Put up the jewels, Marian. \_Exit. Enter Lucr. Lucy. Miss, miss, your father has taken his hat, and stepped out ; and Mr. Davenport is on the stairs ; and I come to tell you — Marian. Alas ! who let him in ? 164 THE PAWNBROKER'S DAUGHTER. Enter Davenport. Dav. My dearest girl — Marian. My father will kill me if lie finds you have been here ! Dav. There is no time for explanations. I have positive information that your father means, in less than a week, to dispose of you to that ugly Saun- ders. The wretch has bragged of it to his acg^uaint- ance, and already calls you his. Marian. Heavens ! Dav. Your resolution must be summary, as the time which calls for it. Mine or his you must be, without delay. There is no safety for you under this roof. Marian. My father — Dav. Is no father, if he would sacrifice you. Maiian. But he is unhappy. Do not speak hard ■words of my father. Dav. Marian must exert her good sense. hiicy (as if watching at the window). Oh miss, your father has suddenly returned ! I see him with Mr. Saunders coming down the street ! Mr. Saun- ders, ma'am ! Marian. Begone, begone, if you love me, Daven- port ! Dav. You must go with me, then, else here I am fixed. Ducy. Ay, miss, you must go, as Mr. Davenport Bays. Here is your cloak, miss, and yom- hat, and your gloves. Your father, ma'am ! — Marian. Oh where ? where ? Whither do you hurry me, Davenport ? Dav. Quickly, quickly, Marian ! At the back- door. [Exit Marian, with Davenport, reluctantly ; in her flight still holding the jewels. Lucy. Away ! — away ! What a lucky thought ol THE pawnbroker's DAUGHTER. 165 mine to say her father was coming ! he would never have got her off else. Lord, Lord, I do love to help lovers I [Exit, following them. Scene U.—A Butcher's Shop, Cutlet. Ben. Cutlet. Eeach me down that book off the shelf where the shoulder of veal hangs. Ben. Is this it ? Cutl£t. No, — this is " Flowers of Sentiment :" the other, — ay, this is a good book : ** An Argu- ment against the Use of Animal Food. By J. K." That means Joseph Eitson. I will open it any- where, and read, just as it happens. One cannot dip amiss into such a book as this. The motto, I see, is from Pope ; I dare say, very much to the pur- pose. {Reads :) — " The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day ; Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand " — Bless US ! is that saddle of mutton gone home to Mrs. Simpson's ? It should have gone an hour ago. Ben. I was just going with it. Cutlet. WeU, go. Where was I ? Oh I— " And licks the hand just raised to shed its blood." Wliat an affecting picture I {Turns over the leaves and reads :) — " It is probable that the long lives which are recorded of the people before the Flood were owing to their being confined to vegetable diet." Ben. The young gentleman in Pullen's Eow, 166 THE pawnbroker's daughter. Islington, that has got the consumption, has sent to know if you can let him have a sweetbread. Cutlet. Take two, — take all that are in shop. What a disagreeable interruption ! {Beads again :) — •* Those fierce and angry passions, which impel man to wage destructive war with man, may be traced to the ferment in the blood, produced by animal diet." Ben. The two pounds of rump-steaks must go home to Mr. Molyneux's. He is in training to fight Cribb. Cutlet. Well, take them : go along, and do not trouble me with your disgusting details. Cutlet {throwing down the hook). Why was I bred to this detestable business ? Was it not plain that this trembling sensibility, which has marked my character from earliest infancy, must disqualify me for a profession which — what do ye want? — ^what do ye buy ? Oh ! it is only somebody going past. I thought it had been a customer — Why was not I bred a glover, like my cousin Langston ? To see him p.oke his two little sticks into a delicate pair of real Woodstock, — "A very little stretching, ma'am, and they will fit exactly." — Or a haberdasher, like my next-door neighbour, — " Not a better bit of lace in all town, my lady : Mrs. Breakstock took the last of it last Friday ; all but this bit, which I can afford to let your ladyship have at a bargain. Reach down that drawer on your left hand, Miss Fisher." Enter in haste Davenpoet, Maeian, and Lucy. lAicy. This is the house I saw a bill up at, ma'am ; and a droll creature the landlord is. Dav. We have no time for nicety. Cutlet. What do ye want ? what do ye buy ? Oh ! it is only Mrs. Lucy. Lucy whispers Cutlet. Cutlet. I have a set of apartments at the end of THE pawnbroker's DAUGHTER. 167 my garden. They are quite detached from the shop. A single lady at present occupies the ground floor. Marian, Ay, ay, anywhere. Dav. In, in — Cutlet, Pretty lamh ! — she seems agitated. Davenport and Marian go in with Cutlet. Lucy. I am mistaken if my young lady does not find an agreeable companion in these apartments. Almost a namesake. Only the difference of Flyn and Flint. I have some errands to do, or I would stop and have some fun with this droll butcher. Cutlet returns. Cutlet. Why, how odd this is ! Your young lady knows my young lady. They are as thick as flies. Lucy. You may thank me for your new lodger, Mr. Cutlet. But, bless me, you do not look well ! CutUt. To tell you the truth, I am rather heavy about the eyes. Want of sleep, I believe. Lucy. Late hours, perhaps. Baking last night ? Cutlet. No : that is not it, Mrs. Lucy. My re- pose was disturbed by a very different cause from what you may imagine. It proceeded from too much thinking. Lucy. The dense it did ! And what, if I may be so bold, might be the subject of your Night Thoughts ? Cutlet. The distress of my fellow-creatures. I never lay my head down on my pillow but I fall a- thinking, how many at this very instant are perish- ing ! — some with cold — Lucy. What ! in the midst of Summer ? Cutlet. Ay. Not. here ; but in countries abroad, where the climate is different from ours. Our Summers are their Winters, and vice versa, you know. Some with cold — 168 THE pawnbroker's daughter. Liicy, What a canting rogue it is ! I should like to trump up some fine story to plague him. \ Aside. Cutlet. Others with hunger ; some a prey to the rage of wild heasts — Lucy. He has got this by rote, out of some book. Cutlet. Some drowning, crossing crazy bridges in the dark ; some by the violence of the devouring flame — lAicy. I have it. For that matter, you need not send your humanity a-travelling, Mr. Cutlet. For instance, last night — Cutlet. Some by fevers, some by gunshot- wounds — Lucy. Only two streets off — Cutlet. Some in drunken quarrels — Lucy (aloud). The butcher's shop at the corner. Cutlet. What were you saying about poor Cleaver ^ Lucy. He has found his ears at last. (Aside.) That he has had his house burnt down. Cutlet. Bless me ! Lucy. I saw four small children taken in at the green-grocer's. Cutlet. Do you know if he is insured ? Lucy. Some say he is, but not to the full amount. Cutlet. Not to the full amount ? — how shocking ! He kiUed more meat than any of the trade between here and Carnaby Market ; and the poor babes, — four of them, you say, — what a melting sight ! He served some good customers about Mary- bone — I always think more of the children, in these cases, than of the fathers and mothers — Lady Lovebrown liked his veal better than any man's in the market — I wonder whether her ladyship is en- gaged — I must go and comfort poor Cleaver, however. [Exit. Liwy. Now is this pretender to humanity gone to avail himself of a neighbour's supposed ruin to in- THE PAWNBEOKEE*S DAUGHTER. 169 veigle his customers from him. FiQe feelings ! — pshaw I [Exit. Re-enter Cutlet. Cutlet. What a deceitful young hussy ! there is not a word of truth in her. There has been no fire. How can people play with one's feeliugs so ? {Sings :)— " For tenderness form'd " — No : I'll try the air I made upon myself. The words may compose me. {Sings :) — A weeping Londoner I am ; A washer-woman was my dam ; She bred me up in a cock-loft, And fed my mind with sorrows soft. For when she wrung, with elbows stout, From linen wet the water out, The drops so like the tears did drip. They gave my infant nerves the hyp. Scarce three clean muckingers a week Would dry the brine that dew'd my cheek ; So, while I gave my sorrow scope, I almost ruin'd her in soap. My parish learning I did win In ward of Farrington- Within ; Where, after school, I did pursue My sports, as little boys will do. Cockchafers— none like me was found To set them spinning round and round. Oh, how my tender heart would melt To think what those poor varmin felt I I never tied tin-kettle, clog, Or salt-box, at the tail of dog, Without a pang more keen at heart Than he felt at his outward part. And when the poor thing clatter'd off, To all the unfeeling mob a scoff. Thought I, " What that dumb creature feels, With half the parish at his heels I" 170 THE PAWNBEOKER's DAUGHTER. Arrived, you see, to man's estate, The butcher's calling is my fate ; Yet still I keep my feeling ways, And leave the town on slaughtering-days. At Kentish Town, or Highgate Hill, I sit, retired, beside some rill ; And tears bedew my glistening eye, To think my playfiQ lambs must die. But, when they're dead, I sell their meat On shambles kept both clean and neat : Sweetbreads also I guard full well. And keep them from the blue-bottle. Envy, with breath sharp as my steel, Has ne'er yet blown upon my veal ; And mouths of dames, and daintiest fops, Do water at my nice lamb-chops. lExit, half laughing, half crying Scene. — A Street. Davenpoet, solus. Dav, Thus far have I secured my charming prize. I can appreciate, while I lament, the delicacy which makes her refuse the protection of my sister's roof. But who comes here ? Enter Pendulous, agitated. It must be. That fretful animal-motion, — that face working up and down with uneasy sensibility, like new yeast, — Jack — Jack Pendulous ! Pen. It is your old friend, and very miserable. Dav. Vapors, Jack. I have not known you fifteen years to have to guess at your complaint. Why, they troubled you at school. Do you remember when you had to speak the speech of Buckingham, when he is going to execution ? Pen. Execution ! — he has certainly heard it. (aside, Dav. What a pucker you were in over-night ! Pen. May be so, may be so, Mr. Davenport. That was an imaginery scene. I have had real troubles smce. THE pawnbroker's DAUGHTER. 171 Dav. Pshaw ! so you call every common accident. Pen. Do you call my case so common, then ? Dav. What case ? Pen. You have not heard, then ? Dav. Positively, not a word. Pen. You must know I have been — (whispers) — tried for a felony since then. Dav. Nonsense ! Pen. No subject for mirth, Mr. Davenport. A confounded short-sighted fellow swore that I stopped him and robbed him on the York race-ground, at nine on a fine moonhght evening, when I was two hundred miles off in Dorsetshire. These hands have been held up at a common bar. Dav. Eidiculous ! — it could not have gone so far. Pen. A great deal farther, I assure you, Mr. Da- venport. I am ashamed to say how far it went. You must know, that, in the first shock and surprise of the accusation, shame — you know I was always susceptible — shame put me upon disguising my name, that, at all events, it might bring no disgrace upon my family. I called myself James Thompson. Dav. For Heaven's sake, compose yourself. Pen. I will. An old family ours, Mr. Davenport, — ^never had a blot upon it till now, — a family famous for the jealousy of its honour for many gene- rations, — think of that, Mr. Davenport, — that felt a stain like a wound — Dav. Be calm, my dear friend. Pen. This served the purpose of a temporary con- cealment well enough ; but, when it came to the — alibi, I think they call it, — excuse these technical terms, they are hardly fit for the mouth of a gentle- man, — the witnesses — that is another term — that I had sent for up from Melcombe Eegis, and relied upon for clearing up my character, by disclosing my real name, John Pendulous, so discredited the cause which they came to serve, that it had quite a contrary 172 THE pawnbrokek's daughter. effect to what was intended. In short, the usual forms passed, and you behold me here the miser- ablest of mankind. Dav. (aside) He must be light-headed. Pen. Not at all, Mr. Davenport. I hear what you say ; though you speak it all one side, as they do at the play-house. Dav. The sentence could never have been carried into — pshaw ! — you are joking : the truth must have come out at last. Pen. So it did, Mr. Davenport, — ^just two minutes and a second too late, by the sheriff's stop-watch. Time enough to save my life, — my wretched life, — but an age too late for my honour. Pray, change the subject : the detail must be as offensive to you. Dav. With all my heart, to a more pleasing theme. The lively Maria Flyn — are you friends in that quar- ter still ? Have the old folks relented ? Pen. They are dead, and have left her mistress of her inclinations. But it requires great strength of mind to — Dav, To what ? Pen. To stand up against the sneers of the world. It is not every young lady that feels herseK confident against the shafts of ridicule, though aimed by the hand of prejudice. Not but in her heart, I believe, she prefers me to all mankind. But think, what would the world say, if, in defiance of the opinions of all manldnd, she should take to her arms a — reprieved man ! Dav. Whims ! You might turn the laugh of the world upon itself in a fortnight. These things are but nine- days' wonders. Pen. Do you think so, Mr. Davenport ? Dav. Where does she live ? Pen. She has lodgings in the next street, in a sort of garden-house, that belongs to one Cutlet. I have THE pawnbroker's DAUGHTER. 173 not seen her since the affair. I was going there at her request. Dav. Ha, ha, ha ! Pen. Why do you laugh ? Dav. The oddest fellow I I will tell you — But here he comes. Enter Cutlet. Cutlet {to Davenport). Sir, the young lady at my house is desirous you should return immediately. She has heard something from home. Pen. What do I hear ? Dav. 'Tis her fears, I dare say. My dear Pendu- lous, you will excuse me — I must not tell him our situation at present, though it cost him a fit of jealousy. We shall have fifty opportunities for explanation. lExit. Pen. Does that gentleman visit the lady at your lodgings ? Cutlet. He is quite familiar there, I assure you. He is all in all with her, as they say. Pen. It is but too plain. Fool that I have been, not to suspect, that, while she pretended scruples, some rival was at the root of her infidelity I Cutlet. You seem distressed, sir. Bless me ! Pen. I am, friend, above the reach of comfort. Cutlet. Consolation, then, can be to no purpose ? Pen. None. Cutlet, I am so happy to have met with him ! Pen. Wretch, wretch, wretch ! Cutlet. There he goes ! How he walks about biting his nails ! I would not exchange this luxury of unavailing pity for worlds. Pen. Stigmatized by the world — Cutlet. My case exactly. Let us compare notes. Pen. For an accident which — Cutlet. For a profession which — Pen. In the eye of reason, has nothing in it — 174 THE pawnbeoker's daughter. Cutlet. Absolutely nothing in it — Pen. Brought up at a public bar — Cutlet Brought up to an odious trade — Pen. With nerves like mine — Cutlet. With nerves like mine — Pen. Arraigned, condemned — Cutlet. By a foolish world — Pen. By a judge and jury — Cutlet. By an invidious exclusion, disqualified for sitting upon a jury at all — Pen. Tried, cast, and — Cutlet. What ? Pen. Hanged, sir ; hanged by the neck till I was — Cutlet. Bless me ! Pen. Why should not I publish it to the whole world, since she, whose prejudice alone I wished to overcome, deserts me ? Cutlet. Lord have mercy upon us ! Not so bad as that comes to, I hope ? Pen. When she joins in the judgment of an illiberal world against me — Cutlet. You said Hanged, sir ; that is, I mean — perhaps I mistook you. How ghostly he looks ! Pen. Fear me not, my friend : I am no ghost, though I heartily wish I were one. Cutlet. Why, then, ten to one you were — Pen. Cut dow7i. The odious words shall out, though it choke me. Cutlet. Your case must have some things in i* very curious. I dare say you kept a journal of your sensations ! Pen. Sensations 1 Cutlet. Ay : while you were being — you know what I mean. They say, persons in your situation have lights dancing before their eyes, — blulish. But, then the worst ofa 11 is coming to one's self again. Pen, Plagues, furies, tormentors ! I shall go mad 1 lExit. THE pawnbroker's DAUGHTER. 175 Cutlet. There, he says he shall go mad ! "Well, my head has not been very right of late : it goes with a whirl and a buzz, somehow. I believe I must not think so deeply. Common people, that don't reason, know nothing of these aberrations. " Great wits go mad, and small ones only dull ; Distracting cares vex not the empty skull : They seize on heads that think, and hearts that feel, As flies attack the better sort of veal." ACT II. Scene at Flint's. Flint. William. Flint. I have over- walked myself, and am quite exhausted. Tell Marian to come and play to me. William. I will, sir. Flint. I have been troubled with an evil spirit of late ; I think, an evil spirit. It goes and comes, as my daughter is with or from me. It cannot stand before her gentle look, when, to please her father, she takes down her music-book. Enter William. William. Miss Marian went out soon after you, and is not returned. Flint. That is a pity, — that is a pity ! Where can the fooHsh girl be gadding ? William. The shopmen say she went out with Mr. Davenport. Flint. Davenport ? Impossible ! William. They say they are sure it was he, by the same token that they saw her slip into his hand, when she was past the door, the casket which you gave her. Flint, Gave her, William ? I only intrusted it 176 THE pawnbeozer's daughter. to her. Slie has robbed me ! Marian is a thief ! You must go to the justice, Wilham, and get out a warrant against her immediately. Do you help them in the description. Put in " Marian Fhnt," in plain words, — no remonstrances, WilUam — ''daughter of Reuben Flint," — no remonstrances; but do it — WilUam. Nay, sir — Flint, I am rock, absolute rock, to all that you can say, — a piece of solid rock. What is it that makes my legs to fail, and my whole frame to totter, thus ? It is my over- walking. I am very faint : support me in, William. [Exeunt. Scene. — The Apartment of Miss Flyn. Miss Flyn. Betty. Miss F. 'Tis past eleven. Every minute I expect Mr. Pendulous here. What a meeting do I anticipate ! Betty. Anticipate, truly ! What other than a joyful meeting can it be between two agreed lovers, who have been parted for these four months ? Miss F. But, in that cruel space, what accidents have happened ! — (aside) — As yet, I perceive she is ignorant of this unfortunate affair. Betty. Lord, madam ! what accidents ? He has not had a fall or a tumble, has he ? He is not coming upon crutches ? Miss F. Not exactly a fall — (aside) — I wish I had com'age to admit her to my confidence. Betty. If his neck is whole, his heart is so too, I warrant it. Miss F. His neck ! — (aside) — She certainly mis- trusts something. He writes me word that this must be his last interview. Betty. Then I guess the whole business. The wretch is unfaithful. Some creature or other has got him into a noose. THE PAWNBROKEB'S DAUGHTER. 177 Miss F. A noose ! Betty. And I shall never more see him hang — Miss F, Hang I did you say, Betty ? Betty. About that dear, fond neck, I was going to add, madam ; but you interrupted me. Miss F. I can no longer labour with a secret which oppresses me thus. Can you be trusty ? Betty. Who ? I, madam ? — {aside) — ^Lord ! I am so glad ! Now I shall know all 1 Miss F. This letter discloses the reasons of his unaccountable long absence from me. Peruse it, and say if we have not reason to be unhappy. [Betty retires to the icindow to read the letter. Mr. Pendulous enters. Miss F. My dear Pendulous ! Pen. Maria ! — Nay, shun the embrace of a dis- graced man, who comes but to tell you that you must renounce his society for ever. Miss F. Nay, Pendulous, avoid me not. Pen. (aside.) That was tender. I may be mis- taken. Whilst I stood on honourable terms, Maria might have met my caresses without a blush. [Betty, who has not attended to the entrance of Pendulous, through her eagerness to read the letter, comes forward. Betty. Ha, ha, ha ! What a funny story, madam ! And is this all you make such a fuss about ? I would not care if twenty of my lovers had been — {seeing Pendulous) — ^Lord I sir, I ask pardon. Pen. Are we not alone, then ? Miss F. 'Tis only Betty, my old servant. You remember Betty ? Pen. What letter is that ? Miss F, Oh ! something from her sweetheart, I suppose. Betty. Yes, ma'am ; that is all. I shall die of laughing. Pen. You have not surely been showing her — 178 THE pawnbroker's daughter. Miss F. I must be ingemions. You must know, then, I was just giving Betty a hint, as you came in. Pen. A hint ? Miss F. Yes, of our unfortunate embarrassment. Pen. My letter ! Miss F. I thought it as well that she should know it at first. Pen. 'Tis mighty well, madam ! — 'tis as it should be. I was ordained to be a wretched laughing-stock to all the world ; and it is fit that our drabs and servant wenches should have their share of the amusement. Betty. Marry, come up ! Drabs and servant wenches ! and this from a person in his circum- stances ! [Betty ^m^rs herself out of the room, muttering. Miss F. I understand not this language. I was prepared to give my Pendulous a tender meeting ; to assure him, that, however in the eyes of the superficial and the censorious he may have incurred a partial degradation, in the esteem of one, at least, he stood as high as ever; that it was not in the power of a ridiculous accident — involving no guilt, no shadow of imputation — to separate two hearts cemented by holiest vows, as ours have been. This untimely repulse to my affections may awaken scruples in me, which hitherto, in tenderness to you, I have suppressed. Pe7i. I very well understand what you call tenderness, madam; but, in some situations, pity — pity — is the greatest insult. Miss F. I can endure no longer. When you are in a calmer mood, you will be sorry that you have wrung my heart so. [Exit. Pen. Maria ! She is gone — in tears ; yet, it seems, she has had her scruples. She said she had THE pawnbroker's DAUGHTER. 179 tried to smother them. Her maid Betty intimated as much. Re-enter Betty. Betty. Never mind Betty, sir : depend upon it, she will never peach. Pen, Peach ! Betty. Lord, sir, these scruples will blow over. Go to her again when she is in a better humour. You know, we must stand off a little at first, to save appearances. Pen. Appearances ! we ! Betty. It will be decent to let some time elapse. Pen. Time elapse ! — •• Lost, wretched Pendulous ! to scorn betray'd, — The scoff alike of mistress and of maid ! What now remains for thee, forsaken man, But to complete thy fate's abortive plan, And finish what the feeble law began ? " [Exeunt. Re-enter Miss Flyn, with Marian. Miss F. Now both our lovers are gone, I hope my friend will have less reserve. You must con- sider this apartment as yours while you stay here. 'Tis larger and more commodious than your own. Manan. You are kind, Maria. My sad story I have troubled you with. I have some jewels here, which I unintentionally brought away. I have only to beg you will take the trouble to restore them to my father ; and, without disclosing my present situation, to tell him that my next step — with or without the concurrence of Mr. Davenport — shall be to throw myself at his feet to be forgiven. I dare not see him till you have explored the way for me. I am convinced that I was tricked into this elopement. Miss F. Your commands shall be obeyed im- plicitly. Marian. You are good. {Agitated.) 180 THE PAWNBROKEE's DAUGHTER. Miss F. Moderate your apprehensions, my sweet friend. I, too, have known my sorrows — {synilmg) — You have heard of the ridiculous affair ? Marian. Between Mr. Pendulous and you ? Davenport informed me of it ; and we both took the liberty of blaming the over-niceness of your scruples. Miss F. You mistake me. The refinement is entirely on the part of my lover. He thinks me not nice enough. I am obliged to feign a little reluctance, that he may not take quite a distaste to me. Will you believe it, that he turns my very constancy into a reproach ; and declares that a woman must be devoid of all delicacy, that, after a thing of that sort, could endure the sight of her husband in — Marian In what ? Miss F. The sight of a man at all in — Marian. I comprehend you not. Miss F, In — in a — (ichispers) — night-cap, my dear ; and now the mischief is out. Marian. Is there no way to cure him ? Miss F. None ; unless I were to try the ex- periment, by placing myself in the hands of justice for a little while, how far an equality in misfortune might breed a sympathy in sentiment. Our reputa- tions would be both upon a level then, you know. What think you of a little innocent shop-lifting, in sport ? Marian. And, by that contrivance, to be taken before a magistrate ? The project sounds oddly. Miss F. And yet I am more than half-persuaded it is feasible. Enter Betty. Betty. Mr. Davenport is below, ma'am, and desires to speak with you. THE PAWNBBOKER'S DAUGHTER. 131 Marian. You will excuse me. {Going — tuminrf hack.) You will remember the casket ? lExit. Miss F, Depend on me. Bettij. And a strange man desires to see you, ma'am. I do not half like his looks. Miss F, Show him in. \_Exit Bettt, and returns with a •police officer. Betty goes out. Officer, Your servant, ma'am. Your name is — Miss F, Flyn, sir. Your business with me ? Officer (alternately surveying the lady and his paper of instructions.) Marian Flint ? Miss F. Maria Flyn. Officer. Ay, ay : Flyn or Flint. 'Tis all one. Some write plain Mary, and some put Ann after it. I come about a casket. Miss F. I guess the whole business. He takes me for my friend. Something may come out of thi^. I will humour him. Officer (aside). Answers to the description to a tittle. " Soft, gray eyes ; pale complexion " — Miss F. Yet I have been told by flatterers that my eyes were blue — (takes out a pocket-glass). I hope I look pretty tolerable to-day. Officer. " Blue !" — they are a sort of bluish-gray, now I look better ; and as for colour, that comes and goes. Blushing is often a sign of a hardened offender. Do you know any thing of a casket ? Miss F. Here is one which a friend has just de- livered to my keeping. Officer. And which I must beg leave to secure, together with your ladyship's person. ** Garnets, pearls, diamond-bracelet," — here they are, sure enough. Miss F. Indeed I am innocent. Officer. Every man is presumed so till he is foun otherwise. 182 THE pawnbroker's daughter. Miss F. Police wit ! Have you a warrant ! Officer. Tolerably cool, that. Here it is, signed by Justice Golding, at the requisition of Keuben Flint, who deposes that you have robbed him. Miss F. How lucky this turns out ! — {aside) — can I be indulged with a coach ? Officer. To Marlborough Street ? certainly — an old offender — {aside) — The thing shall be conducted with as much delicacy as is consistent with security. Miss F. Police manners 1 I will trust myself to your protection, then. lExeunt. Sc^^E.— Police Office* Justice, Flint, Officeks, &o» Justice. Before we proceed to extremeties, Mr. Flint, let me entreat you to consider the conse- quences. What will the world say to your exposing your own child ? Flint. The world is not my friend. I belong to a profession which has long brought me acquainted with its injustice. I return scorn for scorn, and desire its censure above its plaudits. Justice. But, in this case, delicacy must make you pause. Flint. Delicacy ! ha, ha ! — ^pawnbroker ! — fitly these words suit. Delicate pawnbroker ! — dehcate devil ! — ^let the law take its course. Justice. Consider, the jewels are found. Flint. 'Tis not the silly baubles I regard. Are you a man ? are you a father ? and think you I could stoop so low, vile as I stand here, as to make money — filthymoney— of the stuff which a daughter's touch has desecrated? Deep in some pit first I would bury them. Justice. Yet pause a little. Consider. An only child. THE pawnbroker's DAUGHTER. 183 Flint. Only, only ; — there, it is that which stings me, — makes me mad. She was the only thing I had to love me, — to bear me up against the nipping in- juries of the world. I prate when I should act. Bring in your prisoner. IThe JusTiCH makes a sign to the Officeb, who goes out, and returns with Miss Flyn. Flint. What a mockery of my sight is here ! This is no daughter. Officer. Daughter or no daughter, she has con- fessed to this casket. Flint {handling it). The very same. Was it in the power of these pale splendours to dazzle the sight of honesty, — to put out the regardful eye of piety and daughter-love ? Why, a poor glow-worm shows more brightly. Bear witness how I valued them! — [tramples on tliem.) Fair lady, know you aught of my child ? Miss F. I shall here answer no questions. Justice. You must explain how you came by these jewels, madam. Miss F. (aside). Now, confidence assist me ! A gentleman in the neighbourhood will answer for me. Justice. His name ? Miss F, Pendulous. Justice. That hves in the next street ? Miss F. The same. Now I have him, sure. Justice. Let him be sent for : I beUeve the gentle- man to be respectable, and will accept his security. Flint. Why do I waste my time where I have no business ? None, — I have none any more in the world, — none. Enter Pendulous. Fen. What is the meaning of this extraordinary summons ? — Maria here ! Flint. Know you anything of my daughter, sir ? 184 THE pawnbrokee's daughter. Fen. Sir, I neither know her nor yourself, nor ■why I am brought hither ; but for this lady, if you have any thing against her, I will answer with my life and fortune. Justice. Make out the bail-bond. Officer {surveyiTig Pendulous). Please your wor- ship before you take that gentleman's bond, may I have leave to put in a word. Pen. {agitated). I guess what is coming. Officer. I have seen that gentleman hold up his hand at a criminal bar. Justice. Ha ! Miss F. (aside.) Better and better. Officer. My eyes cannot deceive me. His lips quivered about, while he was being tried, just as they do now. His name is not Pendulous. Miss F, Excellent ! Officer. He pleaded to the name of Thompson at York Assizes. Justice. Can this be true ? Miss F. I could kiss the fellow ! Officer. He was had up for a foot-pad. Miss F. A dainty fellow ! Pen. My iniquitous fate pursues me everywhere. Justice. You confess, then ? Pen. I am steeped in infamy. Miss F. I am as deep in the mire as yom^seK. Pen. My reproach can never be washed out. Miss F. Nor mine. Pen. I am doomed to everlasting shame. Miss F. We are both in a predicament. Justice. I am in a maze where all this will end. Enter Makian and Davenpokt. Manan {kneeling). My dear father ! Flint. Do I dream ? Marian. I am your Marian. Justice. Wonders thicken. THE pawnbroker's DAUGHTER. 186 Flint. The casket — Miss F, Let me clear up the rest. Flint, The casket — Miss F, Was inadvertently in your daughter's hand, when, hy an artifice of her maid Lucy, set on, as she confesses, by this gentleman here — Dav. I plead guilty. Miss F. She was persuaded that you were, in a hurry, going to marry her to an object of her dis- like ; nay, that he was actually in the house for the purpose. The speed of her flight admitted not of her depositing the jewels ; but to me, who have been her inseparable companion since she quitted your roof, she intrusted the return of them, which the precipitate measures of this gentleman {j)ointing to the officer) alone prevented. Mr. Cutlet, whom I see coming, can witness this to be true. Enter Cutlet, in haste. Cutlet. Ay, poor lamb ! poor lamb I I can wit- ness. I have run in such a haste, hearing how affairs stood, that I have left my shambles without a protector. If your worship had seen how she cried {pointing to Marian) and trembled, and insisted upon being brought to her father ! Mr. Davenport here could not stay her. Flint. I can forbear no longer. Marian, will you play once again, to please your old father ? Marian. I have a good mind to make you buy me a new grand piano for your naughty suspicions of me. Dav. What is to become of me ? Flint. I will do more than that : the poor lady shall have her jewels again. Marian. Shall she ? Flint. Upon reasonable terms {smiling). And now, I suppose, the court may adjourn. Dav, Marian ! 186 THE pawnbroker's daughter. Flint. I guess what is passing in your mind, Mr. Davenport : but you have behaved, upon the whole, so like a man of honour, that it will give me ]plea- sure, if you will visit at my house for the future ; but — (smiling) — not clandestinely, Marian. Marian. Hush, father ! Flint. I own I had prejudices against gentry; but I have met with so much candour and kindness among my betters this day, — from this gentleman in particular (turning to the Justice), — that I begin to think of leaving off businesc, and setting up for a gentleman myself. Justice. You have the feelings of one. Flint. Marian will not object to it. Justice. But — (turnifig to Miss Flyn) — what mo- tive could induce this lady to take so much disgrace upon herself, when a word's explanation might have relieved her ? Miss F. This gentleman — (turning to Pendulous) — can explain. Pen. The devil ! Miss F. This gentleman, I repeat it, whose back- wardness in concluding a long and honourable suit, from a mistaken delicacy — Pen. How ? Miss F. Drove me upon the expedient of in- volving myself in the same disagreeable embarrass- ments with himself, in the hope that a more perfect sympathy might subsist between us for the future. Peri. I see it — I see it all ! Justice (to Pendulous). You were then tried at York? Pen. I was — Cast — Justice. Condemned. Pen. Executed. Justice. How ! Pen. Cut down, and came to life again ! False delicacy, adieu ! The true sort — which this lady THE pawnbroker's DAUGHTER. 187 has manifested, by an expedient, which, at first sight, might seem a little unpromising — has cured me of the other. "We are now on even terms. Miss F, And may — Fen. Marry, — I know it was your word. Miss F. And make a very quiet-^ Pen. Exemplary^- Miss F. Agreeing pair of— Pen. Acquitted felons. Flint. And let the prejudiced against our pro- jession acknowledge that a money-lender may have the heart of a father ; and that, in the casket, the loss of which grieved him so sorely, he valued nothing 80 dear as — (turning to Marian)— one poor domestic jewel. PEEFACB TO THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. This work is designed as a supplement to the ** Ad- ventures of Telemachus." It treats of the conduct and sufferings of Ulysses, the father of Telemachus. The picture which it exhibits is that of a brave man struggling with adversity ; by a wise use of events, and with an inimitable presence of mind under diffi- culties, forcing out a way for himself through the severest trials to which human life can be exposed ; with enemies, natural and preternatural, surround- ing him on all sides. The agents in this tale, besides men and women, are giants, enchanters, sirens, — things which denote external force or internal tempta- tions ; the twofold danger which a wise fortitude must expect to encounter in its course through this world. The fictions contained in it will be found to comprehend some of the most admired inventions of Grecian mytholgy. The groundwork of the story is as old as the Odyssey ; but the moral and the colouring are comparatively modern. By avoiding the prolixity which marks the speeches and the descriptions in Homer, I have gained a rapidity to the narration, which I hope will make it more attractive, and give it more the air of a romance, to young readers ; 192 PEEFACE, tliough I am sensible, tliat, by the curtailment, I have sacrificed in many places tbe manners to tlie passions, the subordinate characteristics to the esssential interest of the story. The attempt is not to be considered as seeking a comparison with any of the direct translations of the Odyssey either in prose or verse ; though, if I were to state the obliga- tions which I have had to one obsolete version,* I should run the hazard of depriving myself of the very slender degree of reputation which I could hope to acquire from a trifle hke the present undertaking. * The translation of Homer, bj Chapman, in the reign of James I* " You like the * Odyssey.' Did you ever read my ' Adven- tures of Ulysses,' — founded on Chapman's old translation,— for children or men ? Chapman is divine ; and my abridgment has not quite emptied him of his divinity." — Lamb, in a letter to Bernard Bavtu,% ( 193 ) THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES, CHAPTER I. THE CICONS. — THE FRUIT OP THE LOTOS TREE. — POLYPHEMUS AND THE CYCLOPS. THE KINGDOM OF THE WINDS, AND GOD bolus's fatal PRESENT. — THE L^STRYGONIAN MAN-EATERS. This history tells of the wanderings of Ulysses and his followers in their return from Troy, after the de- struction of that famous city of Asia by the Grecians. He was inflamed with a desire of seeing again, after a ten years' absence, his wife and native country Ithaca. He was king of a barren spot, and a poor country in comparison with the fruitful plains of Asia, which he was leaving, or the wealthy kingdoms which he touched upon in his return ; yet, wherever he came, he could never see a soil which appeared in his eyes half so sweet or desirable as his country earth. This made him refuse the offers of the god- dess Calypso to stay with her, and partake of her immortality in the delightful island ; and this gave him strength to break from the enchantments of Circe, the daughter of the Sun. From Troy, ill winds cast Ulysses and his fleet upon the coast of the Cicons, a people hostile to the Grecians. Landing his forces, he laid siege to their chief city, Ismarus, which he took, and with it much spoil, and slew many people. But succ""te proved 194 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. fatal to him ; for his soldiers, elated with the spoil, and the good store of provisions which they found in that place, fell to eating and drinking, forgetful of their safety, till the Cicons, who inhabited the coast, had time to assemble their friends and allies from the interior ; who, mustering in prodigious force, set upon the Grecians while they negligently revelled and feasted, and slew many of them, and recovered the spoil. They, dispirited and thinned in their numbers, with difficulty made their retreat good to the ships. Thence they set sail, sad at heart, yet something cheered, that, with such fearful odds against them, they had not all been utterly destroyed. A dreadful tempest ensued, which for two nights and two days tossed them about ; but, the third day, the weather cleared, and they had hopes of a favourable gale to carry them to Ithaca ; but, as they doubled the Cape of Malea, suddenly a north wind arising drove them back as far as Cythera. After that, for the space of nine days, contrary winds continued to drive them in an opposite direction to the point to which they were bound ; and the tenth day they put in at a shore where a race of men dwell that are sustained by the fruit of the lotos tree. Here Ulysses sent some of his men to land for fresh water, who were met by certain of the inhabitants, that gave them some of their country food to eat, not with any ill intention towards them, though in the event it proved pernicious ; for, having eaten of this fruit, so plea- sant it proved to their appetite, that they in a minute quite forgot all thoughts of home or of their countrymen, or of ever returning back to the ships to give an account of what sort of inhabitants dwelt there, but they would needs stay and Live there among them, and eat of that precious food for ever ; and when Ulysses sent other of his men to look for them, and to bring them back by force, they strove THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. 195 and wept, and would not leave their food for heaven itself, so much the pleasure of that enchanting fruit had bewitched them. But Ulysses caused them to be bound hand and foot, and cast under the hatches ; and set sail with all possible speed from that baneful coast, lest others after them might taste the lotos, which had such strange qualities to make men forget their native country and the thoughts of home. Coasting on all that night by unknown and out- of-the-way shores, they came by daybreak to the land where the Cyclops dwell ; a sort of giant shepherds, that neither plough nor sow, but the earth untilled produces for them rich wheat and barley and grapes : yet they have neither bread nor wine, nor know the arts of cultivation, nor care to know them ; for they live each man to himseK, without laws or govern- ment, or any thing Hke a state or kingdom; but their dwellings are in caves, on the steep heads of moun- tains, every man's household governed by his own caprice, or not governed at all, their wives and chil- dren as lawless as themselves ; none caring for others, but each doing as he or she thinks good. Ships or boats they have none, nor artificers to make them ; no trade or commerce, or wish to visit other shores : yet they have convenient places for harbours and for shipping. Here Ulysses, with a chosen party of twelve followers, landed, to explore what sort of men dwelt there, — whether hospitable and friendly to strangers, or altogether wild and savage, for, as yet, no dwellers appeared in sight. The first sign of habitation which they came to was a giant's cave, rudely fashioned, but of a size which betokened the vast proportions of its owner ; the pillars which supported it being the bodies of huge oaks or pines, in the natural state of the tree ; and all about showed more marks of strength than skill in whoever built it. Ulysses, entering it, ad- mired the savage contrivances and artless structure 196 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. of the place, and longed to see the tenant of so out- landish a mansion ; but well conjecturing that gifts would have more avail in extracting courtesy, than strength would succeed in forcing it, from such a one as he expected to find the inhabitant, he resolved to flatter his hospitality with a present of Greek wine, of which he had store in twelve great vessels, — so strong, that no one ever drank it without an infusion of twenty parts of water to one of wine ; yet the fra- grance of it was even then so delicious, that it would have vexed a man who smelled it to abstain from tasting it ; but whoever tasted it, it was able to raise his courage to the height of heroic deeds. Taking with them a goat-skin flagon full of this pre- cious liquor, they ventured into the recesses of the cave. Here they pleased themselves a whole day with beholding the giant's kitchen, where the flesh of sheep and goats lay strewed ; his dairy, where goat's milk stood ranged in troughs and pails ; his pens, where he kept his live animals ; but those he had driven forth to pasture with him when he went out in the morning. While they were feasting their eyes with a sight of these curiosities, their ears were suddenly deafened with a noise like the falling of a house. It was the owner of the cave, who had been abroad all day, feeding his flock, as his custom was, in the mountains, and now drove them home in the evening from pasture. He threw down a pile of firewood, which he had been gathering against supper time, before the mouth of the cave, which occasioned the crash they heard. The Grecians hid themselves in the remote parts of the cave at sight of the un- couth monster. It was Polyphemus, the largest and savagest of the Cyclops, who boasted himself to be the son of Neptune. He looked more like a moun- tain crag than a man ; and to his brutal body he had a brutish mind answerable. He drove his flock, all that give milk, to the interior of the cave, but left THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 197 rams and the he-goats without. Then, taking up a stone so massy that twenty oxen could not have drawn it, he placed it at the mouth of the cave to defend the entrance, &nd sat him do^vn to milk his ewes and his goats ; which done, he lastly kindled a fire, and, throwing his great eye round the cave, (for the Cyclops have no more than one eye, and that placed in the midst of their forehead,) by the glim- mering light he discerned some of Ulysses's men. "Ho, guests! what are you ? — merchants or wandering thieves ?" he bellowed out in a voice which took from them all power of reply, it was so astounding. Only Ulysses summoned resolution to answer, that they came neither for plunder nor traffic, but were Grecians, who had lost their way, returning from Troy ; which famous city, under the conduct of Agamemnon, the renowned son of Atreus, they had sacked, and laid level with the ground. Yet now they prostrated themselves humbly before his feet, whom they acknowledged to be mightier than they, and besought him that he would bestow the rites of hospitality upon them ; for that Jove was the avenger of wrongs done to strangers, and would fiercely resent any injury which they might suffer. ''Fool! "said the Cyclop, *' to come so far to preach to me the fear of the gods ! We Cyclops care not for your Jove, whom you fable to be nursed by a goat, nor any of your blessed ones. We are stronger than they, and dare bid open battle to Jove himself, though you and all your fellows of the earth join with him !" And he bade them tell him where their ship was in which they came, and whether they had any companions. But Ulysses, with a wise caution, made answer, that they had no ship or companions, but were unfortunate men, whom the sea, splitting their ship in pieces, had dashed upon his coast, and they alone had escaped. He replied nothing, but, 198 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. griping two of the nearest of them as if they had been no more than children, he dashed their brains out against the earth, and, shocking to relate, tore in pieces their limbs, and devoured them, yet warm • and trembling, making a lion's meal of them, lapping the blood : for the Cyclops are man-eaters, and esteem human flesh to be a delicacy far above goat's or kid's ; though, by reason of their abhorred customs, few men approach their coast, except some stragglers, or now and then a shipwrecked mariner. At a sight so horrid, Ulysses and his men were like distracted people. He, when he had make an end of his wicked supper, drained a draught of goat's milk down his prodigious throat, and lay down and slept among his goats. Then Ulysses drew his sword, and half resolved to thrust it with all his might into the bosom of the sleeping monster : but wiser thoughts restrained him, else they had there, without help, all perished; for none but Polyphemus himself could have removed that mass of stone which he had placed to guard the entrance. So they were constrained to abide all that night in fear. When day came, the Cyclop awoke, and, kindling a fire, made his breakfast of two other of his unfor- tunate prisoners ; he then milked his goats, as he was accustomed ; and pushing aside the vast stone, and shutting it again, when he had done, upon the pri- soners, with as much ease as a man opens and shuts a quiver's lid, he let out his flock, and drove them before him with whistlings (as sharp as winds in storms) to the mountains. Then Ulysses, of whose strength or cunning the Cy- clop seems to have had as little heed as of an infant's, being left alone with the remnant of his men which the Cyclop had not devoured, gave manifest proof how far manly wisdom excels brutish force. He chose a stake from among the wood which the Cyclop had piled up for firing, in length and thickness like a THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 199 mast, which he sharpened, and hardened in the fire ; and selected four men, and instructed them what they should do with this stake, and made them perfect in their parts. When the evening was come, the Cyclop drove home his sheep ; and as fortune directed it, either on purpose, or that his memory was overruled by the gods to his hurt, (as in the issue it proved,) he drove the males of his flock, contrary to his custom, along with the dams into the pens. Then shutting to the stone of the cave, he fell to his horrible supper. When he had despatched two more of the Grecians, Ulysses waxed bold with the contemplation of his project, and took a bowl of Greek wine, and merrily dared the Cyclop to drink. " Cyclop," he said, " take a bowl of wine from the hand of your guest : it may serve to digest the man's flesh that you have eaten, and show what drink our ship held before it went down. All I ask in recom- pense, if you find it good, is to be dismissed in a whole skin. Truly you must look to have few visitors, if you observe tins new custom of eating your guests." The brute took and drank, and vehemently enjoyed the taste of wine, which was new to him, and swilled again at the flagon, and entreated for more ; and prayed Ulysses to tell him his name, that he might bestow a gift upon the man who had given him such brave liquor. The Cyclops, he said, had grapes ; but this rich juice, he swore, was truly divine. Again Ulysses pUed him with the wine, and the fool drank it as fast as he poured it out ; and again he asked the name of his benefactor, which Ulysses, cunningly dis- sembling, said, " My name is Noman : my kindred and friends in my own country call me Noman." — *' Then," said the Cyclop, *'this is the kindness, I will show thee, Noman : I will eat thee last of all thy friends." He had scarce expressed his savage 200 THE ADVtlNTURES OF ULYSSES. kindness, when the fumes of the strong wine over- came him, and he reeled down upon the floor, and sank into a dead sleep. Ulysses watched his time while the monster lay insensible ; and, heartening up his men, they placed the sharp end of the stake in the fire till it was heated red hot; and some god gave them a courage beyond that which they were used to have, and the four men with difficulty bored the sharp end of the huge stake, which they had heated red-hot, right into the eye of drunken cannibal ; and Ulysses helped to thrust it in with all his might still further and further, with effort, as men bore with an auger, till the scalded blood gushed out, and the eyeball smoked, and the strings of the eye cracked as the burning rafter broke in it, and the eye hissed as hot iron hisses when it is plunged into water. He, waking, roared with the pain, so loud, that all the cavern broke into claps like thunder. They fled, and dispersed into corners. He plucked the burning stake from his eye, and hurled the wood madly about the cave. Then he cried out with a mighty voice for his brethren the Cyclops that dwelt hard by in caverns upon hills. They, hearing the terrible shout, came flocking from all parts to inquire what ailed Polyphemus, and what cause he had for making such horrid clamours in the night time to break their sleep ; if his fright proceeded from any mortal ; if strength or craft had given him his death blow. He made answer from within, that Noman had hurt him, Noman had killed him, Noman was with him in the cave. They replied, " If no man has hurt thee, and no man is with thee, then thou art alone ; and the evil that afflicts thee is from the hand of Heaven, which none can resist or help." So they left him, and went their way, thinking that some disease troubled him. He, blind, and ready to split with the anguish of the pain, went groaning up and down THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. 201 in the dark to find the doorway ; which when he found, he removed the stone, and sat in the threshold, feehng if he could lay hold on any man going out with the sheep, which (the day now breaking) were beginning to issue forth to their accustomed pastures. But Ulysses, whose first artifice in giving himself that ambiguous name had succeeded so well with the Cyclop, was not of a wit bo gross to be caught by that palpable device ; but, casting about in his mind all the ways which he could contrive for escape, (no less than all their lives depending on the success,) at last he thought of this expedient : He made knots of the osier twigs upon which the Cyclop commonly slept, with which he tied the fattest and fleeciest of the rams together, three in a rank ; and under the belly of the middle ram he tied a man, and himself last ; wrapping himself fast with both his hands in the rich wool of one, the fairest of the flock. And now the sheep began to issue forth very fast : the males went first ; the females, unmilked, stood by, bleating, and requu'ing the hand of their shepherd in vain to milk them, their full bags sore with being unemptied, but he much sorer with the loss of sight. Still, as the males passed, he felt the backs of those fleecy fools, never dreaming that they carried his enemies under their bellies. So they passed on till the last ram came loaded with his wool and Ulysses together. He stopped that ram, and felt him, and had his hand once in the hair of Ulysses, yet knew it not ; and he chid the ram for being last, and spoke to it as if it under- stood him, and asked it whether it did not wish that its master had its eye again, which that abominable Noman with his execrable rout had put out, when they had got him down with wine ; and he willed the ram to tell him whereabout in the cave his enemy lurked, that he might dash his brains, and strew them about, to ease his heart of that torment- 202 THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. ing revenge whicli rankled in it. After a deal of such foolish talk to the beast, he let it go. When Ulysses found himself free, he let go his hold, and assisted in disengaging his friends. The rams which had befriended them they carried off with them to the ships, where their companions, with tears in their eyes, received them as men escaped from death. They plied their oars and set their sails ; and, when they were got as far off from shore as a voice could reach, Ulysses cried out to the Cyclop, ** Cyclop, thou shouldst not have so much abused thy monstrous strength as to devour . thy guests. Jove, by my hands, sends thee requital to pay thy savage inhumanity." The Cyclop heard, and came forth enraged ; and in his anger he plucked a fragment of a rock, and threw it with blind fury at the ships. It narrowly escaped light- ing upon the bark in which Ulysses sat ; but with the fall it raised so fierce an ebb as bore back the ship till it almost touched the shore. '' Cyclop," said Ulysses, " if any ask thee who imposed on thee that unsightly blemish in thine eye, say it was Ulysses, son of Laertes : the Eang of Ithaca am I called, the waster of cities.'* Then they crowded sail, and beat the old sea, and forth they went with a forward gale, — sad for fore-past losses, yet glad to have escaped at any rate, — till they came to the isle where ^olus reigned, who is god of the winds. Here Ulysses and his men were courteously received by the monarch, who showed him his twelve children which have rule over the twelve winds. A month they stayed and feasted with him ; and at the end of the month he dismissed them with many presents, and gave to Ulysses at parting an ox's hide, in which were enclosed all the winds : only he left al3road the West wind, to play upon their sails, and waft them gently home to Ithaca. This bag, bound in a glittering silver band so close that TEE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 203 no breath could escape, Ulysses hung up at the mast. His companions did not know its contents, but guessed that the monarch had given to him some treasures of gold or silver. Nine days they sailed smoothly, favoured by the West wind ; and by the tenth they approached so nigh as to discern lights kindled on the shores of their country earth : when, by ill-fortune, Ulysses, overcome with the fatigue of watching the helm, fell asleep. The mariners seized the opportunity, and one of them said to the rest, " A fine time has this leader of ours : wherever he goes, he is sure of presents, while we come away empty-handed. And see what King iEolus has given him ! — store, no doubt, of gold and silver." A word was enough to those covetous wretches, who, quick as thought, untied the bag ; and, instead of gold, out rushed with mighty noise all the winds ! Ulysses with the noise awoke, and saw their mistake, but too late : for the ship was driving with all the winds back far from Ithaca, far as to the island of ^olus from which they had parted ; in one hour measuring back what in nine days they had scarcely tracked, and in sight of home too ! Up he flew amazed, and, raving, doubted whether he should not fling himself into the sea for grief of his bitter disappointment. At last, he hid himself under the hatches for shame ; and scarcely could he be prevailed upon, when he was told he was arrived again in the harbour of I^ing iEolus, to go himself or send to that monarch for a second succour ; so much the disgrace of having misused his royal bounty (though it was the crime of his followers, and not his own) weighed upon him : and when at last he went, and took a herald with him, and came where the god sat on his throne, feasting with his children, he would not thrust in among them at their meat, but set himself down, like one unworthy, in the threshold. 204 THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. Indignation seized iEolus to behold him in that manner returned ; and he said, " Ulysses, what has brought you back ? Are you so soon tired of your country ? or did not our present please you ? We thought we had given you a kingly passport." Ulysses made answer : " My men have done this ill mischief to me : they did it while I slept." — ** Wretch ! " said iEolus, '' avaunt, and quit our shores ! it fits not us to convoy men whom the gods hate, and will have perish." Forth they sailed, but with far different hopes than when they left the same harbour the first time with all the winds confined, only the West wind suffered to play upon their sails to waft them in gentle murmurs to Ithaca. They were now the sport of every gale that blew, and despaired of ever seeing home again. Now those covetous mariners were cured of their surfeit for gold, and would not have touched it if it had lain in untold heaps before them. Six days and nights they drove along ; and on the seventh day they put into Lamos, a port of the Lgestrygonians. So spacious was this harbour, that it held with ease all their fleet, which rode at anchor, safe from any storms, all but the ship in which Ulysses was embarked. He, as if prophetic of the mischance which followed, kept still without the harbour, making fast his bark to a rock at the land's point, which he climbed with purpose to survey the country. He saw a city with smoke ascending from the roofs, but neither ploughs going, nor oxen yoked, nor any sign of agricultural works. Maldng choice of two men, he sent them to the city to explore what sort of inhabitants dwelt there. His messengers had not gone far before they met a damsel of stature surpassing human, who was coming to draw water from a spring. They asked her who dwelt in that land. She made no reply, THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 205 but led them in silence to her father's palace. He was a monarch, and named Antiphas. He and all his people were giants. When they entered the palace, a woman, the mother of the damsel, but far taller than she, rushed abroad, and called for Anti- phas. He came, and, snatching up one of the two men, made as if he would devour him. The other fled. Antiphas raised a mighty shout ; and instantly, this way and that, multitudes of gigantic people issued out at the gates, and, making for the harbour, tore up huge pieces of the rocks, and flung them at the ships which lay there, — all which they utterly overwhelmed and sunk ; and the unfortunate bodies of men which floated, and which the sea did not devour, these cannibals thrust through with harpoons, like fishes, and bore them off to their dire feast. Ulysses, with his single bark that had never entered the harbour, escaped ; that bark which was now the only vessel left of all the gallant navy that had set sail with him from Troy. He pushed off from the shore, cheering the sad remnant of his men, whom horror at the sight of their countrjonen's fate had almost tui'ned to marble. CHAPTER II. THE HOUSE OP CIRCE. — MEN CHANGED INTO BEASTS. THE VOYAGE TO HELL. — THE BANQUET OF THE DEAD. On went the single ship till it came to the Island of MsBSi, where Circe, the dreadful daughter of the Sun, dwelt. She was deeply skilled in magic, a haughty beauty, and had hair like the Sun. The Sun was her parent, and begot her and her brother ^aetes 203 THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. (such anotlier as herself) upon Perse, daughter of Oceanus. Here a dispute arose among Ulysses's men, which of them should go ashore, and explore the country ; for there was a necessity that some should go to procure water and provisions, their stock of both being nigh spent : but their hearts failed them when they called to mind the shocking fate of their fellows whom the Lsestrygonians had eaten, and those which the foul Cyclop Polyphemus had crushed between his jaws; which moved them so tenderly in the recol- lection, that they wept. But tears never yet sup- plied any man's wants : this Ulysses knew full well ; and dividing his men (all that were left) into two companies, at the head of one of which was himself, and at the head of the other Eurylochus, a man of tried courage, he cast lots which of them should go up into the country ; and the lot fell upon Eury- lochus and his company, two and twenty in number, who took their leave, with tears, of Ulysses and his men that stayed, whose eyes wore the same wet badges of weak humanity : for they surely thought never to see these their companions again, but that, on every coast where they should come, they should find nothing but savages and cannibals. Eurylochus and his party proceeded up the country, till in a dale they descried the house of Circe, built of bright stone, by the road side. Before her gate lay many beasts, — as wolves, lions, leopards, — which, though wild, by her art she had rendered tame. These arose when they saw strangers, and ramped upon their hinder paws, and fawned upon Eury- lochus and his men, who dreaded the effects of such monstrous kindness ; and, staying at the gate, they heard the enchantress within, sitting at her loom, singing such strains as suspended all mortal facul- ties, while she wove a web, subtile and glorious, and of texture inimitable on earth, as all the house- inE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSE3. 237 wiferies of the deities are. Strains so ravishingly sweet provoked even the sagest and most prudent heads among the party to knock and call at the gate. The sliining gate the enchantress opened, and bade them come in and feast. They unwisely followed, all but Eurylochus, who stayed without the gate, suspicious that some train was laid for them. Being entered, sue placed them in chairs of state, and set before tnem meal and honey and SmjTna wine, but mixed with baneful drugs of powerful enchantment. When they had eaten of these, and drunk of her cup, she touched them with her charming-rod, and straight they were transformed into swine, — having the bodies of swine, the bristles and snout and grunting noise of that animal ; only they still retained the minds of men, which made them the more to lament their brutish transformation. Having changed them, she shut them up in her sty with many more whom her wicked sorceries had formerly changed, and gave them swine's food — mast and acorns and chestnuts — to eat. Eurylochus beheld nothing of these sad changes from where he was stationed without the gate ; instead of his companions that entered, (whom he thought had all vanished by witchcraft,) he beheld only a herd of swine ; so he hurried back to the ship to give an account of what he had seen ; but so frightened and perplexed, that he could give no distinct report of any thing : only he remembered a palace, and a woman singing at her work, and gates guarded by lions. But his companions, he said, were all vanished. Then Ulysses — suspecting some foul witchcraft — snatched his sword and his bow, and commanded Eurylochus instantly to lead him to the place ; but Eurylochus fell down, and, embracing his knee?, besought him, by the name of a man whom the gods 203 THE ADVENTUBES OF ULYSSES. had in tlieir protection, not to expose his safety, and the safety of them all, to certain destruction. **Do thou then stay, Eurylochus," answered, Ulysses ; '* eat thou and drink in the ship in safety, while I go alone upon this adventure : necessity, from whose law is no appeal, compels me." So saying, he quitted the ship, and went on shore, accompanied by none : none had the hardihood to offer to partake that perilous adventure with him, so much they dreaded the enchantments of the witch. Singly he pursued his journey till he came to the shining gates which stood before her mansion ; but, when he essayed to put his foot over her threshold, he was suddenly stopped by the apparition of a young man bearing a golden rod in his hand, who was the god Mercury. He held Ulysses by the v/rist, to stay his entrance ; and '' Whither wouldest thou go ? " he said, *' thou most erring of the sons of men ! Knowest thou not that this is the house of great Circe, where she keeps thy friends in a loathsome sty, changed from the fair forms of men into the detestable and ugly shapes of swine ? Art thou prepared to share their fate, from which nothing can ransom thee ?" But neither his words 3 cOr his coming from heaven, could stop the daring foot of Ulysses, whom compassion for the misfortune of his friends had rendered careless of danger; which when the god perceived, he had pity to see valour so misplaced, and gave him the flower of the herb moly, which is sovereign against enchantments. The moly is a small unsightly root, its virtues but little known, and in low estimation ; the dull shep- herd treads on it every day with his clouted shoes : but it bears a small white flG\rer, which is medicinal against charms, blights, mildews, and damps, *' Take this in thy hand," said Mercury, *' and with it boldly enter her gates : when she shall strike thee THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. 209 •with her rod, thinking to change thee, as she has changed thy friends, boldly rush in upon her with thy sword, and extort from her the dreadful oath of the gods, that she will use no enchantments against thee ; then force her to restore thy abused com- panions." He gave Ulysses the little white flower ; and, instructing him how to use it, vanished. When the god was departed, Ulysses with loud knockings beat at the gate of the palace. The shining gates were opened as before, and great Circe with hospital cheer invited in her guest. She placed him on a throne with more distinction than she had used to his fellows; she mingled wine in a costly bowl, and he drank of it, mixed with those poisonous drugs. When he had drunk, she struck him with her charming-rod, and "To your sty!" she cried. ** Out, swine ! mingle with your companions." But those powerful words were not proof against the pre- servative which Mercury had given to Ulysses : he remained unchanged, and, as the god had directed him, boldly charged the witch with his sword, as if he meant to take her life ; which when she saw, and perceived that her charms were weak against the antidote which Ulysses bore about him, she cried out, and bent her knees beneath his sword, em- bracing his, and said, "Who or what manner of man art thou ? Never drank any man before thee of this cup but he repented it in some brute's form. Thy shape remains unaltered as thy mind. Thou canst be none other than Ulysses, renowned above all the world for wisdom, whom the Fates have long since decreed that I must love. This haughty bosom bends to thee. Ithacan I a goddess wooes thee to her bed." "0 Circe!" he replied, "how canst thou treat of love or marriage with one whose friends thou hast turned into beasts ? and now offerest him thy hand in wedlock, only that thou mightest have him in thy 210 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. power, to live the life of a beast with tliee, — naked, effeminate, subject to tliy will, perhaps to be ad- vanced in time to the honour of a place in thy sty ! What pleasure canst thou promise which may tempt the soul of a reasonable man,— thy meats, spiced with poison; or thy wines, drugged with death? Thou must swear to me, that thou wilt never at- tempt against me the treasons which thou hast practised upon my friends." The enchantress, won by the terror of his threats, or by the violence of that new love which she felt kindling in her veins for him, swore by Styx, the great oath of the gods, that she meditated no injury to him. Then Ulysses made show of gentler treatment, which gave her hopes of inspiring him with a passion equal to that which she felt. She called her handmaids, four that served her in chief, — who were daughters to her silver fountains, to her sacred rivers, and to her consecrated woods, — to deck her apartments, to spread rich carpets, and set out her silver tables with dishes of the purest gold, and meat as precious as that which the gods eat, to entertain her guest. One brought water to wash his feet ; and one brought wine to chase away, with a refreshing sweetness, the sorrow that had come of late so thick upon him, and hurt his noble mind. They strewed perfumes on his head ; and, after he had bathed in a bath of the choicest aromatics, they brought him rich and costly apparel to put on. Then he was conducted to a throne of massy silver ; and a regale, fit for Jove when he banquets, was placed before him. But the feast which Ulysses desired was to see his friends (the partners of his voyage) once more in the shapes of m en ; and the food which could give him nourish- ment must be taken in at his eyes. Because he missed this sight, he sat melancholy and thoughtful, and would taste of none of the rich delicacies placed before him ; which when Circe noted, she easily di- THE AD-^-ENTURES OF ULYSSES. 211 vined the cause of his sadness, and, leaving the seat in which she sat tlironed, went to her sty, and let abroad his men, who came in hke swine, and filled the ample hall, where Ulysses sat, with gruntings. Hardly had he time to let his sad eye run over their altered forms and brutal metamorphosis, when, with an ointment which she smeared over them, suddenly their bristles fell off, and they started up in their own shapes, men as before. They knew their leader again, and clung about him, with joy of their late restoration, and some shame for their late change ; and wept so loud, blubbering out their joy in broken accents, that the palace was fiUed with a sound of pleasing mourning; and the witch herself, great Circe, was not unmoved at the sight. To make her atonement complete, she sent for the remnant of Ulysses's men who stayed behind at the ship, giving up their great commander for lost ; who when they came, and saw him again ahve, circled with their fellows. No expression can tell what joy they felt : they even cried out with rapture ; and, to have seen their frantic expressions of mirth, a man might have supposed that they were just in sight of their country earth, the cliffs of rocky Ithaca. Only Eury- lochus would be persuaded to enter that palace of wonders ; for he remembered with a kind of horror how his companions had vanished from his sight. Then great Circe spake, and gave order that there should be no more sadness among them, nor remem- bering of past sufferings ; for as yet they fared Hke men that are exiles from their country ; and, if a gleam of mirth shot among them, it was suddenly quenched with the thought of their helpless and homeless condition. Her kind persuasions wrought so upon Ulysses and the rest, that they spent twelve rhonths in all manner of delight with her in her palace. For Circe was a powerful magician, and could command the moon from her sphere, or unroot 212 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. the solid oak from its place to make it dance for their diversion ; and by the help of her illusions, she could vary the taste of pleasures, and contrive de- lights, recreations, and jolly pastimes, — to " fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream." At length Ulysses awoke from the trance of the faculties into which her charms had thrown him ; and the thought of home returned with ten-fold vi- gour to goad and sting him, — that home where he had left his virtuous wife Penelope, and his young son Telemachus. One day, when Circe had been lavish of her caresses, and was in her kindest hu- mour, he artfully put to her, and as it were afar off, the question of his return home ; to which she answered firmly, " Ulysses ! it is not in my power to detain one whom the gods have destined to fur- ther trials. But leaving me, before you pursue your journey home, you must visit the house of Ades, or Death, to consult the shade of Tiresias, the Theban prophet ; to whom alone, of all the dead, Proserpine, queen of hell, has committed the secret of future events : it is he that must inform you whether you shall ever see again your wife and country." — " Circe!" he cried, <' that is impossible : who shall steer my course to Pluto's kingdom ? Never ship had strength to make that voyage." — '^ Seek no guide," she replied ; " but raise you your mast, and hoist your white sails, and sit in your ship in peace : the North wind shall waft you through the seas till you shall cross the expanse of the ocean, and come to where grow the poplar groves, and willows pale, of Proserpine ; where Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus and Acheron mingle their waves. Cocytus is an arm of Styx, the forgetful river. Here dig a pit, and make it a cubit broad and a cubit long ; and pour in milk and honey and wine, and the blood of a ram, and the blood of a black ewe ; and turn away thy THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 213 face while thou pourest in, and the dead shall come flocking to taste the milk and the blood : but suffer none to approach thy offering till thou hast inquired of Tiresias all which thou wishest to know." He did as great Circe had appointed. He raised his mast, and hoisted his white sails, and sat in his ship in peace. The North wind wafted him through the seas till he crossed the ocean and came to the sacred woods of Proserpine. He stood at the con- fluence of the three floods, and digged a pit, as she had given directions, and poured in his offering, — the blood of a ram and the blood of a black ewe, milk and honey and wine ; and the dead came to his banquet, — aged men and women and youths, and children who died in infancy. But none of them would he suffer to approach, and dip their thin lips in the offering, till Teresias was served, — not though his own mother was among the number, whom now for the first time he knew to be dead ; for he had left her living when he went to Troy ; and she had died since his departure, and the tidings never reached him : though it irked his soul to use constraint upon her, yet, in compliance with the injunction of great Circe, he forced her to retire along with the other ghosts. Then Tiresias, who bore a golden sceptre, came and lapped of the offering ; and immediately he knew Ulysses, and began to prophesy : he denounced woe to Llysses, woe, woe, and many sufferings, through the anger oj Neptune for the putting -out of the eye of the sea-god's son. Yet there was safety after suffering, ij they could abstain from slaughteiing the oxen of the Sun after they landed in the Triangular Island. For Ulysses, the gods had destined him from a Icing to become a beggar, and to perish by his own guests, unless he slew those who knew him not. This prophecy, ambiguously delivered, was all that Tiresias was empowered to unfold, or else there was no longer place for him ; for now the souls of the 211 THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. other dead came flocking in snch numbers, tumul- tuously demanding the blood, that freezing horror seized the limbs of the living Ulysses, to see so many, and all dead, and he the only one ahve in that re- gion. Now his mother came and lapped the blood, without restraint from her son : and now she knew him to be her son, and inquired of him why he had come alive to their comfortless habitations ; and she said, that affliction for Ulysses's long absence had preyed upon her spirits, and brought her to the grave. Ulysses's soul melted at her moving narration ; and forgetting the state of the dead, and that the airy texture of disembodied spirits does not admit of the embraces of flesh and blood, he threw his arms about her to clasp her : the poor ghost melted from his embrace, and, looking mournfully upon him, vanished away. Then saw he other females, — Tyro, who, when she lived, was the paramour of Neptune, and by him had Pelias and Neleus ; Antiope, who bore two like sons to Jove, — Amphion and Zethus, founders of Thebes ; Alcmena, the mother of Hercules, with her fair daughter, afterwards her daughter-in-law, Megara. There also Ulysses saw Jocasta, the unfortunate mother and wife of (Edipus ; who, ignorant of kin, wedded with her son, and, when she had discovered the unnatural alliance, for shame and grief hanged herself. He continued to drag a wretched life above the earth, haunted by the dreadful Furies. There was Leda, the wife of Tyndarus, the mother of the beautiful Helen, and of the two brave brothers, Castor and Pollux, who obtained this grace from Jove, — that, being dead, they should enjoy life alternately, living in pleasant places under the earth. For Pollux had prayed that his brother Castor, who was subject to death, as the son of Tyndarus, should partake of his own immortahty, which he derived THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 215 from an immortal sire : this the Fates denied ; there- fore Pollux was permitted to divide his immortality- wit h his brother Castor, dying and living alternately. There was Iphimedeia, who bore two sons to Nep- tune, that were giants, — Otus and Ephialtes : Earth in her prodigality never nourished bodies to such portentous size and beauty as these two children were of, except Orion. At nine years old they had imaginations of climbing to heaven to see what the gods were doing : they thought to make stairs of mountains, and were for piling Ossa upon Olympus, and setting Pelion upon that ; and had perhaps per- formed it, if they had lived till they were striplings ; but they were cut off by death in tlie infancy of their ambitious project. Phaedra was there, and Procris and Ariadne, mournful for Thesus's desertion : and Mgera and Clymene and Eryphile, who preferred gold before wedlock faith. But now came a mournful ghost, that late was Agamemnon, son of Atreus, the mighty leader of all the host of Greece, and their confederate kings that warred against Troy. He came with the rest to sip a little of the blood at that uncomfortable banquet. Ulysses was moved with compassion to see him among them, and asked him what untimely fate had brought him there ; if storms had overwhelmed him coming from Troy, or if he had perished in some mutiny by his own soldiers at a division of the prey. " By none of these," he replied, " did I come to my death ; but was slain at a banquet to which I was invited by ^gisthus after my return home. He con- spiring with my adulterous wife, laid an artful scheme for my destruction, training me forth to a banquet as an ox goes to the slaughter ; and, there surrounding me, they slew me with all my friends about me." " Clytemnestra, my wicked wife, forgetting the vows which she swore to me in wedlock, would not 216 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. lend a hand to close my eyes in death. But nothing is so distorted with impiety as such a woman, who would kill her spouse that married her a maid. When I brought her home to my house a bride, I hoped in my heart that she would be loving to me and to my children. Now her black treacheries have cast a foul aspersion on her whole sex. Blest husbands will have their loving wives in suspicion for her bad deeds." *' Alas !" said Ulysses, '* there seems to be a fata- lity in your royal house of Atreus, and it appears that they are hated of Jove for their wives. For Helen's sake, your brother Menelaus's wife, what multitudes fell in the wars of Troy !" Agamemnon replied, " For this cause, be not thou more kind than wise to any woman. Let not thy words express to her at any time all that is in thy mind : keep still some secrets to thyself. But thou by any bloody contrivances of thy wife never needst fear to fall. Exceeding wise she is ; and her goodness is as eminent as her wisdom. Icarius's daughter, Penelope the chaste : we left her a young bride when we parted from our wives to go to the wars, her first child suckling at her breast, — the young Telemachus, whom you shall see grown up to manhood on your return ; and he shall greet his father with befitting welcome. My Orestes, my dear son, I shall never see again. His mother has deprived his father of the sight of him, and perhaps will slay him as she slew his sire. It is now no world to trust a woman in. — But what says fame ? Is my son yet alive ? lives he in Orchomen, or in Pylus ? or is he resident in Sparta, in his uncle's court ? As yet, I see, divine Orestes is not here with me." To this Ulysses replied, that he had received no certain tidings where Orestes abode ; only some THE ADVENTUEES OP ULYSSES. 217 tmcertain rumours, which he could not report for truth. While they held this sad conference, with kind tears striving to render unkind fortunes more bear- able, the soul of great Achilles joined them. ** What desperate adventure has brought Ulysses to these regions ?" said Achilles : ** to see the end of dead men, and their foolish shades ?" Ulysses answered him, that he had come to con- sult Tiresias respecting his voyage home. "But thou, son of Thetis !" said he, "why dost thou disparage the state of the dead? Seeing that, as ahve, thou didst surpass all men in glory, thou must needs retain thy pre-eminence here below : so great Achilles triumphs over death." But Achilles made reply, that he had much rather be a peasant-slave upon the earth than reign over all the dead, — so much did the inactivity and sloth- ful condition of that state displease his unquenchable and restless spirit. Only he inquired of Ulysses if his father Peleus were hving, and how his son Neop- tolemus conducted himself. Of Peleus, Ulysses could tell him nothing ; but of Neoptolemus he thus bore witness : "From Sycros I conveyed your son by sea to the Greeks ; where I can speak of him ; for I knew him. He was chief in council and in the field. When any question was proposed, so quick was he in the full apprehen- sion of any case, that he invariably spoke first, and was heard with more attention than the older heads. Only myself and aged Nestor could compare with him in giving advice. In battle I cannot speak his praise, unless I could count all that fell by his sword. I will only mention one instance of his manhood. When we sat hid in the belly of the wooden horse, in the ambush which deceived the Trojans to their destruction, I, who had the manage- ment of that stratagem, still shifted my place from 218 THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. side to side to note the behaviour of our raen. In some I marked their hearts trembling, notwithstand- ing all the pains they took to appear valiant ; and, in others, tears, that, in spite of manly courage, would gush forth. And, to say truth, it was an adventure of high enterprise, and as perilous a stake as was ever played in war's game. But in him I could not observe the least sign of weakness ; no tears nor tremblings, but his hand still on his good sword, and ever urging me to open the machine, and let us out before the time was come for doing it : and, when we sallied out, he was still first in that fierce destruction and bloody midnight desolation of King Priam's city. This made the soul of Achilles to tread a swifter pace, with high-raised feet, as he vanished away, for the joy which he took in his son being applauded by Ulysses. A sad shade stalked by, which Ulysses knew to be the ghost of Ajax, his opponent, when living, in that famous dispute about the right of succeeding to the arms of the deceased Achilles. They being adjudged by the Greeks to Ulysses, as the prize of wisdom above bodily strength, the noble Ajax in despite went mad, and slew himself. The sight of his rival, turned to a shade by his dispute, so subdued the passion of emulation in Ulysses, that, for his sake, he wished that judgment in that controversy had been given against himself, rather than so illustrious a chief should have perished for the desire of those arms which his prowess (second only to Achilles in fight) so eminently had deserved. " Ajax !" he cried, " all the Greeks mourn for thee as much as they lamented Achilles. Let not thy wrath burn for ever, great son of Telamon. Ulysses seeks peace with thee, and will make any atonement to thee that can appease thy wounded spirit." But the shade stalked on, and would not exchange a word with Ulysses, though he THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. 219 prayed it with many tears and many earnest en- treaties. *'He might have spoken to me," said Ulysses, " since I spoke to him ; but I see the re- sentments of the dead are eternal." Then Ulysses saw a throne, on which was placed a Judge passing sentence. He that sat on the throne was Minos, and he was dealing out just judg- ment to the dead. He it is that assigns them their place in bliss or woe. Then came by a thundering ghost, — the large-limb' d Orion, the mighty hunter, who was hunting there the ghosts of the beasts which he had slaughtered in desert hills upon the earth ; for the dead dehght in the occupations which pleased them in the time of their Hving upon the earth. There was Tityus, suffering eternal pains because he had sought to violate the honour of Latona as she passed from Pytho into Panopeus. Two vultures sat perpetually preying upon his Hver with their crooked beaks ; which, as fast as they devoured, is for ever renewed : nor can he fray them away with his great hands. There was Tantalus, plagued for his great sins, standing up to his chin in water, which he can never taste ; but still, as he bows his head, thinking to quench his burning thirst, instead of water he licks up unsavory dust. All fruits pleasant to the sight, and of dehcious flavour, hang in ripe clusters about his head, seeming as though they offered themselves to be plucked hy him ; but, when he reaches out his hand, some wind carries them far out of his sight into the clouds : so he is starved in the midst of plenty by the righteous doom of Jove, in memory of that inhuman banquet at which the sun turned pale, when the unnatural father served up the hmbs of his little son in a dish, as meat for his divine guests. There was Sisyphus, that sees no end to his labours. His punishment is, to be for ever rolling THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. up a vast stone to the top of a mountain ; which, when it gets to the top, falls down with a crushing weight, and all his work is to be begun again. He was bathed all over in sweat, that reeked out a smoke which covered his head like a mist. His crime had been the revealing of state secrets. There Ulysses saw Hercules : not that Hercules who enjoys immortal life in heaven among the gods, and is married to Hebe, or Youth ; but his shadow, which remains below. About him the dead flocked as thick as bats, hovering around, and cuffing at his head : he stands with his dreadful bow, ever iu the act of shooting. There also might Ulysses have seen and spoken with the shades of Theseus and Pirithous and the old heroes ; but he had conversed enough with horrors : therefore, covering his face with his hands that he might see no more spectres, he resumed his seat in his ship, and pushed off. The bark moved of itself, without the help of any oar, and soon brought him out of the regions of death into the cheerful quarters of the living, and to the Island of iEsea, whence he had set forth. CHAPTER III. THE SONG OF THE SIRENS. — SCYLLA AND CHAKYBDIS. — THE OXEN OF THE SUN. — THE JUDGMENT. — THE CEEW KILLED BY LIGHTNING. <' Unhappy man, who at thy birth wast appointed twice to die ! Others shall die once ; but thou, besides that death which remains for thee, common to all men, hast in thy lifetime visited the shades of death. Thee, both Scylla and Charybdis expect. Thee the deathful Sirens lie in wait for, that taint the minds of all who listen to them with their sweet Tim ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 221 singing." Whosoever shall but hear the call of any Siren, he will so des^nse both wife and children, through their sorceries, that the stream of his affec- tion never again shall set homewards ; nor shall he take joy in wife or children thereafter, or they in him." With these prophetic greetings great Circe met Ulysses on his return. He besought her to instruct him in the nature of the Skens, and by what method their baneful allurements were to be resisted. *'They are sisters three," she replied, **that sit in a mead (by which your ship must needs pass) cir- cled with dead men's bones. These are the bones of men whom they slew, after fawningly enticing them into their fen. Yet such is the celestial harmony of their voices accompanying the persuasive magic of their words, that, knowing this, you shall not be able to withstand their entice- ments. Therefore, when you are to sail by them, you shall stop the ears of your companions with wax, that they may hear no note of that dangerous music ; but for yourself, that you may hear, and yet live, give them strict command to bind you hand and foot to the mast, and in no case to set you free till you are out of the danger of the temptation, though you should entreat it, and implore it ever so much, but to bind you rather the more for your requesting to be loosed. So shall you escape that snare." Ulysses then j)rayed her that she would inform him what Scylla and Charybdis were, which she had taught him by name to fear. She replied, " Sailing from Mseo. to Trinacria, you must pass at an equal distance between two fatal rocks. Incline never so little either to the one side or the other, and your ship must meet with certain destruction. No vessel ever yet tried that pass without being lost but the Argo, which owed her safety to the sacred freight ehe bore, — the fleece of the golden-backed ram, which 222 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. could not perish. The biggest of these rocks which you shall come to, Scylla hath in charge. There, in a deep whirlpool at the foot of the rock, the abhorred monster shrouds her face ; who if she were to show her full form, no eye of man or god could endure the sight : thence she stretches out all her six long necks, peering and diving to suck up fish, dolphins, dog-fish, and whales, whole ships and their men, — whatever comes within her raging gulf. The other rock is lesser, and of less ominous aspect ; but there dreadful Charybdis sits, supping the black deeps. Thrice a day she drinks her pits dry, and thrice a day again she belches them all up : but, when she is drinking, come not nigh ; for, being once caught, the force of Neptune cannot redeem you from her swallow. Better trust to Scylla ; for she will but have for her six necks six men : Charybdis, in her insatiate draught, will ask all." Then Ulysses inquired, in case he should escape Charybdis, whether lie might not assail that other monster with his sword : to which she replied, that he must not think that he had an enemy subject to death or wounds to contend with ; for Scylla could never die. Therefore his best safety was in flight, and to invoke none of the gods but Cratis, who is Scylla's mother, and might perhaps forbid her daughter to devour them. For his conduct after he arrived at Trinacria, she referred him to the admoni- tion which had been given him by Tiresias. Ulysses having communicated her instructions, as far as related to the Sirens, to his companions, who had not been present at that interview, — but con- cealing from them the rest, as he had done the terrible predictions of Tiresias, that they might not be deterred by fear from pursuing their voyage, — the time for departure being come, they set their sails, and took a final leave of great Circe ; who by her art calmed the heavens, and gave them smooth seas, THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. 223 ftnd a riglit fore-wind (the seaman's friend) to bear tliem on their way to Ithaca. They had not sailed past a hundred leagues, before the breeze which Circe had lent them suddenly stopped. It was stricken dead. All the sea lay in prostrate slumber. Not a gasp of air could be felt. The ship stood still. Ulysses guessed that the island of the Sirens was not far off, and that they had charmed the air so with their devilish singing. Therefore he made him cakes of wax, as Circe had instructed him, and stopped the ears of his men with them : then, causing himself to be bound hand and foot, he commanded the rowers to ply their oars, and row as fast as speed could carry them past that fatal shore. They soon came within sight of the Sirens, who sang in Ulysses's hearing : •' Come here, thou, worthy of a world of praise, That dost so high the Grecian glory raise, — Ulysses ! Stay thy ship, and that song hear That none pass'd ever, but it bent his ear, And left him ravish'd, and instructed more By us than any ever heard before. For we know all things, — whatsoever were In wide Troy labour'd ; whatsoever there The Grecians and the Trojans both sustain'd By those high issues that the gods ordain'd : And whatsoever all the earth can show. To inform a knowledge of desert, we know." These were their words ; but the celestial harmony of the voices which sang them no tongue can de- scribe : it took the ear of Ulysses with ravishment. He would have broken his bonds to rush after them ; and threatened, wept, sued, entreated, commanded, crying out with tears and passionate imprecations, conjuring his men by all the ties of perilf past which they had endured in common, by fellowship and love, and the authority which he retained among them, to let him loose ; but at no rate would they obey him. And stiU the Sirens sang. Ulysses 224 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. made signs, motions, gestures, promising mountains of gold if they would set him free ; but their oars only moved faster. And still the Sirens sang. And still, the more he adjured them to set him free, the faster with cords and ropes they bound him ; till they were quite out of hearing of the Sirens' notes, whose effect great Cu'ce had so truly predicted And well she might speak of them ; for often sh . had joined her own enchanting voice to theirs while she sat in the flowery meads, mingled with the Sirens and the Water Nymphs, gathering their potent herbs and drugs of magic quality. Their singing altogether has made the gods stoop, and ''heaven drowsy with the harmony." Escaped that peril, they had not sailed yet a hundred leagues farther, when they heard a roar afar off, which Ulysses knew to be the barking of Scylla's dogs, which surround her waist, and bark incessantly. Coming nearer, they beheld a smoke ascend, with a horrid murmur, which arose from that other whirlpool, to which they made nigher approaches than to Scylla. Through the furious eddy which is in that place, the ship stood still as a stone ; for there was no man to lend his hand to an oar ; the dismal roar of Scylla's dogs at a distance, and the nearer clamours of Charybdis, where every thing made an echo, quite taking from them the power of exertion. Ulysses went up and down, encouraging his men, one by one ; giving them good words ; telling them they were in greater perils when they were blocked up in the Cyclop's cave ; yet. Heaven assisting his counsels, he had dehvered them out of that extremity ; telling them that he could not believe but they remembered it; and wishing them to trust to the same care which he had now for their welfare. They must, he said, exert all the strength and wit which they had, and try if Jove would not grant them an escape, even out of this THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 225 peril. In particular, he cheered up the pilot who sat at the helm, and told him that he must show more firmness than other men, as he had more trust committed to him ; and had the sole management, by his skill, of the vessel in which all their safety was embarked. That a rock lay hid within those boiling whirlpools which he saw, on the outside of which he must steer, if he would avoid his own destruction, and the destruction of them all. They heard him, and, like men, took to the oars ; but Utile knew what opposite danger, in shunning that rock, they must be thrown upon. For Ulysses had concealed from them the wounds, never to be healed, which Scylla was to open : their terror woulU else have robbed them of all care to steer, or move an oar, and have made them hide under the hatches, for fear of seeing her, where he and they must die an idle death. But, even then, he forgot the precautions which Circe had given him to pre- vent harm to his person ; who had willed him not to arm, or show himself once to Scylla : but, dis- daining not to venture life for his brave companions, he could not contain, but armed in all points, and taking a lance in each hand, he went up to the fore-deck, and looked when Scylla would appear. She did not show herself as yet; and still the vessel steered closer by her rock, as it sought to shun that other more dreaded: for they saw how horribly Charybdis's black throat drew into her all the whirling deep, which she disgorged again ; that all about her boiled like a kettle, and the rock roared with troubled waters ; which when she supped in again, all the bottom turned up, and disclosed far under shore the swart sands naked, the sight of which frayed the startled blood from their faces, and made Ulysses tr^,^ his to view the wonder of whirlpools. Which whoJ Scylla saw from out her black den, she darted out her six 2528 THE ADVENTURES OP TJLYSSES. long necks, and swooped np as many of Ms friends ; whose cries Ulysses heard, but saw them too late, with their heels turned up, and their hands thrown to him for succour, who had been their help in all extremities, but could not deliver them now ; and he heard them shriek out as she tore them ; and, to the last, they continued to throw their hands out to him for sweet life. In all his sufferings he never had beheld a sight so full of misery. Escaped from Scylla and Charybdis, but with a diminished crew, Ulysses and the sad remains of his followers reached the Trinacrian shore. Here, landing, he beheld oxen grazing, of such surpassing size and beauty, that, both from them and from the shape of the island, (having three promontories jutting into the sea,) he judged rightly that he was come to the Triangular Island, and the oxen of the Sun, of which Tiresias had forewarned him. 80 great was his terror, lest through his own fault, or that of his men, any violence or profanation should be offered to the holy oxen, that even then, tired as they were with the perils and fatigues of the day past, and unable to stir an oar or use any exer- tion, and though night was fast coming on, he would have had them re- mbark immediately, and make the best of their way from that dangerous station : but his men, with one voice, resolutely opposed it ; and even the too-cautious Eurylochus himself with- stood the proposal ; so much did the temptation of a little ease and refreshment (ease tenfold sweet after such labours) prevail over the sagest counsels, and the apprehension of certain evil outweigh the pro- spect of contingent danger. They expostulated, fchat the nerves of Ulysses seemed to be made of Bteel, and his limbs not liable to lassitude like other men's : that waking or sleeping seemed indifferent )o him ; but that they were men, not gods, and felt )he common ajDpetites for food and sleep ; that, in THE ADVENTURES OP Um^SES. 227 fjie night-time, all the winds most destructive ti ships are generated ; that black night still required to be served with meat and sleep, and quiet havens and ease ; that the best sacrifice to the sea was in the morning. With such sailor-hke sayings and mutinous arguments, which the majority have always ready to justify disobedience to their betters, they forced Ulysses to comply with their requisition, and, against his will, to take up his night quarters on shore. But he first exacted from them an oath, that they would neither maim nor kill any of the cattle which they saw grazing, but content them- selves with such food as Circe had stowed their vessel with when they parted from^sea. This they, man by man, severally promised, imprecating the heaviest curses on whomsoever should break it ; and, mooring their bark within a creek, they went to Bupper, contenting themselves that night with such food as Circe had given them, not without many sad thoughts of their friends whom Scylla had devoured, the grief of which kept them, great part of the night, walmig. In the morning Ulysses urged them again to a religious observance of the oath that they had sworn ; not in any case to attempt the blood of those fair herds which they saw grazing, but to content them- selves with the ship's food ; for the god who owned those cattle sees and hears all. They faithfully obeyed, and remained in that good mind for a month ; during which they were confined to that station by contrary winds, till all the wine and the bread were gone which they had brought with them. When their victuals were gone, necessity compelled them to stray in quest of whatever fish or fowl they could snare, which that coast did not yield in any great abundance. Then Ulysses prayed to all the gods that dwelt in bountiful heaven, that they would be pleased to yield them some i ^ans to stay 228 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. their hunger, without having recourse to profane and forbidden violations : but the ears of heaven seemed to be shut, or some god incensed plotted his ruin ; for at mid- day, when he should chiefly have been vigilant and watchful to prevent mischief, a deep sleep fell upon the eyes of Ulysses, during which he lay totally insensible of all that passed in the world, and what his friends or what his enemies might do for his welfare or destruction. Then Eurylochus took his advantage. He was the man of most authority with them after Ulysses. He represented to them all the misery of their condition : how that every kind of death is hateful and grievous to mortality ; but that, of all deaths, famine is attended with the most pain- ful, loathsome, and humiliating circumstances ; that the subsistence which they could hope to draw from fowling or fishing was too precarious to be depended upon ; that there did not seem to be any chance of the winds changing to favour their escape ; but that they must inevitably stay there and perish, if they let an irrational superstition deter them from the means which Nature offered to their hands ; that Ulysses might be deceived in his belief that these oxen had any sacred qualities above other oxen ; and even admitting that they were the property of the god of the Sun, as he said they were, the Sun did neither eat nor drink ; and the gods were best served, not by a scrupulous conscience, but by a thankful heart, which took freely what they as freely offered. With these and such like persuasions he prevailed on his half- famished and half- mutinous companion^ to begin the impious violation of their oath by the slaughter of seven of the fairest of these oxen which were grazing. Part they roasted and ate, and part they offered in sacrifice to the gods ; particularly to Apollo, god of the Sun, vowing to build a temple to his godhead when they should arrive in Ithaca, and deck it with magnificent and THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 229 nnmeroTis gifts. Vain men, and sciperstition worse than that which they so lately derided, to imagine that prospective penitence can excuse a presrjit violation of duty, and that the pure natures of the heavenly powers will admit of compromise or dis- pensation for sin ! But to their feast they fell ; dividing the roasted portions of the flesh, savory and pleasant meat to them, hut a sad sight to the eyes, and a savour of death in the nostrils of the waking Ulysses, who just woke in time to witness, but not soon enough to prevent, their rash and sacrilegious banquet. He had scarce time to ask what great mischief was this which they had done unto him, when, behold, a prodigy ! The ox-hides which they had stripped began to creep as if they had life ; and the roasted flesh bellowed, as the ox used to do when he was living. The hair of Ulysses stood up on end with affright at these omens ; but his companions, like men whom the gods had infatuated to their destruc- tion, persisted in their horrible banquet. The Sun, from his burning chariot, saw how Ulysses's men had slain his oxen ; and he cried to his father Jove, " Kevenge me upon these impious men, who have slain my oxen, which it did me good to look upon when I walked my heavenly round. In all my daily course I never saw such bright and beautiful creatures as those my oxen were." The fai^her promised that ample retribution should be tiiKen ^f those accursed men ; which was fulfilled shortly after, when they took their leave of the fatal island. Six days they feasted, in spite of the signs of heaven; and on the seventh, the wind changing, they set their sails, and left the island ; and their hearts were cheerful with the banquets they had held ; all but the heart of Ulysses, which sank within him, as with wet eyes he behdd his friends, anal Ms^O IHE ADYENTUEES OP n.'S'SSEg. gave them for lost, as men devoted tr^ divine ven- geance ; which soon overtook them ; for they had not gone many leagues before a dreadful tejrpest arose which burs-t their cables. Down came tlteir mast, crushing the skull of the pilot in its fall : off he fell from the stern into the water ; and the bark, wanting his management, drove along at the wind's mercy. Thunders roared, and terrible lightnings of Jove came down ; first a bolt struck Eurylochus, then another, and then another, till all the crew were killed, and their bodies swam about like sea- mews ; and the ship was split in pieces. Only Ulysses survived ; and he had no hope of safety but in tying himself to the mast, where he sat riding upon the waves, like one that in no extremity would yield to fortune. Nine days was he floating about with all the motions of the sea, with no other sup- port than the slender mast under him, till the tenth night cast him, all spent and weary with toil, upon the friendly shores of the Island Ogygia. CHAPTEE IV. THE ISLAND OF CALYPSO. IMMOKTALITY REFUSED. Hencefoeth the adventures of the single Ulysses must be pursued. Of all those faithful partakers of his toil, who with him left Asia, laden with the spoils of Troy, now not one remains, but all are a prey to the remorseless waves, and food for some great iish ; their gallant navy reduced to one ship, and that finally swallowed up and lost. Wliere now are all their anxious thoughts of home ? that perseve- rance with which they went through the severest sufferings and the hardest labours to which poor sea- farers were ever exposed, that their toils at last THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 281 might be crowned with the sight of their native shores and wives at Ithaca ? Ulysses is now in the Isle Ogygia, called the Delightful Island. The poor shipwrecked chief, the slave of all the elements, is once again raised by the caprice of fortune into a shadow of prosperity. He that was cast naked upon the shore, bereft of all his companions, has now a goddess to attend upon him ; and his companions are the nymphs which never die. Who has not heard of Calypso, — her grove crowned with alders and poplars ; her grotto, against which the luxu- riant vine laid forth his purple grapes ; her ever- new delights, crystal fountains, running brooks, meadows flowering with sweet balm-gentle and with violets, — blue violets, which like veins, enamelled the smooth breasts of every fragrant mead ? It were useless to describe over again what has been so well told already, or to relate those soft arts of courtship which the goddess used to detain Ulysses, — the same in kind which she afterwards practised upon his less wary son, whom Minerva, in the shape of Mentor, hardly preserved from her snares, when they came to the Delightful Island together in search of the scarce departed Ulysses. A memorable example of married love, and a worthy instance how dear to every good man his country is, was exhibited by Ulysses. If Circe loved him sincerely, Calypso loves him with tenfold more warmth and passion. She can deny him nothing but his departure. She offers him every thing, even to a participation of her immortality : if he will stay and share in her pleasures, he shall never die. But death with glory has greater charms for a mind heroic than a life that shall never die, with shame ; and, when he pledged his vows to liis Penelope, he re- served no stipulation that he would forsake her whenever a goddess should think him worthy of THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. her bed, but they had sworn to live and grow old together : and he would not survive her if he could ; nor meanly share in immortality itself, from which she was excluded. These thoughts kept him pensive and melancholy in the midst of pleasure. His heart was on the seas, making voyages to Ithaca. Twelve months had worn away, when Minerva from heaven saw her favourite ; how he sat still pining on the sea- shores (his daily custom), wishing for a ship to carry him home. She (who is Wisdom herself) was indignant that so wise and brave a man as Ulysses should be held in effeminate bondage by an unworthy goddess ; and, at her request, her father Jove ordered Mercury to go down to the earth to command Calypso to dismiss her guest. The divine messenger tied fast to his feet his winged shoes, which bear him over land and seas ; and took in hand his golden rod, the ensign of his au- thority. Then, wheeling in many an airy round, he staid not till he alighted on the firm top of the Mountain Pieria : thence he fetched a second circuit over the seas, kissing the waves in his flight with his feet, as light as any sea-mew fishing dips her wings, till he touched the Isle Ogygia, and soared up from the blue sea to the grotto of the goddess, to v/hom his errand was ordained. His message struck a horror, checked by love, through all the faculties of Calypso. She replied to it incensed, " You gods are insatiate, past all that live, in all things which you afiect ; which makes you so envious and grudging. It afflicts you to the heart when any goddess seeks the love of a mortal man in marriage, though you yourselves without scruple link yourselves to women of the earth. So it fared with you when the delicious fingered Morn- ing shared Orion's bed : you could never satisfy your hate and your jealousy till you had incensed the THE ADVENTUKES OP ULYSSES. chastity-loving dame, Diana, who leads the precise lifej to come upon him by stealth in Ortygia, and pierce him through with her arrows. And when rich- hau-ed Ceres gave the reins to her affections, and took lasion (well worthy) to her arms, the secret was not so cunningly kept but Jove had soon notice of it : and the poor mortal paid for his felicity with death, struck through with lightnings. And now you envy me the possession of a wretched man, whom tempests have cast upon my shores, making him lawfully mine ! whose ship Jove rent in pieces with his hot thunderbolts, killing all his friends. Him I have preserved, loved, nourished ; made him mine by protection ; my creature, — by every tie of gratitude, mine ; have vowed to make him death- less like myself : him you will take from me. But I know your power, and that it is vain for me to resist. Tell your king that I obey his mandates." With an ill grace. Calypso promised to fulfil the commands of Jove ; and. Mercury departing, she went to find Ulysses, where he sat outside the grotto, not knowing of the heavenly message, drowned in discontent, not seeing any human probability of his ever returning home. She said to him, " Unhappy man, no longer afflict yourself with pining after your country, but build you a ship, with which you may return home ; since it is the will of the gods ; who doubtless, as they are greater in power than I, are greater in skill, and best can tell what is fittest for man. But I call the gods, and my inward conscience, to witness, that I had no thought but what stood with thy safety, nor would have done or coun- selled any thing against thy good. I persuaded thee to nothing which I should not have followed myself in thy extremity : for my mind is innocent and simple. Oh ! if thou knewest what dreadful sufferings thou must yet endure, before ever thou 284 THE ADVENTUBES OF ULYSSES. readiest thy native land, thou wouldest not esteem so hardly of a goddess's offer to share her immor- tality with thee ; nor for a few years' enjoyment of a perishing Penelope, refuse an imperishable and never-dying life with Calypso." He replied, " Ever-honoured, great Calypso, let it not displease thee, that I, a mortal man, desire to see and converse again with a wife that is mortal : human objects are best fitted to human infirmities. I well know how far in wisdom, in feature, in sta- ture, proportion, beauty, in all the gifts of the mind, thou exceedest my Penelope : she is mortal, and subject to decay ; thou art immortal, evergrowing, yet never old : yet in her sight all my desires terminate, all my wishes ; in the sight of her, and of my country earth. If any god, envious of my return, shall lay his dreadful hand upon me as I pass the seas, I submit ; for the same powers have given me a mind not to sink under oppression. In wars and waves, my sufferings have not been small." She heard his pleaded reasons, and of force she must assent : so to her nymphs she gave in charge from her sacred woods to cut down timber, to make Ulysses a ship. They obeyed, though in a work unsuitable to their soft fingers ; yet to obe- dience no sacrifice is hard : and Ulysses busily bestirred himself, labouring far more hard than they, as was fitting, till twenty tall trees, driest and fittest for timber, were felled. Then, like a skilful shipwright, he fell to joining the planks ; using the plane, the axe, and the auger, with such expedition, that in four days' time a ship was made, complete with all her decks, hatches, side-boards, yards. Calypso added linen for the sails, and tack- ling ; and when the ship was finished she was a goodly vessel for a man to sail in, alone or in company, over the wide seas. By the fifth morning she was launched ; and Ulysses, furnished with store of THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 285 provisions, rich garments, and gold and silver, given him by Calyi^so, took a last leave of her and of her nymphs, and of the Isle Ogygia which had so befriended him. CHAPTER V. THE TEMPEST. — THE 8EA-BIRD'S GIFT. — THE ESCAPE BY SWIM- MING. THE SLEEP IN THE WOODS. At the stern of his solitary ship Ulysses sat, and steered right artfully. No sleep could seize his eyelids. He beheld the Pleiads, the Bear, which is by some called the Wain, that moves round about Orion, and keeps still above the ocean ; and the slow-setting sign Bootes, which some name the Waggoner. Seventeen days he held his course ; and on the eighteenth the coast of Phseacia was in sight. The figure of the land, as seen from the sea, was pretty and circular, and looked some- thing like a shield. Neptune, returning from visiting his favourite Ethiopians, from the mountains of the Solymi descried Ulysses ploughing the waves, his domain. The sight of the man he so much hated for Pol}"- phemus's sake, his son, whose eye Ulysses had prt out, set the god's heart on fire ; and snatching in his hand his horrid sea-sceptre, the trident of his power, he smote the air and the sea, and con- jured up all his black storms, calling down night from the cope of heaven, and taking the earth into the sea, as it seemed, with clouds, through the darkness and indistinctness which prevailed ; the billows rolling up before the fury of all the winds, that contended together in their mighty sport. Then the knees of Ulysses bent with fear, and 286 THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. then all his spirit was spent ; and he wished that he had been among the number of his countrymen who fell before Troy, and had their funerals celebrated by all the Greeks, rather than to perish thus, where no man could mourn him or know him. As he thought these melancholy thoughts, a huge wave took him, and washed him overboard : ship and all upset amidst the billows ; he struggling afar off, clinging to her stern broken off, which he yet held ; her mast cracking in two with the fury of that gust of mixed winds that struck it ; sails and sail-yards fell into the deep ; and he himself was long drowned under water, nor could he get his head above, wave so met with wave, as if they strove which should depress him most ; and the gorgeous garments given him by Calypso clung about him, and hindered his swimming. Yet neither for this, nor for the overthrow of his ship, nor his own perilous condition, would he give up his drenched vessel ; but, wrestling with Neptune, got at length hold of her again, and then sat in her hull, exulting over death, which he had escaped, and the salt waves, which he gave the seas again to give to other men. His ship, striving to live, floated at random, cuffed from wave to wave, hurled to and fro by all the winds : now Boreas tossed it to Notus, Notus passed it to Eurus, and Eurus to the West Wind, who kept up the horrid tennis. Them in their mad sport Ino Leucothea beheld, — Ino Leucothea, now a sea-goddess, but once a mortal, and the daughter of Cadmus. She with pity beheld Ulysses the mark of their fierce con- tention ; and rising from the waves, alighted on the ship, in shape like to the sea-bird which is called a cormorant ; and in her beak she held a wonderful girdle made of sea-weeds, which grow at the bottom of the ocean, which she dropped at his THE ADVENTUKES OP ULYSSES. 237 feet ; and the bird spake to Ulysses, and counselled him not to trust any more to that fatal vessel against which Neptune had levelled his furious wi*ath, nor to those ill-befriending garments which Calypso had given him, but to quit both it and them, and trust for his safety to swimming. " And here," said the seeming bird: ''take this girdle, and tie about your middle, which has virtue to pro- tect the wearer at sea, and you shall safely reach the shore ; but, when you have landed, cast it far from you back into the sea." He did as the sea- bird instructed him : he stripped himself naked, and, fastening the wondrous girdle about his middle, cast himself into the sea to swim. The bird dived past his sight into the fathomless abyss of the ocean. Two days and two nights he spent in struggling with the waves, though sore buffeted, and almost spent, never giving up himself for lost ; such con- fidence he had in that charm which he wore about his middle, and in the words of that divine bird. But, the third morning, the winds grew calm, and all the heavens were clear. Then he saw himself nigh land, which he knew to be the coast of the PhaBacians, a people good to strangers,- and abound- ing in ships ; by whose favour he doubted not that he should soon obtain a passage to his own country. And such joy he conceived in his heart as good sons have, that esteem their father's life dear, when long sickness has held him down to his bed, and wasted his body, and they see at length health return to the old man, with restored strength and spirits, in re- ward of their many prayers to the gods for his safety : so precious was the prospect of home-return to Ulysses, that he might restore health to his country (his better parent), that had long languished as full of distempers in his absence. And then for his own safety's sake he had joy to see the shores, the woods, so nigh and within his grasp as they THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. seemed ; and he laboured with all the might of hands and feet to reach with swimming that nigh- seeming land. But, when he approached near, a horrid sound of a huge sea beating against rocks informed him that here was no place for landing, nor any harbour for man's resort : but, through the weeds and the foam which the sea belched up against the land, he could dimly discover the rugged shore all bristled with flints, and all that part of the coast one impending rock, that seemed impossible to climb ; and the water all about so deep, that not a sand was there for any tired foot to rest upon ; and every moment he feared lest some wave more cruel than the rest should crush him against a cliff, rendering worse than vain all his landing : and, should he swim to seek a more commodious haven farther on, he was fearful, lest, weak and spent as he was, the winds would force him back a long way into the main, where the terrible god Neptune, for wrath that he had so nearly escaped his power, having gotten him again into his domain, would send out some great whale (of which those seas breed a horrid number) to swallow him up alive ; with such malignity did he still pursue him. While these thoughts distracted him with diversity of dangers, one bigger wave drove against a sharp rock his naked body, which it gashed and tore, and wanted little of breaking all his bones, so rude was the shock. But, in this extremity, she prompted him that never failed him at need. Minerva (who is Wisdom itself) put it into his thoughts no longer to keep swimming off and on, as one dallying with danger, but boldly to force the shore that threatened him, and to hug the rock that had torn him so rudely ; which with both hands he clasped, wrestling with extremity, till the rage of that billow which had driven him upon it was passed : but then again THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 239 the rock drove back that wave so furiously, that it reft him of his hold, sucking him with it in its re- turn ; and the sharp rock, his cruel friend, to which he dinged for succour, rent the flesh so sore from his hands in parting, that he fell off, and could sustain himself no longer. Quite under water he fell ; and, past the help of fate, there had the hapless Ulysses lost all portion that he had in this life, if Minerva had not prompted his wisdom in that peril to essay another course, and to explore some other shelter, ceasing to attempt that landing-place. She guided his wearied and nigh-exhausted limbs to the mouth of the fan* river Callicoe, which, net far from thence, disbursed its watery tribute to the ocean. Here the shores were easy and accessible, and the rocks (which rather adorned than defended its banks) so smooth, that they seemed polished of purpose to invite the landing of our sea-wanderer, and to atone for the uncourteous treatment which those less hospitable cliffs had afforded him. And the god of the river, as if in pity, stayed his current, and smoothed his waters, to make his landing more easy : for sacred to the ever-living deities of the fresh waters, be they mountain-stream, river, or lake, is the cry of erring mortals that seek their aid ; by reason, that, being inland-bred, they partake more of the gentle humanities of our nature than those marine deities whom Neptune trains up in tempests in the unpitying recesses of his salt abyss. So, by the favour of the river's god, Ulysses crept to land, half-drowned. Both his knees faltering, his strong hands falling down through weakness from the excessive toil he had endured, his cheeks and nostrils flowing with froth of the sea-brine, much of which he had swallowed in that conflict, voice and breath spent, down he sank as in death. Dead weary he was. It seemed that the sea had soaked through his heart, and the pains he felt in all his veins were 240 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. little less than those which one feels that has endured the torture of the rack. But when his spirits came a little to themselves, and his recollection by degrees began to return, he rose up, and unloosing from his waist the girdle or charm which that divine bird had given him, and remembering the charge which he had received with it, he flung it far from him into the river. Back it swam with the course of the ebbing stream till it reached the sea, where the fair hands of Ino Leucothea received it, to keep it as a pledge of safety to any future ship- wrecked mariner, that, like Ulysses, should wander in those perilous waves. Then he kissed the humble earth in token of safety; and on he went by tbe side of that pleasant river, till he came where a thicker shade of rushes that grew on its banks seemed to point out the place where he might rest his sea-wearied limbs. And here a fresh perplexity divided his mind, — whether he should pass the night, which was coming on, in that place, where, though he feared no other enemies, the damps and frosts of the chill sea- air in that exposed situation might be death to him in his weak state ; or whether he had better climb the next hill, and pierce the depth of some shady wood, in which he might find a warm and sheltered though insecure repose, subject to the approach of any wild beast that roamed that way. Best did this last course appear to him, though with some danger, as that which was more honourable, and savoured more of strife and self- exertion, than to perish without a struggle, the passive victim of cold and the elements. So he bent his course to the nearest woods ; where, entering in, he found a thicket, mostly of wild olives and such low trees, yet growing so intertwined and knit together, that the moist wind had not leave to play through their branches, nor the sun's scorching beams to pierce their recesses, nor any THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 241 shower to beat through : they grew so thick, that, as it were, each folded iu the other. Here, creeping in, he made his bed of the leaves which were beginning to fall, of which was such abundance, that two or three men might have spread them ample coverings, such as might shield them from the Winter's rage, though the air breathed steel, and blew as it would burst. Here, creeping in, he heaped up store of leaves all about him, as a man would billets upon a Winter fire, and lay down in the midst. Rich seed of virtue lying hid in poor leaves ! Here Minerva soon gave him sound sleep ; and here all his long toils past seemed to be concluded, and shut up within the little sphere of his refreshed and closed eyelids. CHAPTER VI. THE PRINCESS NAUSICAA. THE WASHING. THE GAME WITH THE BALL. — THE COUBT OF PH^ACIA AND KING ALCIN0U8. Meantime Minerva, designing an interview between the king's daughter of that country and Ulysses when he should awake, went by night to the palace of King Alcinous, and stood at the bedside of the Princess Nausicaa in the shape of one of her fa- vourite attendants, and thus addressed the sleeping princess : — " Nausicaa, why do you lie sleeping here, and never bestow a thought upon your bridal orna- ments ? of which you have many and beautiful, laid up in your wardrobe against the day of your marriage, which cannot be far distant ; when you shall have need of all, not only to deck your own person, but to give away in presents to the vu'gins, that, honouring you, shall attend you to the temple. Your reputation stands much upon the timely care of these things : these things are they which fill 212 THE ADVENTUEES OP ULYSSES. father and reverend mother with delight. Let us arise betimes to wash your fair vestments of linen and silks in the river : and request your sire to lend you mules and a coach ; for your wardrobe is heavy, and the place where we must wash is distant ; and, besides, it fits not a great princess like you to go so far on foot." So saying, she went away, and Nausicaa awoke full of pleasing thoughts of her marriage, which the dream had told her was not far distant ; and as soon as it was dawn she arose and dressed herself, and went to find her parent. The queen, her mother, was already up, and seated among her maids, spinning at her wheel, as the fashion was in those primitive times, when great ladies did not disdain housewifery ; and the kii:ig, her father, was preparing to go abroad at that early hour to the council with his grave senate. " My father," she said, " will you not order mules and a coach to be got ready, that I may go and wash, I and my maids, at the cisterns that stand without the city'?" ''What washing does my daughter speak of?" said Alcinous. Mine and my brothers' garments," she replied, **that have contracted soil by this time with lying by so long in the wardrobe. Five sons have you, that are my brothers : two of them are married, and three are bachelors. These last it concerns to have their garments neat and unsoiled : it may ad- vance their fortunes in marriage. And who but me, their sister, should have a care of these things ? You yourself, my father, have need of the whitest apparel, when you go, as now, to the council." She used this plea, modestly dissembhng her care of her own nuptials to her father ; who was not dis- pleased at this instance of his daughter's discretion : for a seasonable care about marriage may be per- THE ADVENTUBES OF ULYSSES. 243 mitted to a young maiden, provided it be accom- panied with modesty, and dutiful submission to her parents in the choice of her future husband. And there was no fear of Nausicaa's choosing wrongly or improperly ; for she was as wise as she was beauti- ful, and the best in all Phasacia were suitors to her for her love. So Alcinous readily gave consent that she should go, ordering mules and a coach to be prepared. And Nausicaa brought from her chamber all her vestments, and laid them up in the coach, and her mother placed bread and wine in the coach, and oil in a golden cruse, to soften the bright skin of Nausicaa and her maids when they came out of the river. Nausicaa, making her maids get up into the coach with her, lashed the mules, till they brought her to the cisterns which stood a little on the outside of the town, and were supphed with water from the river Callicoe. There her attendants unyoked the mules, took out the clothes, and steeped them in the cisterns, wash- ing them in several waters, and afterwards treading them clean with their feet ; venturing wagers who should have done soonest and cleanest, and using many pretty pastimes to beguile their labours as young maids use, while the princess looked on. When they had laid their clothes to dry, they fell to playing again ; and Nausicaa joined them in a game with the ball, which is used in that country ; which is performed by tossing the ball from hand to hand with great expedition, she who begins the pas- time singing a song. It chanced that the princess, whose turn it became to toss the ball, sent it so far from its mark, that it fell beyond into one of the cisterns of the river ; at which the whole company, in merry consternation, set up a shriek so loud that it waked the sleeping Ulysses, who was taking his rest, after his long toil, in the woods, not far dis- 244 THE ADVENTUEES OP ULYSSES, tant from the place where these young maids had come to wash. At the sound of female voices, Ulysses crept forth from his retirement ; making himself a covering with boughs and leaves as well as he could to shroud his nakedness. The sudden appearance of his weather-beaten and almost naked form so frighted the maidens, that they scudded away into the woods and were all about to hide themselves : only Minerva (who had brought about this interview, to admirable purposes, by seemingly accidental means,) put cou- rage into the breast of Nausicaa,andshe stayed where she was, and resolved to know what manner of man Ulysses was, and what was the occasion of his strange coming to them. He, not venturing (for delicacy) to approach and clasp her knees, as suppliants should, but standing far off, addressed this speech to the young princess : " Before I presume rudely to press my petition, I should first ask whether I am addressing a mortal woman, or one of the goddesses. If a goddess, you seem to me to be likest to Diana, the chaste huntress, the daughter of Jove. Like hers are your lineaments, your stature, your features, and air divine." She making answer that she was no goddess, but a mortal maid, he continued : — *' If a woman, thrice blessed are both the authors of your birth ; thrice blessed are your brothers, who even to rapture must have joy in your perfections, to see you grown so like a young tree, and so graceful. But most blessed of all that breathe is he that has the gift to engage your young neck in the yoke of marriage. I never saw that man that was worthy of you. I never s.aw man or woman that at all parts equalled you. Lately at Delos (where I touched) I saw a young palm which grew beside Apollo's temple ; it exceeded all the trees which I ever beheld for straightness and beauty : I can THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 245 compare you only to that. A stupor past adraira- tion strikes me, joined with fear, which keeps me back from approaching you to embrace your knees. Nor is it strange ; for one of freshest and firmest spirit would falter, approaching near to so bright an object ; but I am one whom a cruel habit of cala- mity has prepared to receive strong impress^'ons. Twenty days the unrelenting seas have tossed me up and down, coming from Ogygia ; and at length cast me shipwrecked last night upon your coast. I have seen no man or woman since I landed but yourself. All that I crave is clothes, which you may spare me ; and to be shown the way to some neighbouring town. The gods, who have care of strangers, will requite you for these courtesies." She, admiring to hear such complimentary words proceed out of the mouth of one whose outside looked so rough and uncompromising, made answer : *• Stranger, I discern neither sloth nor folly in you ; and yet I see that you are poor and wretched : from which I gather that neither wisdom nor industry can secure felicity ; only Jove bestows it upon whom- soever he pleases. He, perhaps, has reduced you to this plight. However, since your wanderings have brought you so near to our city, it lies in our duty to supply your wants. Clothes, and what else a human hand should give to one so suppliant, and so tamed with calamity, you shall not want. We will show you our city, and tell you the name of our people. This is the land of the Phasacians, of which my father, Alcinous, is king." Then calling her attendants, who had dispersed on the first sight of Ulysses, she rebuked them for their fear, and said, '* This man is no Cyclop, nor monster of sea or land, that you should fear him : but he seems manly, staid, and discreet, and though decayed in his outward appearance, yet he has the mind's riches, wit and fortitude, in abundance. 246 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. Show him the cisterns where he may wash him from the sea-weeds and foam that hang about him, and let him have garments that fit him out of those which we have brought with us to the cisterns." Ulysses, retiring a little out of sight, cleansed him in the cisterns from the soil and imiDurities with which the rocks and waves had covered all his body ; and, clothing himself with befitting raiment which the princess's attendants had given him, he pre- sented himself in more worthy shape to Nausicaa. She admired to see what a comely personage he was, now he was dressed in all parts : she thought him some king or hero, and secretly wished tbat the gods would be pleased to give her such a husband. Then causing her attendants to yoke her mules, and lay up in the coach the vestments, which the sun's heat had sufficiently dried, she ascended with her maids, and di'ove off to the palace : bidding Ulysses, as she departed, to keep an eye upon the coach, and to follow it on foot at some distance; which she did, because, if she had suffered him to have ridden in the coach with her, it might have subjected her to some misconstructions of the com- mon people, who are always ready to vilify and censure their betters, and to suspect that charity is not always pure charity, but tha.t love or some sinister intention lies hid under its disguise. So discreet and attentive to appearance in all her actions was this admirable princess. Ulysses, as he entered the city, wondered to see its magnificence ; its markets, buildings, temples ; its walls and rampires ; its trade and resort of men ; its harbours for shipping, which is the strength of the Phseacian state. But when he approached the palace, and beheld its riches, the proportion of its architecture, its avenues, gardens, statues, fountains, he stood rapt in admiration, and almost forgot his THE ADVENTXJEES OF ULYSSES. 247 m^n condition in surveying the flourishing estates of others : but, recollecting himself, he passed on boldly into the inner apartment, where the king and queen were sitting at dinner with their peers ; Nau- sicaa having prepared them for his approach. To them humbly kneeUng, he made it his request, that, since fortune had cast him naked upon their shores, they would take him into their protection, and grant him a conveyance by one of the ships, of which their great Phaeacian state had such good store, to carry him to his own country. Having delivered his request, to grace it with more humility, he went and sat himself down upon the hearth among the ashes, as the custom was in those days when any would make a petition to the throne. He seemed a petitioner of so great state, and of so superior a deportment, that Alcinous himself arose to do him honour, and, causing him to leave that abject station which he had assumed, placed him next to his throne upon a chair of state ; and thus he spake to his peers : — ** Lords and councillors of Phaeacia, ye see this man, who he is we know not, that is come to us in the guise of a petitioner. He seems no mean one ; but, whoever he is, it is fit, since the gods have cast him upon our protection, that we grant him the rights of hospitality while he stays with us ; and, at his departure, a ship well manned, to convey so worthy a personage as he seems to be, in a manner suitable to his rank, to his own country." This counsel the peers with one consent approved ; and, wine and meat being set before Ulysses, he ate and drank, and gave the gods thanks who had stirred up the royal bounty of Alcinous to aid him in that extremity. But not as yet did he reveal to the king and queen who he was, or whence he had come: only in brief terms he related his being cast upon their shores, his sleep in the woods, and his meeting ^48 THE ADYENTUEES OP ULYSSES. witli the Princess Naiisicaa ; whose generositr, mingled with discretion, filled her parents with delight, as Ulysses in eloquent phrases adorned and commended her virtues. But Alcinous, humanely considering that the troubles which his guest had undergone required rest, as well as refreshment by food, dismissed him early in the evening to his chamber ; where, in a magnificent apartment, Ulys- ses found a smoother bed, but not a sounder repose, than he had enjoyed the night before, sleeping upon leaves which he had scraped together in his necessity. CHAPTER VII. THE SONGS OF DEMODOCUS. — THE CONVOT HOME. — THE MAEINEBS TEANSFORMED TO STONE. — THE YOUNG SHEPHERD. When it was daylight, Alcinous caused it to be pro- claimed by the heralds about the town, that there was come to the palace a stranger, shipwrecked on their coast, that in mien and person resembled a god ; and inviting all the chief jDeople of the city to come and do honour to the stranger. The palace was quickly filled with guests, old and young ; for whose cheer, and to grace Ulysses more, Alcinous made a kingly feast, with banquetings and music. Then Ulysses being seated at a table next the king and queen, in all men's view, after they had feasted, Alcinous ordered Demodocus, the court- singer, to be called to sing some songs of the deeds of heroes, to charm the ear of his guest. Demodocus came, and reached his harp, where it hung between two pillars of silver ; and then the blind singer, to whom, in recompense of his lost sight, the Muses had given an inward discernment, a soul and a THE ADVENTUKES OF ULYSSES. 249 voice to excite the hearts of men and gods to delight, began in grave and solemn strains to sing the glories of men highliest famed. He chose a poem, the sub- ject of which was, The stem Strife stirred up between Ulysses and great Achilles, as, at a banquet sacred to the gods, in di-eadful language they expressed their difference ; while Agamemnon sat rejoiced in soul to hear those Grecians jar; for the oracle in Pytho had told him, that the period of their wars in Troy should then be, when the Kings of Greece, anxious to arrive at the wished conclusion, should fall to strife, and contend which must end the war force or stratagem. This brave contention he so expressed to the life, in the very words which they both used m the quarrel, that it brought tears into the eyes of Ulysses at the remembrance of past passages of his life ; and he held his large purple weed before his face to conceal it. Then, craving a cup of wine, he poured it out in secret libation to the gods, who had put into the mind of Demodocus unknowingly to do him so much honour. But when the moving poet began to tell of other occurrences where Ulysses had been pre- sent, the memory of his brave followers who had been with him in all difficulties, now swallowed up and lost in the ocean, and of those kings that had fought with him at Troy, some of whom were dead, some exiles like himself ; all this forced itself so strongly upon his mind, that, forgetful where he was, he sobbed outright with passion ; which yet he re- strained, but not so cunningly but Alcinous per- ceived it, and, without taking notice of it to Ulysses, privately gave signs that Demodocus should cease from his singing. Next followed dancing in the Phaeacian fashion, when they would show respect to their guests ; which was succeeded by trials of skill, games of strength, running, racing, hurhng the quoit, mock fights. 250 THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. hurling the javelin, shooting with the bow ; in some of which games, Ulysses, modestly challenging his entertainers, performed such feats of strength and prowess as gave the admiring Phseacians fresh rea- son to imagine that he was either some god, or hero of the race of the gods. These solemn shows and pageants, in honour of his guest. King Alcinous continued for the space of many days, as if he could never be weary of show- ing courtesies to so worthy a stranger. In all this time he never asked him his name, nor sought to know more of him than Ulysses of his own accord dis- closed ; till on a day as they were seated feasting, after the feast was ended, Demodocus, being called as was the custom, to sing some grave matter, sang how Ulysses, on that night when Troy was fired, made dreadful proof of his valour, maintaining singly a combat against the whole household of Deiphobus ; to which the divine expresser gave both act and passion, and breathed such a fire into Ulysses's deeds, that it inspired old death with life in the lively expressing of slaughters, and rendered life 80 sweet and passionate in the hearers, that all who heard felt it fleet from them in the narration : which made Ulysses even pity his own slaughterous deeds, and feel touches of remorse, to see how song can revive a dead man from the grave, yet no way can it defend a hving man from death ; and in imagina- tion he underwent some part of death's horrors, and felt in his hving body a taste of those dying panga which he had dealt to others, that, with the strong conceit, tears (the true interpreters of unutterable emotion) stood in his eyes. Which King Alcinous noting, and that this was now the second time that he had perceived him to be moved at the mention of events touching the Trojan wars, he took occasion to ask whether his guest had lost any friend or kinsman at Troy, that THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 251 Demodocus's singing had brought into his mind. Then Ulysses, drying his tears with his cloak, and observing that the eyes of all the company were upon him, desirous to give them satisfaction in what he could, and thinking this a fit time to reveal his true name and destination, spake as follows : " The courtesies which ye all have shown me, and in particular yourself and princely daughter, King Alcinous ! demand from me that I should no longer keep you in ignorance of what or who I am ; for to reserve any secret from you, who have with such openness of friendship embraced my love, would argue either a pusillanimous or an ungrateful mind in me. Know, then, that I am that Ulysses, of whom I perceive ye have heard something ; who heretofore have filled the world with the renown of my policies. I am he, by whose counsels, if Fame is to be beheved at all, more than by the united valour of all the Grecians, Troy fell. I am that un- happy man whom the heavens and angry gods have conspired to keep an exile on the seas, wandering to seek my home, which still flies from me. The land which I am in quest of is Ithaca ; in the ports of which some ship belonging to your navigation- famed Phaeacian state may haply at some time have found a refuge from tempests. If ever you have experienced such kindness, requite it now, by granting to me, who am the king of that land, a passport to that land." Admiration seized all the court of Alcinous to behold in their presence one of the number of those heroes who fought at Troy ; whose divme story had been made known to them by songs and poems, but of the truth of which they had little known ; or rather they had hitherto accounted those heroic exploits as fictions and exaggerations of poets : but, having seen and made proof of the real Ulysses, they began to take those supposed inventions to be real verities, 252 THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. and the tale of Troy to be as true as it was de- lightful. Then King Alcinous made answer: "Thrice for-- tunate ought we to esteem our lot in having seen- and conversed with a man of whom report hath spoken so loudly, hut, as it seems, nothing beyond the truth. Though we could desire no fehcity greater than to have you always among us, renowned Ulysses, yet, your desire having been expressed so often and so deeply to return home, we can deny you nothing, though to our own loss. Our kingdom of Phaeacia, as you know, is chiefly rich in shipping. In all parts of the world, where there are navigable seas, or where ships can pass, our vessels will be found. You cannot name a coast to which they do 'not resort. Every rock and every quicksand is known to them, that lurks in the vast deep. They pass a bird in flight ; and with such unerring certainty they make to their destination, that some have said that they have no need of pilot or rudder, but that they move instinctively, self-directed, and know the minds of their voyagers. Thus much, that you may not fear to trust yourself in one of our Phaeacian ships. To-morrow, if you please, you shall launch forth. To-day spend with us in feasting, who never can do enough when the gods send such visitors." Ulysses acknowledged King Alcinous's bounty ; and, while these two royal personages stood inter- changing courteous expressions, the heart of the Princess Nausicaa was overcome. She had been gazing attentively upon her father's guest, as he delivered his speech : but, when he came to that part where he declared himself to be Ulysses, she blessed herself, and her fortune, that in relieving a poor shipwrecked mariner, as he seemed no better, she had conferred a kindness on so divine a hero as he proved ; and, scarce waiting till her father had done speaking, with a cheerful countenance she THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. 253 addressed Ulysses, bidding him be cheerful, and when he returned home, as by her father's means she trusted he would shortly, sometimes to re- member to whom he owed his life, and who met him in the woods by the river Callicoe. "Fair flower of Phseacia," he replied, " so may all the gods bless me with the strife of joys in that desired day, whenever I shall see it, as I shall always acknowledge to be indebted to your fair hand for the gift of life which I enjoy, and all the bless- ings which shall follow upon my home -return. The gods give thee, Nausicaa, a princely husband ; and from you two may blessings spring to the state." So prayed Ulysses, his heart overflowing with admira- tion and grateful recollections of King Alcinous's daughter. Then, at the king's request, he gave them a brief relation of all the adventures that had befallen him since he launched forth from Troy ; during which the Princess Nausicaa took great delight (as ladies are commonly taken with travellers' stories of this kind) to hear of the monster Poljrphemus, of the men that devour each other in Leestrygonia, of the enchantress Circe, of Scylla, and the rest ; to which she listened with a breathless attention, letting fall a shower of tears from her fair eyes, every now and then, when Ulysses told of some more than usual distressful passage in his travels : and all the rest of his auditors, if they had before entertained a high respect for their guest, now felt their veneration in- creased tenfold, when they learned from his own mouth what perils, what sufferance, what endurance of evils beyond man's strength to support, this much- sustaining, almost heavenly man, by the greatness of his mind and by his invincible courage, had struggled through. The night was far spent before Ulysses had ended his narrative : and with wishful glances he cast his 254 THB ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. eyes towards the eastern parts, which the sun had begun to flecker with his first red ; for, on the morrow, Alcinous had promised that a bark should be in readiness to convey him to Ithaca. In the morning a vessel well manned and ap- pointed was waiting for him ; into which the king and queen heaped presents of gold and silver, massy- plate, apparel, armour, and whatsoever things of cost or rarity they judged would be most acceptable to their guest : and, the sails being set, Ulysses, embarking with expressions of regret, took his leave of his royal entertainers, of the fair princess (who had been his first friend), and of the peers of PhaB- acia ; who crowding down to the beach to have the last sight of their illustrious visitant, beheld the gallant ship with aU her canvass spread, bounding and curvetting over the waves like a horse proud of his rider, or as if she knew that in her capacious womb's rich freightage she bore Ulysses. He whose life past had been a series of disquiets, in seas among rude waves, in battles amongst ruder foes, now slept securely, forgetting all ; his eyelids bound in such deep sleep as only yielded to death : and, when they reached the nearest Ithacan port by the next morning, he was still asleep. The mariners, not willing to awake him, landed him softly, and laid him in a cave at the foot of an olive-tree, which made a shady recess in that narrow harbour, the haunt of almost none but the sea-nymphs, which are called Naiads ; few ships before this Phaeacian vessel having put into that haven, by reason of the diffi- culty and narrowness of the entrance. Here leaving him asleep, and disposing in safe places near him the presents with which King Alcinous had dis- missed him, they departed for Phaeacia, where however these wretched mariners never again set foot : for just as they arrived, and thought to salute their country earth, — in sight of their city's turrets, and in open THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. 255 view of tlieir friends, who from the harhour with shouts greeted their return, — ^their vessel and all the mariners which were in her were turned to stone, and stood transformed and fixed in sight of the whole Phaeacian city ; where it yet stands, by Nep- tune's vindictive wrath, who resented thus highly the contempt which those Phseacians had shown in convoying home a man whom the god had destined to destruction. Whence it comes to pass, that the Phaeacians at this day will not at any price be induced to lend their ships to strangers, or to become the carriers for other nations, so highly do they still dread the displeasure of their sea-god, while they see that terrible monument ever in sight. When Ulysses awoke, (which was not till some time after the mariners had departed,) he did not at first know his country again ; either because long absence had made it strange, or because Minerva (which was more likely) had cast a cloud about his eyes, that he should have greater pleasure hereafter in discovering his mistake : so, like a man sud- denly awaking in some desert isle, to which his sea- mates have transported him in his sleep, he looked around, and, discerning no known objects, he cast his hands to heaven for pity, and complained on those ruthless men who had beguDed lum with a promise of conveying him home to his country, and perfidiously left him to perish in an unknown land. But then the rich presents of gold and silver given him by Alcinous, which he saw carefully laid up in secure places near him, staggered him ; which seemed not hke the act of wrongful or unjust men, such as turn pirates for gain, or land helpless pas- sengers in remote coasts to possess themselves of then- goods. While he remained in this suspense, there came up to him a young shepherd, clad in the finer sort of apparel, such as kings' sons wore in those days when 256 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES, princes did not disdain to tend sheep ; who accost- ing him, was saluted again by Ulysses, who asked him what country that was on which he had been just landed, and whether it were part of a continent or an island. The young shepherd made show of wonder to hear any one ask the name of that land ; as country people are apt to esteem those for mainly ignorant and barbarous who do not know the names of places which are familiar to them, though perhaps they who ask have had no opportunities of knowing, and may have come from far countries. *' I had thought," said he, " that all people knew our land. It is rocky and barren, to be sure ; but well enough : it feeds a goat or an ox well ; it is not wanting either in wine or in wheat ; it has good springs of water, some fair rivers, and wood enough, as you may see. It is called Ithaca." Ulysses was joyed enough to find himself in his own country : but so prudently he carried his joy, that, dissembling his true name and quality, he pretended to the shepherd that he was only some foreigner who by stress of weather had put into that port ; and framed on the sudden a story to make it plausible how he had come from Crete in a ship of Phaeacia : when the young shepherd, laughing, and taking Ulysses's hand in both his, said to him, '* He must be cunning, I find, who thinks to overreach you. What ! cannot you quit your wiles and your subtleties, now that you are in a state of security ? Must the first word with which you salute your native earth be an untruth ? and think you that you are unknown?" Ulysses looked again ; and he saw, not a shep- herd, but a beautiful woman, whom he immediately knew to be the goddess Minerva, that in the wars of Troy had frequently vouchsafed her sight to him ; and had been with him since in perils, saving him unseen. THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 257 ** Let not my ignorance offend thee, great Mi- nerva," he cried, " or move thy displeasure, that in that shape I iinew thee not ; since the skill of dis- cerning deities is not attainable by wit or study, but hard to be hit by the wisest of mortals. To know thee truly, through all thy changes, is only given to those whom thoa art pleased to grace. To all men thou takest all hkenesses. All men in their wits think that they know thee, and that they have thee. Thou art Wisdom itself. But a semblance of thee; which is false wisdom, often is taken for thee ; so thy counterfeit view appears to many, but thy true presence to few : those are they, which, loving thee above all, are inspired with light from thee to know thee. But this I surely know, that, all the time the sons of Greece waged war against Troy, I was sundry times graced with thy appear- ance ; but, since, I have never been able to set eyes upon thee till now, but have wandered at my own discretion, to myself a blind guide, erring up and down the world, wanting thee." Then Minerva cleared his eyes, and he knew the ground on which he stood to be Ithaca, and that cave to be the same which the people of Ithaca had in former times made sacred to the sea-nymphs, and where he himself had done sacrifices to them a thou- sand times ; and full in his view stood Mount Nerytus, with all his woods : so that now he knew for a certainty that he was arrived in his own coun- try ; and, with the delight which he felt, he could not forbear stooping down, and kissing the soil. 258 THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES, CHAPTEE VIII. THH CHANGE FEOM A KING TO A BEGGAR. — EUMaiUS THE HEBDS- MAN, AND TELEMACHUS. Not long did Minerva suffer him to indulge vain transports ; but, briefly recounting to him the events which had taken place in Ithaca during his absence, she showed him that his way to his wife and throne did not lie so open, but that, before he could be re-instated in the secure possession of them, he must encounter many difficulties. His palace, wanting its king, was become the resort of insolent and imperious men, the chief nobility of Ithaca and of the neighbouriDg isles, who, in the confidence of Ulysses being dead, came as suitors to Penelope. The queen (it was true) continued single, but was little better than a state prisoner in the power of these men, who, under a pretence of waiting her decision, occupied the king's house, rather as owners than guests, lording and domineering at their plea- sure, profaning the palace, and wasting the royal substance with their feasts and mad riots. More- over, the goddess told him, how, fearing the at- tempts of these lawless men upon the person of his young son Telemachus, she herself had put it into the heart of the prince to go and seek his father in far countries ; how, in the shape of Mentor, she had borne him company in his long search ; which though failing, as she meant it should fail, in its first object, had yet had this effect, — that through hardships he had learned endurance ; through ex- perience he had gathered wisdom; and, wherever his footsteps had been, he had left such memorials THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 259 of his worth, that the fame of Ulysses's son was already hlown throughout the world ; that it was now not many days since Telemachus had arrived in the island, to the great joy of the queen, his mother, who had thought him dead, by reason of his long absence, and had begun to mourn for him with a giief equal to that which she endured for Ulysses ; the goddess herself having so ordered the course of his adventures, that the time of his return should correspond with the re- turn of Ulysses, that they might together concert measures how to repress the power and insolence of those wicked suitors. This the goddess told him ; but of the particulars of his son's adventures, of his having been detained in the Delightful Island, which his father had so lately left, of Calypso and her nymphs, and the many strange occurrences which may be read with profit and delight in the history of the prince's adventures, she forbore to tell him as yet, judging that he would hear them with greater pleasure from the lips of his son, when he should have him in an hour of stillness and safety, when their work should be done, and none of their enemies left alive to trouble them. Then they sat down, the goddess and Ulysses, at the foot of a wild ohve-tree, consulting how they might with safety bring about his restoration. And when Ulysses revolved in his mind how that his enemies were a multitude, and he single, he began to despond ; and he said, '' I shall die an ill death like Agamemnon : in the threshold of my own house I shall perish, hke that unfortunate monarch, slain by some one of my wife's suitors." But then, again, caUing to mind his ancient courage, he secretly wished that Minerva would but breathe such a spirit into his bosom as she inflamed him with in the hour of Troy's destruction, that he might encounter with three hundred of those impudent suitors at once, 260 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. and strew the pavements of his beautiful palace with their blood and brains. And Minerva knew his thoughts ; and she said, *' I will be strongly with thee, if thou fail not to do thy part. And for a sign between us that I will perform my promise, and for a token on thy part of obedience, I must change thee, that thy person may not be known of men." Then Ulysses bowed his head to receive the divine impression ; and Minerva, by her great power, changed his person so that it might not be known. She changed him to appearance into a very old man, yet such a one as by his limbs and gait seemed to have been some considerable person in his time, and to retain yet some remains of his once pro- digious strength. Also, instead of those rich robes in which King Alcinous had clothed him, she threw over his limbs such old and tattered rags as wander- ing beggars usually wear. A staff supported his steps, and a scrip hung to his back, such as travel- ling mendicants use to hold the scraps which are given to them at rich men's doors. So from a king he became a beggar, as wise Tiresias had predicted to him in the shades. To complete his humiliation, and to prove his obedience by suffering, she next directed him in this beggarly attire to go and present himself to his old herdsman, Eumseus, who had the care of his swine and his cattle, and had been a faithful steward to him all the time of his absence. Then, strictly charging Ulysses that he should reveal himself to no man but to his own son, whom she would send to him when she saw occasion, the goddess went her way. The transformed Ulysses bent his course to the cottago of the herdsman ; and, entering in at the front court, the dogs, of which Eumaeus kept many fierce ones for the protection of the cattle, flew with THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 261 open mouths upon him, as those ignoble animals have oftentimes an antipathy to the sight of any- thing like a beggar ; and would have rent him in pieces with their teeth, if Ulysses had not had the prudence to let fall his staff, which had chiefly pro- provoked their fury, and to sit down in a care- less fashion upon the ground. But, for all that, some serious hurt had certainly been done to him, so raging were the dogs, had not the herdsman, whom the barking of the dogs had fetched out of the house, with shouting and with throwing of stones repressed them. He said, when he saw Ulysses, ** Old father, how near you were to being torn in pieces by these rude dogs ! I should never have forgiven myself, if, through neglect of mine, any hurt had happened to you. But Heaven has given me so many cares to my portion, that I might well be excused for not attending to every thing ; while here I lie grieving and mourning for the absence of that majesty which once ruled here, and am forced to fatten his swine and his cattle to feed evil men, who hate him, and who wish his death; when he perhaps strays up and down the world, and has not where- with to appease hunger, if indeed he yet lives (which is a question,) and enjoys the cheerful light of the sun." This he said, little thinking that he of whom he spoke now stood before him, and that in that un- couth disguise and beggarly obscurity was present the hidden majesty of Ulysses. Then he invited his guest into the house, and set meat and drink before him ; and Ulysses said, *' May Jove and all the other gods requite you for the kind speeches and hospitable usage which you have shown me !" Eumaeus made answer, *' My poor guest, if one in much worse plight than yourself had arrived here, it were a shame to such scanty means as I 262 THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. have, if I had let him depart without entertaining him to the best of my abihty. Poor men, and such as have no houses of their own, are by Jove himself recommended to our care. But the cheer which we that are servants to other men have to bestow is but sorry at most ; yet freely and lovingly I give it to you. Indeed, there once ruled here a man, whose return the gods have set their faces against, who, if he had been suffered to reign in peace and grow old among us, would have been kind to me and mine. But he is gone ; and, for his sake, would to God that the whole posterity of Helen might perish with her, since in her quarrel so many worthies have perished I But such as your fare is, eat it, and be welcome ; such lean beasts as are food for poor herdsmen. The fattest go to feed the voracious stomachs of the queen's suitors. Shame on their un worthiness ! There is no day in which two or three of the noblest of the herd are not slain to sup- port their feasts and their surfeits." Ulysses gave good ear to his words ; and, as he ate his meat, he even tore it and rent it with his teeth, for mere vexation that his fat cattle should be slain to glut the appetites of those godless suitors. And he said, *^ What chief or what ruler is this that thou commendest so highly, and sayest that he pe- rished at Troy ? I am but a stranger in these parts. It may be I have heard of some such in my long travels." Eumaeus answered, *'01d father, never any one, of all the strangers that have come to our coast with news of Ulysses being alive, could gain credit with the queen or her son yet. These travellers, to get raiment or a meal, will not stick to invent a lie. Truth is not the commodity they deal in. Never did the queen get any thing of them but lies. She receives all that come, graciously ; hears their stories, inquires all she can ; but all ends in tears and dis- THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 2G3 Batisfaction. But in God's name, old father, if you have got a tale, make the most on't ; it may gain you a cloak or a coat from somebody to keep you warm : but, for him who is the subject of it, dogs and vultures long since have torn him limb from limb, or some great fish at sea has devoured him, or he lieth with no better monument upon his bones than the sea sand. But for me, past all the race of men, were tears created ; for I never shall find so kind a royal master more : not if my father or my mother could come again, and visit me from the tomb, would my eyes be so blessed as they would be with the sight of him again, coming as from the dead. In his last rest my soul shall love him. He is not here, nor do I name him as a flatterer, but because I am thankful for his love and care which he had to me, a poor man ; and, if I knew surely that he were past all shores that the sun shines upon, I would invoke him as a deified thing." For this saying of Eumaeus the tears stood in Ulysses's eyes ; and he said, *' My friend, to say and to afi&rm positively that he cannot be alive, is to give too much license to incredulity. For, not to speak at random, but with as much solemnity as an oath comes to, I say to you, that Ulysses shall return ; and whenever that day shall be, then shall you give to me a cloak and a coat ; but till then I will not receive so much as a thread of a garment, but rather go naked ; for no less than the gates of hell do I hate that man whom poverty can force to tell an untruth. Be Jove, then, witness to my words, that this very year, nay, ere this month be fully ended, your eyes shall behold Ulysses dealing vengeance in his own palace upon the wrongers of his wife and his son.' To give the better credence to his words, he amused Eumasus with a forged story of his life ; feigning of himself that he was a Cretan born, and one that went with Idomeneus to the wars of Troy. 264 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. Also he said that he knew Ulysses, and related various passages which he alleged to have happened betwixt Ulysses and himself ; which were either true in the main, as having really happened between Ulysses and some other person, or were so like to truth, as corresponding with the known character and actions of Ulysses, that Eumaeus's incredulity was not a little shaken. Among other things, he asserted that he had lately been entertained in the court of Thesprotia, where the king's son of the country had told him that Ulysses had been there but just before him, and was gone upon a voyage to the oracle of Jove in Dodona, whence he would shortly return, and a ship would be ready by the bounty of the Thesprotians to convey him straight to Ithaca. " And, in token that what I tell you is true," said Ulysses, '* if your king come not within the period which I have named, you shall have leave to give orders to your servants to take my old carcass, and throw it headlong from some steep rock into the sea, that poor men, taking example by me, may fear to lie." But Eumaeus made answer, that that would be small satisfaction or pleasure to him. So, while they sat discoursing in this manner, supper was served in ; and the servants of the herds- man, who had been out all day in the fields, came in to supper, and took their seats at the fire ; for the night was bitter and frosty. After supper, Ulysses, who had well eaten and drunken, and was refreshed with the herdsman's good cheer, was resolved to try whether his host's hospitality would extend to lending him a good warm mantle or rug to cover him in the night season ; and framing an artful tale for the purpose, and in a merry mood filling a cup of Greek wine, he thus began : — " I will tell you a story of your king Ulysses and myself. If there is ever a time when a man may have leave to teU his own stories, it is when he has THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 2G5 drunken a little too much. Strong liquor diiveth the fool, and moves even the heart of the wise, — moves and impels him to sing and to dance, and break forth in pleasant laughter, and perchance to prefer a speech too, which were better kept in. When the heart is open, the tongue will be stirring. But you shall hear. We led our powers to ambush once under the walls of Troy." The herdsmen crowded about him, eager to hear any thing which related to their king Ulysses and the wars of Troy ; and thus he went on : — ** I remember Ulysses and Menelaus had the di- rection of that enterprise ; and they were pleased to join me with them in the command. I was at that time in some repute among men ; though fortune has played me a trick since, as you may perceive. But I was somebody in those times, and could do something. Be that as it may, a bitter freezing night it was — such a night as this : the air cut like steel, and the sleet gathered on our shields like crystal. There were some twenty of us, that lay close couched down among the reeds and bulrushes that grew in the moat that goes round the city. The rest of us made tolerable shift ; for every man had been careful to bring with him a good cloak or mantle to wrap over his armour and keep himself warm : but I, as it chanced, had left my cloak be- hind me, as not expecting that the night would prove so cool ; or rather, I believe, because I had at that time a brave suit of new armour on, which, being a soldier, and having some of the soldier's vice about me — vanity — I was not willing should be hidden under a cloak. But 1 paid for my indiscretion with my sufferings ; for with the inclement night, and the wet of the ditch in which we lay, I was well- nigh frozen to death : and when I could endure no longer, I jogged Ulysses, who was next to me, and had a nimble ear, and made known my case to him, 266 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. assuring him that I must inevitably perish. He answered, in a low whisper, ' Hush ! lest any Greek should hear you, and take notice of your softness.' Not a word more he said, but showed as if he had no pity for the plight I was in. But he was as con- siderate as he was brave ; and even then, as he lay with his head reposing upon his hand, he was medi- tating how to relieve me, without exposing my weak- ness to the soldiers. At last, raising up his head, he made as if he had been asleep, and said, ' Friends, I have been warned in a dream to send to the fleet of King Agamemnon for a supply, to recruit our numbers ; for we are not sufficient for his enter- prise :' and, they believing him, one Thoas was de- spatched on that errand, who departing, for more speed, as Ulysses had foreseen, left his upper gar- ment behind him, a good warm mantle, to which I succeeded, and, by the help of it, got through the night with credit. This shift Ulysses made for one in need ; and would to Heaven that I had now that strength in my limbs which made me in those days to be accounted fit to be a leader under Ulysses ! I should not then want the loan of a cloak or a mantle to wrap about me, and shield my old limbs from the night- air." The tale pleased the herdsmen ; and Eumseus, who more than all the rest was gratified to hear tales of Ulysses, true or false, said, that for his story he deserved a mantle and a night's lodging, which he should have ; and he spread for him a bed of goat and sheep skins by the fire : and the seem- ing beggar, who was indeed the true Ulysses, lay down and slept under that poor roof, in that abject disguise to which the will of Minerva had subjected him. When morning was come, Ulysses made offer to depart, as if he were not willing to burthen his host's hospitality any longer, but said that he would go THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. 2G7 and try the humanity of the town's folk, if any there would bestow upon him a bit of bread or a cup of drink. Perhaps the queen's suitors (he said) out of their full feasts would bestow a scrap on him : for he could wait at table, if need were, and play the nimble serving-man ; he could fetch wood (he said) or build a fire, prepare roast meat or boiled, mix the wine with water, or do any of those offices which recommend poor men like him to services in great men's houses. ** Alas ! poor guest,'* said Eumseus, " you know not what you speak. What should so poor and old a man as you do at the suitors' tables ? Their light minds are not given to such grave servitors. They must have youths, richly tricked out in flowing vests, with curled hair, like so many of Jove's cup-bearers, to fill out the wine to them as they sit at table, and to shift their trenchers. Their gorged insolence would but despise and make a mock at thy age. Stay here. Perhaps the queen of Telemachus, hear- ing of thy arrival, may send to thee of their bounty." As he spake these words, the steps of one crossing the front court were heard, and a noise of the dogs fawning and leaping about as for joy : by which token Eumseus guessed that it was the prince, who, hearing of a traveller being arrived at Eumaeus's cottage that brought tidings of his father, was come to search the truth ; and Eumaeus said, " It is the tread of Telemachus, the son of King Ulysses.'* Before he could well speak the words, the prince was at the door ; whom Ulysses rising to receive, Telemachus would not suffer that so aged a man as he appeared should rise to do respect to him ; but he courteously and reverently took him by the hand, and inclined his head to him, as if he had surely known that it was his father indeed ; but Ulysses covered his eyes with his hands, that he might not show the tears which stood in them. And Tele- 2C8 THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. maclius said, ** Is this the man who can tell us tidings of the king, my father ?" " He brags himself to be a Cretan born," said Eumaeus, '' and that he has been a soldier and a traveller ; but whether he speak the truth or not, he alone can tell. But whatsoever he has been, what he is now is apparent. Such as he appears, I give him to you ; do what you will with him : his boast at present is that he is at the very best a sup- plicant." *'Be he what he may," said Telemachus, '*I ac- cept him at your hands. But where I should bestow him I know not, seeing that, in the palace, his age would not exempt him from the scorn and contempt which my mother's suitors in their light minds would be sure to fling upon him : a mercy if he escaped without blows ; for they are a company of evil men, whose profession is wrongs and violence." Ulysses answered, " Since it is free for any man to speak in presence of your greatness, I must say that my heart puts on a wolfish inchnation to tear and to devour, hearing your speech, that these suitors should with such injustice rage, where you should have the rule solely. What should the cause be ? Do you wiKuUy give way to their ill manners ? or has your government been such as has procured ill-will" towards you from your people ? or do you mistrust your kinsfolk and friends in such sort, as, without trial, to decline their aid ? A man's kindred are they that he might trust to when extremities run high." Telemachus replied, *' The kindred of Ulysses are few. I have no brothers to assist me in the strife ; but the suitors are powerful in kindred and friends. The house of old Arcesius has had this fate from the heavens, that from old it still has been supplied with single heirs. To Arcesius, Laertes only was born ; from Laertes descended only Ulysses ; from Ulysses, THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 209 I alone have sprung, wliom lie left so young, that from me never comfort arose to him. But the end of all rests in the hands of the gods." Then, Eumaeus departing to see to some necessary- business of his herds, Minerva took a woman's shape, and stood in the entry of the door, and was seen by Ulysses : but by his son she was not seen ; for the presence of the gods is invisible save to those to whom they will to reveal themselves. Nevertheless, the dogs which were about the door saw the goddess, and durst not bark, but went crouching, and licldng the dust for fear. And, giving signs to Ulysses that the time was now come in which he should make himself known to his son, by her great power she changed back his shape into the same which it was before she transformed him ; and Telemachus, who saw the change, but nothing of the manner by which it was effected, (only he saw the appearance of a king in the vigour of his ago where but just now he had seen a worn and decrepit beggar,) was struck with fear, and said, *' Some god has done this house this honour ; " and he turned away his eyes and would have worshipped. But his father permitted it not, but said, *'Look better at me. I am no deity : why put you upon me the reputation of godhead ? I am no more but thy father : I am even he. I am that Ulysses, by reason of whose absence thy youth has been exposed to such wrongs from injurious men." Then kissed he his son, nor could any longer refrain those tears which he had held under such mighty restraint before, though they would ever be forcing themselves out in spite of him ; but now, as if their sluices had burst, they came out like rivers, pouring upon the warm cheeks of his son. Nor yet by all these violent arguments could Telemachus be persuaded to believe that it was his father, but he said some deity had taken that shape to mock him ; for he aflarmed, that it 270 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. was not in tlie power of any man, who is sustained by mortal food, to change his shape so in a moment from age to youth : for '* but now," said he, " you were all wrinkles, and were old ; and now you look as the gods are pictured." His father replied, ''Admire, but fear not, and know me to be at all parts substantially thy father, who in the inner powers of his mind, and the un- seen workings of a father's love to thee, answers to his outward shape and pretence. There shall no other Ulysses come here. I am he, that after twenty years' absence, and suffering a world of ill, have recovered at last the sight of my country earth. It was the will of Minerva that I should be changed as you saw me. She put me thus together : she puts together or takes to pieces whom she pleases. It is in the law of her free power to do it, — some- times to show her favourites under a cloud, and poor, and again to restore to them their ornaments. The gods raise and throw down men with ease." Then Telemachus could hold out no longer: but he gave way now to a full belief and persuasion of that which for joy at first he could not credit, — that it was indeed his true and very father that stood before him ; and they embraced and mingled their tears. Then said Ulysses, *' Tell me who these suitors are, what are their numbers, and how stands the queen thy mother affected to them." " She bears them still in expectation," said Tele- machus, " which she never means to fulfil, that she will accept the hand of some one of them in second nuptials ; for she fears to displease them by an abso- lute refusal. So from day to day she lingers them on with hope, which they are content to bear the deferring of, while they have entertainment at free cost in our palace." Then said Ulysses, *' Eeckon up their numbers, THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 271 that we may know their strength and ours, if we, having none but ourselves, may hope to prevail against them." '' father ! " he replied, I have ofttimes heard of your fame for wisdom, and of the great strength of your arm ; but the venturous mind which your speeches now indicate moves me even to amazement : for in no wise can it consist with wisdom or a sound mind, that two should try their strength against a host. Nor five, nor ten, nor twice ten strong, are these suitors, but many more by much : from Dulichium came there fifty and two, they and their servants ; twice twelve crossed the seas hither from Samos ; from Zacynthus, twice ten ; of our native Ithacans, men of chief note, are twelve who aspii-e to the bed and crown of Penelope ; and all these under one strong roof, — a fearful odds against two ! My father, there is need of caution, lest the cup which your great mind so thirsts to taste of vengeance prove bitter to yourself in the drinking ; and therefore it were well that we should bethink us of some one who might assist us in this undertaking." "Thinkest thou," said his father, ''if we had Minerva and the king of the skies to be our friends, would their assistance make strong our part ? or must we look out for some further aid yet ? " " They you speak of are above the clouds," said Telemachus, *' and are sound aids indeed, as powers that not only exceed human, but bear the chief est sway among the gods themselves." Then Ulysses gave directions to his son to go and mingle with the suitors, and in no wise to impart his secret to any, — not even to the queen, his mother; but to hold himself in readiness, and to have his weapons and his good armour in pre- paration. And he charged him, that when he himself should come to the palace, as he meant to follow shortly after, and present himself in his 272 THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. beggar's likeness to the suitors, that whatever he should see which might grieve his heart, with what foul usage and contumelious language soever the suitors should receive his father, coming in that shape, though they should strike and drag him by the heels along the floor, that he should not stir nor make offer to oppose them, further than by mild words to expostulate with them, until Minerva from heaven should give the sign which should be the prelude to their destruction. And Telemachus, promising to obey his father's instructions, departed : and the shape of Ulysses fell to what it had been before ; and he became to all outward appearance a beggar, in base and beggarly attire. CHAPTEE IX. THE queen's suitors. — THE BATTLE OF THE BEGGARS. — THE ARMOUR TAKEN DOWN. — THE MEETING WITH PENELOPE. From the house of Eumaeus the seeming beggar took his way, leaning on his staff, till he reached the palace ; entering in at the hall where the suitors sat at meat. They, in the pride of their feasting, began to break their jests in mirthful manner when they saw one looking so poor and so aged approach. He, who expected no better entertainment, was nothing moved at their behaviour ; but, as became the character which he had assumed, in a suppliant posture crept by turns to every suitor, and held out his hands for some charity, with such a natural and beggar-resembling grace, that he might seem to have practised begging all his life : yet there was a fcjort of dignity in his most abject stoopings, that whoever had seen him would have said, " If it had pleased Heaven that this poor man had been born a king, he would gracefully have filled a throne." THE ADVENTUEES OF ULYSSES. 273 Some pitied him, and some gave liim alms, as tlieir present humour inclined them ; hut the greater part reviled him, and bade him begone, as one that spoiled their feast : for the presence of misery has this power -with it, — that, while it stays, it can dash and overturn the mirth even of those who feel no pity, or have no wish to relieve it ; Nature bearing this witness of herself in the hearts of the most obdurate. Now, Telemachus sat at meat with the suitors, and knew that it was the king, his father, who in that shape begged an alms ; and when his father came and presented himself before him in turn, as he had done to the suitors one by one, he gave him of his own meat which he had in his dish, and of his own cup to di'ink : and the suitors were past measure offended to see a pitiful beggar, as they esteemed him, to be so choicely regarded by the prince. Then Antinous, who was a great lord, and of chief note among the suitors, said, " Prince Tele- machus does ill to encourage these wandering beggars, who go from place to place, affirming that they have been some considerable persons in their time ; filling the ears of such as hearken to them with lies, and pressing with their bold feet into king's palaces. This is some saucy vagabond, some travel- ling Egyptian." "I see," said Ulysses, ''that a poor man should get but little at your board : scarce should he get salt from your hands, if he brought his own meat." Lord Antinous, indignant to be answered with such sharpness by a supposed beggar, snatched up a stool, with which he smote Ulysses where the neck and shoulders join. This usage moved not Ulysses : but in his great heart he meditated deep evils to come upon them all, which for a time must be kept close ; and he went and sat himself down in the doorway to eat of that which was given him ; and he said, " For life or possessions a man will fight; but for his 274 THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. belly this man smites. If a poor man has any god to take his part, my Lord Antinous shall not live to be the queen's husband." Then Antinous raged highly, and threatened to drag him by the heels, and rend his rags about his ears, if he spoke another word. But the other suitors did in no wise approve of the harsh language, nor of the blow which Antinous had dealt ; and some of them said, *' Who knows but one of the deities goes about hid under that poor disguise ? for in the likeness of poor pilgrims the gods have many times descended to try the dispositions of men whether they be humane or impious." While these things passed, Telemachus sat and observed all, but held his peace, remembering the instructions of his father. But secretly he waited for the sign which Minerva was to send from heaven. That day, there followed Ulysses to the court one of the common sort of beggars, Irus by name, — one that had received alms before-time of the suitors, and was their ordinary sport, when they were inclined as on that day) to give way to mirth, to see him eat and drink ; for he had the appetite of six men, and was of huge stature and proportions of body, yet had in him no spirit nor courage of a man. This man, thinking to curry favour with the suitors, and recommend himself especially to such a great Lord as Antinous was, began to revile and scorn Ulysses, putting foul language upon him, and fairly challenging him to fight with the fist. But Ulysses, deeming his rail- ings to be nothing more than jealousy, and that envious disposition which beggars commonly manifest to brothers in their trade, mildly besought him not to trouble him, but to enjoy that portion which the liberality of their entertainers gave him, as he did, quietly ; seeing that, of their bounty, there was suffi- cient for all. But Irus, thinking that this forbearance in Ulysses THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 275 was nothing more than a sign of fear, so much the more highly stormed and bellowed, and provoked him to fight : and by this time the quarrel had attracted the notice of the suitors, who with loud laughter and shouting egged on the dispute ; and Lord Anti- nous swore by all the gods it should be a battle, and that in that hall the strife should be determined. To this the rest of the suitors, with violent clamour, acceded ; and a circle was made for the combatants, and a fat goat was proposed as the victor's prize, as at the Olympic or the Pythian games. Then Ulysses, seeing no remedy, or being not unwilling that the suitors should behold some proof of that strength which ere long in their own persons they were to taste of, stripped himself and prepared for the com- bat. But first he demanded that he should have fair play shown him ; that none in that assembly should aid his opponent, or take part against him : for, being an old man, they might easily crush him with their strength. And Telemachus passed his word that no foul play should be shown him, but that each party should be left to his own un- assisted strength; and to this he made Antinous and the rest of the suitors swear. But when Ulysses had laid aside his garments, and was bare to the waist, all the beholders admired the goodly sight of his large shoulders, which were of such exquisite shape and whiteness, and his great and brawny bosom, and the youthful strength which seemed to remain in a man thought so old ; and they said, '* What limbs and what sinews he has ! " and coward fear seized on the mind of that great beggar, and he dropped his threats and his big words, and would have fled : but Lord Antinous stayed him, and threatened him, that, if he declined the combat, he would put him in a ship and land him on the shores where King Echetus reigned, — the roughest tyrant which at that time the world container!, and 276 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. who liad tliat antipathy to rascal beggars such as he, that, when landed on his coast, he would crop their ears and noses, and give them to the dogs to tear. So Irus, in whom fear of King Echetus prevailed above the fear of Ulysses, undressed himself to fight. But Ulysses, provoked to be engaged in so odious a strife with a fellow of his base conditions, and loathing longer to be made a spectacle to entertain the eyes of his foes, with one blow, which he struck him beneath the ear, so shattered the teeth and jaw- bone of this soon-baffled coward, that he laid him sprawling in the dust, with small stomach or ability to renew the contest. Then, raising him on his feet, he led him bleeding and sputtering to the door, and put his staff in his hand, and bade him go [use his command upon dogs and swine, but not presume himself to be lord of the guests another time, nor of the beggary! The suitors applauded in their vain minds the issue of the contest, and rioted in mirth at the expense of poor Irus, who they vowed should be forthwith embarked, and sent to King Echetus ; and they bestowed thanks on Ulysses for ridding the court of that unsavory morsel, as they called him : but in their inward souls they would not have cared if Irus had been victor, and Ulysses had taken the foil ; but it was mirth to them to see the beggars fight. In such pastimes and light entertainments the day wore away. When evening was come, the suitors betook them- selves to music and dancing ; and Ulysses leaned his back against a pillar from which certain lamps hung which gave light to the dancers, and he made show of watching the dancers ; but very different thoughts were in his head. And, as he stood near the lamps, the light fell upon his head, which was thin of hair, and bald, as an old man's. And Eury- machus, a suitor, taking occasion from some words THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. 277 wliicli were spoken before, scoffed and said, '* Now I know for a certainty that some god lurks under the poor and beggarly appearance of this man ; for, as he stands by the lamps, his sleek head throws beams around it, like as it were a glory." And another said, '* He passes his time, too, not much unlike the gods ; lazily living exempt from labour, taking offerings of men." — *' I warrant," said Eurymachus again, *' he could not raise a fence or dig a ditch for his livelihood, if a man would hire him to Avork in a garden." ** I wish," said Ulysses, **that you who speak this and myself were to be tried at any task-work ; that I had a good crooked scythe put in my hand, that was sharp and strong, and you such another, where the grass grew longest, to be up by daybreak, mowing the meadows till the sun went down, not tasting of food till we had finished ; or that we were set to plough four acres in one day of good glebe land, to see whose furrows were evenest and cleanest ; or that we might have one wrestling-bout together ; or that in our right hands a good steel- headed lance were placed, to try whose blows fell heaviest and thickest upon the adversary's head- piece. I would cause you such work, that you should have small reason to reproach me with being slack at work. But you would do well to spare me this reproach, and to save your strength till the owner of this house shall return, — till the day when Ulysses shall return ; when, returning, he shall enter upon his birthright." This was a galling speech to those suitors, to whom Ulysses's return was indeed the thing which they most dreaded ; and a sudden fear fell upon their souls, as if they were sensible of the real pre- sence of that man who did indeed stand amongst them, but not in that form as they might know him; and Eurymachus, incensed, snatched a massy cup 278 THE ADVENTUEES OP ULYSSES. which stood on a table near, and hurled it at the head of the supposed beggar, and but narrowly missed the hitting of him ; and all the suitors rose, as at once, to thrust him out of the hall, which they said his beggarly presence and his rude speeches had profaned. But Telemachus cried to them to forbear, and not to presume to lay hands upon a TVTetched man to whom he had promised protection. He asked if they were mad, to mix such abhorred uproar with his feasts. He bade them take their food and their wine ; to sit up or to go to bed at their free pleasure, so long as he should give license to that freedom : but why should they abusv^ his banquet, or let the words which a poor beggar spake have power to move their spleen so fiercely ? They bit their lips, and frowned for anger, to be checked so by a youth : nevertheless, for that time they had the grace to abstain, either for shame, or that Minerva had infused into them a terror of Ulysses's son. So that day's feast was concluded without blood- shed ; and the suitors, tired with their sports, departed severally each man to his apartment. Only Ulysses and Telemachus remained. And now Tele- machus, by his father's direction, went and brought down into the hall armour and lances from the armoury; for Ulysses said, ''On the morrow we shall have need of them." And moreover he said, " If any one shall ask you why you have taken them down, sayit is to clean them, and scour them from the rust which they have gathered since the owner of this house departed for Troy." And as Telemachus stood by the armour the lights were all gone out, and it was pitch dark, and the armour gave out glistering beams as of fire ; and he said to his father, " The pillars of the house are on fire." And his father said, " It is the gods who sit above the stars, and have power to make the night as light as day ;" and he THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. 279 look it for a good omen. And Telemachus fell to cleaning and sharpening the lances. Now, Ulysses had not seen his wife Penelope in all the time since his return ; for the queen did not care to mingle with the suitors at their banquets, but, as became one that had been Ulysses's wife, kept much in private, spinning, and doing her excellent housewiferies among her maids in the remote apart- ments of the palace. Only upon solemn days she would come down and show herself to the suitors. And Ulysses was filled with a longing desire to see his wife again, whom for twenty years he had not beheld ; and he softly stole through the known pas- sages of his beautiful house, till he came where the maids were lighting the queen thi-ough a stately gallery that led to the chamber where she slept. And when the maids saw Ulysses, they said, '* It is the beggar who came to the court to-day about whom all that uproar was stirred up in the hall : what does he here ? But Penelope gave commandment that he should be brought before her ; for she said, *' It may be that he has travelled, and has heard some- thing concerning Ulysses." Then was Ulysses right glad to hear himself named by his queen ; to find himself in no wise for- gotten, nor her great love towards him decayed in all that time that he had been away. And he stood before his queen ; and she knew him not to be Ulysses, but supposed that he had been some poor traveller. And she asked him of what country he was. He told her (as he had before told to Eumaeus) that he was a Cretan born, and, however poor and cast down he now seemed, no less a man than bro- ther to Idomeneus, who was grandson to King Minos ; and, though he now wanted bread, he had once had it in his power to feast Ulysses. Then he feigned how Ulysses, sailing for Troy, was forced by stress of weather to put his fleet in at a port of Crete, 280 THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. where for twelve days he was his guest, and enter- tained by him with all befitting guest rites ; and he described the very garments which Ulysses had on, by which Penelope knew he had seen her lord. In this manner, Ulysses told his wife many tales of himself, at most but painting, but painting so near to the life, that the feeling of that which she took in at her ears became so strong, that the kindly tears ran down her fair cheeks while she thought upon her lord, dead as she thought him, and heavily mourned the loss of him whom she missed, whom she could not find, though in very deed he stood so near her. Ulysses was moved to see her weep : but he kept his own eyes as dry as iron or horn in their hds ; putting a bridle upon his strong passion, that it should not issue to sight. Then told he how he had lately been at the court of Thresprotia, and what he had learned concerning Ulysses there, in order as he had delivered to Eumseus : and Penelope was wont to believe that there might be a possibihty of Ulysses being alive ; and she said, "I dreamed a dream this morning. Methought I had twenty household fowl which did eat wheat steeped in water from my hand ; and there came suddenly from the clouds a crook-beaked hawk, who soused on them, and killed them all, trussing their necks ; then took his flight back up to the clouds. And, in my dream, methought that I wept and made great moan for my fowls, and for the destruction which the hawk had made ; and my maids came about me to comfort me. And, in the height of my grief, the hawk came back; and, lighting upon the beam of my chamber, he said to me in a man's voice, which sounded strangely, even in my dream, to hear a hawk to speak : ' Be of good theer,' he said, ' daughter of Icarius ! for this is no dream which thou hast seen^ but that which THE ADVENTUBES OP ULYSSES. 281 shall happen to thee indeed. Those household fowl, which thou lamentest so without reason, are the suitors who devour thy substance, even as thou sawest the fowl eat from thy hand ; and the hawk is thy husband, who is coming to give death to the suitors.' And I awoke, and went to see to my fowls, if they were alive, and I found them eating wheat from their troughs, all well and safe as before my dream." Then said Ulysses, " This dream can bear no other interpretation than that which the hawk gave to it, who is your lord, and who is coming quickly to effect all that his words told you." "Your words," she said, **my old guest, are so sweet, that, would you sit and please me with your speech, my ears would never let my eyes close their spheres for very joy of your discourse : but none that is merely mortal can live without the death of sleep, so the gods who are without death themselves have ordained it, to keep the memory of our mor- tality in our minds, while we experience, that, as much as we live, we die every day ; in which con- sideration I will ascend my bed, which I have nightly watered with my tears since he that was the joy of it departed for that bad city:" she so speak- ing, because she could not bring her lips to name the name of Troy, so much hated. So for that night they parted, — Penelope to her bed, and Ulysses to his son, and to the armour and the lances in the hall ; where they sat up all night cleaning and watching by the armour. CHAPTER X. THE MADNESS FROM ABOVE. — THE BOW OV ULYSSES. — THB SliAUGHTER. — THE CONCLUSION. When daylight appeared a tumultuous concourse of the suitors again filled the hall ; and some won- 282 THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. dered, and some inquired, what meant that glitter- ing store of armour and lances which lay on heaps by the entry of the door : and to all that asked, Tele- machus made reply, that he had caused them to be taken down to cleanse them of the rust and of the stain which they had contracted by lying so long unused, even ever since his father went for Troy ; and with that answer their minds were easily satisfied. So to their feasting and vain rioting again they fell. Ulysses, by Telemachus's order, had a seat and a mess assigned in the doorway ; and be had his eye ever on the lances. And it moved gall in some of the great ones there present to have their feast still dulled with the society of that wretched beggar, as they deemed him ; and they reviled and spurned at him with their feet. Only there was one Philaetius, who had something of a better nature than the rest, that spake kindly to him, and had his age in respect. He coming up to Ulysses, took him by the hand with a kind of fear, as if touched exceedingly with imagination of his great worth, and said thus to him : " Hail, father stranger ! My brows have sweat to see the injuries which you have received ; and my eyes have broken forth in tears when I have only thought, that, such being oftentimes the lot of worthiest men, to this plight Ulysses may be reduced, and that he now may wander from place to place as you do : for such, who are compelled by need to range here and there, and have no firm home to fix their feet upon, God keeps them in this earth, as under water ; so are they kept down and depressed. And a dark thread is sometimes spun in the fate of kings." At this bare likening of the beggar to Ulysses, Minerva from heaven made the suitors for foolish joy to go mad, and roused them to such a laughter as would never stop : they laughed without power of ceasing ; their eyes stood full of tears for excessive THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. 283 joy. But fears and horrible misgivings succeeded ; and one among them stood up and prophesied : " Ah, wretches !" he said, *' what madness from heaven has seized you, that you can laugh ? See you not that your meat drops blood? A night, like the night of death, wraps you about ; you shriek without knowing it ; your eyes tlu'ust forth tears ; from the fixed walls, and the beam that bears the whole house up, falls blood ; ghosts choke up the entry ; full is the hall with apparitions of murdered men ; under your feet is hell ; the sun falls from heaven, and it is midnight at noon." But, Hke men whom the gods had infatuated to their destruction, they mocked at his fears ; and Eurymachus said, *' This man is surely mad: conduct him forth into the market- place ; set him in the Hght ; for he dreams that 'tis night within the house." But Theoclymenus (for that was the prophet's name), whom Minerva had graced with a prophetic spirit, that he, foreseeing, might avoid the destruc- tion which awaited them, answered, and said, " Eury- machus, I will not require a guide of thee ; for I have eyes and ears, the use of both my feet, and a sane mind within me ; and with these I will go forth of the doors, because I know the imminent evils which await all you that stay, by reason of this poor guest, who is a favourite with all the gods." So saying, he turned his back upon those inhospitable men, and went away home, and never returned to the palace. These words which he spoke were not unheard by Telemachus, who kept still his eye upon his father, anxiously expecting when he would give the sign which was to precede the slaughter of the suitors. They, dreaming of no such thing, fell sweetly to their dinner, as joying in the great store of banquet which was heaped in full tables about them ; but there reigned not a bitterer banquet planet in all 284 THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. heaven tlian that which hung over them this day, by secret destination of Minerva. There was a bow which Ulysses left when he went for Troy. It had lain by since that time, out of use, and unstrung ; for no man had strength to draw that bow save Ulysses. So it had remained as a monument of the great strength of its master. This bow, with the quiver of arrows belonging thereto, Telemachus had brought down from the armoury on the last night, along vnth the lances ; and now Mi- nerva, intending to do Ulysses an honour, put it into the mind of Telemachus to propose to the suitors to try who was strongest to draw that bow ; and he promised that, to the man who should be able to draw that bow, his mother should be given in mar- riage, — Ulysses's wife the prize to him who should bend the bow of Ulysses. There was great strife and emulation stirred up among the suitors at those words of the Prince Tele- machus. And to grace her son's words, and to con- firm the promise which he had made, Penelope came and showed herself that day to the suitors ; and Minerva made her that she appeared never so comely in their sight as that day ; and they were inflamed with the beholding of so much beauty, proposed as the price of so great manhood ; and they cried out, that if all those heroes who sailed to Colchis for the rich purchase of the golden-fleeced ram had seen earth's richer prize, Penelope, they would not have made their voyage, but would have vowed their va- lour and their lives to her ; for she was at all parts faultless. And she said, ** The gods have taken my beauty from me since my lord went for Troy. But Tele- machus willed his mother to depart, and not be pre- sent at that contest ; for he said, ** It may be, some rougher strife shall chance of this than may be expe- THE ADVENTURES OP tILTSSES. 285 dient for a woman to witness." And she retired, she and her maids, and left the hall. Then the bow was brought into the midst, and a mark was set up by Prince Telemachus ; and Lord Antinous, as the chief among the suitors, had the first offer ; and he took the bow, and, fitting an arrow to the string, he strove to bend it. But not with all his might and main could he once draw together the ends of that tough bow ; and when he found how vain a thing it was to endeavour to draw Ulysses's bow, he desisted, blushing for shame and for mere anger. Then Eurymachus adventured, but with no better success : but as it had torn the hands of Anti- nous, so did the bow tear and strain his hands, and marred his delicate fingers ; yet could he not once stir the string. Then called he to the attendants to bring fat and unctuous matter ; which melting at the fire, he dipped the bow therein, thinking to supple it, and make it more pliable : but not with all the help of art could he succeed in making it to move. After him Liodes and Amphinomus and Polybus and Eu- rynomus and Polyctorides essayed their strength ; but not any one of them, or of the rest of those as- piring suitors, had any better luck : yet not the meanest of them there but thought himself well worthy of Ulysses's wife ; though, to shoot with Ulysses's bow, the completest champion among them was by proof found too feeble. Then Ulysses prayed that he might have leave to try : and immediately a clamour was raised among the suitors because of his petition ; and they scorned and swelled with rage at his presumption, and that a beggar should seek to contend in a game of such noble mastery. But Telemachus ordered that the bow should be given to the beggar, and that he should have leave to try, since they had failed; " for," he said, ** the bow is mine, to give or to withhold :" and none durst gainsay the prince. 286 THE ADVENTURES OP ULYSSES. Then Ulysses gave a sign to his son, and he com- manded the doors of the hall to be made fast ; and all wondered at his words, but none could divine the cause. And Ulysses took the bow into his hands ; and, before he essayed to bend it, he surveyed it at all parts, to see whether, by long lying by, it had contracted any stiffness which hindered the drawing : and, as he was busied in the curious surveying of his bow, some of the suitors mocked him, and said, *' Pa.st doubt, this man is a right cunning archer, and knows his craft well. See how he turns it over and over, and looks into it, as if he could see through the wood!" And others said, ''We wish some onfe would tell out gold into our laps but for so long a time as he shall be in drawing that string." But when he had spent some little time in making proof of the bow, and had found it to be in good plight, like as a harper in tuning his harp draws out a string, with such ease or much more did Ulysses draw to the head the string of his own tough bow ; and, in letting it go, it twanged with such a shrill noise as a swallow makes when it sings through the air : which so much amazed the suitors, that their colour came and went, and the skies gave out a noise of thunder, which at heart cheered Ulysses ; for he knew that now his long labours, by the dis- posal of the Fates, drew to an end. Then fitted he an arrow to the bow ; and, drawing it to the head, he sent it right to the mark which the prince had set up. Which done, he said to Telemachus, "You have got no disgrace yet by your guest ; for I have struck the mark I shot at, and gave myself no such trouble in teasing the bow with fat and fire as these men did, but have made proof that my strength is not impaired, nor my age so weak and contemptible as these were pleased to think it. But come : the day going down calls us to supper ; after which THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 287 succeed poem and harp, and all delights which used to crown princely banquetings." So sapng, he beckoned to his son, who straight girt his sword to his side, and took one of the lances (of which there lay great store from the armoury) in his hand, and, armed at all points, advanced towards his father. The upper rags which Ulysses wore fell from his shoulder, and his own kingly likeness returned ; when he rushed to the great hall-door with bow and quiver full of shafts, which down at his feet he poured, and in bitter words presignified his deadly intent to the suitors. " Thus far, he said, '* this contest has been decided harmless : now for us there rests another mark, harder to hit, but which my hands shall essay notwithstanding, if Phoebus, god of archers, be pleased to give me the mastery." With that he let fly a deadly arrow at Antinous, which pierced him in the throat, as he was in the act of lifting a cup of wine to his mouth. Amaze- ment seized the suitors as their great champion fell dead ; and they raged highly against Ulysses, and said that it should prove the dearest shaft which he had ever let fly ; for he had slain a man whose Uke breathed not in any part of the kingdom : and they flew to their arms, and would have seized the lances ; but Minerva struck them with dimness of sight, that they went erring up and down the hall, not knowing where to find them. Yet so infatuated were they by the displeasure of Heaven, that they did not see the imminent peril which impended over them ; but every man believed that this accident had happened beside the intention of the doer. Fools ! to think by shutting their eyes to evade destiny, or that any other cup remained for them but that which their great Antinous had tasted ! Then Ulysses revealed himself to all of them, and told them that he was the man whom they thought 288 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES, was dead at Troy, whose palace they had usurped, whose wife in his lifetime they had sought in impious marriage, and that for this reason destruction was come upon them. And he dealt his deadly arrows among them, and there was no avoiding him, nor escaping from his horrid person ; and Telemachus by his side plied them thick with those murderous lances from which there was no retreat, till fear itself made them vahant, and danger gave them eyes to understand the peril. Then they which had swords drew them, and some with shields that they had found, and some with tables and benches snatched up in haste, rose in a mass to overwhelm and crush those two ; yet they singly bestirred themselves like men, and defended themselves against that great host ; and through tables, shields, and all, right through, the arrows of Ulysses clove, and the irre- sistible lances of Telemachus ; and many lay dead, and all had wounds. And Minerva, in the like- ness of a bird, sate upon the beam which went across the hall, clapping her wings with a fearful noise : and sometimes the great bird would fly among them, cuffing at the swords and at the lances, and up and down the hall would go, beating her wings, and troubling every thing, that it was fright- ful to behold; and it frayed the blood from the cheeks of those heaven-hated suitors- But to Ulysses and his son she appeared in her own divine simili- tude, with her snake-fringed shield, a goddess armed, fighting their battles. Nor did that dreadful pair desist till they had laid all their foes at their feet. At their feet they lay in shoals : like fishes when the fishermen break up their nets, so they lay gasping and sprawHng at the feet of Ulysses and his son. And Ulysses remembered the prediction of Tiresias, which said that he was to perish by his own guests, unless he slew those who Imew him not. Then certain of the queen's household went up, THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 289 and told Penelope what had happened ; and how her lord Ulysses was come home, and had slain the suitors. But she gave no heed to their words, but thought that some frenzy possessed them, or that they mocked her; for it is the property of such extremes of sorrow as she had felt not to believe when any great joy cometh. And she rated and chid them exceedingly for troubling her. But they the more persisted in their asseverations of the truth of what they had affirmed ; and some of them had seen the slaughtered bodies dragged forth of the hall. And they said, ** That poor guest, whom you talked with last night, was Ulysses." Then she was yet more fully persuaded that they mocked her ; and she wept. But they said, " This thing is true which we have told. We sat within, in an inner room in the palace and the doors of the hall were shut on us ; but we heard the cries and the groans of the men that were killed, but saw nothing, till at length your son called to us to come in ; and, entering, we saw Ulysses standing in the midst of the slaughtered." But she, persisting in her unbelief, said that it was some god which had deceived them to think it was the person of Ulysses. By this time Telemachus and his father had cleansed their hands from the slaughter, and were come to where the queen was talking with those of her household; and when she saw Ulysses she stood motionless, and had no power to speak, — sudden surprise and joy and fear and many passions so strove within her. Sometimes she was clear that it was her husband that she saw, and sometimes the altera- tion which twenty years had made in his person (yet that was not much) so perplexed her, that she knew not what to think, and for joy she could not beheve, and yet for joy she would not but believe; and, above all, that sudden change from a beggar to a king troubled her, and wrought uneasy scruples 290 THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. in her mind. But Telemachus, seeing her strange- ness, blamed her, and called her an ungentle and tyrannous mother ; and said that she showed a too great curiousness of modesty to abstain from embracing his father, and to have doubts of his person, when, to all present, it was evident that he was the very real and true Ulysses. Then she mistrusted no longer ; but ran and fell upon Ulysses's neck, and said, *' Let not my husband be angry that I held off so long with strange delays : it is the gods, who severing us for so long time, have caused this unseemly distance in me. If Menelaus's wife had used half my caution, she would never have taken so freely to a stranger's bed ; and she might have spared us all these plagues which have come upon us through her shameless deed." These words, with which Penelope excused herself, wrought more affection in Ulysses than if, upon a first sight, she had given up herself implicitly to his embraces ; and he wept for joy to possess a wife so discreet, so answering to his own staid mind, one that had a depth of wit proportioned to his own, and one that held chaste virtue at so high a price. And he thought the possession of such a one cheaply purchased with the loss of all Circe's delights and Calypso's immortality of joys ; and his long labours and his severe sufferings past seemed as nothing, now they were crowned with the enjoyment of his virtuous and true wife, Penelope. And as sad men at sea, whose ship has gone to pieces nigh shore, swimming for their lives, all drenched in foam and brine, crawl up to some poor patch of land, which they take posses- sion of with as great a joy as if they had the world given them in fee, — with such delight did this chaste wife cling to her lord restored, till the dark night fast coming on reminded her of that more intimate and happy union, when, in her long-widowed bed, she should once again clasp a living Ulysses. THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. 291 So, from that time, the land had rest from the suitors. And the happy Ithacans, with songs and solemn sacrifices of praise to the gods, celebrated the return of Ulysses : for he that had been so long absent was returned to wreak the evil upon the heads of the doers : in the place where they had done the evil, there wreaked he his vengeance upon them. TALES REMINISCENCES OF JUKE JUDKINS, ESQ., or BIRMINGHAM.* I AM the only son of a considerable brazier in Birmingham, who, dying in 1803, left me successor to the business, with no other encumbrance than a sort of rent-charge, which I am enjoined to pay out of it, of ninety-three pounds sterling per annum, to his widow, my mother : and which the improving state of the concern, I bless God, has hitherto enabled me to discharge with punctuality. (I say, I am enjoined to pay the said sum, but not strictly obhgated : that is to say, as the will is worded, I believe the law would relieve me from the payment of it ; but the wishes of a dying parent should in Bome sort have the effect of law.) So that, though the annual profits of my business, on an average of the last three or four years, would appear to an indifferent observer, who should inspect my shop- books, to amount to the sum of one thousand three hundred and three pounds, odd shillings, the real proceeds in that time have fallen short of that sum to the amount of the aforesaid payment of ninety- three pounds sterling annually. * From the New Monthly Magazine ^ 1826. 296 REMINISCENCES OF JUKE JUDKINS. I was always my father's favourite. He took a delight, to the very last, in recounting the little sagacious tricks and innocent artifices of my child- hood. One manifestation thereof I never heard him repeat without tears of joy trickling down his cheeks. It seems, that when I quitted the parental roof, (Aug. 27, 1788,) being then six years and not quite a month old, to proceed to the Free School at Warwick, where my father was a sort of trustee, my mother — as mothers are usually provident on these occasions — had stuffed the pockets of the coach, which was to convey me and six more children of my own growth that were going to be entered along with me at the same seminary, with a prodigious quantity of gingerbread, which I remem- ber my father said was more than was needed : and so indeed it was ; for, if I had been to eat it all myself, it would have got stale and mouldy before it had been haK spent. The consideration whereof set me upon my contrivances how I might secure to myself as much of the gingerbread as would keep good for the next two or three days, and yet none of the rest in manner be wasted. I had a little pair of pocket-compasses, which I usually carried about me for the purpose of making draughts and measure- ments, at wliich I was always very ingenious, of the various engines and mechanical inventions in which such a town as Birmingham abounded. By means of these, and a small penknife which my father had given me, I cut out the one half of the cake, cal- culating that the remainder would reasonably serve my turn ; and subdividing it into many little slices, which were curious to see for the neatness and nice- ness of their proportion, I sold it out in so many pennyworths to my young companions as served us all the way to Warwick, which is a distance of some twenty miles from this town : and very merry, I assure you, we made ourselves with it, feasting all REMINISCENCES OP JUKE JUDKINS. 297 the way. By this honest stratagem I jDut double the prime cost of the gingerbread into my purse, and secured as much as I thought would keep good and moist for my next two or three days' eating. When I told this to my parents on their first visit to me at Warwick, my father (good man) patted me on the cheek, and stroked my head, and seemed as if he could never make enough of me ; but my mother unaccountably burst into tears, and said, '' it was a very niggardly action," or some such expression, and that " she would rather it would please God to take me " — meaning (God help me ! ) that I should die — " than that she should live to see me grow up a mean man: " which shows the difference of parent from parent, and how some mothers are more harsh and intolerant to their children than some fathers ; when we might expect quite the contrary. My father, however, loaded me with presents from that time, which made me the envy of my school-fellows. As I felt this growing disposition in them, I naturally sought to avert it by all the means in my power ; and from that time I used to eat my little packages of fruit, and other nice things, in a corner, so privately that I was never found out. Once, I remember, I had a huge apple sent me, of that sort which they call cats'-heads. I concealed this all day under my pillow ; and at night, but not before I had ascertained that my bed-fellow was sound asleep, — which I did by pinching him rather smartly two or three times, which he seemed to perceive no more than a dead person, though once or twice he made a motion as if he would turn, which frightened me, — I say, when I had made all sure, I fell to work upon my apple ; and, though it was as big as an ordinary man's two fists, I made shift to get through it before it was time to get up. And a more delicious feast I never made ; thinking all night what a good parent I had (I mean my father) to send me so many nice 298 REMINISCENCES OF JUKE JUDKINS. tilings, when the poor lad that lay by me had no parent or friend in the world to send him any thing nice : and, thinking of his desolate condition, I munched and munched as silently as I could, that I might not set him a-longing if he overheard me. And yet, for all this considerateness and attention to other people's feelings, I was never much a favourite with my school-fellows ; which I have often wondered at, seeing that I never defrauded any one of them of the value of a halfpenny, or told stories of them to their master, as some little lying boys would do, but was ready to do any of them all the services in my power, that were con- sistent with my own well-doing. I think nobody can be expected to go further than that. But I am detaining my reader too long in recording my juvenile days. It is time I should go forward to a season when it became natural that I should have some thoughts of marrying, and, as they say, settling in the world. Nevertheless, my reflections on what I may call the boyish period of my life may have their use to some readers. It is pleasant to trace the man in the boy ; to observe shoots of generosity in those young years ; and to watch the progress of liberal sentiments, and what I may call a genteel way of thinking, which is discernible in some children at a very early age, and usually lays the foundation of all that is praiseworthy in the manly character afterwards. With the warmest inclinations towards that way of life, and a serious conviction of its superior advantages over a single one, it has been the strange infelicity of my lot never to have entered into the respectable estate of matrimony. Yet I was once very near it. I courted a young woman in my twenty- seventh year ; for so early I began to feel symptoms of the tender passion ! She was well to do in the world, as they call it ; but yet not such a REMINISCENCES OP JUKE JUDKINS. 299 fortune, as, all things considered, perhaps I might have pretended to. It was not my own choice altogether ; but my mother very strongly pressed me to it. She was always putting it to me, that I had " comings-in sufficient," — that I **need not stand upon a portion ;" though the young woman, to do her justice, had considerable expectations, which yet did not quite come up to my mark, as I told you before. My mother had this saying always in her mouth, that I had ** money enough ;" that it w^as time I enlarged my housekeeping, and to show a spirit be- fitting my circumstances. In short, what with her importunities, and my own desires in part co- operating, — for, as I said, I w^as not yet quite twenty-seven, — a time when the youthful feelings may be pardoned if they show a little impetuosity, — I resolved, I say, upon all these considerations, to set about the business of courting in right earnest. I was a young man then ; and having a spice of romance in my character (as the reader has doubtless observed long ago), such as that sex is apt to be taken with, I had reason in no long time to think my addresses were anything but disagreeable. Cer- tainly the happiest part of a young man's life is the time when he is going a- courting. All the generous impulses are then awake, and he feels a double existence in participating his hopes and wishes with another being. Return yet again for a brief moment, ye visionary views, — transient en- chantments ! ye moonlight rambles with Cleora in the Silent Walk at Vauxhall, (N.B. — About a mile from Birmingham, and resembling the gardens of that name near London, only that the price of admission is lower,) when the nightingale has sus- pended her notes in June to listen to our loving discourses, while the moon was overhead! (for we generally used to take our tea at Cleora's mother's before we set out, not so much to save expenses as BOO KEMINISCENCES OF JUKE JUDKINS. to avoid the publicity of a repast in the gardens, — coming in much about the time of half-price, as they call it,) — ye soft intercommunions of soul, when, exchanging mutual vows, we prattled of coming felicities ! The loving disputes we have had under those trees, when this house (planning our future settlement) was rejected, because, though cheap, it was dull ; and the other house was given up, because though agreeably situated, it was too high-rented ! — one was too much in the heart of the town, another was too far from business. These minutiae will seem impertinent to the aged and the prudent. I write them only to the young, Young lovers, and passionate as being young (such were Cleora and I then), alone can understand me. After some weeks wasted, as I may now call it, in this sort of amorous colloquy, we at length fixed upon the house in the High Street, No. 203, just vacated by the death of Mr. Hutton of this town, for our future residence. I had all the time lived in lodgings (only renting a shop for business), to be near my mother, — near, I say : not in the same house ; for that would have been to introduce confusion into our housekeeping, w^hich it was desirable to keep separate. Oh the loving wrangles, the endearing differences, I had with Cleora, before we could quite make up our minds to the house that was to receive us ! — I pre- tending, for argument's sake, the rent was too high, and she insisting that the taxes were moderate in proportion ; and love at last reconciling us in the same choice. I think at that time, moderately speaking, she might have had any thing out of me for asking. I do not, nor shall ever, regret that my character at that time was marked with a tinge of •prodigality. Age comes fast enough upon us, and, in its good time, will prune away all that is incon- venient in these excesses. Perhaps it is right that it should do so. Matters, as I said, were ripening LEMINISCENCES OP JUKE JUDKINS. 301 to a conclusion between us, only the house was yet not absolutely taken, — some necessary arrangements, which the ardour of my youthful impetuosity could hardly brook at that time (love and youth will be precipitate), — some preliminary arrangements, I say, with the landlord, respecting fixtures, — very neces- sary things to be considered in a young man about to settle in the world, though not very accordant with the impatient state of my then passions, — some ob- stacles about the valuation of the fixtures, — had hitherto precluded (and I shall always think provi- dentially) my final closes with his offer ; when one of those accidents, which, unimportant in them- selves, often arise to give a turn to the most serious intentions of our life, intervened, and put an end at once to my projects of wiving and of house- keeping. I was never much given to theatrical entertain- ments ; that is, at no time of my life was I ever what they call a regular play-goer : but on some occasion of a benefit-night, which was expected to be very productive, and indeed turned out so, Cleora expressing a desire to be present, I could do no less than offer, as I did very willingly, to squire her and her mother to the pit. At that time it was not customary in our town for tradesfolk, except some of the very topping ones, to sit, as they now do, in the boxes. At the time appointed I waited upon the ladies, who had brought with them a young man, a distant relation, whom it seems they had invited to be of the party. This a little disconcerted me, as I had about me barely silver enough to pay for our three selves at the door, and did not at first know that their relation had proposed paying for himself. However, to do the young man justice, he not only paid for himself, but for the old lady besides ; leaving me only to pay for two, as it were. In our passage to the theatre the notice of Cleora was attracted to 802 EEMINISCENCES OF JUKE JUDKINS. some orange wenches tliat stood about the doors vending their commodities. She was leaning on my arm; and I could feel her every now and then giving me a nudge, as it is called, which I after- wards discovered were hints that I should buy some oranges. It seems, it is a custom at Birmingham, and perhaps in other places, when a gentleman treats ladies to the play, — especially when a full night is expected, and that the house will be incon- veniently warm, — to provide them with this kind of fruit, oranges being esteemed for their cooling property. But how could I guess at that, never having treated ladies to a play before, and being, as I said, quite a novice at entertainments of this kind ? At last, she spoke plain out, and begged that I would buy some of '' those oranges," pointing to a particular barrow. But, when I came to examine the fruit, I did not think the quality of it was answerable to the price. In this way I handled several baskets of them ; but something in them aU displeased me. Some had thin rinds, and some were plainly over-ripe, which is as great a fault as not being ripe enough ; and 1 could not (what they call) make a bargain. While I stood haggling with the women, secretely determining to put off my purchase till I should get within the theatre, where I expected we should have better choice, the young man, the cousin, (who, it seems, had left us without my missing him,) came running to us with his pockets stuffed out with oranges, inside and out, as they say. It seems, not liking the look of the barrow-fruit any more than myself, he had slipped away to an eminent fruiterer's, about three doors distant, which I never had the sense to think of, and had laid out a matter of two shillings in some of the best St. Michael's, I think, I ever tasted. What a little hinge, as I said before, the most important affairs in life may turn upon ! The mere inadvertence to the fact that there BE31INISCENCES OF JUKE JUDKINS. 803 was an eminent fruiterer's within three doors of us, though we had just passed it without the thought once occurring to me, which he had taken ad- vantage of, lost me the affection of my Cleora. From that time she visibly cooled towards me ; and her partiality was as visibly transferred to this cousin. I was long unable to account for this change in her behaviour; when one day, accidentally discoursing of oranges to my mother, alone, she let drop a sort of reproach to me, as if I had offended Cleora by my nearness, as she called it, that evening. Even now, when Cleora has been wedded some years to that same officious relation, as I may call him, I can hardly be persuaded that such a trifle could have been the motive to her inconstancy ; for could she suppose that I would sacrifice my dearest hopes in her to the paltry sum of two shillings, when I was going to treat her to the play, and her mother too, (an expense of more than four times that amount,) if the young man had not interfered to pay for the latter, as I mentioned ? But the caprices of the sex are past finding out : and I begin to think my mother was in the right ; for doubtless women know women better than we can pretend to know them. CUPID'S KEVENGE. Leontius, Duke of Lycia, who in times past had borne the character of a wise and just governor, and was endeared to all ranks of his subjects, in his latter days fell into a sort of dotage, which mani- fested itself in an extravagant fondness for his daughter Hidaspes. This young maiden, with the 804 cupid's revenge. Prince Leucippus, her brother, were the only re- membrances left to him of a deceased and beloved consort. For her, nothing was thought too precious. Existence was of no value to him but as it afforded opportunities of gratifying her wishes. To be in- strumental in relieving her from the least little pain or grief, he would have lavished his trea- sures to the giving away of the one-half of his dukedom. All this deference on the part of the parent had yet no power upon the mind of the daughter to move her at any time to solicit any unbecoming suit, or to disturb the even tenour of her thoughts. The humility and dutifulness of her carriage seemed to keep pace with his apparent willingness to release her from the obligations of either. She might have satisfied her wildest humours and caprices ; but, in truth, no such troublesome guests found harbour in the bosom of the quiet and unaspiring maiden. Thus far the prudence of the princess served to counteract any ill effects which this ungovernable partiality in a parent was calculated to produce in a less virtuous nature than that of Hidaspes ; and this foible of the duke's, so long as no evil resulted from it, was passed over by the courtiers as a piece of harmless frenzy. But upon a solemn day, a sad one, as it proved for Lycia, — when the returning anniversary of the princess's birth was kept with extraordinary re- joicings, the infatuated father set no bounds to his folly, but would have his subjects to do homage to her for that day, as to their natural sovereign ; as if he indeed had been dead, and she, to the exclu- sion of the male succession, was become the rightful ruler of Lycia. He saluted her by the style of Duchess ; and with a terrible oath, in the presence cupid's revenge. 805 of his nobles, he confirmed to her the grant of all things whatsoever that she should demand on that day, and for the six next following ; and if she should ask any thing, the execution of which must be deferred until after his death, he pronounced a dreadful curse upon his son and successor if he failed to see to the performance of it. Thus encouraged, the princess stepped forth with a modest boldness ; and, as if assured of no denial, spake as follows. But, before we acquaint you with the purport of her speech, we must premise, that in the land of Lycia, which was at that time pagan, above all their other gods the inhabitants did in an especial manner adore the deity who was supposed to have influence in the disposing of people's affections in love. This god, by the name of Cupid, they feigned to be a beautiful boy, and iiinfjed ; as indeed, between young persons, these frantic passions are usually least under constraint ; while the wings might signify the haste with which these ill-judged attachments are commonly dissolved, and do indeed go away as lightly as they come, flying away in an instant to light upon some newer fancy. They painted him blindfolded, because these silly affections of lovers make them blind to the defects of the beloved ob- ject, which every one is quick-sighted enough to dis- cover but themselves ; or because love is for the most part led blindly, rather than directed by the open eye of the judgment, in the hasty choice of a mate. Yet, with that inconsistency of attributes with which the heathen people commonly over- complimented their deities, this blind love, this Cupid, they figured with a bow and arrows ; and, being sightless, they yet feigned him to be a notable archer and an unerring marksman. No heart wab supposed to be proof against the point of his inevi table dart. By such incredible fictions did these 80G cupid's revenge. poor pagans make a shift to excuse tlieir vanities, and to give a sanction to their irregular affections, under the notion that love was irresistible ; whereas, in a well-regulated mind, these amorous conceits either find no place at all, or, having gained a foot- ing, are easily stifled in the beginning by a wise and manly resolution. This frenzy in the people had long been a source of disquiet to the discreet princess ; and many were the conferences she had held with the virtuous prince, her brother, as to the best mode of taking off the minds of the Lycians from this vain super- stition. An occasion, furnished by the blind grant of the old duke, their father, seemed now to present itself. The courtiers then, being assembled to hear the demand which the princess should make, began to conjecture, each one according to the bent of his own disposition, what the thing would be that she should ask for. One said, " Now surely she will ask to have the disposal of the revenues of some wealthy province, to lay them out — as was the manner of Eastern princesses — in costly dresses and jewels becoming a lady of so great expectancies." Another thought that she would seek an extension of power, as women naturally love rule and dominion. But the most part were in hope that she was about to beg the hand of some neighbour prince in marriage, who, by the wealth and contiguity of his dominions, might add strength and safety to the realm of Lycia. But in none of these things was the expectation of these crafty and worldly-minded courtiers gratified ; for Hidaspes, first maldng lowly obeisance to her father, and thanking him on bended knees for so great grace conferred upon her, — according to a plan precon- certed with Ijeucippus, — made suit as follows : — ** Your loving care of me, i)rincely father! by which in my tenderest age you made up to me for cijpid's revenge. 807 tlie loss of a mother at those years when I was scarcely able to comprehend the misfortune, and your bounties to me ever since, have left me nothing to ask for myself, as wanting and desiring nothing. But, for the people whom you govern, I beg and desire a boon. It is known to all nations, that the men of Lycia are noted for a vain and fruitless su- perstition, — the more hateful as it bears a show of true religion, but is indeed nothing more than a self- pleasing and bold wantonness. Many ages before this, when every man had taken to himself a trade, as hating idleness far worse than death, some one that gave himself to sloth and wine, finding himself by his neighbours rebuked for his unprofitable life, framed to himself a god, whom he pretended to obey in his dishonesty ; and, for a name, he called him Cupid. This god of merely man's creating — as the nature of man is ever credulous of any vice which takes part with his dissolute conditions — quickly found followers enough. They multiplied in every age, especially among your Lycians, who to this day remain adorers of this drowsy deity, who certainly was first invented in drink, as sloth and luxury are commonly the first movers in these idle love passions. This ninged hoy — for so they fancy him — has his sacrifices, his loose images set up in the land, through all the villages ; nay, your own sacred palace is not exempt from them, to the scandal of sound devotion, and the dishonour of the true deities, which are only they who give good gifts to man, — as Ceres, who gives us corn ; the planter of the olive, Pallas ; Nep- tune, who directs the track of ships over the great ocean, and binds distant lands together in friendly commerce ; the inventor of medicine and music, Apollo ; and the cloud-compelling Thunderer of Olympus: whereas the gifts of this idle deity — if indeed he have a being at all out of the brain of his frantic worshippers — usually prove destructive and 808 cupid's revenge. pernicious. My suit, then, is, that this unseemly idol throughout the land be plucked down, and cast into the fire ; and that the adoring of the same may be prohibited on pain of death to any of your sub- jects henceforth found so offending." Leontius, startled at this unexpected demand from the princess, with tears besought her to ask some wiser thing, and not to bring down upon herself and him the indignation of so great a god. ** There is no such god as you dream of," said then Leucippus boldly, who had hitherto forborne to second the petition of the princess ; but a vain opi- nion of him has filled the land with love and wan- tonness. Every young man and maiden that feels the least desire to each other, dares in no case to suppress it ; for they think it to be Cupid's motion, and that he is a god !" Thus pressed by the solicitations of both his chil- dren, and fearing the oath which he had taken, in an evil hour the misgiving father consented ; and a proclamation was sent throughout all the provinces for the putting down of the idol, and the suppression of the established Cupid worship. Notable, you may be sure, was the stir made in all places among the priests, and among the artificers in gold, in silver, or in marble, who made a gainful trade, either in serving at the altar, or in the manu- facture of the images no longer to be tolerated. The cry was as clamorous as that at Ephesus when a kin- dred idol was in danger ; for " great had been Cupid of the Lycians." Nevertheless, the power of the duke, backed by the power of his more popular chil- dren, prevailed ; and the destruction of every vestige of the old rehgion was but as the work of one day throughout the country. And now, as the pagan chronicles of Lycia inform us, the displeasure of Cupid went out, — the displea- sure of a great god, — flying through all the dukedom, Cupid's revenge. 803 and sowing evils. But, upon the first movers of the profanation, his angry hand lay heaviest ; and there was imposed upon them a strange misery, that all might know that Cupid's revenge was mighty. With his arrows hotter than plagues, or than his own anger, did he fiercely right himself ; nor could the prayers of a few concealed worshippers, nor the smoke arising from an altar here and there which had escaped the general overthrow, avert his wrath, or make him to cease from vengeance, until he had made of the once-flourishing country of Lycia a most wretched land. He sent no famine, he let loose no cruel wild beasts among them, — inflictions with one or other of which the rest of the Olympian deities are fabled to have visited the nations under their displeasure, — but took a nearer course of his own ; and his invisible arrows went to the moral heart of Lycia, infecting and filling court and country with desires of unlawful marriages, unheard-of and monstrous affections, prodigious and misbecoming unions. The symptoms were first visible in the changed bosom of Hidaspes. This exemplary maiden — whose cold modesty, almost to a failing, had discom-aged the addresses of so many princely suitors that had sought her hand in marriage — by the venom of this inward pestilence, came on a sudden to cast eyes of affection upon a mean and deformed creature, Zoilus by name, who was a dwarf, and lived about the palace, the common jest of the courtiers. In her besotted eyes he was grown a goodly gentleman : and to her maidens, when any of them reproached him with the defect of his shape in her hearing, she would reply, that ** to them, indeed, he might appear defective, and unlike a man, as indeed no man was like unto him ; for in form and complexion he was beyond painting. He is like," she said, '* to nothing that we have seen ; yet he doth resemble Apollo, as 810 CUPID S KEVENGE. I have fancied him, when, rising in the East, he bestirs himself, and shakes dayhght from his hair." And, overcome with a passion which was heavier than she could bear, she confessed herself a wretched creature, and implored forgiveness of god Cupid, whom she had provoked ; and, if possible, that he would grant it to her that she might enjoy her love. Nay, she would court this piece of deformity to his face ; and when the wretch, supposing it to be done in mockery, has said that he could wish himself more ill- shaped than he was, if it would contribute to make her grace merry, she would reply, "Oh! think not that I jest ; unless it be a jest not to esteem my life in comparison with thine ; to hang a thousand kisses in an hour upon those lips ; unless it be a jest to vow that I am willing to become your wife, and to take obedience upon me." And by his '* own white hand," taking it in hers — so strong was the delusion — she besought him to swear to marry her. The term had not yet expired of the seven days within which the doting duke had sworn to fulfil her will, when, in pursuance of this frenzy, she pre- sented herself before her father, leading in the dwarf by the hand, and, in the face of all the courtiers, solemnly demanding his hand in marriage. And, when the apish creature made show of blushing at the unmerited honour, she, to comfort him, bade him not to be ashamed ; for, *'in her eyes he was worth a kingdom." And now, too late, did the fond father repent of his dotage. But when by no importunity he could prevail upon her to desist from her suit, for his oath's sake he must needs consent to the mar- riage. But the ceremony was no sooner, to the derision of all present, performed, than, with the just feelings of an outraged parent, he commanded the head of the presumptuous bridegroom to be cupid's revenge. 811 stricken off, and committed the distracted princess olose prisoner to her chamber, where, after many- deadly swoonings, with intermingled outcries upon the cruelty of her father, she, in no long time after, died ; making ineffectual appeals, to the last, to the mercy of the offended Power — the Power that laid its heavy hand upon her, to the bereavement of her good judgment first, end finally to the extinction of a life that might have proved a blessing to Lycia. Leontius had scarcely time to be sensible of her danger before a fresh cause for mourning overtook him. His son Leucippus, who had hitherto been a pattern of strict life and modesty, was stricken with a second arrow from the deity, offended for his over- turned altars, in which the j)rince had been the chief instrument. The god caused his heart to fall away, and his crazed fancy to be smitten with the excel- ling beauty of a wicked widow, by name Bacha. This woman, in the first days of her mourning for her husband, by her dissembling tears and affected coyness had drawn Leucippus so cunningly into her snares, that before she would grant him a return of love, she extorted from the easy-hearted prince a contract of marriage, to be fulfilled in the event of his father's death. This guilty intercourse, which they covered with the name of marriage, was not carried with such secrecy but that a rumour of it ran about the palace, and by some ofi&cious courtier was brought to the ears of the old duke, who, to satisfy himself of the truth, came hastily to the house of Bacha, where he found his son courting. Taking the prince roundly to task, he sternly asked who that creature was that had thus bewitched him out of his honour. Then Bacha, pretending ignorance of the duke's person, haughtily demanded of Leucippus what saucy old man that was, that without leave had burst into the house of an afflicted widow to hinder her paying her tears (as she pretended) to the dead. 312 cupid's revenge. Then the duke declaring himself, and threatening her for having corrupted his son, giving her the reproachful terms of witch and sorceress, Leucippus mildly answered, that he " did her wrong." The bad woman imagining that the prince for very fear would not betray their secret, now conceived a pro- ject of monstrous wickedness ; which was no less than to ensnare the father with the same arts which had subdued the son, that she might no longer be a concealed wife, nor a princess only under cover, but by a union with the old man, become at once the true and acknowledged Duchess of Lycia. In a posture of humility, she confessed her ignorance of the duke's quality ; but, now she knew it, she be- sought his pardon for her wild speeches, which pro- ceeded, she said, from a distempered head, w^hich the loss of a dear husband had affected. He might command her life, she told him, which w^as now of small value to her. The tears which accompanied her words, and her mourning weeds (which, for a blind to the world, she had not yet cast off), heightening her beauty, gave a credence to her pro- testations of her innocence. But the duke continuing to assail her with rexDroaches, with a matchless con- fidence, assuming the air of injured virtue, in a somewhat lofty tone she replied, that though he were her sovereign, to whom in any lawful cause she was bound to submit, yet, if he sought to take away her honour, she stood up to defy him. Thaty she said, was a jewel dearer than any he could give her, which, so long as she should keep, she should esteem herself richer than all the prmces of the earth that were without it. If the prince, his son, knew any thing to her dishonour, let him tell it. And here she challenged Leucippus before his father to speak the worst of her. If he w^ould, how^ever, sacrifice a woman's character to please an unjust humour of the duke's, she saw no remedy, she said, oupid's seyenge. 813 now he was dead (meaning her late husband) that with his life would have defended her reputation. Thus appealed to, Leucippus, who stood awhile astonished at her confident falsehoods, though igno- rant of the full drift of them, considering that not the reputation only, but probably the life, of a woman whom he had so loved, and who had made such sacrifices to him of love and beauty, depended upon his absolute concealment of their contract, framed his mouth to a compassionate untruth, and with solemn asseverations confirmed to his father her assurances of her innocence. He denied not that with rich gifts he had assailed her virtue, but had found her relentless to his solicitations ; that neither gold nor greatness had any power over her. Nay, so far he went on to give force to the protestations of this artful woman, that he confessed to having offered marriage to her, which she, who scorned to listen to any second wedlock, had rejected. All this while Leucippus secretly prayed to Heaven to forgive him while he uttered these bold untruths ; since it was for the prevention of a greater mischief only, and had no mahce in it. But, warned by the sad sequel which ensued, be very careful, young reader, how in any case you tell a he. Lie not, if any man but ask you ** how you do," or •* what o'clock it is." Be sure you make no false excuse to screen a friend that is most dear to you. Never let the most well-intended falsehood escape your lips ; for Heaven, which is entirely Truth, will make the seed which you have sown of untruth to yield miseries a thousand-fold upon yours, as it did upon the head of the ill-fated and mistaken Leucippus. Leontius, finding the assurances of Bacha so con- fidently seconded by his son, could no longer withhold his belief ; and, only forbidding their meeting for the futuie, took a courteous leave of the lady, presenting 814 cupid's eevenge. her at tlie same time with a valuable ring, in recom- pense, as he said, of the injustice which he had done her in his false surmises of her guiltiness. In truth, the surpassing beauty of the lady, with her appearing modesty, had made no less impression upon the heart of the fond old duke than it had awakened in the bosom of his more pardonable son. His first design was to make her his mistress ; to the better ac- complishing of which, Leucippus was dismissed from the court, under the pretext of some honourable employment abroad. In his absence, Leontius spared no oifers to induce her to comply with his purpose. Continually he solicited her with rich offers, with messages, and by personal visits. It was a ridicu- lous sight, if it were not rather a sad one, to behold this second and worse dotage, which by Cupid's wrath had fallen upon this fantastical old new lover. All his occupation now was in dressing and pranking himself up in youthful attire to please the eyes of his new mistress. His mornings were employed in the devising of trim fashions, in the company of tailors, embroiderers, and feather-dressers. So infatuated was he with these vanities, that, when a servant came and told him that his daughter was dead, — even she whom he had but lately so highly prized, — the words seemed spoken to a deaf person. He either could not or would not understand them ; but, like one senseless, fell to babbling about the shape of a new hose and doublet. His crutch, the faithful prop of long aged years, was discarded ; and he resumed the youthful fashion of a sword by his side, when his years wanted strength to draw it. In this condition of folly, it was no difficult task for the widow, by affected pretences of honour, and arts of amorous denial, to draw in this doting duke to that which she had all along aimed at, — the offer of his crown in marriage. She was now Duchess of Lycia ! In her new elevation the mask was quickly cupid's revenge. 815 thrown aside, and the impions Bacha appeared in her true qualities. She had never loved the duke, her husband ; but had used him as the instrument of her greatness. Taking advantage of his amorous folly, which seemed to gain growth the nearer he approached to his grave, she took upon her the whole rule of Lycia ; placing and displacing, at her will, all the great officers of state ; and filling the court with creatures of her own, the agents of her guilty pleasures, she removed from the duke's person the oldest and trustiest of his dependants. Leucippus, who at this juncture was returned from his foreign mission, was met at once with the news of his sister's death and the strange wedlock of the old duke. To the memory of Hidaspes he gave some tears ; but these were swiftly swallowed up in his horror and detestation of the conduct of Bacha. In his first fury, be resolved upon a full disclosure of all that had passed between him and his wicked step- mother. Again, he thought, by killing Bacha, to rid the world of a monster. But tenderness for his father recalled him to milder counsels. The fatal secret, nevertheless, sat upon him like lead, while he was determined to confide it to no other. It took his sleep away, and his desire of food ; and, if a thought of mirth at any time crossed him, the dreadful truth would recur to check it, as if a mes- senger should have come to whisper to him of some friend's death. With difficulty he was brought to wish their highnesses faint joy of their marriage ; and at the first sight of Bacha, a friend was fain to hold his wrist hard to prevent him from fainting. In an interview, which after, at her request, he had with her alone, the bad woman shamed not to take up the subject lightly ; to treat as a trifle the marriage vow that had passed between them; and, seeing him sad and silent, to threaten him with the displeasure of the duke, his father, if by words or looks he gave 816 cupid's bevenge. any suspicion to the world of their dangerous secret. ** What had happened," she said, *' was by no fault of hers. People would have thought her mad if she had refused the duke's offer. She had used no arts to entrap his father. It was Leucippus's own reso- lute denial of any such thing as a contract having passed between them which had led to the pro- posal." The prince, unable to extenuate his share of blame in the calamity, humbly besought her, that " since, by his own great fault, things had been brought to their present pass, she would only live honest for the future, and not abuse the credulous age of the old duke, as he well knew she had the power to do. For himself, seeing that life was no longer desirable to him, if his death was judged by her to be indispen- sable to her security, she was welcome to lay what trains she pleased to compass it, so long as she would only suffer his father to go to his grave in peace, since he had never wronged her." This temperate appeal was lost upon the heart of Bacha, who from that moment was secretly bent upon effecting the destruction of Leucij^pus. Her project was, by feeding the ears of the duke with exaggerated praises of his son, to awaken a jealousy in the old man, that she secretly preferred Leucippus. Next, by wilfully insinuating the great popularity of the prince (which was no more indeed than the truth) among the Lycians, to instil subtle fears into the duke that his son had laid plots for circumventing his life and throne. By these arts she was working upon the weak mind of the duke almost to distrac- tion, when, at a meeting concocted by herself between the prince and his father, the latter taking Leucippus soundly to task for these alleged treasons, the prince replied only by humbly drawing his sword, with the intention of laying it at his father's feet ; and begging him, since he suspected him, to sheathe it in his own Cupid's eevenge. 817 bosom, for of his life he had been long weary. Bacha entered at the crisis, and, ere Leucippus could finish his submission, with loud outcries alarmed the courtiers, who, rushing into the presence, found the prince with sword in hand indeed, but with far other intentions than his bad woman imputed to him, for she boldly accused him of having drawn it upon his father ! Leucippus was quickly disarmed ; and the old duke, trembling between fear and rage, committed him to a close prison, from which, by Bacha's aims, he never could have come out alive but for the interference of the common people, who, loving their prince, and equally detesting Bacha, in a simulta- neous mutiny arose, and rescued him from the hands of the officers. The court was now no longer a place of living for Leucippus ; and hastily thanking his countrymen for his deliverance, which in his heart he rather de- precated than welcomed, as one that wished for death, he took leave of all court hopes, and, aban- doning the palace, betook himself to a life of peni- tence in solitude. Not so secretly did he select his place of penance, in a cave among lonely woods and fastnesses, but that his retreat was traced by Bacha ; who, baffled in her purpose, raging like some she-wolf, despatched an emissary of her own to destroy him privately. There was residing at the court of Lycia, at this time, a young maiden, the daughter of Bacha by her first husband, who had hitherto been brought up in the obscurity of a poor country abode with an uncle ; but whom Bacha now publicly owned, and had pre- vailed upon the easy duke to adopt as successor to the throne in wrong of the true heir, his suspected son Leucippus. This young creature, Urania by name, was as artless and harmless as her mother was crafty and wicked. To the unnatural Bacha she had been an 818 CUPID S REVENGE. object of neglect and aversion ; and only for tlie pro- ject of supplanting Leucippus had she fetched her out of retirement. The bringing-up of Urania had been among country hinds and lasses : to tend her flocks or superintend her neat dairy had been the extent of her breeding. From her calling, she had contracted a pretty rusticity of dialect, which, among the fine folk of the court, passed for simplicity and folly. She was the unfittest instrument for an ambitious design that could be chosen ; for her manners in a palace had a tinge still of her old occupation ; and, to her mind, the lowly shep- herdess's life was best. Simplicity is oft a match for prudence : and Urania was not so simple but she understood that she had been sent for to court only in the prince's wrong ; and in her heart she was determined to defeat any designs that might be contriving against her brother-in-law. The melancholy bearing of Leucippus had touched her with pity. This wrought in her a kind of love, which, for its object, had no further end than the well-being of the beloved. She looked for no return of it, nor did the possibility of such a blessing in the remotest way occur to her, — so vast a distance she had imagined between her lowly bringing-up and the courtly breeding and graces of Leucippus. Hers was no raging flame, such as had burned destructive in the bosom of poor Hidaspes. Either the vindictive god in mercy had spared this young maiden, or the wrath of the con- founding Cupid was restrained by a higher Power from discharging the most malignant of his arrows against the peace of so much innocence. Of the extent of her mother's malice she was too guileless to have entertained conjecture ; but from hints and whispers, and, above all, from that tender watchful- ness with which a true afi'ection like Urania's tends the safety of its object, — fearing even where no cause cupid's revenge. 819 for fear subsists, — she gathered that some danger was impendijig over the prince, and with simple heroism resolved to countermine the treason. It chanced upon a day that Leucippus had been indulging his sad meditations in forests far from human converse, when he was struck with the ap- pearance of a human being, so unusual in that solitude. There stood before him a seeming youth, of delicate appearance, clad in coarse and peasant attire. "He was come," he said, "to seek out the prince, and to be his poor boy and servant, if he would let him." — " Alas ! poor youth," replied Leucippus, " why do you follow me, who am as poor as you are ?" — " In good faith," was his pretty answer, "I shall be well and rich enough if you will but love me." And, saying so, he wept. The prince, admiring this strange attachment in a boy, was moved with compassion ; and seeing him ex- hausted, as if with long travel and hunger, invited him in to his poor habitation, setting such refresh- ments before him as that barren spot afforded. But by no entreaties could he be prevailed upon to take any sustenance ; and all that day, and for the two follomng, he seemed supported only by some gentle flame of love that was within him. He fed only upon the sweet looks and courteous entertainment which he received from Leucippus. Seemingly, he wished to die under the loving eyes of his master. " I cannot eat," he prettily said ; " but I shall eat to-morrow." — "You will be dead by that time," replied Leucippus. — "I shall be well then," said he ; " since you will not love me." Then the prince asked him why he sighed so. " To think," was his innocent reply, " that so fine a man as you should die, and no gay lady love him." — " But you will love me," said Leucippus. " Yes, sure," said he, " till I die ; and when I am in heaven I shall wish for you." — "This is a love," thought the other, "that 820 etJPID S REVENGE. I never yet heard tell of. But come, thou art sleepy, child : go in, and I will sit with thee." Then, from some words which the poor youth dropped, Leucippus, suspecting that his wits were beginning to ramble, said, '* What portends this?" — " I am not sleepy," said the youth ; '' but you are sad. I would that I could do any thing to make you merry ! Shall I sing ? " But soon, as if re- covering strength, "There is one approaching!" he wildly cried out. '* Master, look to yourself! " His words were true : for now entered, with pro- vided weapon, the wicked emissary of Bacha, that we told of ; and, directing a mortal thrust at the prince, the supposed boy, with a last effort, interposing his weak body, received it in his bosom, thanking the heavens in death that he had saved **so good a master.'* Leucippus, having slain the villain, was at leisure to discover, in the features of his poor servant, the countenance of his devoted sister-in-law ! Through solitary and dangerous ways she had sought him in that disguise ; and, finding him, seems to have resolved upon a voluntary death by fasting, — partly that she might die in the presence of her beloved, and partly that she might make known to him in death the love which she wanted boldness to disclose to him while living, but chiefly because she knew, that, by her demise, all obstacles would be removed that stood between her prince and his succession to the throne of Lycia. Leucippus had hardly time to comprehend the strength of love in his Urania, when a trampling of horses resounded through his solitude. It was a party of Lycian horsemen, that had come to seek him, dragging the detested Bacha in their train, who was now to receive the full penalty of her misdeeds. Amidst her frantic fury upon the missing of her daughter, the old duke had suddenly died, not with- oupid's beyenge. 821 out suspicion of her having administered poison to him. Her punishment was submitted to Leucippus, who was now, with joyful acclaims, saluted as the rightful Duke of Lycia. He, in no way moved with his great wrongs, but considering her simply as the parent of Urania, and saluting her only by the title of "Wicked Mother," bade her to live. ** That reverend title," he said, as he pointed to the bleeding remains of her child, "must be your pardon. I will use no extremity against you, but leave you to Heaven." The hardened mother, not at all re- lenting at the sad spectacle that lay before her, but making show of dutiful submission to the young duke, and with bended knees approaching him, suddenly with a dagger inflicted a mortal stab upon him; and, with a second stroke stabbing herself, ended both their wretched lives. Now was the tragedy of Cupid's wrath awfully completed ; and the race of Leontius faihng in the death of both his children, the chronicle relates that under their new duke, Ismenus, the offence to the angry Power was expiated ; his statues and altars were, with more magnificence than ever, re-erected ; and he ceased thenceforth from plaguing the land. Thus far the pagan historians relate erring. But from this vain idol story a not unprofitable moral may be gathered against the abuse of the natural but dangerous passion of love. In the story of Hidaspes we see the preposterous linking of beauty with deformity ; of princely expectancies with mean and low conditions, in the case of the prince, her brother ; and of decrepit age with youth, in the ill- end of their doting father, Leontius. By their examples we are warned to decline all unequal and Unassorted unions. ( 822 ) THE DEFEAT OF TIME; OK, A TALE OF THE FAIRIES.* TiTANiA and her moonlight elves were assembled under the canopy of a huge oak, that served to shelter them from the radiance of the moon, which, being now at her full, shot forth intolerable rays, — intolerable, I mean, to the subtile texture of their little shadowy bodies, — but dispensing an agreeable coolness to us grosser mortals. An air of discomfort sate upon the queen and upon her courtiers. Their tiny friskings and gambols were forgot ; and even Robin Goodfellow, for the first time in his little airy life, looked grave. For the queen had had melan- choly forebodings of late, founded upon an ancient prophecy laid up in the records of Fairyland, that the date of faiiy existence should be then extinct when men should cease to believe in them. And she knew how that the race of the nymphs, which were her predecessors, and had been the guardians of the sacred floods, and of the silver fountains, and of the consecrated hills and woods, had utterly dis- appeared before the chilling touch of man's incredu- lity ; and she sighed bitterly at the approaching fate of herself and of her subjects, which was dependent upon so fickle a lease as the capricious and ever mutable faith of man. When, as if to realize her fears, a melancholy shape came gliding in, and that was — Time, who with his intolerable scythe mows down kings and kingdoms ; at whose dread approach the fays huddled together as a flock of timorous ♦ From Hone's Table Book, THE DEFEAT OF TIME. 828 sheep ; and the most courageous among them crept into acorn-cups, not enduring the sight of that an- cientest of monarchs. Titania's first impulse was to wish the presence of her false lord, King Oberon, — who was far away, in the pursuit of a strange beauty, a fay of Indian Land, — that with his good lance and sword, like a faithful knight and husband, he might defend her against Time. But she soon checked that thought as vain ; for what could the prowess of the mighty Oberon himself, albeit the stoutest champion in Fau-yland, have availed agamst so huge a giant, whose bald top touched the skies ? So, in the mildest tone, she besought the spectre, that in his mercy he would overlook and pass by her small subjects, as too diminutive and powerless to add any worthy trophy to his renown. And she besought him to employ his resistless strength against the ambitious children of men, and to lay waste their aspiring w^orks ; to tumble down their towers and turrets, and the Babels of their pride, — fit objects of his devouring scythe, — but to spare her and her harmless race, who had no existence beyond a dream ; frail objects of a creed that lived but in the faith of the beUever. And with her little arms, as well as she could, she grasped the stem knees of Time ; and, waxing speechless with fear, she beckoned to her chief attendants, and maids of honour, to come forth from their hiding-places, and to plead the plea of the fairies. And one of those small, delicate creatures came forth at her bidding, clad all in white Hke a chorister ; and in a low, melodious tone, not louder than the hum of a pretty bee, — when it seems to be demurring whether it shall pitch upon this sweet flower or that before it settles, — set forth her humble petition. *' We fairies," she said, '* are the most inoffensive race that live, and least deserving to perish. It is we that have the care of all sweet melodies, that no discords may offend the sun, who 824 THE DEFEAT OP TIME ; is the great soul of mnsic. We rouse the lark at morn ; and the pretty Echoes, which respond to all the twittering choir, are of our making. Wherefore, great King of Years, if ever you have loved the music which is raining from a morning cloud sent from the messenger of day, the lark, as he mounts to heaven's gate, heyond the ken of mortals ; or if ever you have listened with a charmed ear to the night-bird, that — ' In the flowery spring, Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring Of her sour sorrows, sweeten' d with her song,' — spare our tender tribes, and we will muffle up the sheep-bell for thee, that thy pleasure take no inter- ruption whenever thou shalt listen unto Philomel." And Time answered, that " he had heard that song too long ; and he was even wearied with that ancient strain that recorded the wrong of Tereus. But, if she would know in what music Time de- lighted, it was, when sleep and darkness lay upon crowded cities, to hark to the midnight chime which is tolling from a hundred clocks, like the last knell over the soul of a dead world ; or to the crush of the fall of some age-worn edifice, which is as the voice of himself when he disparteth kingdoms." A second female fay took up the plea, and said, ** We be the handmaids of the Spring, and tend upon the birth of all sweet buds : and the pastoral cow- slips are our friends ; and the pansies ; and the violets, like nuns ; and the quaking harebell is in our wardship ; and the hyaciath, once a fair youth, and dear to Phoebus." Tlien Time made answer, in his wrath striking the harmless ground with his hurtful scythe, that ** they must not think that he was one that cared for flowers, except to see them wither, and to take her beauty from the rose." OR, A TALE OP THE FAIRIES. 825 And a third fairy took up the plea, and said, '* We are kindly things ; and it is we that sit at evening, and shake rich odours from sweet bowers upon discoursing lovers, that seem to each other to be their own sighs ; and we keep off the bat and the owl from their privacy, and the ill-boding whistler ; and we flit in sweet dreams across the brains of in- fancy, and conjure up a smile upon its soft lips to beguile the careful mother, while its little soul is fled for a brief minute or two to sport with our youngest fairies." Then Saturn (which is Time) made answer, that *' they should not think that he delighted in tender babes, that had devoured his own, till fooHsh Khea cheated him with a stone, which he swallowed, thinking it to be the infant Jupiter." And thereat, in token, he disclosed to view his enormous tooth, in which appeared monstrous dints left by that un- natural meal ; and his great throat, that seemed capable of devom'ing up the earth, and all its in- habitants at one meal. " And for lovers," he con- tinued, '* my deUght is, with a hurrying hand to snatch them away from their love-meetings by stealth at nights ; and, in absence, to stand like a motion- less statue, or their leaden planet of mishap, (whence I had my name,) till I make their minutes seem ages." Next stood up a male fairy, clad all in green, like a forester or one of Robin Hood's mates, and, doffing his tiny cap, said, *' We are small foresters, that live in woods, training the young boughs in graceful in- tricacies, with blue snatches of the sky between : we frame all shady roofs and arches rude ; and some- times, when we are plying our tender hatchets, men say that the tapping woodpecker is nigh. And it is we that scoop the hollow cell of the squin-el, and carve quaint letters upon the rinds of trees, which, in sylvan solitudes, sweetly recall to the mind of the 826 THE DEFEAT OF TIME ; heat-oppressed swain, ere he lies down to slumber, the name of his fair one, dainty Aminta, gentle Rosalind, or chastest Laura, as it may happen." Saturn, nothing moved with this courteous ad- dress, bade him be gone; or, ''if he would be a woodman, to go forth and fell oak for the fairies' coffins, which would forthwith be wanted. For himseK, he took no delight in haunting the woods, till the yellow leaves (their golden plumage) were beginning to fall, and leave the brown-black limbs bare, like Nature in her skeleton dress." Then stood up one of those gentle fairies that are good to man, and blushed red as any rose while he told a modest story of one of his own good deeds. ** It chanced upon a time," he said, " that while we were looking at cowslips in the meads, while yet the dew was hanging on the buds like beads, we found a babe left in its swathing-clothes, — a little sorrowful, deserted thing, begot of love, but begetting no love in others ; guiltless of shame, but doomed to shame for its parents' offence in bringing it by indirect courses into the world. It was pity to see the abandoned little orphan left to the world's care by an unnatural mother. How the cold dew kept wetting its childish coats ! and its little hair, how it was bedabbled, that was like gossamer ! Its pout- ing mouth, unknowing how to speak, lay half opened like a rose-lipped shell; and its cheek was softer than any peach, upon which the tears, for very roundness, could not long dwell, but fell off, in clearness like pearls, — some on the grass, and some on his little hand ; and some haply wandered to the little dimpled well under his mouth, which Love himself seemed to have planned out, but less for tears than for smiles. Pity it was, too, to see how the burning sun had scorched its helpless limbs ; for it lay without shade or shelter, or mother's breast, for foul weather or fair. So, having com- OB, k TALE OP THE FAIRIES. 827 passion on its sad plight, my fellows and I turned ourselves into grasshoppers, and swarmed about the babe, making such shrill cries as those pretty little chirping creatures make in their mirth, till with our noise we attracted the attention of a passing rustic, a tender-hearted hind, who, wondering at our small but loud concert, strayed aside curiously, and found the babe, where it lay in the remote grass, and, taking it up, lapped it in his russet coat, and bore it to his cottage, where his wife kindly nui'tured it till it grew up a goodly personage. How this babe pros- pered afterwards, let proud London tell. This was that famous Sir Thomas Gresham, who was the chiefest of her merchants, the richest, the wisest. Witness his many goodly vessels on the Thames, freighted with costly merchandise, jewels from Ind, and pearls for courtly dames, and silks of Samar- cand. And witness, more than all, that stately Bourse (or Exchange) which he caused to be built, a mart for merchants from East and West, whose graceful summit still bears, in token of the fairies' favours, his chosen crest, the gi-asshopper. And, like the grasshopper, may it pleace you, great king, to suffer us also to live, partakers of the green earth!" The fairy had scarce ended his plea, when a shrill cry, not unlike the grasshopper's, was heard. Poor Puck — or Eobin Goodfellow, as he is sometimes called — had recovered a little from his first fright, and, in one of his mad freaks, had perched upon the beard of old Time, which was flowing, ample, and majestic ; and was amusing himself with plucking at a hair, which was indeed so massy, that it seemed to him that he was removing some huge beam of timber rather than a hair ; which Time by some ill chance perceiving, snatched up the impish mischief with his great hand, and asked what it was. ** Alas 1" quoth Puck, *' a little random elf am I, 828 THE DEFEAT OP TIME. born in one of Nature's sports ; a very weed, created for the simple, sweet enjoyment of myself, but for no other purpose, worth, or need, that ever I could learn. 'Tis I that bob the angler's idle cork, till the patient man is ready to breathe a curse. I steal the morsel from the gossip's fork, or stop the sneez- ing chanter in mid psalm ; and, when an infant has been born with hard or homely features, mothers say I changed the child at nurse : but to fulfil any graver purpose I have not wit enough, and hardly the will. I am a pinch of lively dust to frisk upon the wind : a tear would make a puddle of me ; and so I tickle myself with the lightest straw, and shun all griefs that might make me stagnant. This is my small philosophy." Then Time, dropping him on the ground, as a thing too inconsiderable for his vengeance, grasped fast his mighty scythe : and now, not Puck alone, but the whole state of fairies, had gone to inevitable wreck and destruction, had not a timely apparition interposed, at whose boldness Time was astounded ; for he came not with the habit or the forces of a deity, who alone might cope with Time, but as a simple mortal, clad as you might see a forester that hunts after wild conies by the cold moonshine ; or a stalker of stray deer, stealthy and bold. But by the golden lustre in his eye, and the passionate wanness in his cheek, and by the fair and ample space of his forehead, which seemed a palace framed for the habi- tation of all glorious thoughts, he knew that this was his great rival, who had power given him to rescue whatsoever victims Time should clutch, and to cause them to live for ever in his immortal verse. And, muttering the name of Shakspeare, Time spread his roc-like wings, and fled the controlling presence ; and the liberated court of the fairies, with Titania at their head, flocked around the gentle ghost, giving him thanks, nodding to him, and doing him cour- MARIA HOWE. 829 tesies, who had crowned them henceforth with a permanent existence, to live in the minds of men, while verse shall have power to charm, or Midsummer moons shall brighten. What particular endearments passed between the fairies and their poet, passes my pencil to dehneate ; but, if you are curious to be informed, I must refer you, gentle reader, to the *' Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," a most agreeable poem lately put forth by my friend Thomas Hood ; of the first half of which the above is nothing but a meagre and a harsh prose abstract. Farewell ! The words of Mercury are harsh after tJie songs of Apollo. MAEIA HOWE; OR, THE EFFECT OP WITCH STORIES.* I WAS brought up in the country. From my infancy I was always a weak and tender- spirited girl, subject to fears and depressions. My parents, and particu- larly my mother, were of a very different disposition. They were what is usually called gay. They loved pleasure and parties and visiting ; but, as they found the turn of my mind to be quite opposite, they gave themselves little trouble about me, but upon such occasions generally left me to my choice, which was much oftener to stay at home, and indulge myself in my solitude, than to join in their rambling visits. I was always fond of being alone, yet always in a * This and the two following juvenile stories are from " Mrs. Leicester's School." — Editor. 830 MAEIA HOWE manner afraid. There was a book-closet which led into my mother's dressing-room. Here I was ex- tremely fond of being shut up by myself, to take down whatever volumes I pleased, and pore upon them, — no matter whether they were fit for my years or no, or whether I understood them. Here, when the weather would not permit me to go into the dark walk [my ivalk, as it was called) in the garden, — here, when my parents have been from home, I have stayed for hours together, till the loneliness, w^hich pleased me so at first, has at length become quite frightful, and I have rushed out of the closet into the inha- bited parts of the house, and sought refuge in the lap of some one of the female servants, or of my aunt, who would say, seeing me look pale, that Maria had been frightening herself with some of those nasty books : so she used to call my favourite volumes, which I would not have parted with, no, not with one of the least of them, if I had had the choice to be made a fine princess, and to govern the world. But my aunt was no reader. She used to excuse herself, and say that reading hurt her eyes. I have been naughty enough to think that this was only an excuse ; for I found that my aunt's weak eyes did not prevent her from poring ten hours a day upon her Prayer-book, or her favourite Thomas a Kempis. But this was always her excuse for not reading any of the books I recommended. My aunt was my father's sister. She had never been mar- ried. My father was a good deal older than my mother, and my aunt was ten years older than my father. As I was often left at home with her, and as my serious disposition so well agreed with hers, an intimacy grew up between the old lady and me ; and she would often say that she loved only one person in the world, and that was me. Not that she and my parents were on very bad terms ; but the old lady did not feel herself respected enough. The OR, THE EFFECTS OF WITCH STORIES. 831 attention and fondness which she showed to me, conscious as I was that I was almost the only being she felt any thing like fondness to, made me love her, as it was natural : indeed I am ashamed to say that I fear I almost loved her better than both my parents put together. But there was an oddness, a silence, about my aunt, which was never interrupted but by her occasional expressions of love to me, that made me stand in fear of her. An odd look from under her spectacles would sometimes scare me away, when I had been peering up in her face to make her kiss me. Then she had a way of muttering to herself, which, though it was good words and religious words that she was mumbling, somehow I did not like. My weak spirits, and the fears I was subject to, always made me afraid of any personal singularity or oddness in any one. I am ashamed, ladies, to lay open so many particulars of our family ; but in- deed it is necessary to the understanding of what I am going to tell you of a very great weakness, if not wickedness, which I was guilty of towards my aunt. But I must return to my studies, and tell you what books I found in the closet, and what reading I chiefly admired. There was a great Book of Martyrs, in which I used to read, or rather I used to spell out meanings ; for I was too ignorant to make out many words : but there it was written all about those good men who chose to be burned ahve, rather than forsake their religion, and become naughty Papists. Some words I could make out, some I could not : but I made out enough to fill my little head with vanity ; and I used to think I was so courageous that I could be burned too ; and I would put my hands upon the flames which were pictm-ed in the pretty pictures which the book had, and feel them. But you know, ladies, there is a great differ- ence between the flames in a picture and real fire ; and I am now ashamed of the conceit which I had 882 MAEIA HOWE ; of my own courage, and think how poor a martyr I should have made in those days. Then there was a book not so big, but it had pictures in it. It wag called Culpepper's Herbal. It was full of pictures of plants and herbs ; but I did not much care for that. Then there was Salmon's Modem History, out of which I picked a good deal. It had pictures of Chinese gods, and the great hooded serpent, which ran strangely in my fancy. There were some law books, too ; but the old English frightened me from reading them. But, above all, what I relished was Stackhouse's History of the Bible, where there was the picture of the ark, and all the beasts getting into it. This delighted me, because it puzzled me : and many an aching head have I got with poring into it, and contriving how it might be built, with such and such rooms, to hold all the world, if there should be another flood ; and sometimes settling what pretty beasts should be saved, and what should not ; for I would have no ugly or deformed beast in my pretty ark. But this was only a piece of folly and vanity, that a little reflection might cure me of. Foolish girl that I was, to suppose that any creature is reaUy ugly, that has aU its limbs contrived with heavenly wisdom, and was doubtless formed to some beautiful end ! — though a child cannot comprehend it. Doubtless a frog or a toad is not ugher in itself than a squirrel or a pretty green lizard ; but we want understanding to see it. These fancies, ladies, were not so very foolish or naughty, perhaps, but that they may be forgiven in a child of six years old ; but what I am going to tell» I shall be ashamed of, and repent, I hope, as long as I live. It will teach me not to form rash judg- ments. Besides the picture of the ark, and many others which I have forgot, Stackliouse contained one picture which made more impression upon my childish understanding than all tlie rest : it was the picture c THE EFFECTS OF WITCH STORIES. 833 ie picture of the raising up of Samuel, which I used to call the Witcli-of-Endor picture. I was always very fond of picking up stories about witches. There was a book called Glanvil on Witches, which used to lie about in this closet : it was thumbed about, and showed it had been much read in former times. This was my treasure. Here I used to pick out the strangest stories. My not being able to read them very well, probably made them appear more strange and out of the way to me. But I could collect enough to understand that witches were old women, who gave themselves up to do mischief ; how, by the help of spu'its as bad as themselves, they lamed cattle, and made the corn not grow ; and how they made images of wax to stand for people that had done them any injury, or they thought had done them injury ; and how they burned the images before a slow fire, and stuck pins in them ; and the persons which these waxen images repre- sented, however far distant, felt all the pains and torments in good earnest which were inflicted in show upon these images : and such a horror I had of these wicked witches, that though I am now better instructed, and look upon all these stories as mere idle tales, and invented to fill people's heads with nonsense, yet I cannot recall to mind the horrors which I then felt, without shuddering, and feeling something of the old fit return. This foolish book of witch stories had no pictures in it ; but I made up for them out of my own fancy, and out of the great picture of the raising up of Samuel, in Stackliouse. I was not old enough to understand the difference there was between these silly, improbable tales, which imputed such powers to poor old women, who are the most helpless things in the creation, and the narrative in the Bible, which does not say that the witch, or pretended witch, raised up the dead body of Samuel by her own x^cver, 834 MAKIA HOWE ; but, as it clearly appears, lie was permitted by the divine will to appear, to confound the presumption of Saul ; and that the witch herself was really as much frightened and confounded at the miracle as Saul himself, not expecting a real appearance, but probably having prepared some juggling, sleight- of-hand tricks, and sham appearance, to deceive the eyes of Saul ; whereas neither she, nor any one living, had ever the power to raise the dead to life, but only He who made them from the first. These reasons I might have read in Stackhouse's book itself, if I had been old enough, and have read them in that very book since I was older ; but at that time ] looked at little beyond the picture. These stories of witches so terrified me, that my sleep was often broken ; and in my dreams I always had a fancy of a witch being in the room with me. I know now that it was only nervousness; but though I can laugh at it now as well as you, ladies, if you knew what I then sufiered, you would be thankful that you have had sensible people about you to instruct you, and teach you better. I was let grow up wild, like an ill weed ; and thrived accordingly. One night, when I had been terrified in my sleep with my imaginations, I got out of bed, and crept softly to the adjoining room. My room was next to where my aunt usually sat when she was alone. Into her room I crept for relief from my fears. The old lady was not yet retired to rest, but was sitting with her eyes half open, half closed, her spectacles tottering upon her nose ; her head nodding over her Prayer-book ; her hps mumbling the words as she read them, or half read them, in her dozing posture ; her grotesque appearance, her old-fashioned dress, resembling what I had seen in that fatal pictm-e in Stackhouse. All this, with the dead time of night, as it seemed to me, (for I had gone through my first sleep,) joined to produce a OH, THE EFFECTS OF WITCH STORIES. 835 wicked fancy in me, that the form which I had beheld was not my aunt, but some witch. Her mumbUng of her prayers confirmed me in this shocking idea. I had read in Glanvil of those wicked creatures read- ing their prayers backwards; and I thought that this was the operation which her lips were at this time employed about. Instead of flying to her friendly lap for that protection which I had so often ex- perienced when I have been weak and timid, I shrunk back, terrified and bewildered, to my bed, where I lay, in broken sleep and miserable fancies, till the morning, w^hich I had so much reason to wish for, came. My fancies a little wore away with the light ; but an impression was fixed, which could not for a long time be done away. In the daytime, when my father and mother were about the house, when I saw them familiarly speak to my aunt, my fears all vanished ; and when the good creature has taken me upon her knees, and shown me any kind- ness more than ordinary, at such times I have melted into tears, and longed to tell her what naughty, foolish fancies I had had of her. But when night returned, that figure which I had seen recurred, — the posture, the half-closed eyes, the mumbling and muttering which I had heard. A confusion was in my head, who it w^as I had seen that night : it was my aunt, and it was not my aunt ; it was that good creature, why loved me above all the world, engaged at her good task of devotions, — perhaps praying for some good to me. Again it was a witch, a creature hateful to God and man, reading backwards the good prayers ; who would perhaps destroy me. In these conflicts of mind I passed several weeks, till, by a revolution in my fate, I was removed to the house of a female relation of my mother's in a distant part of the country, who had come on a visit to our house, and observing my lonely ways, and apprehensive of the ill effect of my mode of living upon my health, 836 MARIA HOWE. begged leave to take me home to her house to reside for a short time. I went, with some reluctance at leaving my closet, my dark walk, and even my aunt, who had been such a source of both love and terror to me. But I went, and soon found the good effects of a change of scene. Instead of melancholy closets and lonely avenues of trees, I saw lightsome rooms and cheerful faces. I had companions of my own age. No books were allowed me but what were rational and sprightly, — that gave me mirth, or gave me instruction. I soon learned to laugh at witch stories ; and when I returned, after three or four months' absence, to our own house, my good aunt appeared to me in the same light in which I had viewed her from my infancy, before that foolish fancy possessed me ; or rather, I should say, more kind, more fond, more loving than before. It is impossible to say how much good that lady (the kind relation of my mother's that I spoke of) did to me by changing the scene. Quite a new turn of ideas was given to me. I became sociable and companionable. My parents soon discovered a change in me ; and I have found a similar alteration in them. They have been plainly more fond of me since that change, as from that time I learned to conform myself more to their way of living. I have never since had that aversion to company, and going out with them, which used to make them regard me with less fondness than they would have wished to show. I impute all that I had to complain of in their neglect to my having been a little unsociable, uncompanionable mortal. I lived in this manner for a year or two, passing my time between our house and the lady's who so kindly took me in hand, till, by her advice, I was sent to this school ; where I have told you, ladies, what, for fear of ridicule, I never ventured to tell any person besides, — the story of my foohsh and naughty fancy. oo 7 ) SUSAN YATES; OR, FIRST GOING TO CHURCH. I WAS bom and brought up in a house in which my parents had all their lives resided, which stood in the midst of that lonely tract of land called the Lincolnshire Fens. Few families besides our own Uved near the spot ; both because it was reckoned an unwholesome air, and because its distance from any town or market made it an inconvenient situa- tion. My father was in no very affluent circum- stances ; and it was a sad necessity which he was put to, of having to go many miles to fetch any thing from the nearest village, which was full seven miles distant, through a sad, miry way, that at all times made it heavy walking, and which, after rain, was almost impassable. But he had no horse or carriage of his own. The church, which belonged to the parish in which our house was situated, stood in this village ; and its distance being, as I said before, seven miles from our house, made it quite an impossible thing for my mother or me to think of going to it. Sometimes, indeed, on a fine dry Sunday, my father would rise early, and take a walk to the village, just to see how tjoodness thrived, as he used to say; but he would generally return tired and the worse for his walk. It is scarcely possible to explain to any one who has not lived in the fens what difficult and dangerous walking it is. A mile is as good as four, I have heard my father say, in those parts. My mother, who in the early part of her life had lived in a more civihzed spot, and had been used to constant 838 SU3AN YATES ; church -going, would often lament her situation. It was from her I early imbibed a great curiosity and anxiety to see that thing which I heard her call a church, and so often lament that she could never go to. I had seen houses of various structures, and had seen in pictures the shapes of ships and boats, and palaces and temples, but never rightly any thing that could be called a church, or that could satisf;y me about its form. Sometimes I thought it must be like our house ; and sometimes I fancied it must be more like the house of our neighbour, Mr. Sutton, which was bigger and handsomer than ours. Sometimes I thought it was a great hollow cave, such as I have heard my father say the first in- habitants of the earth dwelt in. Then I thought it was like a waggon or a cart, and that it must be some- thing moveable. The shape of it ran in my mind strangely; and one day I ventured to ask my mother, what was that foolish thing she was always longing to go to, and which she called a church. Was it any thing to eat or drink ? or was it only like a great huge plaything, to be seen and stared at ? I was not quite five years of age when I made this inquiry. This question, so oddly put, made my mother smile : but, in a little time, she put on a more grave look, and informed me that a church was nothing that I had supposed it ; but it was a great building, far greater than any house which I had seen, where men and women and children came together twice a day, on Sundays, to hear the Bible read, and make good resolutions for the week to come. She told me that the fine music which we sometimes heard in the air, came from the bells of St. Mary's Chui'ch, and that we never heard it but when the wind was ill a particular point. This raised my wonder more than all the rest ; for I had somehow conceived that the noise which I heard was occasioned by birds up OR, FIRST GOING TO CHURCH. 339 in the air, or that it was made by the angels, whom (so ignorant I was till that time) I had alwaj^s considered to be a sort of birds : for, before this time, I was totally ignorant of any thing like religion ; it being a principle with my father, that yomig heads should not be told too many things at once, for fear they should get confused ideas, and no clear notion of any thing. We had always, indeed, so far observed Sundays, that no work was done upon that day ; and upon that day I wore my best muslin frock, and was not allowed to sing or to be noisy : but I never understood why that day should differ from any other. We had no public meetings : indeed the few straggling houses which were near us would have furnished but a slender congregation ; and the loneliness of the place we lived in, instead of making us more sociable, and drawing us closer together, as my mother used to say it ought to have done, seemed to have the effect of making us more distant and more averse to society than other people. One or two good neighbours indeed we had, but not in numbers to give me an idea of church attendance. 13ut now my mother thought it high time to give me some clearer instruction in the main points of religion ; and my father came readily into her plan. I was now permitted to sit up half an hour later on Sunday evening, that I might hear a portion of Scripture read, which had always been their custom ; though, by reason of my tender age, and my father's opinion on the impropriety of children being taught too young, I had never till now been an auditor. I was taught my prayers, and those things which you, ladies, I doubt not, had the benefit of being in- structed in at a much earher age. The clearer my notions on these points became, they only made me more passionately long for the privilege of joining in that social service from which 840 SUSAN YATES ; it seemed that we alone, of all the inhabitants of the land, were debarred ; and when the wind was in that point which enabled the sound of the distant bells of St. Mary's to be heard over the great moor which skirted our house, I have stood out in the air to catch the sounds, which I almost devoured : and the tears have come into my eyes, when sometimes they seemed to speak to me, almost in articulate sounds, to come to church, and because of the great moor which w^as between me and them I could not come ; and the too tender apprehension of these things has filled me with a religious melancholy. With thoughts like these, I entered into my seventh year. And now the time was come when the great moor was no longer to separate me from the object of my wishes and of my curiosity. My father having some money left him by the will of a deceased relation, we ventured to set up a sort of carriage : no very superb one, I assure you, ladies; but in that part of the world it was looked upon with some envy by our poorer neighbours. The first party of pleasure v/hich my father proposed to take in it was to the village where I had so often wished to go ; and my mother and I were to accompany him : for it was very fit, my father observed, that little Susan should go to church, and learn how to behave herself ; for we might sometime or other have occasion to Hve in London, and not always be confined to that out-of- the-way spot. It was on a Sunday morning that we set out, my little heart beating with almost breathless expecta- tion. The day was fine, and the roads were as good as they ever are in those parts. I was so happy and 60 proud ! I was lost in dreams of what I was going to see. At last the tall steeple of St. Mary's Church came in view. It was pointed out to me by my father as the place from which the music had OB, FIRST GOING TO CHURCH. 841 come which I had heard over the moor, and fancied to be angels singing. I was wound up to the highest pitch of delight at having visibly presented to me the spot from which had proceeded that unknown friendly music ; and when it began to peal, just as we approached the village, it seemed to speak, ** Susan is come! " as plainly as it used to invite me to come when I heard it over the moor. I pass over our alighting at the house of a relation, and all that passed till I went with my father and mother to church. St. Mary's Church is a great church for such a small village as it stands in. My father said it had been a cathedral, and that it had once belonged to a monastery ; but the monks were all gone. Over the door there was stone-work representing the saints and bishops ; and here and there, along the sides of the church, there were figures of men's heads, made in a strange, grotesque way. I have seen the same sort of figures in the round tower of the Temple Church in London. My father said they were very improper ornaments for such a place ; and so I now think them : but it seems the people who built these great churches, in old times, gave themselves more liberties than they do now ; and I remember that when I first saw them, and before my father had made this observation, though they were so ugly and out of shape, and some of them seemed to be grin- ning, and distorting their features with pain or with laughter, yet, being placed upon a church to which I had come with such serious thoughts, I could not help thinking they had some serious meaning ; and I looked at them with wonder, but without any temptation to laugh. I somehow fancied they were the representation of wicked people, set up as a warning. When we got into the church the service was not begun ; and my father kindly took me round to show 842 SUSAN YATES ; me the monuments, and every thing else remark- able. I remember seeing one of a venerable figure, which my father said had been a judge. The figure was kneeling, as if it were alive, before a sort of desk, with a book, I suppose the Bible, lying on it. I somehow fancied the figure had a sort of life in it, it seemed so natural ; or that the dead judge, that it was done for, said his prayers at it still. This was a silly notion : but I was very young, and had passed my little life in a remote place, where I had never seen any thing, nor had known any thing ; and the awe which I felt at first being in a church took from me all power but that of wondering. I did not reason about any thing : I was too young. Now I under- stand why monuments are put up for the dead, and why the figures which are put upon them are de- scribed as doing the actions which they did in their lifetime, and that they are a sort of pictures set up for our instruction. But all was new and sur- prising to me on that day, — the long windows with little panes, the pillars, the pews made of oak, the little hassocks for the people to kneel on, the form of the pulpit, with the sounding-board over it, grace- fully carved in flower-work. To you, who have lived all your lives in populous places, and have been taken to church from the earliest time you can remember, my admiration of these things must appear strangely ignorant ; but I was a lonely young creature, that had been brought up in remote places, where there was neither church, nor church-going inhabitants. I have since lived in great towns, and seen the ways of churches and of worship ; and I am old enough now to distinguish between what is essential in rehgion, and what is merely formal or ornamental. When my father had done pointing out to me the things most worthy of notice about the church, the service was almost ready to begin : the parishionerp OR, FlilST GOING TO CHURCH. 843 had most of them entered, and taken their seats ; and we were shown into a x^ew, where my mother was already seated. Soon after, the clergyman entered, and the organ began to play what is called the Voluntary. I had never seen so many people assembled before. At first I thought that all eyes were upon me, and that because I was a stranger. I was terribly ashamed and confused at first : but my mother helped me to find out the places in the Prayer-book ; and being busy about that, took off some of my painful apprehensions. I was no stranger to the order of the service, having often read in the Prayer-book at home : but, my thoughts being confused, it puzzled me a little to find out the responses and other things which I thought I knew so well ; but I went through it tolerably well. One thing which has often troubled me since is, that I am afraid I was too full of myself, and of thinking how happy I was, and what a privilege it was for one that was so young to join in the service with so many grown people ; so that I did not attend enough to the instruction which I might have received. I remember, I fooHshly applied to myself every thing that was said, so as it could mean nobody but my- self, I was so full of my own thoughts. All that assembly of people seemed to me as if they were come together only to show me the way of a church. Not but I received some very affecting impressions from some things which I heard that day : but the standing-up and sitting-down of the people, the organ, the singing, — the way of all these things took up more of my attention than was proper : or I thought it did. I believe I behaved better, and was more serious, when I went a second time and a third time : for now we went, as a regular thing, every Sunday ; and continued to do so, till, by a still further change for the better in my father's circum- stances, we removed to London. Oh it was a 844 ARABELLA HAEDY ; happy day for me, my first going to St. Mary's Church : before that day, I used to feel hke a little outcast in the wilderness ; like one that did not be- long to the world of Christian people. I have never felt like a little outcast since. But I never can hear the sweet sound of bells, without thinking of the angels singing, and what poor but pretty thoughts I had of angels in my uninstructed solitude. AEABELLA HAKDY; OR, THE SEA VOYAGE. I WAS born in the East Indies. I lost my father and mother when young. At the age of five my relations thought it proper that I should be sent to England for my education. I was to be intrusted to the care of a young woman who had a character for great humanity and discretion ; but just as I had taken leave of my friends, and we were about to take our passage, the young woman suddenly fell sick, and could not go on board. In this unpleasant emer- gency no one knew how to act. The ship was at the very point of sailing, and it was the last which was to sail for the season. At length the captain, who was known to my friends, prevailed upon my relation, who had come with us to see us embark, to leave the young woman on shore, and to let me embark separately. There was no possibihty of getting any other female attendant for me in the short time allotted for our preparation ; and the op- portunity of going by that ship was thought too valuable to be lost. No other ladies happened to be going ; and so I was consigned to the care of the captain and his crew — trough and unaccustomed at- OR, THE SEA VOYAGE. 846 tendants for a young creature, delicately brought up as I had been : but, indeed, they did their best to make me not feel the difference. The unpolished sailors were my nursery-maids and my waiting- women. Every thing was done by the captain and the men to accommodate me, and make me easy. I had a little room made out of the cabin, which was to be considered as my room, and nobody might enter into it. The first mate had a great character for bravery and all sailor-like accomplishments ; but with all this he had a gentleness of manners, and a pale, feminine cast of face, from ill health and a weakly constitution, which subjected him to some ridicule from the officers, and caused him to be named Betsy. He did not much like the appellation ; but he submitted to it the better, saying that those who gave him a woman's name well knew that he had a man's heart, and that, in face of danger, he would go as far as any man. To this young man, whose real name was Charles Atkinson, the care of me, by a lucky thought of the captain, was especially intrusted. Betsy was proud of his charge ; and, to do him justice, acquitted himself with great diligence and adroitness through the whole of the voyage. From the beginning I had somehow looked upon Betsy as a woman, hearing him so spoken of; and this reconciled me in some measure to the want of a maid, which I had been used to. But I was a manageable girl at all times, and gave nobody much trouble. I have not knowledge enough to give an account of my voyage, or to remember the names of the seas we passed through, or the lands which we touched upon in our course. The chief thing I can remember (for I do not recollect the events of the voyage in any order) was Atkinson taking me upon deck to see the great whales playing about in the sea. There was one great whale came bounding up out oi the 846 ARABELLA HARDY; sea, and then lie would dive into it again, and then he would come up at a distance where nobody ex- pected him ; and another whale was following after him. Atkinson said they were at play, and that the lesser whale loved that bigger whale, and kept it company all through the wide seas : but I thought it strange play, and a frightful kind of love ; for I every minute expected they would come up to our ship, and toss it. But Atkinson said a whale was a gentle creature ; that it was a sort of sea-elephant ; and that the most powerful creatures in nature are always the least hurtful. And he told me how men went out to take these whales, and stuck long pointed darts into them ; and how the sea was discoloured with the blood of these poor whales for many miles distance : and I admired the courage of the men ; but I was sorry for the inoffensive whales. Many other pretty sights he used to show me, when he was not on watch, or doing some duty for the ship. No one was more attentive to his duty than he : but at such times as he had leisure, he would show me all pretty sea-sights — the dolphins and porpoises that came before a storm ; and all the colours which the sea changed to — how sometimes it was a deep blue, and then a deep green, and some- times it would seem all on fire. All these various appearances he would show me, and attempt to explain the reason of them to me as well as my young capacity would admit of. There was a lion and a tiger on board, going to England as a present to the king ; and it was a great diversion to Atkin- son and me, after I had got rid of my first terrors, to see the ways of these beasts in their dens, and how venturous the sailors were in putting their hands through the grates, and patting their rough coats. Some of the men had monkeys, which ran loose about ; and the sport was for the men to lose them, and find them again. The monkeys would run up on, THE SEA VOYAGE. 817 the shrouds, and pass from rope to rope, with ten times greater alacrity than the most experienced sailor could follow them : and sometimes they would hide themselves in the most unthought-of places ; and when they were found they would grin, and make mouths, as if they had sense. Atkinson de- scribed to me the ways of these little animals in their native woods ; for he had seen them. Oh, how many ways he thought of to amuse me in that long voyage ! Sometimes he would describe to me the odd shapes and varieties of fishes that were in the sea ; and tell me tales of the sea-monsters that lay hid at the bottom, and were seldom seen by men ; and what a glorious sight it would be if our eyes could be sharpened to behold all the inhabitants of the sea at once, swimming in the great deep, as plain as we see the gold and silver fish in a bowl of glass. With such notions he enlarged my infant capacity to take in many things. When in foul weather I have been terrified at the motion of the vessel as it rocked backwards and for- wards, he would still my fears, and tell me that I used to be rocked so once in a cradle ; and that the sea was God's bed, and the ship our cradle, and we were as safe in that greater motion as when we felt that lesser one in our little wooden sleeping-places. When the wind was up, and sang through the sails, and disturbed me with its violent clamour, he would call it music, and bid me hark to the sea-organ ; and with that name he quieted my tender apprehen- sions. When I have looked around with a mournful face at seeing all men about me, he would enter into my thoughts, and tell me pretty stories of his mother and his sisters, and a female cousin that he loved better than his sisters, whom he called Jenny ; and say, that, when we got to England, I should go and see them ; and how fond Jenny would be of his little daughter, as he called me. And, with these 848 ARABELLA HAEDY ; images of women and females which he raised in my fancy, he quieted me for a while. One time, and never but once, he told me that Jenny had promised to be his wife, if ever he came to England ; but that he had his doubts whether he should live to get home, for he was very sickly. This made me cry bitterly. I dwell so long upon the attention of this Atkinson because his death, which happened just before we got to England, affected me so much, and because he alone of all the ship's crew has engrossed my mind ever since ; though, indeed, the captain and all were singularly kind to me, and strove to make up for my uneasy and unnatural situation. The boat- swain would pipe for my diversion, and the sailor- boy would climb the dangerous mast for my sport. The rough foremast-man would never willingly ap- pear before me till he had combed his long black hair smooth and sleek, not to terrify me. The offi- cers got up a sort of play for my amusement ; and Atkinson, or, as thoy called him, Betsy, acted the heroine of the piece. All ways that could be con- trived were thought upon to reconcile me to my lot. I was the universal favourite : I do not know how deservedly ; but I suppose it was because I was alone, and there was no female in the ship besides me. Had I come over with female relations or at- tendants, I should have excited no particular curiosity : I should have required no uncommon attentions. I was one little woman among a crew of men ; and I believe the homage which I have read that men universally pay to women was in this case directed to me, in the absence of all other woman- kind. I do not know how that might be ; but I was a little princess among them, although I was not six years old. I remember, the first drawback which happened to my comfort was Atkinson's not appearing the whole OR, THE SEA VOYAGE. 849 of one day. The captain tried to reconcile me to it I'Y saying that Mr. Atkinson was confined to his cabin ; that he was not quite well, but a day or two would restore him. I begged to be taken in to see him ; but this was not granted. A day, and then another came, and another, and no Atkinson was visible ; and I saw apparent solicitude in the faces of all the officers, who nevertheless strove to put on their best countenances before me, and to be more than usually kind to me. At length, by the desire of Atkinson himself, as I have since learned, I was permitted to go into his cabin, and see him. He was sitting up, apparently in a state of great exhaus- tion : but his face lighted up when he saw me ; and he kissed me, and he told me that he was going a great voyage, far longer than that which we had passed together, and he should never come back. And, though I was so yoimg, I understood well enough that he meant this of his death ; and I cried sadly: but he comforted me, and told me that I musNt be his little executrix, and perform his last will, and bear his last words to his mother and his sisters, and to his cousin Jenny, whom I should see in a short time ; and he gave me his blessing, as a father would bless his child ; and he sent a last kiss by me to all his female relations ; and he made me promise that I would go and see them when I got to England. And soon after this he died : but I was in another part of the ship when he died ; and I was not told it till we got to shore, which was a few days after ; but they kept telling me that he was better and better, and that I should soon see him, but that it disturbed him to talk with any one. Oh, what a grief it was, when I learned that I had lost an old shipmate, that had made an irksome situation so bearable by his kind assiduities ! and to think that he was gone, and I could never repay him for his kindness ! 350 ARABELLA HARDY. When I had been a year and a half in England, the captain, who had made another voyage to India and back, thinking that time had alleviated a little the sorrow of Atkinson's relations, prevailed upon my friends, who had the care of me in England, to let him introduce me to Atkinson's mother and sisters. Jenny was no more. She had died in the interval ; and I never saw her. Grief for his death had brought on a consumjption, of which she lingered about a twelvemonth, and then expired. But in the mother and the sisters of this excellent young man I have found the most valuable friends I possess on this side of the great ocean. They received me from the captain as the little protegee of Atkinson : and from them I have learned passages of his former life; and this in particular, — that the illness of which he died was brought on by a wound, of which he never quite recovered, which he got in a despe- rate attempt, when he was quite a boy, to defend his captain against a superior force of the enemy which had boarded him, and which, by his premature valour inspiriting the men, they finally succeeded in repulsing. This was that Atkinson, who, from his pale and feminine appearance, was called Betsy: this was he whose womanly care of me had got him the name of woman ; who, with more than female attention, condescended to play the handmaid to a httle unaccompanied orphan, that fortune had cast upon the care of a rough sea-captain and his rougher crew. POEMS EXISTENCE, CONSIDERED IN ITSELF, NO BLESSING.* FROM THE LATIN OF PAIilNGBNIUS. The poet, after a seeming approval of suicide from a con- sideration of the cares and crimes of hfe, finally rejecting it, discusses the negative importance of existence, contemplated in itself, without reference to good or evil Op these sad truths consideration had. Thou shalt not fear to quit this world so mad. So wicked : but the tenet rather hold Of wise Calanus and his followers old, Who with their own wills their own freedom wrought, And by seK- slaughter their dismissal sought From this dark den of crime, this horrid lair Of men, that savager than monsters are ; And, scorning longer in this tangled mesh Of ills, to wait on perishable flesh, Did with their desperate hands anticipate The too, too slow relief of lingering fate. And if religion did not stay thine hand, And God, and Plato's wise behests, withstand, I would in like case counsel thee to throw This senseless burden off, of cares below. * From the Athenaum, 1832. 354 THE CELESTIAL MESSENGER Not wine, as wine, men choose, but as it came From such or such a vintage : 'tis the same With life, which simply must be understood A blank negation, if it be not good. But if 'tis ^vretched all, — as men decline And loathe the sour lees of corrupted wine,— 'Tis so to be contemned. Merely to be Is not a boon to seek, or ill to flee ; Seeing that every vilest little thing Has it in common, — from a gnat's small wing, A creeping worm, down to the moveless stone. And crumbling bark from trees. Unless to be, And to be blest, be one, I do not see In bare existence, as existence, aught That's worthy to be loved or to be sought. THE PAETING SPEECH OF THE CELESTIAL MESSENGEE TO THE POET.* FROM THE LATIN OF PAIilNGENIUS, IN THE ZODIACUS VIT^l. But now time warns (my mission at an end) That to Jove's starry court I re-ascend ; From whose high battlements I take delight To scan your earth, diminish'd to the sight, Pendant and round, and, as an apple, small, Self-propt, self-balanced, and secure from fall By her own weight ; and how with liquid robe Blue Ocean girdles round her tiny globe. While lesser Nereus, gliding hke a snake, Betwixt her lands his flexile course doth take, Shrunk to a rivulet ; and how the Po, The mighty Ganges, Tanais, Ister, show * From the Athenaum^ 1834. TO THE POET. 855 No bigger than a ditch which rains have swell'd. Old Nilus' seven proud mouths I late beheld, And mock'd the watery puddles. Hosts steel-clad Ofltimes I thence beheld ; and how the sad Peoples are punish'd by the fault of kings, Which from the purple fiend Ambition springs. Forgetful of mortality, they live In hot strife for possessions fugitive, At which the angels grieve. Sometimes I trace Of fountains, rivers, seas, the change of place ; By ever-shifting course, and Time's unrest, The vale exalted, and the mount deprest To an inglorious valley ; ploughshares going Where tall trees reared their tops, and fresh trec3 growing In antique postures ; cities lose their site ; Old things wax new. Oh what a rare delight To him, who, from this vantage, can survey At once stem Afric and soft Asia, With Europe's cultured plains, and, in their turns, Their scattered tribes ! — those whom the hot Crab burns. The tawn Ethiops ; Orient Indians ; Getulians ; ever-wandering Scythians ; Swift Tartan hordes ; Cilicians rapacious, And Parthians with black-bended bow pugna- cious ; Sabeans incense bring ; men of Thrace ; Itahan, Spaniard, Gaul ; and that rough race Of Britons, rigid as their native colds ; With all the rest the circling sun beholds. But clouds and elemental mists deny These visions blest to any fleshly eye. ( 856 ) HEECULES PACIFICATUS.* A TALE FEOM SUIDAS. In days of yore, ere early Greece Had dream'd of patrols or police, A crew of rake-hells in terrorem Spread wide, and carried all before 'em ; Eifled the poultry and the women, And held that all things were in common ; Till Jove's great son the nuisance saw, And did abate it by club law. Yet not so clean he made his work, But here and there a rogue would lurk In caves and rocky fastnesses, And shunn'd the strength of Hercules. Of these, more desperate than others, A pair of ragamuffin brothers In secret ambuscade join'd forces, To carry on unlawful courses. These robbers' names — enough to shake us — Were Strymon one, the other Cacus ; And, more the neighbourhood to bother, A wicked dam they had for mother. Who knew their craft, but not forbid it : And whatsoe'er they nimm'd she hid it ; Eeceived them with dehght and wonder W^hen they brought home some special plunder ; Call'd them her darlings, and her white boys, Her ducks, her dildings ; aU was right, boys. *' Only," she said, '* my lads, have care Ye fall not into Black Back's snare ; * From the Englishman's Magazine, 1831. HERCULES PAOIFIOATUS. 857 For, if he catch, he'll maul your corpusy And clapper-claw you to some purpose.'* She was, in truth, a kind of witch ; X Had grown by fortune-telling rich ; To spells and conjurings did tackle her, And read folks' dooms by light oracular, In which she saw as clear as daylight What mischief on her bairns would a-light : Therefore she had a special loathing For all that own'd that sable clothing. Who can 'scape fate, when we're decreed to't ? The graceless brethren paid small heed to't. A brace they were of sturdy fellows. As we may say, that fear'd no colours ; And sneer'd with modern infidelity At the old gipsy's fond credulity. It proved all true, though, as she'd mumbled ; For on a day the varlets stumbled On a green spot — sit lingucBjides — ('Tis Suidas tells it), where Alcides, Secure, as fearing no ill neighbour, Lay fast asleep after a ** Labour." His trusty oaken plant was near : The prowling rogues look round, and leer, And each his wicked wits 'gan rub, How to bear off the famous club ; Thinking that they, sans price or hire, would Carry't straight home, and chop for fire-wood : 'T would serve their old dame half a Winter. You stare ; but, faith, it was no splinter : I would not, for much money, spy Such beam in any neighbour's eye. The villains, these exploits not duQ in, Incontinently fell a-puUing. They found it heavy, no slight matter. But tuggld and tugg'd it, tiU the clatter 358 HERCULES PAOinCATUS. Woke Hercules, who in a trice Whijip'd up the knaves, and, with a splice He kept on purpose — which before Had served for giants many a score — To end of club tied each rogue's head fast ; Strapping feet too, to keep them steadfast ; And pickaback them carries townwards, Behind his brawny back, head downwards ; (So fooHsh caK — for rhyme, I bless X. — Comes nolens volens out of Essex ;) Thinking to brain them with his dextra, Or string them up upon the next tree. That club — so equal fates condemn — They thought to catch has now catch'd them. Now, Hercules, we may suppose. Was no great dandy in his clothes ; Was seldom, save on Sundays, seen In calimanco or nankeen ; On anniversaries, would try on A jerkin, spick-span new, from lion ; Went bare for the most part, to be cool, And save the time of his groom of the stole. Besides, the smoke he had been in In Stygian Gulf had dyed his skin To a natural sable — a right hell-fit, That seem'd to careless eyes black velvet. The brethren from their station scurvy, Where they hung dangling topsy-turvy, With horror view the black costume ; And each presumes his hour is come : Then softly to themselves 'gan mutter The warning words their dame did utter ; Yet not so softly, but with ease Were overheard by Hercules. Quoth Cacus, " This is he she spoke of, Which we so often made a joke of." A FRAGMENT. 859 " I see," said the other ; ** thank our sin for't, 'Tis Black Back, sure enough : we're in for't." His godship, who, for all his brag Of roughness, was at heart a wag, At his new name was tickled finely, And fell a-laughing most divinely. Quoth he, '* I'll tell this jest in heaven ; The musty rogues shall be forgiven ;" So, in a twinkling, did uncase them. On mother- earth once more to place them. The varlets, glad to be unhamper'd, Made each a leg, then fairly scamper'd. A FEAGMENT. [His Satanic Majesty seems to have been exceedingly popular with the English bards and bardlings of thirty and odd years ago. The London booksellers' counters were covered with " Devil's Walks," "True Devil's Walks," "Devil's Drives," "Devil's Progresses," "Devil's Bargains," and I know not how many more poems on the same renowned personage. Not only Southey and Coleridge chose Beelzebub for the subject of a poem, but even Elia sang of Satan, and told in immortal verse the true and wonderful history of the Devil's courtship and marriage ; which was published in a dainty little tome, with six humorous designs, price one shilling. The exact title of the work, the bibliographical reader will be pleased to learn, is " Satan in Search of a Wife ; with the whole Progress of his Courtship and Marriage, and who danced at the Wedding. By an Eye-witness." And although the market was rather overstocked with poems concerning the Evil One, Lamb's little effusion had a pretty fair sale. The copyright on a shilling volume must have been very small ; yet Elia, in a letter to a friend, says, " You hinted that there might be something under ten pounds by and by accruing to me, — deviVs money, (you are sanguine ; say seven pounds ten shillings)." The merits of this jeu d'esprit are very small ; indeed it is about the poorest thing its author ever printed : yet many would like to see it — simply because Charles Lamb 860 A FRAGMENT. wrote it. But I have not been able to find a copy of " Satan in Search of a Wife." The following extract from the work, which appeared in an old Number of the Athenceum, will, no doubt, be ac- ceptable to some of Lamb's readers. If we cannot get the whole cake, let us be thankful for the smallest bit thereof. — Editor.^ The Devil was sick and queasy of late, And his sleep and liis appetite fail'd him : His ears they hung down; and his tail it was clapp'd Between his poor hoofs, like a dog that's been rapp'd. None knew what the devil ail'd him. He tumbled and toss'd on his mattress o' nights, That was fit for a fiend's disportal ; h'or 'twas made of the finest of thistle and thorn. "Which Alecto herself had gather'd in scorn Of the best down-beds that are mortal. His giantly chest in earthquakes heaved, With groanings corresponding ; And mincing and few were the words he spoke, While a sigh, like some delicate whirlwind, broke From a heart that seem'd desponding. Now, the Devil an old vdfe had for his dam ; I think none e'er was older : Her years — old Parr's were nothing to them ; And a chicken to her was Methusalem, You'd say, could you behold her. She remember'd Chaos a little child. Strumming upon hand- organs : At the birth of old Night a gossip she sat, The ancientest there ; and was godmother at The christening of the Gorgons. A FRAGMENT. 861 Her bones peep'd tlirougli a rhinoceros's skin, Like a mummy through its cerement ; But she had a mother's heart, and guess'd What pinch'd her son, whom she thus address'd In terms that spoke endearment : — " What ails my Nicky, my darling imp, My Lucifer bright, my Beelze ? My pig, my pug-with-a-curly-tail. You are not well : can a mother fail To see that which all hell see ? " ** mother dear ! I am dying, I fear : Prepare the yew and the willow. And the cypress black ; for I get no ease, By day or by night, for the cursed fleas That skip about my pillow." *♦ Your pillow is clean, and your pillow-beer. For I wash'd 'em in Styx last night, son. And your blankets both, and dried them upon The brimstony banks of Acheron : It is not the Jleas that bite, son. I wish my Nicky is not in love." " mother, you have nick'd it ! " And he tum'd his head aside with a blush Not red-hot pokers, or crimson plush, Could half BO deep have prick'd it. ( 362 ) FOE THE ALBUM OF MISS , FRENCH TEACHER AT MRS GISBORN'S SCHOOL, ENFIELD.* Implored for verse, I send you what I can ; But you are so exact a French-woman, As I am told, Jemima, that I fear To wound with Enghsh your Parisian ear. And think I do your curious volume wrong. With lines not written in the Frenchman's tongue. Had I a knowledge equal to my will. With airy chansons I your leaves would fill ; With, fables that should emulate the vein Of sprightly Gresset or of La Fontaine Or scenes comiques that should approach the air Of your favourite, renowned Mohere, But at my suit the Muse of France looks sour, And strikes me dumb ! Yet what is in my power To testify respect for you, I pray Take in plain English — our rough Enfield way. TO C. ADERS, ESQ.,t ON HIS COLLECTION OF PAINTINGS BY THE OLD GEBMAN MASTERS. Friendliest of men, Aders, I never come Within the precincts of this sacred room, But I am struck with a religious fear. Which says, " Let no profane eye enter here." * From Blackwood^ s Magazine^ 1829. f- From Hone's Year Booh. TO C. ADEBS, ESQ. 868 With imagery from heaven the walls are clothed, Making the things of time seem vile and loathed. Spare saints, whose bodies seem sustain'd by love, With martyrs old in meek procession move. Here kneels a weeping Magdalen, less bright To human sense for her blurr'd cheeks ; in sight Of eyes new-touch'd by Heaven, more winning fair Than when her beauty was her only care. A hermit here strange mysteries doth unlock In desert sole, his knees worn by the rock. There angel harps are sounding, while below Palm-bearing virgins in white order go. Madonnas, varied with so chaste design, While all are different, each seems genuine, And hers the only Jesus : hard outline And rigid form, by Durer's hand subdued To matchless grace and sacro-sanctitude— Durer, who makes thy slighted Germany Vie with the praise of paint-proud Italy. Whoever enters here, no more presume To name a parlour or a drawing-room ; But, bending lowly to each holy story, Make this thy chapel and thine oratory. A A LETTERS TO A BOOKSELLER. Thank you for the books.* I am ashamed to take tithe thus of your press. I am worse to a publisher than the two Universities and the British Museum. A. C. I will forthwith read. B. C. (I can't get out of the A, B, C) I have more than read. Taken altogether, 'tis too lovely ; but what dehcacies I I like most ** King Death;" glorious 'bove all, '* The Lady with the Hundred Rings;" "The Owl;" ** Epistle to What's his Name " f (here may be I'm partial); "Sit down. Sad Soul;" "The Pauper's Jubilee" (but that's old, and yet 'tis never old); "The Falcon;" " Felon's Wife ;" but chiefly the dramatic fragments, — scarce three of which should have escaped my specimens, had an antique name been prefixed. They exceeed his first. Now to the se- rious business of life. Up a court (Blandford Court) in Pall Mall, (exactly at the back of Marlborough • '♦ The Maid of Eloan," by Allan Cunningham ; and Barzy Cornwall' 8 •' Songs and Dramatic Fragments." f Charles Lamb. TO J. PAYNE COLLIER. House,) witli iron gate in front, and containing two houses, at No. 2, did lately live Leishman, my tailor. He is moved somewhere in the neighbourhood, devil knows where. Pray find him out, and give him the opposite. I am so much better, though my head shakes in writing it, that, after next Sunday, I can well see F. and you. Can you throw B. C. in ? Why tarry the wheels of my ♦' Hogarth ?" Chables Lamb. TO J. PAYNE COLLIER. The Gabden of England, Dec. 10. Dear J. P. C, — I know how zealously you feel for our friend S. T. Coleridge ; and I know that you and your family attended his lectures four or five years ago. He is in bad health, and worse mind : and, unless something is done to lighten his mind, he will soon be reduced to his extremities ; and even these are not in the best condition. I am sure that you will do for liim what you can ; but at present he seems in a mood to do for himself. He projects a new course, not of physic, nor of meta- physics, nor a new course of life, but a new course of lectures on Shakspeare and poetry. There is no man better quahfied (always excepting number one) ; but I am pre-engaged for a series of dissertations on Indian and India-pendence, to be completed, at the expense of the company, in I know not (yet) how many volumes foolscap folio. I am busy getting up my Hindoo mythology ; and, for the purpose, I am once more enduring Southey's curse (of '* Kehama "). To be serious, Coleridge's state and affairs make me so : and there are particular reasons just now, and TO JOSEPH COTTLE. 869 hare been any time for the last twenty years, why he should succeed. He will do so with a little en- couragement. I have not seen him lately ; and he does not know that I am writing. Yours (for Coleridge's sake) in haste, 0. Lamb. TO JOSEPH COTTLE. Deab Sir, — It is so long since I have seen or heard from you, that I fear that you will consider a request I have to make as impertinent. About three years since, when I was in Bristol, I made an effort to see you by calling at Brunswick Square ; but you were from home. The request I have to make is, that you would very much obHge me, if you have any small portrait of yourself, by allowing me to have it copied, to accompany a selection of the like- nesses of " Living Bards " which a most particular friend of mine is making. If you have no objection, and would oblige me by transmitting such portrait, I will answer for taking the greatest care of it, and for its safe return. I hope you will pardon the liberty. From an old friend and well-wisher, Chables Lamb. TO THE SAME. Deab Sm, — My friend, whom you have obliged by the loan of your picture, has had it very nicely copied ; and a very spirited drawing it is, every one thinks who has seen it. The copy is not much in- ferior to yours, done by a daughter of Joseph's, E. A, 8W TO JOSEPH COTTLE. I accompany the picture with my warm thanks, both for that, and your better favour, the Messiah^ which I assure you I have read through with great pleasure. The verses have great sweetness, and a New Testament plainness about fliem which affected me very much. I could just wish, that, in page 63, you had omitted the lines 71 and 72, and had ended the period with — " The willowy brook was there, but that sweet sound — When to be heard again on earthly ground ? " Two very sweet lines, and the sense perfect. And in page 154, line 68, — •* He spake, ' I come, ordain'd a world to save, To be baptized by thee in Jordan's wave.'*' These words are hardly borne out by the story, and seem scarce accordant with the modesty with which our Lord came to take his common portion among the baptismal candidates. They also anticipate the beauty of John's recognition of the Messiah, and the subsequent confirmation by the Voice and Dove. You will excuse the remarks of an old brother bard, whose career, though long since pretty well stopped, was co-eval in its beginning with your own, and who is sorry his lot has been always to be so distant from you. It is not likely that C. L. will see Bristol again; but if J. C. should ever visit London, he will be a most welcome visitor to 0. L. My sister joins in cordial remembrances. Dear sir, yours truly, Chaeles Lamb. TO JOSEPH OOTTLB. 871 TO THE SAME. London, India House, May 26, 1829. My dear Sir, — I am quite ashamed of not having acknowledged your kind present earlier; but that unknown something, which was never yet discovered, though so often speculated upon, which stands in the way of lazy folks answering letters, has presented its usual obstacle. It is not forgetfulness nor dis- respect nor incivility, but terribly like all these bad things. I have been in my time a great epistolary scribbler : but the passion, and with it the facility, at length wears out ; and it must be pumped up again by the '':3avy machinery of duty or gratitude, when it should run free. I have read your Fall of Cambria with as much pleasure as I did your Messiah. Your Cambrian poem I shall be tempted to repeat oftenest, as human poems take me in a mood more frequently congenial than divine. The character of Llewellyn pleases me more than any thing else, perhaps ; and then some of the lyrical pieces are fine varieties. It was quite a mistake that I could dislike any thing you should write against Lord Byron ; for I have a thorough aversion to his character, and a very moderate admiration of his genius : he is great in so little a way. To be a poet is to be the man, not a petty portion of occasional low passion worked np in a permanent form of humanity. Shakspeare has thrust such rubbishly feelings into a corner, — the dark dusky heart of Don John, in the Much Ado about Nothing. The fact is, I have not seen your Expostulatory Epistle to him. I was not aware, till your question, that it was out. I shall inquire, and get it forthwith. 372 TO A FARMER AND HIS WIFE. Southey is in town, whom I have seen slightly ; Wordsworth is expected, whom I hope to see much of. I write with accelerated motion ; for I have two or three bothering clerks and brokers about me, who always press in proportion as I seem to be doing something that is not business. I could exclaim a little profanely; but I think you do not like swearing. I conclude, begging you to consider that I feel myself much obliged by your kindness ; and shall be most happy at any and at all times to hear from you. Dear sir, yours truly, Charles Lamb. TO A FABMER AND HIS WIFE. Twelfth Day, '23. The pig was above my feeble praise. It was a dear pigmy. There was some contention as to who should have the ears ; but in spite of his obstinacy (deaf as these little creatures are to advice), I contrived to get at one of them. It came in boots too, which I took as a favour. Generally these pretty toes (pretty toes !) are missing; but I suppose he wore them to look taller. He must have been the last of his race. His little feet would have gone into the silver slipper. I take him to have been a Chinese, and a female. If Evelyn could have seen him, he would never have farrowed two such prodigious volumes ; seeing how much good can be contained in — ^how small a compass ! He crackled delicately. I left a blank at the top of my letter, not being determined which to address it to ; so farmer and TO S. T. COLERIDGE. 873 farmer's wife will please to divide our thanks. May your granaries be full, and your rats empty, and your chickens plump, and your envious neighbours lean, and your labourers busy, and you as idle and as happy as the day is long 1 Vive l' Agriculture! I How do you make your pigs so little f They are vastly engaging at that age : I was BO myself. Now I am a disagreeable old hog, A middle-aged gentleman-and-a-half. My faculties, thank God, are not much impaired ! I have my sight, hearing, taste, pretty perfect ; and can read the Lord's Prayer in common type, by the help of a candle, without making many mistakes. Believe me, that, while my faculties last, I shall ever cherish a proper appreciation of your many kindnesses in this way, and that the last lingering relish of past favours upon my dying memory will be the smack of that Httle ear. It was the left ear, which is lucky. Many happy returns, not of the pig, but of the New Year, to both 1 Mary, for her share of the pig and the memoirs, desires to send the same. Yours truly, C. Lamb. TO S. T. COLERIDGE. THESES QU^DAH lUXOhOQlCM. [The careful reader will observe that these famous theolo- gical propositions as here given, just as they were sent to Coleridge, differ somewhat from the transcript of them given in the letter to Southey, published in Talfourd's Life and Letters of Charles Lamb. Here you have the original theses themselves : there you have a revised and amended copy of 874 TO S. T. COLERIDGE. them. The letter to Coleridge accompanying these learned and knotty questions is not included in any edition of Lamb's Works. " Mr. Coleridge," says Cottle, in his Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey, "at first appeared greatly hurt at this letter." — Editob.] First, Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man? Second, Whether the Archangel Uriel could affirm an un- truth ? and, if he could, whether he would ? Third, Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather to be reckoned among those qualities which the schoolmen term virtutes minus splendida? Fourth, Whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati ever sneer ? Fifth, Whether pure intelligences can love ? Sixth, Whether the Seraphim ardentes do not manifest their virtues by the way of vision and theory? and whether practice be not a sub-celestial and merely human virtue ? Seventh, Whether the vision beatific be any thing more or less than a perpetual representment to each individual angel of his own present attainments and future capabilities, some- how in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, refiecting a per- petual complacency and self-satisfaction ? Eighth, and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not come to be condemned at last, and the man never suspect it beforehand ? Leabned Sir, my Friend, — Presuming on onr long habits of friendship, and emboldened further by your late liberal permission to avail myself of your corre- spondence in case I want any knowledge (which I intend to do when I have no Encyclopaedia or Ladies' Magazine at hand to refer to in any matter of science), I now submit to your inquiries the above theological propositions, to be by you defended or oppugned, or both, in the schools of Germany ; whither, I am told, you are departing, to the utter dissatisfaction of your native Devonshire, and regret of universal England, but to my own individual consolation, if, through the channel of your wished return, learned sir, my friend, may be transmitted to this our island, from those famous theological wits of Leipsic and TO THOMAS HOOD. 875 Gottingen, any rays of illumination, in vain to be derived from the home growth of our English halls and colleges. Finally wishing, learned sir, that you may see Schiller, and swing in a wood {vide poems), and sit upon a tun, and eat fat hams of Westphalia, I remain Your friend and docile pupil to instruct, Chables Lamb. TO THOMAS HOOD.* And what dost thou at the Priory? Cucullus non facit Monachum. Enghsh me that, and challenge old Lignum Janua to make a better. My old New River has presented no extraordinary novelties lately ; but there Hope sits every day, speculating upon traditionary gudgeons. I think she has taken the fisheries. I now know the reason why our forefathers were denominated East and West Angles. Yet is there no lack of spawn ; for I wash my hands in fishets that come through the pump every morning thick as motelings, — little things that perish untimely, and never taste the brook. You do not tell me of those romantic land bays that be as thou goest to Lover's Seat : neither of that little churchling in the midst of a wood (in the opposite direction, nine furlongs from the town), that seems dropped by the Angel that was tired of carrying two packages ; marry, with the other he made shift to pick his flight to Loretto. Liquire out, and see my little Protestant Loretto. It stands apart from trace of human habitation ; yet hath it pulpit, reading-desk, and trim front of massiest marble, as if Robiuson Crusoe had reared it to * Then " anrheninatiziDg himself" at Hastings. 876 TO THOMAS HOOD. .soothe himself with old church-going images. I forget its Christian name, and what she-saint was its gossip. You should also go to No. 18, Standgate Street ; to a Baker, who has the finest collection of marine monsters in ten sea-counties, — sea-dragons, polypi, mer-people, most fantastic. You have only to name the old gentleman in black (not the Devil) that lodged with him a week (he'll remember) last July, and he will show courtesy. He is by far the fore- most of the savans. His wife is the funniest thwart- ing little animal ! They are decidedly the Lions of green Hastings. Well, I have made an end of my say. My epistolary time is gone by when I could have scribbled as long (I will not say as agreeable) as thine was to both of us. I am dwindled to notes and letterets. But, in good earnest, I shall be most happy to hail thy return to the waters of old Sir Hugh. There is nothing like inland mmmuis, fresh ripples, and our native minnows. *' He sang in meads, how sweet the brooklets ran, To the rough ocean and red restless sands." I design to give up smoking ; but I have not yet fixed upon the equivalent vice. I must have quid pro quo ; or quo pro quid, as Tom Woodgate would correct me. My service to him. C. L.* • •• The letter came to hand too late for me to hunt the • Lions ;' but on a subsequent visit to the same Cinque Port with my wife, though we verified the little Loretto, we could not find the Baker, or even his man, howbeit we tried at every shop that had the least sign of bakery or cakeiy in its window. The whole was a batch of fancy bread, — one of those fictions which the writer was apt to pass off upon his friends." — Hood. TO LEIGH HUNT. 877 TO THE SAME. Deab Lamb, — ^You are an impudent varlet ; but I will keep your secret. We dine at Ayrton's on Thursday, and shall try to find Sarah and her two spare beds for that night only. Miss M. and her tragedy may be dished : so may not you and your rib. Health attend you. Yours, T. Hood, Esq. Enfibld. Miss Bridget Hood sends love.* TO LEIGH HUNT. Illustrezzimo Signor, — I have obeyed your man- date to a tittle. I accompany this with a volume ; but what have you done with the first I sent you ? Have you swapped it with some lazzaroni for maca- roni, or pledged it with a gondolier for a passage ? Peradventuri the Cardinal Gonsalvi took a fancy to it ; his Eminence has done my Nearness an honour. 'Tis but a step to the Vatican. As you judge, my works do not enrich the workman ; but I get vat I can for 'em. They keep dragging me on, a poor, worn mill-horse, in the eternal round of the damned • The secret alladed to in. this " notelet " was, that the article in the Gem, entitled The Widow, and published under Lamb's well-known signature, was written by Hood. Of course, the reader will see by the subscription, T. Hood, Esq., that the letter was not written by the author of the ISong of the Shirt. Miss Bridget Hood is Mary Lamb ; and the writer of the epistle is Charles Lamb himself. — ^Epixob. 878 TO LEIGH HUNT. magazine ; but 'tis they are blind, not I. Colbum (where I recognize with delight the gay W. Honey- comb renovated) hath the ascendancy.* I was with the Novellos last week. They have a large, cheap house and garden, with a dainty library (magnificent) without books ; but, what will make you bless your- self (I am too old for wonder), something has touched the right organ in Vincentio at last. He attends a Wesleyan chapel on Kingsland Green. He at first tried to laugh it off — he only went for the singing ; but the cloven foot — I retract — the lamb's trotters are at length apparent. Mary Isabella attributes it to a lightness induced by his headaches ; but I think I see in it a less accidental influence. Mr. Clark is at perfect staggers ! the whole fabric of his infidelity is shaken. He has no one to join him in his horse- insults and indecent obstreperousnesses against Chris- tianity ; for Holmes (the bonny Holmes) is gone to Salisbury to be organist, and Isabella and the Clark make but a feeble quorum. The children have all neat little clasped prayer-books ; and I have laid out seven shillings and eight pence in Watts' s Hjonns for Christmas presents for them. The eldest girl alone holds out. She has been at Boulogne, skirting upon the vast focus of Atheism, and imported bad prin- ciples in patois French. But the strongholds are crumbling. N. appears as yet to have but a con- fused notion of the Atonement. It makes him giddy, he says, to think much about it ; but such giddiness is spiritual sobriety. Well, Byron is gone ; and is now the best poet in England. Fill up the gap to your fancy. Barry Cornwall has at last carried the pretty A. S. They are just in the * A series of pleasant, gossiping articles by Leigh Hunt, called The Family Journal, and pretended to be written by a descendant of Mr. Spectator's friend, Will Honeycomb. — Editor. TO MBS. SHELLEY. 879 treacle-moon. Hope it won't clog his wings (gaum, we used to say at school.) Mary, my sister, has worn me out with eight weeks' cold and toothache, her average complement in the Winter ; and it will not go away. She is otherwise well, and reads novels all day long. She has had an exempt year, a good year ; for which, forgetting the minor ca- lamity, she and I are most thankful. Alsager is in a flourishing house, with wife and children about him, in Mecklenburg Square — almost too fine to visit. Baron Field is come home from Sydney ; but as yet I can hear no tidings of a pension. He is plump and friendly ; his wife, really a very superior woman. He resumes the bar. I have got acquainted with Mr. Irving, the Scotch preacher, whose fame must have reached you. He is an humble disciple at the foot of Gamaliel S. T. C. Judge how his own sec- tarists must stare, when I tell you he has dedicated a book to S. T. C., acknowledging to have learnt more of the nature of faith, Christianity, and Chris- tian Church, from him than from all the men he ever conversed with ! He is a most amiable, sincere, modest man in a room, this Boanerges in the temple. Mrs. Montague told him the dedication would do him no good. " That shall be a reason for doing it," was his answer. Judge, now, whether this man be a quack. Dear H., take this imperfect notelet for a letter : it looks so much the more hke conversing on nearer terms. Love to all the Hunts, old friend Thornton, and all. Yours ever, C. Lamb. TO MES. SHELLEY. Enfield, July 26, 1827. Dear Mrs. Shelley, — At the risk of throwing away some fine thoughts, I must write to say how 380 TO MBS. SHELLEY. pleased we were with your very kind remembering of us (who have unkindly run away from all our friends) before you go. Perhaps you are gone, and then my tropes are wasted. If any piece of better fortune has lighted upon you than you expected, but less than we wish you, we are rejoiced. We are here trying to like soHtude, but have scarce enough to justify the experiment. We get some, however. The six days are our Sabbath ; the seventh — why, Cockneys will come for a little fresh air, and so — But by your month, or October at furthest, we hope to see Islington : I, like a giant refreshed with tiie leaving- off of wine ; and Mary, pining for Mr. Moxon's books and Mr. Moxon's society. Then we shall meet. I am busy with a farce in two acts ;"* the incidents tragi-comic. I can do the dialogue commey for ; but the damned plot — I beheve I must omit it altogether. The scenes come after one another like geese, not marshalling like cranes or a Hyde-Park review. The story is as simple as G. D., and the language plain as his spouse. The characters are thi-ee women to one man ; which is one more than laid hold on him in the Evangely. I think that pro- phecy squinted towards my drama. I want some Howard Paine to sketch a skeleton of artfully succeeding scenes through a whole play, as the courses are arranged in a cookery-book : I to find wit, passion, sentiment, character, and the like trifles : to lay in the dead colours, — I'd Titianesque 'em up : to mark the channel in a cheek (smooth or furrowed, yours or mine) ; and, where tears should course, I'd draw the waters down : to say where a joke should come in or a pun be left out : to bring mj persona on and off like a Beau Nash; and I'd Frankenstein them there : to bring three together on • The Pawnbroker's Daughter. TO THE EDITOR OF THE " TABLE BOOK.'* 381 the stage at once ; they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two ; and there they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw them. I am teaching Emma Latin, to qualify her for a superior governess- ship ; which we see no prospect of her getting. 'Tis like feeding a child with chopped hay from a spoon. Sisyphus — his labours were as nothing to it. Actives and passives jostle in her nonsense, till a deponent enters, like Chaos, more to embroil the fray. Her prepositions are suppositions ; her con- junctions copulative have no connection in them ; her concords disagree ; her interjections are purely English " Ah !" and " Oh !" with a yawn and a gape in the same tongue ; and she herself is a lazy, block- headly supine. As I say to her, ass in prasentlTau^ely makes a wise man infuturo. But I dare say it was so with you when you began Latin, and a good while after. Good-bye ! Mail's love. Yours truly, C. Lamb. TO THE EDITOR OF THE " TABLE BOOK." Dear Sir, — Somebody has fairly played a Jwax on you (I suspect that pleasant rogue M-x-n-") in send- ing the sonnet in my name, inserted in your last Number. True it is that I must own to the verses being mine, but not written on the occasion there pretended ; for I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing the ladyf in the part of Emmeline, and I have understood that the force of her acting in it is rather in the expression of new-born sight than of the pre- * Edward Moxon. + Miss Kelley. BB 382 TO THE EDITOB OP THE ** TABLE-BOOK." vioHS want of it. The lines were really written upon her performance in the Blind Boy, and appeared in the Morning Chronicle some years hack. I suppose our facetious friend thought that they would serve again, like an old coat new turned. Yours (and his nevertheless), C Lamb. TO THE SAME. Sir, — A correspondent in your last Number rather hastily asserts than there is no other authority than Davenport's tragedy''' for the poisoning of Matilda by King John. It oddly enough happens, that in the same Number appears an extract from a play of Heywood's, of an older date, in two parts ; in which play the fact of such poisoning, as well as her iden- tity with Maid Marian, are equally established Michael Drayton also hath a legend, confirmatory ( as far as poetical authority can go) of the violent manner of her death. But neither he nor Davenport confounds her with Kobin's mistress. Besides the named authorities, old Fuller (I think) somewhere relates, as matter of chronicle history, that, old b^itzwalter (he is called Fitzwater both in Heywood and in Davenport) being banished after his daughter's murder (some years subsequently), King John, at a t.ournament in France, being delighted with the valiant bearing of a combatant in the lists, and in- quiring his name, was told that it was his old faithful servant, Fitzwalter, who desired nothing more heartily chan to be reconciled to his liege ; and an affect- ing reconciliation followed. In the common collec- don, called Robin Hood's Garland (I have not King John and Matilda, a tragedy by Robert Davenport. TO P. G. PAIMOEB. 883 seen Kitson's), no mention is made, if I remember, of the nobility of Marian. Is she not the daughter of plain Squire Gamwell of old Gamwell Hall ? Sorry that I cannot gratify the curiosity of your " disembodied spirit"* (who, as such, is methinks sufficiently «* veiled" from our notice) with more authentic testimonies, I rest Your humble abstracter, C. L. TO P. G. PATMORE. Dear P., — I am poorly. I have been to a funeral, where I made a pun, to the consternation of the rest of the mourners ; and we had wine. I can't describe to you the howl which the widow set up at proper intervals. Dash could ; for it was not unlike what he makes.f The letter I sent you was directed to the care of E. White, India House, for Mrs. Hazlitt ; which Mrs. Hazlitt, I don't yet know : but A. has taken it to France on speculation. Really it is embarrassing. There is Mrs. present H., Mrs. late H., and Mrs. John H. ; and to which of the three Mrs. Wiggiuses it appertains, I don't know. I wanted to open it ; but 'tis transportation. I am sorry you are plagued about your book. I would strongly recommend you • The signature of the correspondent referred to in t\w first sentence of the letter. + Hood, in his charming Literary Reminiscences, relatts the following story concerning this dog and liis sometime master : " I remember, in one of oiir strolls, being called to account very pompously by the proprietor of an Enfield villa, who as- serted that my dog Dash, who never hunted any thing in his dog-days, had chased the sheep: whereuiton Elia, <:ikingthe dog's part, said, very emphatically, ' Hunt lambs, sir ? wliy, he has never hunted me I' " — Editob. 884 TO p. G. PATMORB. to take for one story Massinger's Old Law, It is exquisite. I can think of no other. Dash is frightful this morning. He whines, and stands up on his hind-legs. He misses Beckey, who is gone to town. I took him to Barnet the other day ; and he couldn't eat his victuals after it. Pray God his intellects be not slipping. Mary is gone out for some soles. I suppose "tis no use to ask you to come and partake of 'em, else there's a steam-vessel.* I am doing a tragi-comedy, in two acts, and have got on tolerably; but it will be refused, or worse. I never had luck with any thing my name was put to. Oh, I am so poorly ! I waked it at my couslq's the bookbinder's, who is now with God ; or, if he is not, 'tis no fault of mine. We hope the frank wines do not disagree with Mrs. Patmore. By the way, I like her. Did you ever taste frogs ? Get them, if you can. They are little LiUiput rabbits, only a thought nicer. Oh, how sick I am I — not of the world, but of the widow's shrub. She's sworn under six thou- sand pounds ; but I think she perjured herself. She howls in E la ; and I comfort her in B flat. You understand music ? If you haT?en't got " Massinger," you have no- thing to do but go to the first bibhotheque you can Ught upon at Boulogne, and ask for it (Gilford's edition) ; and, if they haven't got it, you can have Athalie, par Monsieur Eacine, and make the best of it ! But that Old Law 's delicious ! '* No shrimps !" (That's in answer to Mary's question about how the soles are to be done.) I am uncertain where this wandering letter may • Mr. Patmore was then at Paris. TO P. G. PATMOKE. 835 reach you. What you mean by " Poste Restante," (jod knows. Do you mean I must pay the postage ? Bo I do to Dover. We had a merry passage with the widow at the Commons. She was howUng, — part howling, and part giving dii'ections to the proctor, — when, crash I down went my sister through a crazy chair, and made the clerks grin ; and I grinned, and the widow tittered ; a)id then I knew that she was not inconsolable. Mary was more frightened than hurt. She'd make a good match for anybody (by " she," I mean the widow). " If he bring but a relict away, He is happy, nor heard to complain." — Shenstone. Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off : but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence ; like his poetry, redundant. Hone has nanged himself for debt. Godwin was taken up for picldng pockets. Beckey takes to bad courses. Her father was blown up in a steam-machine. The coroner found it insanity. I should not hke him to sit on my letter.'*' Do you observe my direction ? Is it Gaelic '? — classical ? Do try and get some frogs. You must ask for " grenouilles " (green eels). They don't understand " frogs ;" though it's a common phrase with us. If you go thi'ough Bulloign (Boulogne), inquire if old Godfrey is Uving, and how he got home from the crusades. He must be a very old man now. If there is any thing new in politics or literature in France, keep it tiH I see you again ; for I'm in ♦ The reader, says Mr. Patmore, need not be told that all the above items of liome-news are pure fiction. 2c 386 TO p. G. PATMORE. no hurry. Chatty-Briant (Chateaubriand) is well, I hope. I think I have no more news ; only give both our loves (" all three," says Dash) to Mrs. Pa.tmore, and bid her get quite well, as I am at present, bating qualms, and the grief incident to losing a valuable relation.* C. L. LoNDRES, July 19, 1897. * In this and some of his other letters, Lamb writes very much in the manner in which Shakspeare's fools and jesters — in some respects the wisest and thoughtfullest characters in his works — talk. If his words be "light as air," they vent "truths deep as the centre." 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In One Volume, thick demy Svo, 855 pages, price i8s. cloth ; 21s. half-bound calf; 24s. whole bound library calf; and 32s. whole bound morocco, HAYDON'S DICTIONARY OF DATES. Relating to aU Ages and Nations, and for Universal Reference. By JOSEPH HAYDN. Revised and greatly enlarged by Benjamin Vincent, Assistant- Secretary of the Royal Institution of Gy-eat Britain. fW- LONDON: 44, DOVER STREET, AND ALL BOOKSELLERS. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 28Feb'61HC FCD27 1961 REC'D OEC 15-65 -2 PM 56Api'616W LOAN DEPT. REC'C APR 1 2 13^AR nm' int> 1 1 1968 4 m 1 1 '66 APR12REQ0 ^^C'D Lfl^pR 2 6 196fi y y 91 fgo'^oj'^i MAY^VfifiblRCD F EB 3 1900 9 DECllJigg 5 3 2 ^"B-tir- fl '^^ ^^8:WA^ LD 21A-50to-12,'60 (B6'221sl0)476B General Library University of California Berkeley !14