THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF ILLINOIS 
 . LIBRARY 
 
 LKfk 
 
Return this book on or before the 
 Latest Date stamped below. A 
 charge is made on all overdue 
 books. 
 
 U. of I. Libraify^'* 
 
 NOV 6 
 
 ^935 
 
 OEC 19^ 
 
 DtC 'I' 
 
 4AH 2 9 1936 
 OCT 2 0 1938 
 
 OCT 2 1 im 
 
 KOVe ,936 
 NOV 2 0 1998 
 Mr / 2 3 1936 
 
 t 7 1936 
 \ 5 ^^^^ 
 
 1 S 
 
 K t 7 1937 
 
 OCT 19 t93^ 
 
 UOV 4 1939 
 
 Mh/ -2 IS 
 
 Oil 15 I94L 
 
 I) 
 
 40 
 
 34{ 
 
 805 7-S 
 
Witl^ dn Introduction by 
 
 Augustine Birrel] 
 
 and Illujtrationj by 
 
 Chairles £*Brock 
 
 1902 
 
 London.. JM-Dcnt gv,i>^ 
 
 ^ y^idtne. Houje ^$^0 Bee/ fore/ 
 
 New\ork- Ch^rlej Scribrvcrj ^ons 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 List of Illustrations . . . ix 
 
 Preface . . . . . i 
 
 LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 
 
 BlAKESMOORE in H SHIRE . . . 5 »^ 
 
 ' Poor Relations . . : . 14 
 
 v^TAGE Illusion . . . , 2^ ^ 
 
 To THE Shad^ of Elliston . . . 3 1 
 
 Ellistoniana . . . . .3 5^ — - 
 
 Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading]. 42"^-^ 
 
 The Old Margate Hoy . . . 53 
 
 The Convalescent . . . . 66 
 
 -V/Sanity 'of True Genius f • • • 73 
 
 Captain Jackson .... '^^<^!^ 
 
 ^^The Superannuated Man . . . 86 
 
 The Genteel Style in Writing . . 98 ^ 
 
Vlii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Barbara S . . . .105 
 
 ^-"^^HE Tombs in the Abbey . .113 
 
 V-<Amicus Redivivus . . .119 
 
 kCS6ME Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney . .126 
 
 ( -Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago . 137 
 
 I Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in 
 
 * THE Productions of Modern Art . 149 
 
 Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of 
 
 Age . . . . .166 
 
 The Wedding . . . • »73 
 
 The Child Angel . . . .183 
 
 Old China . . . . .187 
 
 Confessions of a Drunkard . . . — +96 
 Popular Fallacies .... -rog 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 ' The owner casting envious looks at them all the 
 
 while ' . 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Headpiece — Blakesmoor .... 
 
 5 
 
 * Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits ' 
 
 II 
 
 ' The terror of luckless poacher ' . 
 
 13 
 
 Headpiece — Poor Relations 
 
 
 ' He casually looketh in about dinner time ' 
 
 15 
 
 ' She begs to be helped — after the gentlemen ' 
 
 19 
 
 Headpiece — Stage Illusion .... 
 
 ^5 
 
 ' The pitiable infirmities of old men ' 
 
 28 
 
 Tailpiece — Stage Illusion .... 
 
 30 
 
 Headpiece — To the Shade of Elliston 
 
 31 
 
 Tailpiece — do. 
 
 34 
 
 Headpiece — Ellistoniana . . . 
 
 35 
 
 Headpiece — Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading 
 
 42 
 
 IX 
 
X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ' A fellow will get up and spell out a paragraph ' , 47 
 
 ' Keeping clear of secular contacts ' . . .51 
 
 Headpiece — The Old Margate Hoy , . -53 
 
 ' The o'er-washing billows ' . , . '55 
 
 ' They go wandering on the shingles ' . ,63 
 
 Tailpiece — ^The Old Margate Hoy . . .65 
 
 Headpiece — The Convalescent . , . . .66 
 
 * His broths, and his cordials ' . , , .69 
 Tailpiece — The Convalescent . . . .72 
 Headpiece — Sanity of True Genius . , '73 
 Tailpiece — do. . . . * 11 
 Headpiece — Captain Jackson . . . ,78 
 ' Dear, cracked spinnet ' . . . . .81 
 Headpiece — The Superannuated Man . . .86 
 
 * A formal harangue ' . . . . .91 
 Tailpiece — The Superannuated Man . . .97 
 Headpiece — ^The Genteel Style in Writing . . 98 
 
 * These twelve, one with another, made up twelve hundred 
 
 years' . , . , . .100 
 
 Headpiece — Barbara S . , . .105 
 
 ' An unusual weight of metal ' . . . .110 
 
 Headpiece — The Tombs in the Abbey , . ,113 
 
 * They must rob from their attendance on the worship ' . 115 
 Headpiece — Amicus Redivivus , . , ,119 
 ' The stifle of conflicting judgments* , , ,120 
 Headpiece — Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney . ,126 
 Tailpiece — do. . .136 
 Headpiece — Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago , • ^37 
 ' Pink-coloured hose ' . . . . .139 
 
 * The detestable hag of a domestic ' . . .144 
 Headpiece — Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty. &c. . 149 
 
 * Imagine the confusion of the guests ' . . .155 
 Tailpiece — Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty, &c. . 165 
 Headpiece — Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age 1 66 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Tailpiece — Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age 172 
 Headpiece — The Wedding . , . . • *73 
 
 *The cold reasonings of a father' , . . .176 
 
 ' No Miss Emily to fill it for him * . . .179 
 
 Tailpiece — The Wedding . . . . .182 
 
 Headpiece~i:he ChM Angd , . . .183 
 
 Headpiece — Old China . . . . ,187 
 
 'Lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures ' . , 190 
 
 * Poor gallery scramblers * , . . • ^95 
 Headpiece — Confessions of a Drunkard . . .196 
 
 * A morning pipe ' ..... 203 
 Tailpiece — Confessions of a Drunkard . . . 208 
 ' A modest inoffensive deportment does not necessarily 
 
 imply valour* . . , , .211 
 
 ' The first to be tickled v^rith it ' . . . ' . 213 
 
 * She would put up with the calls of the most impertinent 
 
 visitor' . . , , . .216 
 
 ' Your tall disputants have always the advantage ' .220 
 ' Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare, or a wig ' , , 222 
 
 « He takes an interest in the dressing of it ' , , 231 
 
 ' It has learned to go to market ' . , , . 235 
 
 'Superfluous establishment of six boys ' . , , 241 
 
 ' A book . , . . in sultry arbours ' , . . 247 
 
 * A serious misfortune to a man's friends ' . .251 
 
 <0^ 
 
PREFACE 
 
 BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELI A 
 
 HIS poor gentleman, who for some months past 
 
 had been in a declining way, hath at length paid 
 
 his final tribute to nature. 
 To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour 
 of the thing, if there ever was much in it, was pretty well 
 exhausted ; and a two years' and a half existence has 
 been a tolerable duration for a phantom. 
 
 I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I 
 have heard objected to my late friend's writings was 
 well-founded. Crude they are, I grant you — a sort of 
 unlicked, incondite things — villainously pranked in an 
 affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had 
 not been his^ if they had been otlier than such ; 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 Jirst 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 
 ^ A ^ 
 
2 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 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 blameless vent to his most inward feelings, 
 and expresses his own story modestly. 
 
 My late friend was in many respects a singular char- 
 acter. Those who did not like him, hated him ; and 
 some, who once liked him, afterwards became his 
 bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little 
 concern what he uttered, and in whose presence. He 
 observed neither time nor place, and would e'en out with 
 what came uppermost. With the severe religionist he 
 would pass for a free-thinker ; while the other 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 him- 
 self. 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 
 sometimes in what is called good company, but where he 
 has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd 
 fellow ; till some unlucky occasion provoking it, he would 
 stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether senseless 
 perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his char- 
 acter for the evening. It was hit or miss with him ; but 
 
PREFACE 
 
 3 
 
 nine times out of ten, he contrived by this device to send 
 away a whole company of his enemies. His conceptions 
 rose kindlier than his utterance, and his happiest /m- 
 promptus 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 colour, or something else 
 in the weed pleased him. The burrs stuck to him — 
 but they were good and loving burrs for all that. He 
 never greatly cared for the society of what are called 
 good people. If any of these were scandalised (and 
 ofl^ences 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 goud 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 stammerer proceeded a statist ! 
 I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice 
 
I 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 that my old friend is departed. His Jests were beginning 
 to grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. He 
 felt the approaches of age ; and while he pretended to 
 cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to 
 bind him. Discoursing with him latterly on this subject, 
 he expressed himself with a pettishness, which I thought 
 unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban re- 
 treat (as he called it) at Shacklewell, some children 
 belonging to a school of industry had met us, and bowed 
 and curtseyed, 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 like anything important and 
 parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to 
 that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being 
 treated like a grave or respectable character, and kept 
 a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so 
 entitle him. He herded always, while it was possible, 
 with people younger than himself. He did not conform 
 to the march of time, but was dragged along in the 
 procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He 
 was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never 
 sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of 
 infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the im- 
 pertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses ; but 
 such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of 
 his writings. • 
 
BLAKESMOOR IN H— SHIRE 
 
 I DO not know a pleasure more affecting than to range 
 at will over the deserted apartments of some fine 
 old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur ^ 
 admit of a better passion than envy ; and contemplations 
 on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to 
 have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompat- 
 ible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities ot 
 foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feel- 
 ing, I think, attends us between entering an empty and a 
 crowded church. In the latter it is chance but some pre- 
 sent human frailty — 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 congrega- 
 
 [} Blakesware in Hertfordshire.] 
 
6 BLAKESMOOR IN H -'SHIRE 
 
 tions, old and young, that have found consolation there — 
 the meek pastor — the docile parishioner. With no dis- 
 turbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink 
 in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as 
 fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and 
 weep around thee. 
 
 Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going 
 some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains 
 of an old great house with which I had been impressed in 
 this way in 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 those brick-and-mortar knaves at their 
 process of destruction, at the plucking of every pannel 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 1 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 pannel of the yellow room. 
 
 Why, every plank and pannel of that house for me had 
 
BLAICESMOOR IN H SHIRE 7 
 
 magic in it. The tapestried bed-rooms — tapestry so much 
 better than painting — not adorning merely, but peopling 
 the wainscots — at which childhood ever and anon would 
 steal a look, shifting its 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, deliber- 
 ately divesting of Marsyas. 
 
 Then, that haunted room — in which old Mrs Battle 
 died — whereinto I have crept, but always in the day timcj 
 with a passion of fear ; and a sneaking curiosity, terror- 
 tainted, to hold communication with the past. — Honv shall 
 they build it up again P 
 
 It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted 
 but that traces of the splendour of past inmates were 
 everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still standing — 
 even to the tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumb- 
 ling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told 
 that children had once played there. But I was a lonely 
 child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew 
 every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped every- 
 where. 
 
 The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother 
 of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and 
 admiration. So strange a passion for the place possessed 
 me in those years, that, though there lay — I shame to say 
 how few roods distant from the mansion — half hid by 
 trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the 
 spell which bound me to the house, and such my careful- 
 ness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the 
 idle waters lay unexplored for me ; and not till late in 
 
8 BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE 
 
 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, ex- 
 tensive prospects — and those at no great distance from the 
 house — I was told of such — what were they to me, being 
 put 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 firesides — the 
 low-built roof — parlours ten feet by ten — frugal boards, 
 and all the homeliness of home — these were the condition 
 of my birth — the wholesome soil which I was planted in. 
 Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am 
 not sorry to have had glances of something beyond ; and 
 to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting 
 accidents of a great fortune. 
 
 To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to 
 have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be 
 had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importu- 
 nate 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 vanity as those who do inherit 
 them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what 
 
BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE 9 
 
 herald shall go about to strip me of an idea ? Is it tren- 
 chant 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 unin- 
 terrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer 
 within us to a cognate and corresponding elevation ? 
 
 Or wherefore else, O tattered and diminished 'Scut- 
 cheon 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 sup- 
 porters, with their prophetic " Resurgam " — till, every 
 dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very 
 Gentility ? Thou wert first in my morning eyes ; and of 
 nights, hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but 
 a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee. 
 
 This is the only true gentry by adoption ; the veritable 
 change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by 
 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 his lifetime upon my poor pastoral progenitor. 
 
 If it were presumption so to speculate, the present 
 owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. 
 They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers 
 for a newer trifle ; and I was left to appropriate to myself 
 
lo BLAKESMOOR IN H 
 
 SHIRE 
 
 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 coun- 
 tenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning 
 beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder ; 
 but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in 
 the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality. 
 
 Mine too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair 
 of authority, high-backed and wickered, once the terror 
 of luckless poacher, or self-forgetful maiden — so common 
 since, that bats have roosted in it. 
 
 Mine too — whose else ? — thy costly fruit-garden, with 
 its sun-baked southern wall ; the ampler pleasure-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 glittering ; the verdant quarters 
 p Plumer was the name of the owner of Blakesware.] 
 
V. 
 
 UN" 
 
BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE 13 
 
 " The terror of luckless poacher y 
 
 backwarder still ; and, stretching still beyond, in old 
 formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, 
 and the day-long murmuring wood-pigeon, with that 
 antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist 
 not ; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a 
 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 PC OR Relation — is the most irrelevant thing in 
 nature, — a piece of impertinent correspondency, — 
 an odious approximation, — a haunting conscience, 
 — a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of 
 our prosperity, — an unwelcome remembrancer, — a per- 
 petually 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 yoiir 
 garment, — a death's head at your banquet, — Agathocles' 
 pot, — a Mordecai in your gate, — a Lazarus at your 
 door, — a lion in your path, — a frog in your chamber, — 
 a fly in your ointment, — a mote in your eye, — a triumph 
 to your enemy, an apology to your friends, — the one 
 thing not needful, — the hail in harvest, — the ounce of 
 sour in a pound of sweet. 
 
 He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you 
 " That is Mr A rap, between familiarity and 
 
 14 
 
LIBHARY 
 
 OF T'; : ' 
 
POOR RELATIONS 
 
 17 
 
 respect ; that demands, and, at the same time, seems to 
 despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiHng 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 visitor's two children 
 are accommodated at a side table. He never cometh 
 upon open days, when your wife says with some com- 
 placency, " My dear, perhaps Mr will drop in 
 
 to-day." He remembereth birth-days — and professeth 
 he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth 
 against fish, the turbot being small — yet 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 condition ; and the most 
 part take him to be — a tide waiter. He calleth you by 
 your Christian name, to imply that his other is the same 
 with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish 
 he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity he 
 might pass for a casual dependent ; with more boldness 
 he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. 
 He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more 
 state than 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 ; refusetlt 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 
 
 2 B 
 
i8 
 
 POOR RELATIONS 
 
 your grandfather ; and will thrust in some mean and quite 
 unimportant anecdote of — the family. He knew it when 
 it was not quite so flourishing as " he is blest in seeing it 
 now." He reviveth past situations to institute what he 
 calleth — favourable comparisons. With a reflecting sort 
 of congratulation, he will inquire the price of your furni- 
 ture : and insults you with a special commendation of 
 your window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is 
 the more elegant shape, but, after all, there was something 
 more 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 ap- 
 pealeth 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-an-such had been the crest of 
 the family. His memory is unseasonable ; his compli- 
 ments perverse ; his talk a trouble ; his stay pertinacious ; 
 and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a 
 corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid ot 
 two nuisances. 
 
 There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is — a 
 female Poor Relation. You may do something with the 
 other ; you may pass him off tolerably well ; but your 
 indigent she-relative is hopeless. " He is an old 
 humourist," you may say, " and affects to go thread- 
 bare. 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 indic- 
 ations 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 ^ouse ? " She 
 
 is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine times out 
 of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is something 
 
POOR RELATIONS 19 
 
 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 — altquando sufflami" 
 nandus erat — but there is no raising her. You send her 
 soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped — after the 
 
 gentlemen. Mr requests the honour of taking 
 
 wine with her ; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, 
 and chooses the former — because he does. She calls 
 the servant Sir ; and insists on not troubling him to hold 
 her plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The chil- 
 dren's governess takes upon her to correct her, when she 
 has mistaken the piano for harpsichord. 
 
 Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a noticeable 
 
20 POOR RELATIONS 
 
 instance of the disadvantages, to which this chimerical 
 notion of affinity constituting a claim to an 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 wherewithal in the end 
 to recompense his indignities, and float him again upon 
 the brilliant surface, under which it had been her seeming 
 business and pleasure all along to sink him. All men, 
 besides, are not of Dick's temperament. I knew an 
 Amlet in real life, who wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank 
 
 indeed. Poor W ^ was of my own standing at 
 
 Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he 
 had a blemish, it was too much pride ; but its quality was 
 inoffensive ; it was not of that sort which hardens the 
 heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a distance ; it only 
 sought to ward off derogation from 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 1 had with him, when we were 
 rather older boys, and our tallness made us more obnox- 
 ious to observation in 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 holi- 
 day 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 
 to the society. The servitor's gown (worse than his 
 [1 Favell, who left Cambridge because his father was a house- 
 painter there.] 
 
POOR RELATIONS 
 
 21 
 
 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 discommend- 
 able 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 was upon him, to soothe and to abstract. He 
 was almost a healthy man ; when the waywardness of his 
 fate broke out against him with a second and worse malig- 
 nity. The father of W had hitherto exercised the 
 
 humble profession of house-painter at N , near Oxford. 
 
 A supposed interest with some of the heads of colleges 
 had now induced him to take up his abode in that city, 
 with the hope of being employed upon some public works 
 which were talked of. From that moment I read in the 
 countenance of the young man, the determination which 
 at length tore him from academical pursuits for ever. To 
 a person unacquainted with our Universities, the distance 
 between the gownsmen and the townsmen, as they are 
 called — the trading part of the latter especially — is carried 
 to an access 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 
 
 r whose chamber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he 
 was thus obsequiously and gratuitously ducking. Such a 
 
 I state of things could not last. W must change the 
 
22 
 
 POOR RELATIONS 
 
 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 derelic- 
 tion ; 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 
 him in a better mood — upon a representation of the Artist 
 Evangelist, which the old man, whose affairs were begin- 
 ning to flourish had caused to be set up in a splendid 
 sort of frame over his really handsome shop, either as a 
 token of prosperity, or badge of gratitude to his saint. 
 
 W looked up at the Luke, and, like Satan, "knew 
 
 his mounted sign — and fled." A letter on his father's 
 table the next morning, announced that he had accepted 
 a commission in a regiment about to embark for Portugal. 
 He was among the first who perished before the walls of 
 St Sebastian. 
 
 I do not know how, upon a subject which 1 began 
 with treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a 
 recital so eminently painful ; but this theme of poor rela- 
 tionship 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 gentle- 
 man, clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely appear- 
 ance. 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 
 
POOR RELATIONS 
 
 — for my cue was to admire in silence. A particular 
 elbow chair was appropriated to him, which was in no case 
 to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which 
 appeared on no other occasion, distinguished the days of 
 his coming. I used to think him a prodigiously rich man. 
 All I could make out of him was, that he and my father 
 had been schoolfellows a world ago at Lincoln, and that 
 he came from the Mint. The Mint I knew to be a place 
 where all the money was coined — and I thought he was 
 the owner of all 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 mourn- 
 ing ; 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 superi- 
 ority, 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- 
 
24 
 
 POOR RELATIONS 
 
 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 prefer- 
 ence of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, 
 the dweller on the hill, and the plain-born, could meet on 
 a conciliating level, and lay down their less important 
 differences. Once only I saw the old gentleman really 
 ruffled, and I remembered with anguish the thought that 
 came over me : " Perhaps he will never come here 
 again." He had been pressed to take another plate of 
 the viand, which I have already mentioned as the indis- 
 pensable concomitant of his visits. He had refused with 
 a resistance 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 ot 
 the evening, when some argument had intervened between 
 them, to utter with an emphasis which chilled the com- 
 pany, and which chills me now as I write it — " Woman, 
 you are superannuated." 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 17^1) where he had 
 long held, what he accounted, a comfortable indepen- 
 dence ; and with five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a 
 penny, which were found in his escrutoire after his disease, 
 left the world, blessing God that he had enough to bury 
 him, and that he had never been obliged to any man for a 
 sixpence. This was — a Poor Relation. 
 
STAGE ILLUSION 
 
 A PL AY is said to be well or ill acted in proportion 
 to the scenical illusion produced. Whether such 
 illusion can in any case be perfect, is not the 
 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 his stage business 
 seems indispensable. Yet it is, in fact, dispensed with^ 
 every day by our cleverest tragedians ; and while these 
 references to an audience, in the shape of rant or senti- 
 V ment, 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 
 I comedy, especially those which are a little extravagant, 
 
 »5 
 
26 
 
 STAGE ILLUSION 
 
 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 symptoms of the malady upon him ; the 
 quivering lip, the cowering knees, the teeth chattering ; 
 and could have sworn "that man was frightened." But 
 we forgot all the while— or kept it almost a secret to 
 ourselves — that he never once lost his self-possession ; 
 that he let out by a thousand droll looks and gestures — 
 meant to us^ and not at all supposed to be visible to his 
 fellows in the scene, that his confidence in his own re- 
 sources 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, helplessness, and utter 
 self-desertion, which we know to be concomitants of 
 cowardice in real life, could have given us ? 
 
 Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endur- 
 
STAGE ILLUSION 27 
 
 able 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 
 sympathetic ; i,e, is no genuine miser. Here again a 
 diverting likeness is substituted for a very disagreeable 
 reality. 
 
 Spleen, irritability — the pitiable infirmities of old men, 
 which produce only pain to behold in the realities, 
 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 Gatty acts an old man, is he angry 
 indeed ? or only a pleasant counterfeit, just enough of 
 a likeness to recognise, without pressing upon us the 
 uneasy sense of a reality. 
 
 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 everything before the curtain 
 into his comedy, it produced a harsh and dissonant effect. 
 He was out of keeping with the rest of the Persona 
 Dramatis, There was as little link between him and 
 them as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a 
 third estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individu- 
 
28 
 
 STAGE ILLUSION 
 
 *' The pitiable infirmities of old men.^^ 
 
 ally 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 
 
STAGE ILLUSION 
 
 29 
 
 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 something ungracious in a comic 
 actor holding himself aloof from all participation or con- 
 cern 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 
 somethings and by conscious words and looks express it, 
 as plainly as he can speak, to pit, box, and gallery. 
 When an impertinent in tragedy, an Osric, for instance, 
 breaks in upon the serious passions of the scene, we 
 approve of the contempt 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 perplexity 
 must seem half put on. If he repel the intruder with 
 the sober set face of a man in earnest, and more especially 
 if he deliver his expostulations in a tone which in the 
 world must necessarily provoke a duel ; his real-life 
 manner will destroy the whimsical and purely dramatic 
 existence of the other character (which to render it 
 comic demands an antagonist comicality on the part of 
 the character opposed to it), and convert what was meant 
 
30 
 
 STAGE ILLUSION 
 
 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 refer- 
 ence to an audience which is exacted of it ; but that in 
 some cases a sort of compromise may take place, and all 
 the purposes of dramatic delight be attained by a judicious 
 understanding, not too openly announced, between tlie 
 ladies and gentlemen — on both sides of the curtain. 
 
TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON 
 
 JOYOUS EST 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 
 Avernus ? or art thou enacting Rover (as we would 
 gladlier think ) by wandering Elysian streams ? 
 
 This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief 
 antics amongst us, was in truth any thing but a prison 
 to thee, as the vain Platonist dreams of this body to be 
 no better than a county goal, 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 
 
 3> 
 
32 TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON 
 
 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 the 
 schoolmen admitted a receptacle apart for Patriarchs and 
 un-chrisom Babes) there may exist — not far perchance 
 from that storehouse of all vanities, which Milton saw in 
 visions — a Limbo somewhere for Players ? and that 
 
 Up thither like aerial vapours fly 
 
 Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things 
 
 Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame ? 
 
 All the unaccomplish'd works of Authors' hands. 
 
 Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mix'd, 
 
 Damn'd upon earth, fleet thither — 
 
 Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery. — 
 
 There, by the neighbouring moon (by some not im- 
 properly supposed thy Regent Planet upon earth) mayst 
 thou not still be acting thy managerial pranks, great dis- 
 embodied 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 Fie on sin- 
 ful Phantasy. 
 
 Magnificent were thy cappriccios 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, 
 
TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON 33 
 
 Sculls : " to which, with waving hand, and majestic 
 action, thou deignest no 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 conterminant, you are quietly 
 taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling 
 of Death), with the shade of some recently departed 
 , candle-snuffer. 
 
 But mercy ! what strippings, what tearing off of his- 
 trionic robes, and private vanities ! what denudations to 
 the bone, before the surly Ferryman will admit you to set 
 a foot within his battered lighter. 
 
 Crowns, sceptres ; shield, sword, and truncheon ; thy 
 own coronation robes (for thou hast brought the whole 
 property man's wardrobe with thee, enough to sink a 
 |i navy) ; the judge's ermine ; the coxcomb's wig ; the 
 I snuff-box a la Foppington — all must overboard, he posi- 
 \ tively swears — and that ancient mariner brooks no denial ; 
 I for, since the tiresome monodrame of the old Thracian 
 ! Harper, Charon, it is to be believed, hath shown small 
 
 taste for theatricals. 
 I Aye, now 'tis done. You are just boat weight ; pur a 
 et puta anima. 
 
 But bless me, how little you look ! 
 So shall we all look — kings and keysars — stript for the 
 last voyage. 
 
 I 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. 
 
 I Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, 
 leaving to his two brethren the heavy calendars — honest 
 J Rhadamanth, always partial to players, weighing their 
 2 c 
 
 1 
 
34 TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON 
 
 parti-coloured existence here upon earth, — making account 
 of the few foibles, that may have shaded thy real life^ as 
 we call it (though, substantially, scarcely less a vapour 
 than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards of Drury), as but 
 of so many echoes, natural re-percussions, and results to be 
 expected from the assumed extravagancies of thy secondary 
 or moch life^ nightly upon a stage — after a lenient castiga- 
 tion, 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 Royal of Proserpine. 
 
 PLAUDITO, ET VALETO 
 
JELLISTONIANA 
 
 MY acquaintance with the pleasant creature, whose 
 loss we all deplore, \^as but slight. 
 
 My first introduction to E., which afterwards 
 ripened into an acquaintance a little on this side of inti- 
 macy, 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 agoing 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, dispassionately giving his opinion of the worth 
 
 35 
 
36 
 
 ELLISTONIANA 
 
 or the work in question, and launching out into a disser- 
 tation on its comparative merits with those of certain 
 publications of a similar stamp, its rivals ! his enchanted 
 customers fairly hanging on his lips, subdued to their 
 authoritative sentence. So have I seen a gentleman in 
 comedy acting the shopman. So Lovelace sold his gloves 
 in King Street. I admired the histrionic art, by which 
 he contrived to carry clean away every notion of disgrace, 
 from the occupation he had so generously submitted to ; 
 and from that hour I judged him, with no after 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 professional 
 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 " My case exactly," retorted Elliston — with a 
 
 charming forgetfulness, that the converse of a proposition 
 does not always lead to the same conclusion — " I am the 
 same person ojf the stage that I am ow." 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, becomes 
 ipso facto for that time a palace ; so wherever Elliston 
 walked, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre. He 
 
ELLISTONIANA 
 
 37 
 
 carried about with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and 
 set up his portable playhouse at corners of streets, and in 
 the market places. Upon flintiest pavements he trod the 
 boards still ; and if his theme chanced to be passionate, 
 the green baise carpet of tragedy spontaneously rose 
 beneath his feet. Now this was hearty and showed a 
 love for his art. So Apelles alivays painted — in 
 thought. So G. D.^ always poetises. I hate a luke- 
 warm artist. I have known actors — and some of them 
 of Elliston's own 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 abso- 
 lutely 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 
 Ranger fill the general bosom of the town with satisfac- 
 tion ? why should he not be Ranger, and diffuse the same 
 cordial satisfaction among his private circles ? with his 
 temperament, his animal spirits, his good nature, his follies 
 perchance, could he do better than identify himself with 
 his impersonation ? Are we to like a pleasant rake, or 
 coxcomb, on the stage, and give ourselves airs of aversion 
 for the identical character, presented to us in actual life ? 
 or what would the performer have gained by divesting 
 ( \} George Dyer.] 
 
38 
 
 ELLISTONIANA 
 
 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 trick- 
 eries of his prototype ? 
 
 " But there is something not natural in this everlasting 
 acting ; we want the real man." 
 
 Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom 
 you cannot, or will not see, under some adventitious trap- 
 pings, 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 speak- 
 ing 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 quality here commended was scarcely less con- 
 spicuous in the subject of these idle reminiscences than in 
 my Lord Verulam. Those who have imagined that an 
 unexpected elevation to the direction of a great London 
 Theatre, 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 en- 
 counter 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 ofHce. Grasp- 
 ing my hand with a look of significance, he only uttered, 
 — " Have you heard the news ? " — then with another 
 
ELLISTONI AN A 
 
 39 
 
 look following up the blow, he subjoined, " I am the 
 future manager of Drury Lane Theatre." — Breathless as 
 he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation or reply, but 
 mutely stalked away, leaving me to chew upon his new- 
 blown dignities at leisure. In fact, nothing could be said 
 to it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. 
 This was his great style. 
 
 But was he less great (be witness, O 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 France), when, in melancholy atter- 
 years, again, much near the same spot, I met him, when 
 that sceptre had been wrested from his hand, and his 
 dominion was curtailed to the petty managership, and 
 part proprietorship, of the small Olympic, his Elba? He 
 still played nightly upon the boards of Drury, but in 
 parts alas ! allotted to him, not magnificently distributed 
 by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and magni- 
 ficently 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 interrup- 
 tion — " where could they have put you better ? " Then 
 after a pause — " Where I formerly played Romeo, I 
 now play Mercutio," — and so again he stalked away, 
 neither staying, nor caring for, responses. 
 
 O, it was a rich scene, — but Sir A C ^ the 
 
 best of story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a lame 
 narrative almost as well as he sets a fracture, alone could 
 do justice to it, — that I was a witness to, in the tarnished 
 [1 Sir Anthony Carlisle. J 
 
40 
 
 ELLISTONI ANA 
 
 room (that had once been green) of that same Httle 
 Olympic. There, after his deposition from Imperial 
 Drury, he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill 
 was his "highest heaven"; himself" Jove in his chair.'' 
 There he sat in state, while before him, on complaint of 
 prompter, was brought for judgment — how shall I de- 
 scribe 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 respectable" 
 audience, — had precipitately quitted her station on the 
 boards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgust. 
 
 " And how dare you," said her manager, — assuming 
 a censorial severity, which would have crushed the con- 
 fidence of a Vestris, and disarmed that beautiful Rebel 
 herself of her professional caprices — I verily believe, 
 he thought her 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 Con- 
 fidence — when gathering up his features into one signifi- 
 cant mass of wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation 
 — in a lesson never to have been lost upon a creature less 
 forward than she who stood before him — his words were 
 these : " They have hissed w^." 
 
 'Twas the identical argument a fortiori^ which the son of 
 Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, to per- 
 suade him to take his destiny with a good grace. " I too am 
 mortal." And it is to be believed that in both cases the 
 rhetoric missed of its application, for want of a proper under- 
 standing with the faculties of the respective recipients. 
 
ELLISTONI ANA 
 
 41 
 
 " Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was 
 ; courteously conducting me over the benches of his Surrey 
 Theatre, the last retreat, and recess, of his every-day 
 waning grandeur. 
 \ Those who knew Elliston, will know the manner in 
 which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few 
 words I am about to record. One proud day to me 
 he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to 
 which I had superadded a preliminary haddock. After 
 ; a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not 
 unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I made a 
 \ sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing 
 I that for my own part I never ate but one dish at dinner, 
 f " I too never eat but one thing at dinner," — was his 
 reply — then after a pause — "reckoning fish as nothing." 
 I The manner was all. It was as if by one peremptory 
 I sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the 
 I savoury esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious food- 
 \ giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her 
 1 watery bosom. This was greatness^ tempered with con- 
 I siderate tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but 
 
 welcoming entertainer, 
 f Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston ! 
 ( and not lessened in thy death, if report speak truly, which 
 1 says that thou didst direct that thy mortal remains should 
 repose under no inscription but one of pure Latinity, 
 Classical was thy bringing up ! and beautiful was the 
 feeling on thy last bed, which connecting the man with 
 ' the boy, took thee back to thy latest exercise of imagina- 
 tion, 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. 
 I For thee the Pauline Muses weep. In elegies, that shall 
 ^ silence this crude prose, they shall celebrate thy praise. 
 
DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS 
 AND READING 
 
 To mind the inside ot 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 Poppbigton in the Relapse. 
 
 AN ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much 
 struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, 
 that he has left off reading altogether, to tlie 
 great improvement 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 Hfe in others' 
 speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. 
 When I am not walking, I am reading ; I cannot sit and 
 think. Books think for me. 
 
ON BOOKS AND READING 43 
 
 I I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel 
 I for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read any 
 [ thing which I call a booh. There are things in that shape 
 •[ which I cannot allow fDr such. 
 
 \ In this catalogue of books which are no books — biblia 
 i a-biblia — I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket 
 \ Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back, 
 ! Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large ; the 
 I works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame 
 i 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 
 ] any thing. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so 
 ,j unexcluding. 
 
 1 I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in 
 \ hooks'* clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, 
 • usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, 
 I thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down 
 I 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, 
 f To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find — Adam 
 Smith. To view a well-arranged assortment of block- 
 headed Encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) 
 set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe 
 of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my 
 shivering folios ; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and 
 enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself again in 
 the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to 
 strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils. 
 
 To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum 
 of a volume. Magnificence comes after. This, when it 
 can be afforded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of 
 
 I 
 
44 DETACHED THOUGHTS 
 
 books indiscriminately. I would not dress a set of 
 Magazines, for instance, in full suit. The dishabille, or 
 half-binding (with Russia backs ever) is our costume. 
 A Shakspeare, or a Milton (unless the first editions), it 
 were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The pos- 
 session of them confers no distinction. The exterior of 
 them (the things themselves being so common), strange 
 to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of 
 property in the owner. Thomson's Seasons, again, looks 
 best (I maintain it) a little torn, and dog's-eared. 
 How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied 
 leaves, and worn out appearance, nay, the very odour 
 (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in 
 fastidiousness, of an old " Circulating Library " Tom 
 Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield ! How they speak of the 
 thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with 
 delight ! — of the lone 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, ill-spared from sleep, to steep 
 her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their 
 enchanting contents ! Who would have them a whit less 
 soiled? What better condition could we desire to see 
 them in ? 
 
 In some respects the better a book is, the less it 
 demands from binding. Fielding, Smollet, Sterne, and 
 all that class of perpetually self-reproductive volumes — 
 Great Nature's Stereotypes — we see them individually 
 perish with less regret, because we know the copies of 
 them to be " eterne." But where a book is at once both 
 good and rare — where the individual is almost the species, 
 and when that perishes, 
 
 We know not where is that Promethean torch 
 That can its light relumine— 
 
ON BOOKS AND READING 45 
 
 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 ha've 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 be- 
 come stock books — it is good to possess these in durable 
 and costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of 
 I Shakspeare. I rather prefer the common editions of 
 : Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and with plates^ which, 
 being so execrably bad, serve as maps, or modest remem- 
 j brancers, to the text ; and without pretending to any 
 -• supposable emulation with it, are so 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 con- 
 j trary, I cannot read Beaumont 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 
 I heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of 
 t Melancholy. What need was there of unearthing the 
 j bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in 
 a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure ? 
 what hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever be- 
 coming popular ? — The wretched Malone could not do 
 worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford church to 
 
46 
 
 DETACHED THOUGHTS 
 
 let him white-wash the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, 
 which stood there, in rude but lively fashion depicted, to 
 the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the eye-brow, hair, 
 the very dress he used to wear — the only authentic testi- 
 mony we had, however imperfect, of those curious parts 
 and parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat 
 
 of white paint. By , if 1 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 sacri- 
 legious varlets. 
 
 I think I see them at their work — these sapient trouble- 
 tombs. 
 
 Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the 
 names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a 
 finer relish to the ear — to mine, at least — than that of 
 Milton or of 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 ivhen and nvhere you read a book. 
 In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner 
 is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Fairy 
 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 sea- 
 son, the Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale — 
 
 These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud — 
 to yourself, or ( as it chances) to some single person 
 
CIS 
 
ON BOOKS AND READING 49 
 
 listening. More than one — and it degenerates into an 
 ^ audience. 
 
 Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are 
 t for the eye to gHde over only. It will not do to read 
 \ them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of 
 i modern novels without extreme irksomeness. 
 I A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the 
 \ Bank offices it is the custom (to save so much individual 
 I time) for one of the clerks — who is the best scholar — to 
 
 commence upon the Times, or the Chronicle, and recite 
 j its entire contents aloud pro bono publico. With every\ 
 1 advantage of lungs and elocution, the ef!ect is singularly, 
 j vapid. In barbers' shops and public-houses a fellow will 
 ( get up, and spell out a paragraph which he communicates^ 
 
 as some discovery. Another follows with his selection, j 
 i So the entire journal transpires at length by piece-meal.' 
 I Sejdom-readers are slow readers, and without this expe- 
 : dient no one in the company would probably ever travel 
 ; through the contents of a whole paper, 
 j Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays 
 I one down without a feeling of disappointment. 
 , What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at 
 f 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 amus- 
 ing tete-a-tete pictures — " The Royal Lover and Lady 
 
 G ; " " The Melting Platonic and the Old Beau," 
 
 — and such like antiquated scandal ? Would you exchange 
 I it — at that time, and in that place — for a better book ? 
 
50 DETACHED THOUGHTS 
 
 Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it 
 so much for the weightier kinds of reading — the Paradise 
 Lost, or Comus, he could have read to him — but he 
 missed the pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a 
 magazine, or a light pamphlet. 
 
 I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues or 
 some cathedral alone and reading Candide, 
 
 I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than 
 having been once detected — by a familiar damsel — reclin- 
 ing at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her 
 Cythera), reading — Pamela, There was nothing in the 
 book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure ; 
 but as she seated herself down by me, and seemed deter- 
 mined to read in company, I could have wished it had 
 been — any other book. We read on very sociably for 
 a few pages ; and, not finding the author much to her 
 taste, she got up, and — went away. Gentle casuist, I 
 leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there 
 was one between us) was the property of the nymph or 
 the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get 
 the secret. 
 
 T am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. 1 
 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 ivas 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 ot 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 
 
ON BOOKS AND READING 51 
 
 " Keeping clear of secular contacts. 
 
 contemplate without affection — the poor gentry, who, 
 not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a 
 little learning at the open stalls — the owner, with his hard 
 eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and 
 thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, 
 page after page, expecting every moment when he shall 
 interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves 
 the gratification, they " snatch a fearful ioy." Martin 
 
52 DETACHED THOUGHTS 
 
 B ,1 in this way, by daily fragments, got through two 
 
 volumes of Clarissa, when the stallkeeper damped his 
 laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger 
 days) whether he meant to purchase the work. M. 
 declares, that under 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 2 has moralised upon this 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 he had not any 
 
 Food — for that day at least — enjoy 
 
 The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. 
 
 This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder 
 
 Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny. 
 
 Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat : 
 
 No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat 
 
 P Martin Burney.] 
 
 [2 Mary Lamb.] 
 
|! 
 
 THE OLD MARGATE HOY 
 
 1AM fond of passing my vacation (I believe I have 
 said so before) at one or other of the Universities. 
 Next to these my choice would fix me at some 
 S woody spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley affords 
 I in abundance, on the banks of my beloved Thames. 
 
 But somehow or other my cousin contrives to wheedle 
 I 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! — 
 j and all because we were happy many years ago for a 
 'j brief week at Margate. That was our first sea-side ex- 
 i periment, and many circumstances combined to make it 
 f the most agreeable holyday of my life. We had neither 
 
 53 
 
 I 
 
54 THE OLD MARGATE HOY 
 
 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 accom- 
 modations — 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 cauldrons. 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- 
 chimaera, chimneying and furnacing the deep ; or liker 
 to that fire-god parching up Scamander. 
 
 Can 1 forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their 
 coy reluctant responses (yet to the suppression of any- 
 thing like contempt) to the raw questions, which we of 
 the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, 
 as to the uses of this or that strange naval implement ? 
 'Specially can I forget thee, thou happy medium, thou 
 shade of refuge between us and them, conciliating inter- 
 preter of their skill to our simplicity, comfortable am- 
 bassador between sea and land! — whose sailor-trowsers 
 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-fingered practice in thy 
 culinary vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland 
 nature 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 
 v/ith kindlier ministrations — not to assist the tempest, but, 
 as if touched with a kindred sense of our infirmities, to 
 
THE OLD MARGATE HOY 55 
 
 1 
 
 " TAe 0 er-ivashing hillouosy 
 
 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 officious ministerings, still catering for our 
 comfort, with cards, and cordials, and thy more cordial 
 conversation, alleviate the closeness and the confinement 
 of thy else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very 
 inviting, little cabin ! 
 
 With these additaments to boot, we had on board a 
 fellow-passenger, whose discourse in verity might have 
 beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, and have 
 
56 THE OLD MARGATE HOY 
 
 made mirth and wonder abound as far as the Azores. 
 He was a dark, Spanish-complexioned young man, re- 
 markably handsome, with an officer-like assurance, and 
 an insuppressible volubility of assertion. He was, in fact, 
 the greatest liar I had met with then, or since. He was 
 none of 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, day-light 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 Aldermanbury, 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 distinctions among such a 
 jolly, companionable ship's company, as those were whom 
 I sailed with. Something too must be conceded to the 
 Genius Loci, Had the confident fellow told us half the 
 legends on land, which he favoured us with on the other 
 element, I flatter myself the good sense of most of us 
 would have revolted. But we were in a new world, with 
 everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and place 
 disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel 
 whatsoever. Time has obliterated from my memory 
 much of his wild fablings ; and the rest would appear 
 but dull, as written, and to be read on shore. He had 
 been Aide-de-camp (among other rare accidents and for- 
 tunes) to a Persian prince, and at one blow had stricken 
 
THE OLD MARGATE HOY 57 
 
 off the head of the King of Carimania on horseback, 
 j He, of course, married the Prince's daughter. I forget 
 what unlucky turn in the poHtics of that court, combining 
 with the loss of his consort, was the reason of his quitting 
 Persia ; but with the rapidity of a magician, he transported 
 himself, along with his hearers, back to England, where 
 we still found him in the confidence of great ladies. There 
 was some story of a Princess — Elizabeth, if I remember 
 — having entrusted to his care an extraordinary casket of 
 jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion — but, as I am 
 not certain of the name or circumstance at this distance of 
 time, I must leave it to the Royal daughters of England 
 to settle the honour among themselves in private. I cannot 
 call to mind half his pleasant wonders ; but I perfectly 
 remember, that in the course of his travels he had seen a 
 I phoenix ; and he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar 
 I 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 im- 
 I plicit listeners. His dreaming fancies had transported us 
 I;* beyond the " ignorant present." But when (still hardying 
 I more and more in his triumphs over our simplicity), he 
 j went on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the 
 legs of the Colossus at Rhodes, it really became necessary 
 to make a stand. And here I must do justice to the 
 good sense and intrepidity of one of 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, delivered with all modesty our hero 
 was obliging enough to concede thus much, "the figure 
 was indeed a little damaged.'' This was the only oppo- 
 I sition he met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger 
 
58 THE OLD MARGATE HOY 
 
 him, for he proceeded with his fables which the same 
 youth appeared to swallow with still more complacency 
 than ever, — confirmed, as it were, by the extreme candour 
 of that concession. With these prodigies he wheedled us 
 on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, which one of 
 our own company (having been the voyage before) imme- 
 diately recognising, and pointing out to us, was considered 
 by us as no ordinary seaman. 
 
 All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a 
 different character. It waS| a lad, apparently very poor, 
 very infirm, and very patient. His eye was ever on the 
 sea, with a smile ; and, if he caught now and then some 
 snatches of these wild legends, it was by accident, and 
 they seemed not to concern him. The waves to him 
 whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one, being 
 with us but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring 
 without stirring ; and when some of us pulled out our 
 private stores — our cold meat and our salads — he pro- 
 duced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary 
 biscuit he had laid in ; provision for the one or two days 
 and nights, to which these vessels then were oftentimes 
 obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer acquaint- 
 ance with him, 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. 
 
 These pleasant, and some mournful passages with the 
 first sight of the sea, co-operating with youth, and a sense 
 of holydays, and out-of-door adventure, to me that had 
 been pent up in populous cities for many months before, — 
 
THE OLD MARGATE HOY 59 
 
 I have left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days 
 j gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance for 
 t 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 sight of the sea for the first time P I 
 ^ think the reason usually given — referring to the incapacity 
 of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of them 
 — scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the 
 \ same person see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the 
 first time in his life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a 
 I 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, 
 I and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar 
 [ impression : enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon 
 ] familiarity. But the sea remains a disappointment. — Is it 
 I not, that in the latter we had expected to behold (absurdly, 
 f I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of imagination un- 
 avoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or 
 I that mountain compassable by the eye, but all the sea at 
 
 Once^ THE COMMENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH ? I 
 
 do not say we tell ourselves so much, but the craving of 
 the mind is to be satisfied with nothing less. I will sup- 
 pose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) 
 knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. He 
 comes to it for the first time — all that he has been read- 
 ing of it all his life, and that the most enthusiastic part 
 of life, — all he has gathered from narratives of wander- 
 ing seamen ; what he has gained from true voyages, 
 and what he cherishes as credulously from romance and 
 poetry ; crowding their images, and exacting strange 
 
 I 
 
6o THE OLD MARGATE HOY 
 
 tributes from expectation. — He thinks of the great deep, 
 and of those who go down into it ; of its thousand isles, 
 and of the vast continents it washes ; of its receiving the 
 mighty Plate, or Orellana, into its bosom, without dis- 
 turbance, or sense of augmentation ; of Biscay swells, and 
 the mariner 
 
 For many a day, and many a dreadful night, 
 Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape ; 
 
 of fatal rocks, and the " still- vexed Bermoothes ; of 
 great 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 mer- 
 maids' 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 con- 
 fused hints and shadows of all these ; and when the 
 actual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather 
 too most likely) from our unromantic coasts — a speck, a 
 slip of sea-water, as it shows to him — what can it prove 
 but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment ? 
 Or if he has come to it from the mouth of a river, was it 
 much more than the river widening ? 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 
 
THE OLD MARGATE HOY 6i 
 
 tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of 
 Gebir, 
 
 Is this the mighty ocean ? is this all? 
 
 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 
 Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. There 
 is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugi- 
 tive 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, it were something. I could abide to dwell with 
 Meschek ; to assort with fisher-swains, and smugglers. 
 There are, or I dream there are, many of this latter occu- 
 pation here. Their faces become the place. I like a 
 smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs noth- 
 ing but the revenue, — an abstraction I never greatly cared 
 about, I could go out with them in their mackarel 
 
62 THE OLD MARGATE HOY 
 
 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 recurrence, 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 ot preventive 
 service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the deplor- 
 able absence of a foreign one, to show their detestation 
 of run hollands and zeal for old England. But it is the 
 visitants from town, that come here to 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 listen 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-brokers ; but 1 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, imagina- 
 
THE OLD MARGATE HOY 65 
 
 tion slackens ; they begin to discover that cockles produce 
 no pearls, and then — O 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 unsophisti- 
 cated 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-tackle on their back, as we carry our 
 town necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in 
 Lothbury ? What vehement laughter would it not ex- 
 cite among 
 
 The daughters of Cheapside and wives of Lombard-street. 
 
 I am sure that no town-bred, or inland-born subjects, 
 can feel their true and natural nourishment at these sea- 
 places. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners 
 and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam 
 seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured 
 as by the milder waters of my natural river. 1 would 
 exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow 
 for ever about the banks of Thamesis. 
 
THE CONVALESCENT 
 
 A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, under 
 the name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner 
 of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly 
 leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of reflecting 
 upon any topic foreign to itself. Expect no healthy 
 conclusions from me this month, reader ; I can offer 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 
 abed, and draw daylight curtains about him ; and, shutting 
 out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the works 
 66 
 
THE CONVALESCENT 
 
 67 
 
 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 without 
 controul ! how king-Hke he sways his pillow — tumbling, 
 and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, 
 and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever varying re- 
 quisitions of his throbbing temples. 
 
 He changes sUes oftener than a politician. Now he 
 lies full length, then half-length, obliquely, transversely, 
 head and feet quite across the bed ; and none accuses 
 him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is 
 absolute. They are his Mare Clausum. 
 
 How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self 
 to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme 
 selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty. '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 law-suit, which was to be the making or the 
 marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen trudg- 
 ing about upon this man's errand to fifty quarters of the 
 town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing that soli- 
 citor. 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 jar- 
 
68 THE CONVALESCENT 
 
 gon. 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 his 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 him- 
 self ; he yearneth over himself ; his bowels are even 
 melted within him, to think what he suffers ; he is not 
 ashamed to weep over himself. 
 
 He is for ever plotting how to do some good to him- 
 self ; studying little stratagems and artificial alleviations. 
 
 He makes the most of himself ; dividing himself, by 
 an allowable fiction, into as many distinct individuals, as 
 he hath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he 
 meditates — as of a thing apart from him — upon his poor 
 aching head, and that dull 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 compassionates 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 un- 
 moved, and because he can pour forth his feverish ejacula- 
 tions before it as unreservedly as to his bed-post. 
 
 To the world's business he is dead. He understands 
 not what the callings and occupations of mortals are ; only 
 
THE CONVALESCENT 69 
 
 " His broths, and his cor dials. 
 
 I 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 sick man. To what 
 other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, when he 
 
 , slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so 
 carefully for fear of rustling — is no speculation which he can 
 at present entertain. He thinks only of the regular return 
 
 ;of the same phenomenon at the same hour to-morrow. 
 Household rumours touch him not. Some faint 
 
 i murmur, indicative of life going on within the house, 
 
 ♦ soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it is. 
 
 I 
 
70 THE CONVALESCENT 
 
 He is not to know any thing, not to think of any thing. 
 Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, tread- 
 ing as upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so long as 
 he troubles not himself further than with some feeble 
 guess at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a 
 burthen to him : he can just endure the pressure of con- 
 jecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of 
 the muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking 
 " Who was it ? " He is flattered 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 hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels 
 his sovereignty. 
 
 To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Com- 
 pare the silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the 
 eye only, with which he is served — with the careless 
 demeanour, the unceremonious goings in and out (slap- 
 ping 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 sicknesa (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, which he occupied so 
 lately, in his own, in the family's eye ? 
 
 The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was 
 his presence chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic 
 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 
 
THE CONVALESCENT 
 
 71 
 
 to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the 
 encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and decencies 
 which his shaken frame deprecated ; then to be lifted 
 into it again, for another three or four days' respite, to 
 flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow 
 was a historical record of some shifting posture, some un- 
 easy 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 what caverns 
 of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean 
 pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved ; 
 and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage. 
 
 Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness 
 survives in the still lingering visitations of the medical 
 attendant. But how is he too changed with every thing 
 else ! Can this be he — this man of news — of chat — of 
 anecdotes — of every thing 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. 
 
 Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous — 
 the spell that hushed the household — the desert-like still- 
 ness, felt throughout its inmost chambers — the mute 
 attendance — the enquiry by looks — the still softer deli- 
 cacies of self-attention — the sole and single eye of dis- 
 temper 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 of 
 sickness, yet far enough from the terra firma of established 
 
72 THE CONVALESCENT 
 
 health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting— 
 an article. Articulo Mortis, thought I ; but it is some- 
 thing hard — and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved 
 me. The summons, unreasonable as it appeared, seemed 
 to link me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I 
 had lost sight of ; a gentle call to activity, however trivial ; 
 a wholesome weaning from that preposterous dream of 
 self-absorption — the puffy state of sickness — in which I 
 confess to have lain so long, insensible to the magazines 
 and monarchies, of the world alike ; to its laws and to its 
 literature. The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding ; the 
 acres, which in imagination I had spread over — for the 
 sick man swells in the sole contemplation of his single 
 sufferings, till he becomes a Tityus to himself — are wast- 
 ing 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 insignifi- 
 cant Essayist. 
 
SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS 
 
 O far from the position holding true, that great wit 
 
 (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a 
 
 necessary aUiance 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 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 all the faculties. Madness is the 
 disproportionate straining or excess of any one 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, 
 
 73 
 
74 SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS 
 
 to v/hich 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 the empyrean heaven, and is not 
 intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dis- 
 
 \ may ; 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 let- 
 ting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems 
 to do so, — he has his better genius still whispering at his 
 ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, 
 or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kind- 
 lier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from 
 humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From beyond 
 the scope of Nature if he summon possible existences, he 
 subjugates them to the law of her consistency. He is 
 beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, even when 
 he appears most to betray and desert her. His ideal 
 tribes submit to policy ; his very monsters are tamed to 
 his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by 
 Proteus. He tames and he clothes them with attributes 
 of flesh and blood, till they wonder at themselves, like 
 Indian Islanders forced to submit to European 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 lose themselves, and their 
 
SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS 75 
 
 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 some- 
 thing 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 inconsequence, which has a natural 
 alliance with frenzy, — than a great genius in his " maddest 
 fits," as Wither somewhere calls them. We appeal to 
 any one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane's 
 novels, — as they existed some twenty or thirty years back, 
 — those scanty intellectual viands of the whole female 
 reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled 
 for ever the innutritious phantoms, — whether he has not 
 found his brain more "betossed,'' his memory more 
 puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, 
 among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, 
 the inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some 
 third-rate love intrigue — where the persons shall be a 
 Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene 
 only alternate between Bath and Bond Street — a more 
 bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt 
 wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the 
 productions we refer to, nothing 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, or purposes destitute of motive : — we meet 
 
76 SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS 
 
 phantoms in our known walks ; fantasques only christened. 
 In the poet we have names which announce fiction ; and 
 we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and 
 persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their " where- 
 abouts." But in their inner nature, and the law of their 
 speech and actions, we are at home and upon acquainted 
 ground. The one turns life into a dream ; the other 
 to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every-day 
 occurrences. By what subtile art of tracing the mental 
 processes it is effected, we are not philosophers enough to 
 explain, but in that wonderful episode of the cave of 
 Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the 
 lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and 
 becomes the god of all the treasures of the world: and 
 has a daughter, Ambition, before whom 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 should be 
 at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, 
 at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and 
 yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the 
 most rambling dream, and our judgment yet all the time 
 awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy, 
 — is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the 
 poet in the wildest seeming-aberrations. 
 
 It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a 
 copy of the mind's conceptions in sleep ; it is, in some 
 sort — but what a copy ! Let the most romantic of us, 
 that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of 
 some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the 
 morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That 
 which appeared so shifting, and yet so coherent, while 
 that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool 
 examination, shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, 
 
SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS 77 
 
 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 
 
 MONG 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 enough ; but a feeling Hke reproach 
 persuades me, that this could have been no other in fact 
 than my dear old friend, who some five-and-twenty years 
 ago rented a tenement, which he was pleased to dignify 
 with the appellation here used, about a mile from West- 
 bourn Green. Alack, how good men, and the good 
 turns they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled 
 
CAPTAIN JACKSON 
 
 79 
 
 but by the surprise of some such sad memento as that 
 which now lies before us ! 
 
 He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with 
 a wife and two grown-up daughters, whom he maintained 
 with the port and notions of gentlewomen upon that 
 slender professional allowance. Comely girls they were 
 too. 
 
 And was I in danger of forgetting this man ? — his 
 cheerful suppers — the noble tone of hospitality, when 
 first you set your foot in the cottage — the anxious minis - 
 terings 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 his magnifi- 
 cent 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 will — the revelling 
 imagination of your host — the " mind, the mind, Master 
 Shallow," whole beeves were spread before you — heca- 
 tombs — no end appeared to the profusion. 
 
 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 charges. Then sliding a slender ratio of 
 Single Gloucester upon his wife's plate, or the daughters', 
 he would convey the remnant rind into his own, with a 
 
8o 
 
 CAPTAIN JACKSON 
 
 merry quirk of " the nearer the bone," &c., and declaring 
 that he universally preferred the outside. For we had 
 our table distinctions, you are to know, and some of us 
 in a manner 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. 
 
 Wine we had none; nor, except on very rare occasions, 
 spirits ; but the sensation of wine was there. Some thin 
 kind of ale I remember — " British beverage," he would 
 say. " Push about, my boys ; " " Drink to your sweet- 
 hearts, 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 
 Bacchanalian encouragements. 
 
 We had our songs — " Why, Soldiers, Why " — and 
 the British Grenadiers " — in which last we were all 
 obliged to bear chorus. Both the daughters sang. Their 
 proficiency was a nightly theme — the masters he had 
 given them — the " no-expense " which he spared to ac- 
 complish them in a science "so necessary to young 
 women." But then — they could not sing "without the 
 instrument." 
 
 Sacred, and, by me, never-to-be-violated, Secrets of 
 Poverty ! Should I disclose your honest aims at grand- 
 eur, your makeshift efforts of magnificence ? Sleep, sleep, 
 with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant ; 
 
CAPTAIN JACKSON 
 
 83 
 
 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 
 the cottage was a room, which tradition authenticated to 
 have been the same in which Glover, in his occasional 
 retirements, had penned the greater part of his Leonidas. 
 This circumstance was nightly quoted, though none of 
 the present inmates, that I could discover, appeared ever 
 to have met with the poem in question. But that was 
 no matter. Glover had written there, and the anecdote 
 was pressed into the account of the family importance. 
 It 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 
 of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, not a 
 rood nor square yard whereof our host could call his 
 own, yet gave occasion to an immoderate expansion of 
 — vanity shall I call it? — in his bosom, as he showed 
 them in a glowing summer evening. It was all his, he 
 took it all iff, and communicated rich portions of it to 
 his guests. It was a part of his largess, his hospitality ; 
 it was going over his grounds ; he was lord for the time 
 of showing them, and you the implicit lookers-up to his 
 magnificence. 
 
 He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes 
 — you had no time to detect his fallacies. He would 
 
84 
 
 CAPTAIN JACKSON 
 
 say, " Hand me the silver sugar tongs ; " and before you 
 could discover that 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. Rich men direct you to their 
 furniture, poor ones divert you from it ; he neither did 
 one nor the other, but by simply assuming that every 
 thing 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 every 
 thing. 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 continual collision 
 of his credulity. Her daughters were rational and dis- 
 creet young women ; in the main, perhaps, not insensible 
 to their true circumstances. I have seen them assume a 
 thoughtful air at times. But such was the preponderating 
 opulence of his fancy, that I am persuaded, not for any 
 half hour together did they ever look their own pro- 
 spects fairly in the face. There was no resisting the 
 vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination con- 
 jured 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 I should wish to convey some notion of the 
 manner in which the pleasant creature described the cir- 
 cumstances of his own wedding-day. I faintly remember 
 something of a chaise and four, in which he made his 
 
CAPTAIN JACKSON 
 
 85 
 
 entry into Glasgow on that morning to fetch the bride 
 home, or carry her thither, I forget which. It so com- 
 pletely made out the stanza of the old ballad — 
 
 When we came down through Glasgow town, 
 
 We were a comely sight to see ; 
 My love was clad in black velvet, 
 
 And I myself in cramasie 
 
 I suppose it was the only occasion, upon which his own 
 actual splendour at all corresponded with the world's 
 notions on that subject. In homely cart, or travelling 
 caravan, by whatever humble vehicle they chanced to 
 be transported in less prosperous days, the ride through 
 Glasgow came back upon his fancy, not as a humiliating 
 contrast, but as a fair 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 dis- 
 commendable. Tibbs, and Bobadil, even when detected, 
 have more of our admiration than contempt. But for a 
 man to put the cheat upon himself ; to play the Bobadil 
 at home ; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy 
 himself all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of 
 constitutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, 
 which was reserved for my old friend Captain Jackson. 
 
 I 
 
THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 
 
 Sera tamen respexit 
 Libertas. Virgil. 
 A clerk I was in London gay. 
 
 O'Keefe. 
 
 IF peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste 
 the golden years of thy life — thy shining youth — in 
 the irksome confinement of an office ; to have thy 
 prison days prolonged through middle age down to de- 
 crepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or 
 
 86 
 
THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 87 
 
 respite ; to have lived to forget that there are such things 
 as holydays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives 
 of childhood ; then, and then only, will you be able to 
 appreciate my deliverance. 
 
 It is now six and thirty years since I took my seat at 
 the desk in Mincing-lane. Melancholy was the tran- 
 sition 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 a counting-house. But time partially reconciles us to 
 anything. I gradually became content — doggedly content, 
 as wild animals in cages. 
 
 It is true I had my Sundays to myself ; but Sundays, 
 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 cheerful cries of London, 
 the music, and the ballad-singers — the buzz and stirring 
 murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. 
 The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the 
 glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, 
 and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which 
 make a week-day saunter through the less busy parts of 
 the metropolis so delightful — are shut out. No book- 
 stalls deliciously to idle over — No busy faces to re- 
 create 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 emanci- 
 pated 'prentices and Httle 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 expressing the 
 
88 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 
 
 hollowness of a day's pleasuring. The very strollers in 
 the fields on that day looked 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 re- 
 currence, 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 pro- 
 mised rest ? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. 
 I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one 
 tedious weeks that must intervene before such another 
 snatch would come. Still the prospect of its coming 
 threw something of an illumination upon the darker side 
 of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, I could 
 scarcely have sustained my thraldom. 
 
 Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever 
 been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of 
 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 health and my good 
 spirits flagged. I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, 
 to which I should be found unequal. Besides my day- 
 light 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 emancipation presented itself. I 
 had grown to my desk, as it were ; and the wood had 
 entered into my soul. 
 
 My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me 
 
THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 89 
 
 upon the trouble legible in my countenance ; but I did 
 not know that it had raised the suspicions of any of my 
 employers, when on the 5th of last month, a day ever 
 
 to be remembered by me, L , the junior partner in 
 
 the firm, calling me on one side, directly taxed me with 
 my bad looks, and frankly enquired 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 own dismissal. A week passed in this manner, the 
 most anxious one, I verily believe, in my whole life, 
 when on the evening of the 12th of April, just as I was 
 about quitting my desk to go home (it might be about 
 eight o'clock) I received an awful 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, — when to my utter astonishment B , the eldest 
 
 partner, began a formal harangue to me on the length of 
 my services, my very meritorious conduct during the whole 
 of the time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find out 
 that? I protest I never had the confidence to think as 
 much). He went on to descant on the expediency of 
 retiring at a certain time of life (how my heart panted !), 
 and asking me a few questions as 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 
 
90 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 
 
 served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two- 
 thirds of my accustomed salary — a magnificent offer ! I 
 do not know what I answered between surprise and grati- 
 tude, 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 stammered out a bow, and at just ten 
 minutes after eight I went home — for ever. This noble 
 benefit — gratitude forbids me to conceal their names — I 
 owe to the kindness of the most munificent firm in the 
 world — the house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, 
 and Lacy 
 
 Esto perpetua ! 
 
 For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. 
 1 could only apprehend my felicity ; I was too confused 
 to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was 
 happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the condi- 
 tion 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 lifted 
 up into a vast revenue ; I could see no end of my posses- 
 sions ; 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 
 customary 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 
 
LiB = ;ARY 
 
 ur: : iLLiNois 
 
THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 93 
 
 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 holi- 
 days, 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 eye-sight in by-gone winters. I walk, read, 
 or scribble (as now) just when the lit seizes me. I no 
 longer hunt after pleasure ; I let it come to me. I am 
 like the man 
 
 that's born, and has his years come to him, 
 
 In some green desert. 
 
 "Years,'' you will say; "what is this superannuated 
 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 which I have lived to other people, 
 and not to myself, and you will find me still a young 
 fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man 
 can properly call his own, that which he has all to him- 
 self ; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live 
 it, is other 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 affair of yesterday. The partners, 
 and the clerks with whom I had for so many years, and 
 for so many hours in each day of the year being so closely 
 
94 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 
 
 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 
 Robert 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 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 appropriated 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 com- 
 peers, the faithful partners of my toils for six and thirty 
 years, that smoothed for me with their jokes and con- 
 undrums the ruggedness of my professional 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 mind 
 on such occasions. But my heart smote me. I had 
 violently broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least 
 not courteous. I shall be some time before I get quite 
 reconciled to the separation. Farewell, old cronies, 
 yet not for long, for again and again I will come 
 among ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell 
 Ch , dry, sarcastic, and friendly ! Do , mild. 
 
THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 95 
 
 slove to move, and gentlemanly ' PI , officious to 
 
 do, and to volunteer, good services — and thou, thou 
 dreary pile, fit mansion for a Gresham or a Whittington 
 of old, stately House of Merchants ; with thy labyrin- 
 thine 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 of 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. 
 
 A fortnight has passed since the date of my first com- 
 munication. At that period I was approaching to tran- 
 quility, but had not reached it. I boasted of a calm 
 indeed, but it was comparative only. Something of the 
 first flutter was left ; an unsettling sense of novelty ; the 
 dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed light. I missed my 
 old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary 
 part of my apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, from strict 
 cellular discipline suddenly by some 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 otherwise? What is become 
 of Fish -street Hill? Where is Fenchurch - street ? 
 Stones of old Mincing-lane which I have worn with 
 
96 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 
 
 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 distinction of season. 
 I do not know the day of the week, or of the month. 
 Each day used to be individually felt by me in its re- 
 ference to the foreign post days ; in its distance from, 
 or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednes- 
 day feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations. The genius 
 of each day was upon me distinctly during the whole of 
 it, affecting my appetite, spirits, &c. The phantom of 
 the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sate as a 
 load upon my poor Sabbath recreations. What charm 
 has washed the 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 interrupt the man of much occupation when he 
 is busiest. I can insult over him with an invitation to 
 take a day's pleasure with me to Windsor this fine May- 
 morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor 
 drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking 
 and caring ; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the 
 same eternal round — and what is it all for ? A man 
 can never have too much Time to himself, nor too 
 
THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 97 
 
 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. 
 1 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 -js- -^^ 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 about ; not to and 
 from. They tell me, a certain cum dtgnitate air, that has 
 been buried so long with my other good parts, has begun 
 to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility per- 
 ceptibly. 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. 
 
 ♦ 
 
 « G 
 
THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING 
 
 IT is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury, 
 and Sir William Temple, are models of the genteel 
 style in writing. We should prefer saying — of the 
 lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing can be more un- 
 like, 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 
 ofl^ensively. The peer seems to have written with his 
 coronet on, and his Earl's mantle before him ; the 
 98 
 
GENTEEL STYLE liSf WRITING 99 
 
 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 Francisco de Melo, 
 a "Portugal Envoy in England," • tells him it was 
 frequent in his country for men, spent with age and 
 other decays, so as they could not hope for above a 
 year or two of life, to ship themselves away in a Brazil 
 fleet, and after their arrival there to go on a great length, 
 sometimes of twenty or thirty years, or more, by tne 
 force of that vigour they recovered with that remove. 
 "Whether such an effect (Temple beautifully adds) 
 might grow from the air, or the fruits of that climate, or 
 by approaching nearer the sun, which is the fountain of 
 light and heat, when their natural heat was so far decayed : 
 or whether the piecing out of an old man's life were worth 
 the pains, I cannot tell : perhaps the play is not worth the 
 candle." — 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 Robert Earl of Leicester" 
 furnishes him with a story of a Countess of Desmond, 
 married out of England in Edward the Fourth's time, 
 ; and who lived far in King James's reign. The " same 
 '1 noble person " gives him an account, how such a year, in 
 ^ the same reign, there went about the country a set of 
 i morrice-dancers, composed of ten men who danced, a 
 
loo GENTEEL OTYLE IN WRITING 
 
 " These tivelve, one ivith another^ made up tivelve hundred years, 
 
 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 him the use 
 of hammocks in that complaint ; having been allured to 
 sleep, while suffering under it himself, by the " constant 
 motion or swinging of those airy beds." Count Egmont, 
 and the Rhinegrave 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 compli- 
 ments paid by foreigners to his fruit trees. For the taste 
 and perfection of what we esteem the best, he can truly 
 say, that the French, who have eaten his peaches and 
 
GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING iot 
 
 grapes at Shene in no very ill year, have generally con- 
 cluded that the last are as good as any they have eaten in 
 France on this side Fontainbleau ; 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 Frontignac or Muscat grape. His orange- 
 trees too, are as large as any he saw when he was young 
 in France, except those in Fontainbleau ; 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 enumer- 
 ates, and supposes that they are all by this time pretty 
 common among some gardeners in his neighbourhood, as 
 well as several persons of quality ; for he ever thought all 
 things of this kind "the commoner they are made the 
 better." The 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 North- 
 amptonshire at the furthest northwards ; and praises the 
 " Bishop of Munster at Cosevelt," for attempting nothing 
 beyond cherries in that cold climate ; is equally pleasant 
 and in character. " I may perhaps " (he thus ends his 
 sweet Garden Essay with a passage worthy of Cowley) 
 " be allowed to know something of this trade, since I 
 have so long allowed myself to be good for nothing else, 
 which few men will do, or enjoy their gardens, with- 
 out 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 
 *Df my age ; and I can truly say that, among many great 
 
 i 
 
 1 
 
I02 GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING 
 
 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 Hfe. The measure of 
 choosing well is whether a man likes what 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 employments, 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 afi^ectation, 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 refictt, 
 
 Me, when 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 
 with reason,'' he says, " if health could be purchased with 
 
GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING 103 
 
 gold ? who not ambitious, if it were at the command ot 
 power, or restored by honour ? but, alas ! a white staff 
 will not help gouty feet to walk better than a common 
 cane ; nor a blue riband bind up a wound so well as a 
 fillet. The glitter of gold, or of diamonds, will but hurt 
 sore eyes instead of curing them ; and an aching head 
 will be no more eased by wearing a crown, than a common 
 night-cap." In a far better style, and more accordant 
 with his own humour of plainness, are the concluding 
 sentences 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 is," he says, " that, whether the 
 fierceness of the Gothic humours, or noise of their per- 
 petual wars, frighted it away, or that the unequal mixture 
 of the modern languages would not bear it — the great 
 heights and excellency both of poetry and music fell with 
 the Roman learning and empire, and have never since 
 recovered the admiration and applauses that before at- 
 tended them. Yet, such as they are amongst us, they 
 must be confessed to be the softest and the sweetest, the 
 most general and most innocent amusements of common 
 time and life. They still find room in the 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 perturba- 
 tions 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 m a storm, but is 
 
I04 GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING 
 
 80 to both when a little agitated by gentle gales ; and so 
 the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or affec- 
 tions. 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 them- 
 selves 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 them- 
 selves, though nobody hurts them." "When all is done 
 (he concludes), human life is at the greatest and the best 
 but like a froward child, that must be played with, and 
 humoured a little, to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and 
 then the care is over." 
 
BARBARA S 
 
 ON the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 4, 
 I forget which it was, just as the clock had struck 
 
 one, Barbara S , with her accustomed 
 
 punctuaHty, 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 
 
 105 
 
io6 
 
 BARBARA S 
 
 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 Richard 
 with infantine petulance in the Duke of York ; and in 
 her turn had rebuked that petulance when she was Prince 
 of Wales. She would have done the elder child in 
 Morton's pathetic after-piece to the life ; but as yet the 
 " Children in the Wood '' was not. 
 
 Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, 
 I have seen 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 were, blotted 
 and scrawled, as for a child's use, she kept them all ; 
 and in the zenith of her after reputation it was a delight- 
 ful sight to behold them bound up in costliest Morocco, 
 each single — each small part making a book — with fine 
 clasps, gilt-splashed, &c. She had conscientiously kept 
 them as they had been delivered to her ; not a blot 
 
BARBARA S 
 
 107 
 
 had been efaced or tampered with. They were precious 
 to her for their affecting remenibrancings. They were 
 her principia, her rudiments ; the elementary atoms ; the 
 Httle 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 — s-o I will just mention an obser- 
 vation 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 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 j-^^-experience, she told me, that so 
 long ago as when she used to play the part of the Little 
 Son to Mrs Porter's Isabella, (I think it was) when 
 that impressive actress has been bending over her in 
 some heart-rending colloquy, she has felt real hot tears 
 come trickling from her, which (to use her powerful 
 expression), have perfectly scalded her back. 
 
 I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs Porter ; but 
 it was some great actress of that day. The name is 
 indifferent ; but the fact of the scalding tears I most 
 distinctly remember. 
 
 I was always fond of the society of players, and am 
 
io8 
 
 BARBARA S 
 
 not sure that an impediment in my speech (which cer- 
 tainly kept me out of the pulpit) even more than certain 
 personal disqualifications, which are often got over in 
 that profession, did not prevent me at one time of life 
 from adopting it. I have had the honour (I must 
 ever call it) once to have been admitted to the tea-table 
 of Miss Kelly. I have played at serious whist with Mr 
 Liston. I have chatted with ever good-humoured Mrs 
 Charles Kemble. I have conversed as friend to friend 
 with her accomplished husband. I have been indulged 
 with a classical conference with Macready ; and with 
 a sight of the Player-picture gallery, at Mr Matthews' s, 
 when the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love 
 of the old actors (whom he loves so much), went over 
 it with me, supplying to his capital collection, what 
 alone the artist could not give them — voice ; and their 
 living motion. Old tones, half-faded, of Dodd, and 
 Parsons, and Baddeley, have lived again for me at his 
 bidding. Only Edwin he could not restore to me. I 
 have supped with ; but 1 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 circum- 
 stances. 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 ac- 
 companies 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. 
 
BARBARA S 
 
 At the period I commenced with, her slender earnings 
 were the sole support of the family, including two younger 
 sisters. I must throw a veil over some mortifying cir- 
 cumstances. Enough to say, that her Saturday's pittance 
 was the only chance of a Sunday's (generally their only) 
 meal of meat. 
 
 One thing I will only mention, that in some child's 
 part, where in her theatrical character she was to sup off a 
 roast fowl ( O 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 (O grief and pain of heart to Barbara ! ) that when 
 she crammed a portion of it into her mouth, she was 
 obliged sputteringly to reject it ; and what with shame of 
 her ill-acted part, and pain of real appetite at missing such 
 a dainty, her little heart sobbed almost to breaking, till a 
 flood of tears, which the well-fed spectators were totally 
 unable to comprehend, mercifully relieved her. 
 
 This was the little starved, meritorious maid, who stood 
 before old Ravenscroft, the treasurer, for her Saturday's 
 payment. 
 
 Ravenscroft was a man, I have heard many old 
 theatrical people beside 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 mis- 
 take : God knows Ravenscroft would never have dis- 
 covered it. 
 
 But when she got down to the first of those uncouth 
 
no BARBARA S 
 
 ' * An unusual iveight of metal. " 
 
 landing-places, she became sensible of an unusual weight 
 of metal pressing her little hand. 
 Now mark the dilemma. 
 
 She was by nature a good 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 philo- 
 sophy. 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 
 
BARBARA S 
 
 1 1 1 
 
 which concerned grown-up people, men and women. 
 She had never known temptation, or thought of preparing 
 resistance against it. 
 
 Her first impulse was to go back to the old treasurer, 
 and explain to him his blunder. He was already so con- 
 fused with age, besides a natural want of punctuality, that 
 she would have had some difficulty in making him under- 
 stand 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 Mr Ravenscroft had always been 
 so good-natured, had stood her friend behind the scenes, 
 and even recommended her promotion to some of her 
 little parts. But again the old man was reputed to be 
 worth a world of money. He was supposed to have fifty 
 pounds a year clear of the theatre. And then came 
 staring upon her the figures of her little stockingless and 
 shoeless sisters. And when she looked at her own neat 
 white cotton stockings, which her situation at the theatre 
 had made it 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 they could ac- 
 company 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 own, 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 
 
112 
 
 BARBARA S 
 
 her feet to move) she found herself transported back to 
 the individual desk she had just quitted, and her hand in 
 the old hand of Ravenscroft, who in silence took back 
 the refunded treasure, and who had been sitting (good 
 man) insensible to the lapse of minutes, which to her 
 were anxious ages ; and from that moment a deep peace 
 fell upon her heart, and she knew the quality of honesty. 
 
 A year or two's unrepining application to her pro- 
 fession brightened up the feet, and the prospects, of her 
 little sisters, set the whole family upon their legs again, 
 and released her from the difficulty of discussing moral 
 dogmas upon a landing-place. 
 
 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 1 800, 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 Randolph) even to Mrs Siddons. 
 
 1 The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she 
 changed by successive marriages for those of Dancer, Barry, 
 and Crawford. She was Mrs Crawford, a third time a widow, 
 when 1 knew her. [This note is Lamb's mystification ; the 
 story is true of Miss Kelly, though details are altered.] 
 
THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY 
 
 IN A LETTER TO R 
 
 S- 
 
 HOUGH in some points of doctrine, and perhaps 
 
 of discipline, I am diffident of lending a perfect 
 
 assent to that church which you have so worthily 
 hhtorijied'i 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. 
 Tudge 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 
 
 P Robert Southey.] 
 2 H 
 
114 THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY 
 
 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 doubt- 
 less 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 grace- 
 fully blending ever with the religious, may have been 
 sown in you among those wrecks of splendid mortality. 
 You owe it to the place of your education ; you owe it 
 to your learned fondness for the architecture of your 
 ancestors ; you owe it to the 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 raising your voice 
 against them, till they be totally done away with and 
 abolished ; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no 
 longer closed against the decent, though low-in-purse, 
 enthusiast, or 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 maintained in its 
 impressive services, that our Cathedral be no longer an 
 object of inspection to the poor at those times only, in 
 which they must rob from their attendance on the worship 
 every minute which they can bestow upon the fabric. In 
 vain the public prints have taken up this subject, in vain such 
 poor nameless writers as myself express their indignation. 
 A word from you. Sir — a hint in your Journal — would 
 be sufficient to fling open the doors of the Beautiful 
 Temple again, as we can remember them when we were 
 boys. At that time of life, what would the imagina- 
 tive faculty (such as it is) in both of us, have suffered, 
 
"5 
 
Ui: 
 
THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY 117 
 
 if the entrance to so much reflection had been ob- 
 structed by the demand of so much silver ' — If we had 
 scraped it up to gain an occasional admission fas we 
 certainly should have done) would the sight of those 
 old tombs have been as impressive to us (while we 
 had been weighing anxiously prudence against senti- 
 ment) 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 tivo 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 quiet worth, how much capacity for en- 
 larged feeling, how much taste and genius, may coexist, 
 especially in youth, with a purse incompetent to this de- 
 mand. — A respected friend of ours, during his late visit 
 to the metropolis, presented himself for admission to St 
 Paul's. At the same time a decently clothed man, with 
 as decent a wife, and child, were bargaining for the same 
 indulgence. The price was only twopence each person. 
 The poor but decent man hesitated, desirous to go in ; 
 but there were three of them, and he turned away reluc- 
 tantly. 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 hum- 
 bler brethren. Shame these Sellers out of the Temple. 
 Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the 
 
ii8 THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY 
 
 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 v/as 
 free to all ? Do the rabble come there, or trouble their 
 heads about such speculations? It is all that you can do 
 to drive them into your churches ; they do not voluntarily 
 offer themselves. They have, alas ! no passion for an- 
 tiquities ; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If 
 they had, they would be no longer the rabble. 
 
 For forty years that I have known the Fabric, the only 
 well-attested charge of violation adduced, has been — a 
 ridiculous dismemberment committed upon the effigy of 
 that amiable spy. Major Andre. And is it for this — the 
 wanton mischief of some schoolboy, fired perhaps with raw 
 notions of Transatlantic Freedom — or the remote possi- 
 bility of such a mischief occurring again, so easily to be 
 prevented by stationing a constable within the walls, if 
 the vergers are incompetent to the duty — is it upon such 
 wretched pretences, that the people of England are made 
 to pay a new Peter's Pence, so long abrogated ; or must 
 content themselves with contemplating the ragged Exterior 
 of their Cathedral ? The mischief was done about the 
 time that you were a scholar there. Do you know any- 
 thing about the unfortunate relic ? — 
 
AMICUS REDIVIVUS 
 
 Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep 
 Clos'd o'er the head of your loved Lycidas ? 
 
 1D0 not know when I have experienced a stranger 
 sensation, than on seeing my old friend G. D.,^ who 
 had been paying me a morning visit a few Sundays 
 back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, in- 
 stead of turning down the right hand path by which he 
 had entered — with staff in hand, and at noon day, deliber- 
 ately 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 
 George Dyer.] 
 
 119 
 
I20 AMICUS REDIVIVUS 
 
 The stifle of conflicting judgments,*^ 
 
 was quite gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled me 
 to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery appari- 
 tion 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 Anchi cs. 
 
 And here I cannot but do justice to the ofTcious 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 communicate their advice as to 
 
AMICUS REDIVIVUS 
 
 I 2 I 
 
 the recovery ; prescribing variously the appHcation, 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 emer- 
 gency, 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 omitteth no occasion of obtruding his 
 services, from a case of common surfeit-suflx)cation to the 
 ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too wilful 
 application of the plant Cannabis outwardly. But though 
 he declineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his oc- 
 cupation 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 
 
122 AMICUS REDIVIVUS 
 
 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 fre- 
 quency 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, friction, 
 &c., is a simple tumbler, or more, of the purest Cognac, 
 with water, made as hot as the convalescent can bear it. 
 Where he 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 prescrip- 
 tion. Nothing can be more kind or encouraging than 
 this procedure. It addeth confidence to the patient, to 
 see his medical adviser go hand in hand with himself in 
 the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his own draught, 
 what peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him in the 
 potion ? In fine, Monoculus is a humane, sensible man, 
 who, for a slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, 
 is content to wear it out in the endeavour to save the lives 
 of others — his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty 
 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 deliverances he had ex- 
 perienced 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 
 
AMICUS REDIVIVUS 
 
 123 
 
 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 ele- 
 ment, 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 the fear of 
 want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. — 
 Anon, he would burst into little fragments of chanting — 
 of songs long ago — ends of deliverance hymns, not re- 
 membered 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, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the 
 sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers. 
 
 Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton — what a spark you 
 were like to have extinguished for ever ! Your salubrious 
 streams to this City, for now near two centuries, would 
 hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment wash- 
 ing away. Mockery of a river — liquid artifice — wretched 
 conduit ! henceforth rank with canals, and sluggish aque- 
 ducts. Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the 
 explorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales 
 of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace 
 your salutary waters sparkling through green Hertford- 
 shire, and cultured Enfield parks ? — Ye have no swans — 
 no Naiads— no river God — or did the benevolent hoary 
 aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also 
 might have the tutelary genius of your waters ? 
 
 Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been 
 some consonancy in it ; but what willows had ye to wave 
 
AMICUS REDIVIVUS 
 
 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 Dyerian ? 
 
 And could such spacious virtue find a grave 
 Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a w^ave ? 
 
 I protest, George, you shall not venture out again — no, 
 not by daylight — without a sufficient pair of spectacles — 
 in your musing moods especially. Your absence of mind 
 we have borne, till your presence of body came to be 
 called in question by it. You shall not go wandering 
 into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can help it. Fie, man, 
 to turn dipper at your years, after your many tracts in 
 favour of sprinkling only ! 
 
 I have nothing but water in my head o'nights since 
 this frightful accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence 
 in his dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning 
 to sink, and crying out to his good brother Hopeful (that 
 is, to me), "I sink in deep waters; the billows go over 
 my head, all the waves go over me. Selah." Then I 
 have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. 
 I cry out too late to save. Next follow — a mournful 
 procession — suicidal faces, saved against their wills from 
 drowning ; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant grate- 
 fulness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks of watchet 
 hue — constrained Lazari — Pluto's half-subjects — stolen 
 fees from the grave — bilking Charon of his fare. At 
 their head Arion — or is it G. D. ? — in his singing 
 garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive 
 garland, which Machaon (or Dr Hawes) snatcheth 
 straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of 
 Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which 
 the half-drenched on earth are constrained to drown 
 
AMICUS RKDIVIVUS 
 
 125 
 
 downright, by wharfs where OpheHa twice acts her 
 muddy death. 
 
 And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible 
 world, when one of us approacheth (as my friend did 
 so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When a soul 
 knocks once, twice, at death's door, the sensation aroused 
 within the palace must be considerable ; and the grim 
 Feature, by modern science so often dispossessed of his 
 prey, must have learnt 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 Roman 
 lore — to crown with unfading chaplets the half-fmished 
 love labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Mark- 
 land expected — him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter — him 
 the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely 
 
 seen upon earth,^ with newest airs prepared to greet ; 
 
 and, patron of the gentle Christ's boy, — who should have 
 been his patron through life — the mild Askew, with long- 
 ing aspirations leaned foremost from his venerable ^scul- 
 apian 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. 
 
 » Graium tantum 'vidit. 
 
SOME 50NNET5 OF5IR PHILIP SYDNEY 
 
 YDNEY'S Sonnets^ — I speak of the best of them — 
 are among the very best of their sort. They fall 
 below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and 
 high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his 
 compositions of a similar structure. They are in a truth 
 126 
 
 S 
 
SIR PHILIP SYDNEY 
 
 127 
 
 what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says of that work 
 (to which they are a sort of after-tune or appHcation), 
 " vain and amatorious enough, yet the things in their 
 kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be 
 "full of worth and wit." They savour of the Courtier, 
 it must be allowed, and not of the Commonwealths-man. 
 But Milton was a Courtier when he wrote the Masque at 
 Ludlow Castle, and still more a Courtier when he com- 
 posed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to 
 begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him ; 
 and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon 
 the crisis which preceded the Revolution, there is no 
 reason why he should not have acted the same part 
 in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a 
 later Sydney. He did not want for plainness or bold- 
 ness of spirit. His letter on the French match may 
 testify, he could speak his mind freely to Princes. The 
 times did not call him to the scaffold. 
 
 The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton 
 were the compositions of his maturest years. Those of 
 Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written in 
 the very hey-day of his blood. They 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, outlandish wealth, 
 gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in self-depreciating 
 similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the Beloved. 
 We must be Lovers — or at least the cooling touch of 
 time, the circum pracordia frlgusy 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 
 
128 
 
 SOME SONNETS OF 
 
 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 
 [ad Leonoram I mean) have rather erred on the farther 
 side ; and that the poet came not much short of a re- 
 ligious indecorum, when he could thus apostrophise a 
 singing-girl :— 
 
 Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes) 
 
 Obtigit aetheriis ales ab ordinibus. 
 Quid mirum, Leonora, tibi si gloria major, 
 
 Nam tua prsesentem vox sonat ipsa Deum ? 
 Aut Deus, aut vacui certe mens tertia coeli, 
 
 Per tua secreto guttura serpit agens ; 
 Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda 
 
 Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono. 
 Quod si cuncta quidem Deus est, per cunctaque 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 darken- 
 ing of a dead language) to cast a veil over the ugly 
 appearance of something very like blasphemy in the 
 last two verses. I think the Lover would have been 
 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 
 fellowship with his mortal passions. 
 
 I 
 
 With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb*st the skies ; 
 How^ silently ; and with how wan a face ! 
 What ! may it be, that even in heavenly place 
 That busy Archer his sharp arrows tries? 
 
SIR PHILIP SYDNEY 
 
 129 
 
 Sure, if that long-with-iove-acquainted eyes 
 Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case ; 
 I read it in thy looks ; thy languisht grace 
 To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. 
 Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me, 
 Is constant love deemed there but wa.nt of wit I 
 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 ungratefulness 
 there a virtue? 
 
 n. 
 
 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, 
 The indifferent judge between the high and low ; 
 With shield of proof shield me from out the prease ^ 
 Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw ; 
 
 0 make in me those civil wars to cease : 
 
 1 will good tribute pay, if thou do so. 
 
 Take thou of me sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; 
 A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; 
 A rosy garland, and a 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. 
 
 m. 
 
 The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness 
 Bewray itself in my long-settled eyes. 
 Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise, 
 With idle pains, and missing aim, do guess. 
 Some, that know how my spring I did address, 
 Deem that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies ; 
 Others, because the Prince my service tries, 
 Think, that I think state errors to redress ; 
 But harder judges judge, ambition's rage. 
 Scourge of itself, still climbing slippery place, 
 
 ^ Press. 
 2 , 
 
SOME SONNETS OF 
 
 Holds my young brain captiv'd 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. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Because I oft in dark abstracted guise 
 
 Seem most alone in greatest company, 
 
 With dearth of w^ords, or answ^ers quite awry, 
 
 To them that would make speech of speech arise ; 
 
 They deem, and of their doom the rumour flies, 
 
 That poison foul of bubbling Pride doth lie 
 
 So in niy swelling breast, that only I 
 
 Fawn on myself, and others do despise ; 
 
 Yet Pride^ I think, doth not my soul possess. 
 
 Which looks too oft in his unflattering glass 
 
 But one worse fault — Ambition — I confess, 
 
 That makes me oft my best friends overpass, 
 
 Unseen, unheard — while Thought to highest place 
 
 Bends all his 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 suueet 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, 
 
 Stella looked on, and from her heavenly face 
 
 Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race. 
 
 VI. 
 
 In martial sports I had my cunning tried, 
 And yet to break more staves did me address. 
 
SIR PHILIP SYDNEY 
 
 While with the people's shouts (I must confess) 
 Youth, luck, and praise, even fiU'd my veins with pride — 
 When Cupid having me (his slave) descried 
 In Mars's livery, prancing in the press. 
 
 What now. Sir Fool I " said he : ** I would no less : 
 Look here, I say." I look'd, and Stella spied. 
 Who hard by made a window send forth light. 
 My heart then quak'd, then dazzled were mine eyes ; 
 One hand forgot to rule, th' other to fight ; 
 Nor trumpet's sound I heard, nor friendly cries. 
 My foe came on, and beat the air for me — 
 Till that her blush made me my shame to see. 
 
 VII. 
 
 No more, my dear, no more these counsels try; • 
 
 0 give my passions leave to run their race ; 
 Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace ; 
 
 Let folk o'ercharged with brain against me cry ; 
 Let clouds bedim my face, break in mine eye ; 
 Let me no steps, but of lost labour, trace ; 
 Let all the earth with scorn recount my case — 
 But do not will me from my love to fly. 
 
 1 do not envy Aristotle's wit. 
 
 Nor do aspire to Caesar's bleeding fame ; 
 Nor aught do care, though some above me sit 
 Nor hope, nor wish, another course to frame. 
 But that which once may win thy cruel heart : 
 Thou art my wit, and thou my virtue art. 
 
 vni. 
 
 Love still a boy, and oft a wanton, is, 
 
 School'd only by his mother's tender eye ; 
 
 What wonder then, if he his lesson miss, 
 
 When for so soft a rod dear play he try ? 
 
 And yet my Star, because a sugar'd kiss 
 
 In sport I suck'd, while she asleep did lie. 
 
 Doth lour, nay chide, nay threat, for only this. 
 
 Sweet, it was saucy Love, not humble I. 
 
 But no 'scuse serves ; she makes her wrath appear 
 
 In beauty's throne — see nov/ who dares come near 
 
132 
 
 SOME SONNETS OF 
 
 Those scarlet judges, threat'ning bloody pain? 
 
 0 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, 
 
 1 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 by 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 — 
 Although less gifts imp feathers oft on Fame. 
 Nor that he could, young- wise, wise-valiant, frame 
 His sire's revenge, join'd with a kingdom's gain ; 
 And, gain'd by Mars could yet mad Mars so tame. 
 That Balance weigh'd what Sword did late obtain. 
 Nor that he made the Floure-de-luce so 'fraid. 
 Though strongly hedged of bloody Lions' paws. 
 That witty Lewis to him a tribute paid. 
 Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause — 
 But only, for this worthy knight durst prove 
 To lose his crown rather than fail his love. 
 
 XI. 
 
 0 happy Thames, that didst my Stella bear, 
 
 1 saw thyself, with many a smiling line 
 Upon thy cheerful face, Joy's livery wear, 
 While those fair planets on thy streams did shine 
 
SIR PHILIP SYDNEY 
 
 The boat for joy could not to dance forbear, 
 While wanton winds, with beauty so divine 
 Ravish^, stay'd not, till in her golden hair, 
 They did themselves (O sweetest prison) twine. 
 And fain those jEoI's youth there would their stay 
 Have made ; but, forced by nature still to fly, 
 First did with puffing kiss those locks display. 
 She, so dishevell'd, blushed ; from window I 
 With sight thereof cried out, O fair disgrace, 
 Let honour's self to thee grant highest place I 
 
 XII. 
 
 Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be ; 
 And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet, 
 Tempers her words to trampling horses* feet, 
 More soft than to a chamber melody ; 
 Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me 
 To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet, 
 My Muse and I must you of duty greet 
 With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. 
 Be you still fair, honour'd by public heed. 
 By no encroachment wrong'd nor time forgot ; 
 Nor blam'd for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed. 
 And that you know, I envy you no lot 
 Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss, 
 Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may kiss. 
 
 Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the last 
 sonnet, are my favourites. But the general beauty of 
 them all is, that they are so perfectly characteristical. 
 The spirit of "learning and of chivalry," — of which 
 union, Spenser has entitled Sydney to have been the 
 " president,'^ — shines through them. I confess I can see 
 nothing of the "jejune " or " frigid " in them ; much less 
 of the "stiff" and "cumbrous" — which I have some- 
 times heard objected to the Arcadia. The verse runs off 
 swiftly and gallantly. It might have been tuned to the 
 trumpet; or tempered (as himself expresses it) to "tramp- 
 ling horses' feet." They abound in felicitous phrases — 
 
 I 
 
'34 
 
 SOME SONNETS OF 
 
 O heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face — 
 
 Zth Sonnet, 
 
 Sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; 
 
 A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; 
 A rosy garland, and a weary head. 
 
 znd Sonnet. 
 
 That sweet enemy, — France — 
 
 5M 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 circum- 
 stantiated. Time and place appropriates every one of 
 them. It is not a fever of passion wasting itself upon a 
 thin diet of dainty words, but a transcendent passion per- 
 vading and illuminating action, pursuits, studies, feats of 
 arms, the opinions of contemporaries and his judgment of 
 them. An historical thread runs through them, which 
 almost affixes a date to them ; marks the ivhen and <where 
 they were written. 
 
 I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the merit 
 of these poems, because I have been hurt by the wanton- 
 ness ( I wish I could treat it by a gentler name) with which 
 W. H.i 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 Jine idea from my mind. The 
 noble images, passions, sentiments, and poetical delicacies 
 of character, scattered all over the Arcadia (spite of 
 some stiffness and encumberment), justify to me the 
 1 [William Hazlitt.] 
 
SIR PHILIP SYDNEY 
 
 135 
 
 character which his contemporaries have left us of the 
 writer. I cannot think with the Critic, that Sir PhiHp 
 Sydney was that opprobrious thing which a foolish noble- 
 man 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 I) — 
 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 say 
 
 When he descended down the mount, 
 His personage seemed most divine : 
 A thousand graces one might count 
 Upon his lovely cheerful eyne. 
 
 To hear him speak, and sweetly smile, 
 
 You were in Paradise the while. 
 
 A siveet attractive kind of grace ; 
 
 A full assurance given by looks ; 
 
 Continual comfort in a face^ \ 
 
 The lineaments of Gospel books — 
 
 I trow that countenance cannot lye, 
 Whose thoughts are legible in the eye. 
 
 « » * * ♦ ■ 
 
 Above all others this is he, 
 Which erst approved in his song 
 
136 
 
 SOME SONNETS 
 
 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 a finer store. 
 
 He wrote of Love with high conceit, 
 And Beauty reared above her height. 
 
 Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running 
 into rage) in the Poem, — the last in the collection accom- 
 panying the above, — which from internal testimony I 
 believe to be Lord Brooke's, — beginning with " Silence 
 augmenteth grief," — and then seriously ask himself, 
 whether the subject of such absorbing and confounding 
 regrets could have been that thing which Lord Oxford 
 termed him. 
 
NEWSPAPERS THlRirV-FIVE YEARS AGO 
 l->vAN STUART once told us that he did not 
 
 remember that he ever deHberately 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, Reader, 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 worked for both these 
 gentlemen. 
 
»38 
 
 NEWSPAPERS 
 
 It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges ; 
 to trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river ; 
 
 With holy reverence to approach the rocks, 
 Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song. 
 
 Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's ex- 
 ploratory ramblings after the cradle of the infant Nilus, 
 we well remember on one fine summer holy day (a " whole 
 day's leave" we called it at Christ's Hospital) sallying 
 forth at rise of sun, not very well provisioned either for 
 such an undertaking, to trace the current of the New 
 River — Middletonian stream ! — to its scaturient source, 
 as we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell. Gallantly 
 did we commence our solitary quest — for it was essential 
 to the dignity of a Discovery, that no eye of schoolboy, 
 save our own, should beam on the detection. By flowery 
 spots, and verdant lanes skirting Hornsey, Hope trained 
 us on in many a baffling 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 re- 
 vealed ; till spent, and nigh famished, before set of 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 tra- 
 veller 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 litera- 
 ture ; from the Gnat which preluded to the -^neid, to 
 the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on. 
 
 In those days every Morning Paper, as an essential 
 
.i!\OlS 
 
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO 141 
 
 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 in these cases. 
 The chat of the day, scandal, but, above all, dress, fur- 
 nished the material. The length of no paragraph was 
 to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they 
 must be poignant. 
 
 A fashion of flesh, or rather />/«i-coloured hose for the 
 ladies, luckily coming up at the juncture, when we were 
 on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to S.'s 
 Paper, established our reputation in that line. We were 
 pronounced a " capital hand." O the conceits which we 
 varied upon red in all its prismatic differences ! from the 
 trite and obvious flower of Cytherea, to the flaming cos- 
 tume 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 seem- 
 ingly ever approximating something " not quite proper ; 
 while, like a skilful posture-master, balancing betwixt de- 
 corums and their opposites, he keeps the line, from which 
 an hair's-breadth deviation is destruction ; hovering in the 
 confines of light and darkness, or where "both seem either ; " 
 a hazy uncertain delicacy ; Autolycus-like in the Play, 
 still putting off his expectant auditory with " Whoop, 
 do me no harm, good man ! " But, above all, that 
 conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles 
 our midriff to remember, where allusively to the flight 
 of Astraea — ultima Calestum terras reliquit — we pronounced 
 — in reference to the stockings still — that Modesty, 
 
 TAKING HER 'FINAL LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST BlUSH 
 WAS VISIBLE IN HER ASCENT TO THE HeAVENS BY THE 
 
 TRACT OF THE GLOWING INSTEP. This might be Called 
 
42 
 
 NEWSPAPERS 
 
 the crowning conceit ; and was esteemed tolerable writing 
 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. 
 
 Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns 
 daily consecutively for a fortnight, would surfeit the 
 stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many 
 jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a long 
 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 
 want beyond mere bread and cheese — was exactly that 
 part of the day which (as we have heard of No Man's 
 Land) may be fitly denominated No Man's Time ; that 
 is, no time in which a man ought to be up, and awake, in. 
 To speak more plainly, it is that time, of an hour, or an hour 
 and a half's duration, in which a man, whose occasions call 
 him up so preposterously, has to wait for his breakfast. 
 
 O those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, or 
 half-past five in summer, and not much later in the dark 
 seasons, we were compelled to rise, having been perhaps 
 not above four hours in bed — (for we were no go-to-beds 
 with the lamb, though we anticipated the lark oftimes in 
 
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO 143 
 
 her rising — we like a parting cup at midnight, as all 
 young men did before these effeminate times, and to have 
 our friends about us — we were not constellated under 
 Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore incapable of 
 Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless — we were none of your 
 Basilian water - sponges, nor had taken our degrees at 
 Mount Ague — we were right toping Capulets, jolly com- 
 panions, we and they) — but to have to get up, as we said 
 before, curtailed of half our 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 
 pleasure in her announcement that it was " time to rise ; " 
 and whose chappy knuckles we have often yearned to 
 amputate, and string them up at our chamber-door, to 
 be a terror to all such unreasonable rest-breakers in 
 future 
 
 " Facil " and sweet, as Virgil 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 pre- 
 pended — there was the labour," there the " work." 
 
 No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to 
 that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out 
 for half the tyranny, which this necessity exercised upon 
 us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sunday 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 — 
 
144 
 
 NEWSPAPERS 
 
 The detestable hag of a domestic y 
 
 Reader, try it for once, only for one short twelvemonth. 
 
 It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings 
 came up ; but mostly instead of it, some rugged, untract- 
 able subject ; some topic impossible to be contorted into 
 the risible ; some feature, upon which no smile could 
 play ; some flint, from which no process of ingenuity 
 could procure a distillation. 'J'here they lay ; there your 
 
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO 145 
 
 appointed tale of brick-making was set before you, which 
 you must finish, with or without straw, as it happened. 
 The craving Dragon — the Public — hke 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 tap- 
 ping his impracticable brains in a like service for the 
 "Oracle." Not that Robert 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 Snoiv Hill^ who should we meet but 
 Mr Deputy Humphreys I we rejoice to add that the worth) 
 Deputy appeared to enjoy a good state of health. We do not 
 ever remember to have seen him look better J*^ This gentle- 
 man 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 he told with tears of 
 satisfaction in his eyes, and chuckling at the anticipated 
 effects of its announcement next day in the paper. We 
 did not quite comprehend where the wit of it lay at the 
 time ; nor was it easy to be detected, when the thing 
 came out, advantaged by type and letterpress. He had 
 better have met any thing that morning than a Common 
 Council Man. His services were shortly after dispensed 
 with, on the plea that his paragraphs of late had been 
 
146 
 
 NEWSPAPERS 
 
 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 — " // is not 
 generally kno^n that the three Blue Balls at the Paivn^ 
 brokers^ shops are the ancient arms of hombardy. The 
 Lombards ivere the first money-brokers in Eur ope, 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 own 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 pre- 
 lusive delicacies of the present writer — the curt " Astraean 
 allusion " — would be thought pedantic and out of date, in 
 these days. 
 
 From the office of the Morning Post (for we may as 
 well exhaust our Newspaper Reminiscences at once) by 
 change of property in the paper, we were transferred, 
 
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO 147 
 
 mortifying exchange ! to the office of the Albion News- 
 paper, late Rackstrow'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 com- 
 mand, had purchased (on tick doubtless) the whole and 
 sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with all the rights and 
 titles (such as they are 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 deter- 
 mined upon pulling down the Government in the first in- 
 stance, 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 
 allowed no credit to publications of that side in politics. 
 An outcast from politer bread, we attached our small talents 
 to the forlorn fortunes of our friend. Our occupation 
 now was to write treason. 
 
 Recollections of feelings — which were all that now 
 remained from our first boyish heats kindled by the 
 French Revolution, when, if we were misled, we erred 
 
 1 
 
NEWSPAPERS 
 
 in the company of some, who are accounted very good 
 men now — rather than any tendency at this time to Re- 
 pubHcan doctrines — assisted us in assuming a style of 
 writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very under 
 tone — to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was 
 now to insinuate, rather than recommend, possible abdica- 
 tions. Blocks, axes, Whitehall 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 occupa- 
 tion under Stuart. But with change of masters it is 
 ever change of service. Already one paragraph, and 
 another, as we learned afterwards from a gentleman at 
 the Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, 
 with a view of its being submitted at least to the 
 attention of the proper Law Officers — when an unlucky, 
 
 or rather lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J s 
 
 M h,i who was on the eve of departing for India to 
 
 reap the fruits of his apostacy, as F. pronounced it (it is 
 hardly worth particularising), happening to offend the nice 
 sense of Lord, or, as he then delighted to be called, Citizen 
 Stanhope, deprived F. at once of the last hopes of a guinea 
 from the last patron that had stuck by us ; and breaking up 
 our establishment, left us to the safe, but somewhat morti- 
 fying, neglect of the Crown Lawyers. It was about this 
 time, or a little earlier, that Dan Stuart made that curious 
 confession to us, that he had " never deliberately walked 
 into an Exhibition at Somerset House in his life." 
 
 Sir James Mackintosh. 1 
 
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 P 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 tyranni- 
 cally, that he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he should 
 falsify a revelation ? Any that has imparted to his 
 
 149 
 
ISO THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY 
 
 compositions, 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 appro- 
 priate place in no other picture in the world but this ? Is 
 there any thing 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 Gallery ? 
 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, and no 
 ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido, in his 
 harmonious version of it, saw no further. But from the 
 depth 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 pre- 
 sence and new offers of a god, — as if unconscious of 
 Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some uncon- 
 cerning 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, 
 
OF MODERN ART 
 
 and harmonising. Had the artist made the woman one 
 shade less indifferent to the God ; still more, had she ex- 
 pressed a rapture at his 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 Raphael in the Vatican. It is the Presentation of the 
 new-born Eve to Adam by the Almighty. A fairer 
 mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier sire 
 perhaps of men since born. But these are matters sub- 
 ordinate to the conception of the situation^ displayed in 
 this extraordinary production. A tolerably modern artist 
 would have been satisfied with tempering certain raptures 
 of connubial anticipation, with a suitable acknowledgment 
 to the Giver of the blessing, in the countenance of the first 
 bridegroom ; something like the 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 Raphael expounded the 
 situation of Adam. Singly upon his brow sits the absorb- 
 
 I 
 
152 THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY 
 
 ing sense of wonder at the created miracle. The moment 
 is seized by the intuitive artist, perhaps not self-conscious 
 of his art, in which neither of the conflicting emotions — 
 a moment how abstracted — have had time to spring up, 
 or to battle for indecorous mastery. — We have seen a 
 landscape of a justly admired neoteric, in which he aimed 
 at delineating a fiction, one of the most severely beautiful 
 in antiquity — the gardens of the Hesperides. To do Mr 
 
 justice he had painted a laudable orchard, with 
 
 fitting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of which a 
 Polypheme, by Poussin is somehow a fac-simile for the 
 situation) looking over into the world shut out backwards, 
 so that none but a " still-climbing Hercules " could hope 
 to catch a peep at the admired Ternary of Recluses. No 
 conventual porter could keep his eyes better than this 
 custos with jthe " lidless eyes.'' He not only sees that 
 none do intrude into that privacy, but, as clear as day- 
 light, 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 soli- 
 tude with a bevy of fair attendants, maids of honour, 
 or ladies of the bed-chamber, accordi-^.g to the approved 
 etiquette at a court of the nineteenth century ; giving to 
 the whole scene the air of a fete champetre, if we will but 
 excuse the absence of the gentlemen. This is well, and 
 Watteauish. But what is become of the solitary mystery 
 — the 
 
 Daughters three, 
 That sing around the golden tree ? 
 
 This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated 
 this subject. 
 
OF MODERN ART 153 
 
 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 the point of 
 the story in the " Belshazzar's Feast." We will intro- 
 duce it by an apposite anecdote. 
 
 The court historians of the day record, that at the first 
 dinner given by the late King (then Prince Regent) at the 
 Pavilion, the following characteristic frolic was played 
 off. The guests were select and admiring ; the banquet 
 profuse and admirable ; the lights lustrous and oriental ; 
 the eye was perfectly dazzled with the display of plate, 
 among which the great gold salt-cellar, brought from the 
 regalia in the Tower for this especial purpose, itself a 
 tower ! stood conspicuous for its magnitude. And now 
 the Rev. ^ the then admired court 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 — Earthquake — Swallow-up- alive ! 
 
 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 Fitz-what's-her-name fainting, 
 and the Countess of * holding the smelling-bottle, 
 till the good-humoured Prince caused harmony to be 
 
154 THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY 
 
 restored by calling in fresh candles, and declaring that 
 the whole was nothing but a pantomime hoax, got up 
 by the ingenious Mr Farley, of Covent Garden, from 
 hints which his Royal Highness himself had furnished ! 
 Then imagine the infinite applause that followed, the 
 mutual rallyings, the declarations that they were not 
 much frightened," of the assembled galaxy. 
 
 The point of time in the picture exactly answers to the 
 appearance of the transparency in the anecdote. The 
 huddle, the flutter, the bustle, the escape, the alarm, 
 and the mock alarm ; the prettinesses heightened by 
 consternation ; the courtier's fear which was flattery, 
 and the lady's which was affectation ; all that we may 
 conceive to have taken place in a mob of Brighton 
 courtiers, 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 God, writing 
 judgments, would have been met by the withered con- 
 science ? There is a human fear, and a divine fear. 
 The one is disturbed, restless, and bent upon escape. 
 The other is bowed down, eflPortless, passive. When the 
 spirit appeared before Eliphaz in the visions of the night, 
 and the hair of his flesh stood up, was it in the thoughts 
 of the Temanite to ring the bell of his chamber, or to call 
 up the servants ? But let us see in the text what there is 
 to justify all this huddle of vulgar consternation. 
 
155 
 
OiS 
 
OF MODERN ART 157 
 
 From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzar 
 had made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and 
 drank wine before the thousand. The golden and silver 
 vessels are gorgeously enumerated, with the princes, the 
 king's concubines, and his wives. Then follows — 
 
 In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's 
 hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the 
 plaster of the wall of the king's palace ; and the king 
 saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king^s 
 countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled 
 him, so that the joints of his loins were loosened, and 
 his knees smote one against another." 
 
 This is the plain text. By no hint can it be other- 
 wise inferred, but that the appearance was solely confined 
 to the fancy of Belshazzar, that his single brain was 
 troubled. Not a word is spoken of its being seen by 
 any else there present, not even by the queen herself, 
 who merely undertakes for the interpretation of the 
 phenomenon, as related to her, doubtless, by her husband. 
 The lords are simply said to be astonished ; 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 recals 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 
 
158 THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY 
 
 — let it have been visible to all Babylon — as the knees 
 of Belshazzar were shaken, and his countenance troubled, 
 even so would the knees of every man in Babylon, and 
 their countenances, as of an individual man, have been 
 troubled ; bowed, bent down, so would they have re- 
 mained, stupor-fixed, with no thought of struggling with 
 that inevitable judgment. 
 
 Not all that is optically possible to be seen, is to be 
 shown in every 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 glittering upon the 
 bride's fingers, the metal and fashion of the wine-pots ; 
 for at such seasons there is leisure and luxury to be 
 curious. But in a "day of 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 anato- 
 mical 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, differ- 
 
OF MODERN ART 
 
 >59 
 
 ences of public and private buildings, men and women at 
 their standing occupations, the diversified thousand pos- 
 tures, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion truly, but physi- 
 cally 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 pro- 
 prieties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only ? A 
 thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure to con- 
 template the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker 
 at his oven, and to turn over with antiquarian coolness the 
 pots and pans of Pompeii. 
 
 ^* Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou. Moon, 
 in the valley of Ajalon." Who, in reading this magnifi- 
 cent Hebraism, in his conception, sees aught but the heroic 
 son of Nun, with the outstretched arm, and the greater 
 and lesser light obsequious ? Doubtless there were to be 
 seen hill and dale, and chariots and horsemen, on open 
 plain, or winding by secret defiles, and all the circum- 
 stances 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, which 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 Angerstein's. It 
 seems a thing between two beings. A ghastly horror at 
 itself struggles with newly-apprehending gratitude at second 
 
i6o THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY 
 
 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 irrele- 
 vant herd of passers-by at a distance, who have not heard 
 or but 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 ? Now 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 faintly, 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 un- 
 concerning objects ? can it think of them at all ? or 
 what associating league to the imagmation 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 be fully 
 satisfied with a beautiful naked figure recumbent under 
 wide- stretched oaks ? Disseat those woods, and place 
 the same figure among fountains, and fall of pellucid 
 water, and you have a — Naiad! Not so in a rough print 
 we have seen after Julio Romano, we think — for it is long 
 since — there ^ by no process, with mere change of scene, 
 could the figure have reciprocated characters. Long, 
 grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beau- 
 tiful in convolution and distortion, linked to her con- 
 natural tree, co-twisting with its limbs her own, till 
 both seemed either — these, animated branches ; those, 
 
OF MODERN ART i6i 
 
 disanimated members — yet the animal and vegetable lives 
 sufficiently kept distinct — his Dryad lay — an approxi- 
 mation of two natures, which to conceive, it must be 
 seen ; analogous to, not the same with, the delicacies 
 of O vidian transformations. 
 
 To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial comprehen- \ 
 sion, the most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness i 
 and fruitfulness. The large eye of genius saw in the , 
 meanness of present objects their capabilities of treatment 
 from their relations to some grand Past or Future. How 
 has Raphael — we must still linger about the Vatican — 
 treated the humble craft of the ship-builder, in his " Build- 
 ing 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 modern art. As the 
 Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge's friend made the pro- 
 phetic guess at Rome, 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 preparations in the shipyards of Civita 
 Vecchia did Raphael look for instructions, when he ima- 
 gined the Building of the Vessel that was to be conserva- 
 tory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. 
 Tn 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 
 
i62 THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY 
 
 directions. And there are his agents — the soHtary but 
 sufficient Three — hewing, sawing, every one with the 
 might and earnestness of a Demiurgus ; under some in- 
 stinctive rather than technical guidance ! giant-muscled ; 
 every one a Hercules, or liker to those Vulcanian Three, 
 that in sounding caverns under Mongibello wrought in fire 
 — Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyracmon. So work 
 the workmen that should repair a world ! 
 
 Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with 
 pictorial subjects. In the latter, the exterior accidents 
 are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as nothing. 
 Othello's colour — the infirmities and corpulence of a 
 Sir John Falstaff — do they haunt us perpetually in the 
 reading ? or are they obtruded upon our conceptions one 
 time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration at the 
 respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character ? 
 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 exter- 
 nality, 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 un- 
 hallowed accompaniment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at 
 the heels of Rosinante. 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 
 I starved steed. We wish not to see that counterfeited, 
 ' which we would not have wished to see in the reality. 
 Conscious of the heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, 
 on hearing that his withered person was passing, would 
 
OF MODERN ART 
 
 have stepped over his threshold to gaze upon his forlorn 
 habiliments, and the " strange bed-fellows 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 
 Hke 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 shew myself thankful, and a doer of 
 good to all sorts of people, especially of the rank that your 
 person shows you to be ; and if those nets, as they take 
 up but a little piece of ground, should take up the whole 
 world, I would seek out new worlds to pass through, 
 rather than break them : and (he adds,) that you may give 
 credit to this my exaggeration, behold at least he that 
 promiseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if 
 haply this name hath come to your hearing." Illustrious 
 Romancer ! 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 jip at the 
 heartless banquets of great men ? Was that pitiable infir- 
 mity, which in thy First Part misleads him, alivays from 
 Within^ into half-ludicrous, but more than half-compas- 
 sionable 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, Goneril would have blushed to practise 
 
164 THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY 
 
 upon the abdicated king at this rate, and the she-wolf 
 Regan not have endured to play the pranks upon his 
 fled wits, which thou hast made thy Quixote suffer in 
 Duchesses' halls, and at the hands of that unworthy 
 nobleman.^ 
 
 In the First Adventure, even, it needed all the art of 
 the most consummate artist in the Book way that the 
 world hath yet seen, to keep up in the mind of the reader 
 the heroic attributes of the character without relaxing ; 
 so as absolutely that they shall suffer no alloy from the 
 debasing fellowship of the clown. If it ever obtrudes 
 itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh ; or not, 
 rather, to indulge a contrary emotion ? — Cervantes, stung, 
 perchance, by the relish with which his Reading Public 
 had received the fooleries of the man, more to their 
 palates than the generosities of the master, in the sequel 
 let his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the balance, 
 and sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his contem- 
 poraries. We know that in the present day the Knight 
 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 Guzman de 
 Alfarache " — that some less knowing hand would prevent 
 him by a spurious Second Part ; and judging, that it 
 would be easier for his competitor to out-bid him in the 
 comicalities, than in the romance, of his wo) k, he aban- 
 doned his. Knight, and has fairly set up the S |uire 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 hereditary deference, with which he has 
 
 1 Yet from this Second Part, our cried-up pictures are mostly 
 selected, the waiting omen with beards, &c. 
 
OF MODERN ART 165 
 
 hitherto accompanied his master — two for a pair almost — 
 does he substitute a downright Knave, with open eyes, 
 for his own ends only following a confessed Madman ; 
 and offering at one time to lay, if not actually laying, 
 hands upon him ! From the moment that Sancho loses 
 his reverence, Don Quixote is become — a treatable lunatic. 
 Our artists handle him accordingly. 
 
REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR'S 
 COMING OF AGE 
 
 THE Old Tear being ^ad, and the New Tear 
 coming of age, which he does, by Calendar 
 Law, as soon as the breath is out of the old 
 gentleman's body, nothing would serve the young spark 
 but he must give a dinner upon the occasion, to which all 
 the Days in the year were invited. The Festivals, whom 
 he deputed as his stewards, were mightily taken with the 
 notion. They had been engaged time out of mind, they 
 said, in 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 
 Fasfs should be admitted. Some said, tlie 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 Day, who had a design upon 
 jish 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 pro- 
 vided for three hundred and sixty-five guests at the prin- 
 166 
 
NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE 167 
 
 cipal table ; with an occasional knife and fork at the 
 side-board for the Twenty- Ninth of February, 
 
 I should have told you, that cards of invitation had 
 been issued. The carriers were the Hours ; twelve little, 
 merry, whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire to see, 
 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 ]^ept a little on the 
 aloof, and seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said. 
 Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for she came in a 
 tiffany suit, white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake, 
 all royal, glittering, and Epiphanous. The rest came, 
 some in green, some in white — but old Lent and his family 
 were not yet out of mourning. Rainy Days came in, 
 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 D 007ns day 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 
 it. It would have posed old Erra Pater to have found 
 out any given Day in the year, to erect a scheme upon — 
 good Days, bad Days, wTre so shuffled together, to the 
 confounding of all sober horoscopy. 
 
 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. j4sh Wednesday got 
 wedded in (as was concerted) betwixt Christmas and 
 
bS REJOICINGS UPON THE 
 
 Lorcl 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 ling, but commended it to the devil for a sour, 
 windy, acrimonious, censorious, hy-po-crit-crit-critical 
 mess, and no dish for a gentleman. Then he dipt his fist 
 into the middle of the great custard that s.tood before his 
 left-hand neighbour^ and daubed his hungry beard all over 
 with it, till you would have taken him for the Last day in 
 December, it so hung in icicles. 
 
 At another part of the table. Shrove Tuesday, was help- 
 ing the Second of September to some cock broth, — which 
 courtesy the latter returned with the delicate thigh of a hen 
 pheasant — so there was no love lost for that matter. The 
 Last of Lent was spunging upon Shrovetide's pancakes ; 
 which ylprtl Fool perceiving, told him he did well, for 
 pancakes were proper to a good fry-day. 
 
 In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of 
 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 cooked at home for that purpose, thinking to feast 
 thereon incontinently ; but as it lay in the dish March 
 many weathers, 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 re- 
 moved ; nor did she recover her stomach till she had 
 gulped down a Restorative, confected of Oak Apple, 
 which the merry Twenty Ninth of May always carries 
 ^bout with him for that purpose. 
 
NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE 169 
 
 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 Tnventy 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 pre- 
 scriptive right to have lain with her, till her rival had 
 basely supplanted her ; whom she represented as little 
 better than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes^ 
 while she (the legitimate Birthday) had scarcely a rag, 
 &c. 
 
 April Fool^ being made mediator, confirmed the right 
 in the strongest form of words to the appellant, but 
 decided for peace' sake that the exercise of it should 
 remain with the present possessor. At the same time, he 
 slily rounded the first lady in the ear, that an action might 
 lie against the Crown for bi-geny. 
 
 It beginning to grow a little duskish. Candlemas lustily 
 bawled out for lights, which was opposed by all the Days^ 
 who protested against burning daylight. Then fair water 
 was handed round in silver ewers, and the same lady was 
 observed to take an unusual time in Washing herself. 
 
 May Day, with that sweetness which is peculiar to her, 
 in a neat speech proposing the health of the founder, 
 crowned her goblet (and by her example the rest of the 
 company) with garlands. This being done, the lordly 
 Neiv Tear 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 any thing was found unreasonable) 
 in their rents. 
 
 At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days in- 
 1 The late King. 
 
 I 
 
REJOICINGS UPON THE 
 
 voluntarily looked at each other, and smiled ; ^pril Fool 
 whistled to an old tune of " New Brooms ; " and a surly 
 old rebel at the further end of the table (who was dis- 
 covered to be no other than the Fifth of November)^ 
 muttered out, distinctly enough to be heard by the whole 
 company, words to this effect, that, " when the old one is 
 gone, he is a fool that looks for a better." Which rude- 
 ness of his, the guests resenting, unanimously voted his 
 expulsion ; and the male-content was thrust out neck and 
 heels into the cellar, as the properest place for such a 
 houtefeu and firebrand 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 Tiventy Ninth of February, that 
 had sate all this while mumchance 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, some- 
 where between the Greek Calends and Latter Lammas, 
 
 Ash Wednesday, being now called upon for a song, 
 with his eyes fast stuck in his head, and as well as the 
 Canary he had swallowed would give him leave, struck 
 up a Carol, which Christmas Day had taught him for 
 the nonce ; and was followed by the latter, who gave 
 Miserere " in fine style, hitting off the mumping notes 
 and lengthened drawl of Old Mortification with infinite 
 humour. April Fool swore they had exchanged con- 
 ditions : but Good Friday was observed to look extremely 
 
NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE 171 
 
 grave ; and Sunday held her fan before her face, that she 
 might not be seen to smile. 
 
 Shrove-ttde^ Lord Mayor^s Day, and Jlpril 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 u^prll Fool gave 
 it in favour of the Forty Days before Easter ; because 
 the debtors in all cases outnumbered the creditors, and 
 they kept lent all the year. 
 
 All this while, Valentine's Day kept courting pretty 
 May^ who sate next him, slipping amorous billets-doux 
 unaer the table, till the Dog Days (who are naturally 
 of a warm constitution) began to be jealous, and to 
 bark and rage exceedingly, ylpril 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 Ember Days, 
 were at it with their bellows, to blow it into a flame ; 
 and all was in a ferment : till old Madam Septuagesima 
 (who boasts herself the Mother of the Days) wisely 
 diverted the conversation with a tedious tale of the 
 loves 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 whi'.h 
 I apprehend she meant the Almanack. Then she 
 rambled on to the Days that <were gone, the good old 
 
172 NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE 
 
 Days, and so to the Days before the Flood — which 
 plainly showed her old head to be little better than 
 crazed and doited. 
 
 Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks 
 and great coats, and took their leaves. Lord Mayor s 
 Day went off in a Mist, as usual ; Shortest Day in a 
 deep black Fog, that 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 patrole, called the Eve of St 
 Christopher — seeing j^sh Wednesday in a condition little 
 better than he should be — e'en whipt him over his 
 shoulders, pick-a-back fashion, and Old Mortification 
 went floating home singing — 
 
 On the bat's back 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. 
 
THE WEDDING 
 
 1D0 not know when I have been better pleased than 
 at being invited last week to be present at the 
 wedding of a friend's daughter. I like to make 
 one at these ceremonies, which to us old people give 
 back our youth in a manner, and restore our gayest 
 season, in the remembrance of our own success, or the 
 regrets, scarcely less tender, of our own youthful dis- 
 appointments, in this point of a settlement. On these 
 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 ; and, in the participated socialities of 
 the little community, I lay down 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 celebra- 
 tion had been hitherto deferred, to an almost unreasonable 
 
 173 
 
174 
 
 THE WEDDING 
 
 state of suspense in the lovers, by some invincible pre- 
 judices which the bride's father had unhappily contracted 
 upon the subject of the too early marriages of females. 
 He has been lecturing any time these five years — for to 
 that length the courtship has been protracted — upon the 
 propriety of putting off the solemnity, till the lady should 
 have <:ompleted 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 experi- 
 ment. But a little wheedling on the part of his wife, 
 who was by no means a party to these overstrained notions, 
 joined to some serious expostulations on that of his friends, 
 who, from the growing infirmities of the old gentleman, 
 could not promise ourselves many years' enjoyment of his. 
 company, and were anxious to bring matters to a conclu- 
 sion during his life-time, 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 ,2 
 
 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 will 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, whatever pretences of interest or prudence may be 
 held out to cover it. The hardheartedness 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 sometimes in to tear 
 [1 Admiral Burney.] John Payne.] 
 
THE WEDDING 
 
 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, have a trembling foresight, 
 which paints the inconveniences (impossible to be con- 
 ceived in the same degree by the other parent) of a life 
 of forlorn ceHbacy, 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, forward- 
 ness becomes a grace, and maternal importunity receives 
 the name of a virtue. — But the parson stays, while I pre- 
 posterously assume his ofEce ; I am preaching, while the 
 bride is on the threshold. 
 
 Nor let any of my female readers suppose that the sage 
 reflections which have just escaped me have the obliquest 
 tendency of application to the young lady, who, it will be 
 seen, is about to venture upon a change in her condition, 
 at a mature and competent age^ and not without the fullest 
 
176 
 
 THE WEDDING 
 
 " TJie cold reasonings of a father. 
 
 approbation of all parties. I only deprecate i^ery 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 had 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 whiteness, they assisted in robes, such 
 
THE WEDDING 
 
 177 
 
 as might become Diana's nymphs — Foresters indeed— as 
 such who had not yet come to the resolution of putting off 
 cold virginity. These young maids, not being so blest as 
 to have a mother living, I am told, keep single for their 
 father's sake, and live all together 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. Gal- 
 lant girls ! each a victim worthy of Iphigenia ! 
 
 I do not know what business I have to be present in 
 solemn places. I cannot divest me of an unseasonable 
 disposition to levity upon the most awful occasions. I 
 was never cut out for a public functionary. Ceremony 
 and I have long shaken hands : but I could not resist 
 the importunities of the young lady's father, whose gout 
 unhappily confined him at home, to act as parent on this 
 occasion, and give away the Iride^ Something ludicrous 
 occurred to me at this most serious of all moments — a 
 sense of my unfitness to have the disposal, even in imagina- 
 tion, of the sweet young creature beside me. I fear I was 
 betrayed to some lightness, for the awful eye of the parson 
 — and the rector's eye of Saint Mildred's in the Poultry is 
 no trifle of a rebuke — was upon me in an instant, souring 
 my incipient jest to the tristful severities of a funeral. 
 
 This was the only misbehaviour which I can plead to upon 
 this solemn occasion, unless what was objected to me after 
 
 the ceremony by one of the handsome Miss T s, be 
 
 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 
 2 M 
 
178 
 
 THE WEDDING 
 
 could perceive that the bride's mother, and some elderly 
 ladies present (God bless them!) would have been 
 well content, if I had come in any other colour than 
 that. But I got over the omen by a lucky apologue, 
 which I remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian 
 author, of all the birds being invited to the linnets' 
 wedding, at which, when all the rest came in their gayest 
 feathers, the raven alone apologised for his cloak because 
 "he had no other." This tolerably reconciled the elders. 
 But with the young people all was merriment, and shaking 
 of hands, and congratulations, and kissing away the bride's 
 tears, and kissings from her in return, till a young lady, 
 who assumed some experience in these matters, having 
 worn the nuptial bands some four or five weeks longer 
 than her friend, rescued her, archly observing, with halt 
 an eye upon the bridegroom, that at this rate she would 
 have " none left." 
 
 My friend the admiral was in fine wig and buckle on this 
 occasion — a striking contrast to his usual neglect of personal 
 appearance. He did not once shove up his borrowed locks 
 (his custom ever at his morning studies) to betray the few 
 grey stragglers of his own beneath them. He wore an 
 aspect of thoughtful satisfaction. I trembled for the 
 hour, which at iength approached, when after a pro- 
 tracted breakfast 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, 
 wishing them a felicitous journey, let us return to the 
 assembled guests. 
 
 As when a well-graced actor leaves the stage. 
 The eyes of men 
 
 Are idly bent on him that enters next, 
 
THE WEDDING 
 
 i8i 
 
 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 antici- 
 pated so far. Even the infinity of full satisfaction, that 
 had betrayed itself through the prim looks and quiet 
 deportment of his lady, began to wane into something of 
 misgiving. No one knew whether to take their 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 otherwise like to have 
 brought me into disgrace in the fore-part of the day ; I 
 mean a power, in any emergency, of thinking and giving 
 vent to all manner of strange nonsense. In this awkward 
 dilemma I found it sovereign. I rattled off some of my 
 most excellent absurdities. Ail were willing to be re- 
 lieved, at ar»Y expense of reason, from the pressure of the 
 intolerable vacuum which had succeeded to the morning 
 bustle. By this means I was fortunate in keeping 
 together the better part of the company to a late hour : 
 and a rubber of whist (the Admiral's favourite game) 
 with some rare strokes of chance as well as skill, which 
 came opportunely on his sids — lengthened out till mid- 
 night — 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. Every body 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 
 
 t 
 
l82 
 
 THE WEDDING 
 
 at once, or the latter preceding the former ; the host 
 and the guest conferring, yet each upon a different topic, 
 each understanding himself, neither trying to understand or 
 hear the other ; draughts and poHtics, chess and political 
 economy, cards and conversation on nautical matters, 
 going on at once, without the hope, or indeed the wish, 
 of distinguishing them, make it altogether the most 
 perfect concordia discors you shall meet with. Yet some- 
 how the old house is not quite what it should be. The 
 Admiral still enjoys his pipe, but he has no Miss Emily 
 to fill it for him. The instrument stands where it stood, 
 but she is gone, whose delicate touch could 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 dis- 
 posed of. The youthfulness of the house is flown. Emily 
 is married. 
 
THE CHILD ANGEL 
 
 A DREAM 
 
 1 CHANCED upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical 
 thing of a dream the other night, that you shall hear 
 of. I had been reading the " Loves of the Angels," 
 and went to bed with my head full of speculations, sug- 
 gested 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 — nor the downright Bible 
 heaven — but a kind of fairyland 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. 
 
 Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, 
 or whether it came purely out of its own head, neither 
 
 183 
 
184 
 
 THE CHILD ANGEL 
 
 you nor I know — but there lay, sure enough, wrapt in its 
 little cloudy swaddling bands — a Child Angel. 
 
 Sun-threads — filmy beams — ran through the celestial 
 napery of what seemed its princely cradle. All the 
 winged orders hovered round, watching when the new- 
 born should open its yet closed eyes ; which, when it did, 
 first one, and then the other — with a solicitude and appre- 
 hension, yet not such as, stained with fear, dim the 
 expanding eye-lids of mortal infants, but as if to explore 
 its path in those its unhereditary palaces — what an inex- 
 tinguishable titter that time spared not celestial visages ! 
 Nor wanted there to my seeming — O 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 smiihtudes of 
 earth, to greet, with terrestrial child-rites the young 
 present^ which earth had made to heaven. 
 
 Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full sym- 
 phony 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 forthwith flagged and was 
 recovered into the arms of those full-winged angels. 
 And a wonder it was to see how, as years went round 
 in heaven — a year in dreams is as a day — continually 
 its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but, wanting 
 the perfect angelic nutriment, anon was shorn of its aspir- 
 ing, and fell fluttering — still caught by angel hands — for 
 ever to put forth shoots, and to fall fluttering, because its 
 birth was not of the unmixed vigour of heaven. 
 
THE CHILD ANGEL 
 
 185 
 
 And a name was given to the Babe Angel, and it was 
 to be called Ge-Uranlay because its production was of 
 earth and heaven. 
 
 And it could not taste of death, by reason of its adop- 
 tion into immortal palaces ; but it was to know weakness, 
 and reliance, and the shadow of human imbecility ; and 
 it went with a lame gait ; but in its goings it exceeded 
 all mortal children in grace and swiftness. Then pity 
 first sprang up in angelic bosoms; and yearnings (like 
 the human) touched them at the sight of the immortal 
 lame one. 
 
 And with pain did then first those Intuitive Essences, 
 with pain and strife to their natures (not grief), put back 
 their bright intelligences, and reduce their ethereal minds, 
 schooling them to degrees and slower processes, so to 
 adapt their lessons to the gradual illumination (as must 
 needs be) of the half-earth-born ; and what intuitive 
 notices they could not repel (by reason that their nature is, 
 to know all things at once), the half-heavenly novice, by 
 the better part of its nature, aspired to receive into its 
 understanding ; so that Humility a'nd Aspiration went on 
 even-paced in the instruction of the glorious Amphibium. 
 
 But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross to 
 breathe the air of that super- subtile region, its portion 
 was, and is, to be a child for ever. 
 
 And because the human part of it might not press into 
 the heart and inwards of the palace of its adoption, those 
 full-natured angels tended it by turns in the purlieus of the 
 palace, where were shady groves and rivulets, like this 
 green earth from which it came ; so Love, with Voluntary 
 Humility, waited upon the entertainment of the new- 
 adopted. 
 
 And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams Time is 
 nothing), and still it kept, and is to keep, perpetual child- 
 
86 
 
 THE CHILD ANGEL 
 
 hood, and is the Tutelar Genius of Childhood upon earth, 
 and still goes lame and lovely. 
 
 By the banks of the river Pison is seen, lone-sitting by 
 the grave of the terrestrial Adah, whom the angel Nadir 
 loved, a Child ; but not the same which I saw in heaven. 
 A 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. 
 
OLD CHINA 
 
 IHA.VE an almost feminine partiality for old china. 
 When I go to see any great house, I enquire for 
 the china-closet, and next for the picture gallery. 
 I cannot defend the order of preference, but by saying, 
 that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a 
 date to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an 
 acquired one. I can call to mind the first play, and the 
 first exhibition, that I was taken to ; but I am not con- 
 scious of a time when china jars and saucers were intro- 
 duced into my imagination. 
 
 I had no repugnance then — why should I now have ? 
 — to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that 
 under the notion of men and women, float about, uncir- 
 cumscribed by any element, in that world before per- 
 spective — a china tea-cup. 
 
 187 
 
 I 
 
i88 
 
 OLD CHINA 
 
 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 jirma 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 (as angles go in our world) must 
 infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead— »-a 
 furlong off on the other side of the same strange stream ! 
 
 Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of their 
 world — see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the h^ys. 
 
 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 un- 
 mixed still of an afternoon) some of these speciosa miracula 
 upon a set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent pur- 
 chase) 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 afford to please 
 the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort — when a 
 passing sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of my 
 companion. 1 am quick at detecting these summer 
 clouds in Bridget. 
 
 " I wish the good old times would come again,'' she 
 
OLD CHINA 189 
 
 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 pur- 
 chase, now that you have money enough and to spare. 
 Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a 
 cheap luxury (and, O ! how much ado I had to get you 
 to consent in those times!) — we were used to have a 
 debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for 
 and against^ and think what we might spare it out of, 
 and what saving we could hit upon, that should be an 
 equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we 
 felt the money that we paid for it." 
 
 " Do you remember the brown suit, which you made 
 to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon 
 you, it grew so 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 Satur- 
 day night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you 
 should be too late — and when the old bookseller with 
 some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling 
 taper (for he was setting bed wards) lighted out the relic 
 from his dusty treasures — and when you lugged it home, 
 wishing it were twice as cumbersome — and when you pre- 
 sented it to me — and when we were exploring the perfect- 
 ness 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 yoij 
 
190 OLD CHINA 
 
 ' Lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures. 
 
 half the honest vanity, with which you flaunted it about 
 in that overworn suit — your old corbeau — for four or five 
 weeks longer than you should have done, to pacify your 
 conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen — or sixteen 
 shillings was it? — a great aftair we thought it then — 
 which you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can 
 afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see 
 that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases 
 now." 
 
 When you came home with twenty apologies for 
 
OLD CHINA 
 
 191 
 
 laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after 
 Lionardo, which we christened the 'Lady Blanch;' 
 when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the 
 money — and thought of the money, and looked again at 
 the picture — was there no pleasure in being a poor man ? 
 Now, you have nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi's, 
 and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you ? " 
 
 Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to En- 
 field, 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 Hkely to allow us a table-cloth — and 
 wish for such another honest hostess, as tzaak Walton 
 has described many a one on the pleasant banks of the 
 Lea, when he went a fishing — and sometimes they would 
 prove obliging enough, and sometimes they would look 
 grudgingly upon us — but we had cheerful looks still for 
 one another, and would eat our plain food savorily, 
 scarcely grudging Piscator his .Trout Hall? Now, — 
 when we go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom 
 moreover, we 'ride part of the way — and go into a fine 
 inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the 
 expense — which, after all, never has half the relish of 
 those chance country snaps, when we were at the mercy 
 of uncertain usage, and a precarious welcome." 
 
 "You are too proud to see a play anywhere now 
 but in the pit. Do you remember where it was we 
 used to sit, when we saw the Battle of Hexham, and 
 the Surrender of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs Bland 
 
192 
 
 OLD CHINA 
 
 in the Children in the Wood — when we squeezed out 
 our shilHngs a-piece to sit three or four times in a season 
 in the one-shilHng 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 our thoughts were with Rosalind in 
 Arden, or with Viola at the Court of Illyria? You 
 used to say, that the Gallery was the best place of all 
 for enjoying a play socially — that the relish of such 
 exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of 
 going — that the company we met there, not being ia 
 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 in- 
 convenient 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 difliculty 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. 
 
OLD CHINA 
 
 »93 
 
 while they were yet dear — to have them for a nice 
 supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If 
 we were to treat ourselves now — that is, to have dainties 
 a little above our means, it 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, and talk of curtailing this charge, and 
 doing without that for the future — and the hope that 
 youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you were 
 never poor till now) we pocketed up our loss, and in 
 conclusion, with " lusty brimmers " (as you used to quote 
 it out of hearty cheerful Mr Cotton^ as you called him), 
 we used to welcome in the " coming guest." Now we 
 « N 
 
94 
 
 OLD CHINA 
 
 have no reckoning at all at the end of the old year — 
 no flattering promises about the new year doing better 
 for us.'' 
 
 Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, 
 that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am carefu. 
 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 the sea, we should not much 
 mend ourselves. That we had much to struggle with, 
 as we grew up together, we have reason to be most 
 thankful. It strengthened, and knit our compact closer. 
 We could never have been what we have been to each 
 other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you 
 now complain of. The resisting power — those natural 
 dilations of the youthful spirit, which circumstances can- 
 not straiten — with us are long since passed away. Com- 
 petence to age is supplementary youth, a sorry supplement 
 indeed, but 1 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 1 be young to see them — 
 could the good old one-shilling gallery days return — 
 they are dreams, my cousin, now — but could you and 
 I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by 
 our well-carpeted fire-side, sitting on this luxurious sofa 
 — be once more struggling up those inconvenient stair 
 cases, pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed by the 
 
OLD CHINA 
 
 " Poor gallery scramblers " 
 
 poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers — could I once 
 more hear those anxious shrieks of yours — and the 
 delicious Thank God, ive 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 R is supposed to have, to pur- 
 chase 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- 
 Madonaish chit of a lady in that very blue summer 
 house.'' 
 
CONFESSIONS OFA DRUNKARD 
 
 DEHORTATIONS from the use of strong Hquors 
 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, unfortunately their 
 sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil is acknowledged, 
 the remedy simple. Abstain. No force can oblige a man 
 to raise the glass to his head against his will. ^Tis as easy 
 as not to steal, not to tell lies. 
 
 Alas ! the hand to pilfer, and the tongue to bear false 
 196 
 
A DRUNKARD 
 
 197 
 
 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 ac- 
 customed to scatter their pernicious contraries. But 
 when a man has commenced sot 
 
 0 pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout 
 nerves and a strong head, whose liver is happily un- 
 touched, 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 
 mayst 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. 
 But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not 
 like climbing a mountain, but going through fire? what if 
 the whole system must undergo a change violent as that 
 which we conceive of the mutation of form in some 
 insects \ 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, which have induced no 
 constitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole 
 victim, body and soul ? 
 
 1 have known one in that state, when he rjas 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, 
 
198 
 
 CONFESSIONS OF 
 
 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. 
 
 1 believe that there are constitutions, robust heads and 
 iron insides, whom scarce any excesses can hurt ; whom 
 brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at all 
 events whom wine, taken in ever so plentiful measure, can 
 do no worse injury to than just to muddle their faculties, 
 perhaps never very pellucid.p<X)n them this discourse is 
 wasted. They would but laugh at a weak brother, who, 
 trying his strength with them, and coming off foiled from 
 the contest, would fain persuade them that such agonistic 
 exercises are dangerous. It is to a very different descrip- 
 tion 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 ordi- 
 nary pitch of all around them without it. This is the 
 secret of our drinking. Such must fly the convivial board 
 in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves 
 for term of life. 
 
 Twelve years ago I had completed my six-and-twentieth 
 year. I had lived from the period of leaving school to 
 that time pretty much in solitude. My companions were 
 chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of my 
 own book-loving and sober stamp. I rose early, went to 
 bed betimes, and the faculties which God had given me, I 
 have reason to think, did not rust in me unused. 
 
A DRUNKARD 
 
 About that time I fell in with some companions of a 
 different 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 impedi- 
 ment in my speech ! 
 
 Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire 
 to any character but that of a wit. When you find a 
 tickling relish upon your tongue disposing you to that sort 
 of conversation, especially if you find a preternatural flow 
 of ideas setting in upon you at the sight of a bottle and 
 fresh glasses, avoid giving way to it as you would fly your 
 greatest destruction. If you cannot crush the power of 
 fancy, or that within you which you mistake for such, 
 divert it, give it some other play. Write an essay, pen a 
 character or description, — but not as I do now, with tears 
 trickling down your cheeks. 
 
 To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to 
 foes ; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools ; to 
 be esteemed dull when you cannot be witty, to be ap- 
 plauded for witty when you know that you have been 
 dull ; to be called upon for the extemporaneous exercise 
 of that faculty which no premeditation can give ; to be 
 spurred on to 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 swal- 
 low draughts of life-destroying wine which are to be 
 distilled into airy breath to tickle vain auditors ; to mort- 
 
200 
 
 CONFESSIONS OF 
 
 gage miserable morrows for nights of madness ; to waste 
 whole seas of time upon those who pay it back in little 
 inconsiderable drops of grudging applause, — are the wages 
 of buffoonery and death. 
 
 Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all con- 
 nexions which have no solider fastening than this liquid 
 cement, more kind to me than my own taste or penetra- 
 tion, at length opened my eyes to the supposed qualities 
 of my first friends. No trace of them is left but in the 
 vices which they introduced, and the habits they infixed. 
 In them my friends survive still, and exercise ample retri- 
 bution 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 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 streams of my late over-heated notions 
 of companionship ; and the slightest fuel which they unr 
 consciously 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 puflRng 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 
 
A DRUNKARD 
 
 20I 
 
 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 1 have paid, the 
 slavery which I have vowed to it. How, when I 
 have resolved to quit it, a feeling as of ingratitude has 
 started up ; how it has put on personal claims and made 
 the demands of a friend upon me. How the reading of it 
 casually in a book, as where Adams takes his whiff in the 
 chimney-corner of some inn in Joseph Andrews, or Pisca- 
 tor in the Complete Angler breaks his fast upon a morn- 
 ing pipe in that delicate room Ptscatorthus 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 
 illuminating it came to darken, from a quick solace it 
 turned to a negative relief, thence to a restlessness and 
 dissatisfaction, thence to a positive misery. How, even 
 now, when the whole secret stands confessed in all its 
 dreadful truth before me, I feel myself linked to it beyond 
 the power of revocation. Bone of my bone 
 
202 
 
 CONFESSIONS OF 
 
 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 Repugnance at 
 the same instant of time is applying a snake to his side. 
 In his face is feeble delight, the recollection of past rather 
 than perception of present pleasures, languid enjoyment of 
 evil with utter imbecility to good, a Sybaritic effeminacy, 
 a submission to bondage, the springs of the will gone down 
 like a broken clock, the sin and the suffering co-instan- 
 taneous, 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 
 
203 
 
,LLii\OlS 
 
A DRUNKARD 
 
 205 
 
 no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all the way emanat- 
 ing from himself ; to perceive all goodness emptied out of 
 him, and yet not to be able to forget a time when it was 
 otherwise ; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his own 
 self-ruins : — 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 damnationt to run thro' 'em. 
 
 Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety 
 be that fine thing you would have us to understand, if the 
 comforts of a cool brain are to be preferred to that state 
 of heated excitement which you describe and deplore, 
 what hinders in your own 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 / — 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 refreshment purling over 
 my burning tongue. But my waking stomach rejects it. 
 That which refreshes innocence, only makes me sick and 
 faint. 
 
 But is there no middle way betwixt total abstinence 
 and the excess which kills you ? — For your sake, reader,. 
 
 I 
 
206 
 
 CONFESSIONS OF 
 
 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, para- 
 doxical as it may appear, reason shall only visit him through 
 intoxication ; for it is a fearful truth, that the intellectual 
 faculties by repeated acts of intemperance may be driven 
 from their orderly sphere of action, their clear day-light 
 ministries, 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 midnight 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 
 
 1 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 firmness derived from a repetition ot 
 practices, the general effect of which had shaken both them and 
 him so terribly. 
 
A DRUNKARD 
 
 207 
 
 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. 
 
 Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, 
 the trouble, and obscure perplexity, of an ill dream In 
 the day time I stumble upon dark mountains. 
 
 Business, which, though never particularly adapted to 
 my nature, yet as something of necessity to be gone 
 through, and therefore best undertaken with cheerful- 
 ness, 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 occupa- 
 tion 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 impossible to be got through. So much the 
 springs of action are broken. 
 
 The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse 
 with mankind. I dare not promise that a friend's honour, 
 or his cause, would be safe in my keeping, if I were put 
 to the expense of any manly resolution in defending it. 
 
2o8 CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD 
 
 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 con- 
 dition was penned at long intervals, with scarcely any 
 attempt at connection of thought, which is now difficult 
 to me. 
 
 The noble passages which formerly delighted me in 
 history or poetic fiction, now only draw a few weak 
 tears, allied to dotage. My broken and dispirited nature 
 seems to sink before anything great and admirable. 
 
 I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or 
 none. It is inexpressible how much this infirmity adds 
 to a sense of shame, and a general feeling of deterior- 
 ation. 
 
 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. 
 
 L 
 
 THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD. 
 
 HIS axiom contains a principle of compensation, 
 
 which disposes us to admit the truth of it. But 
 
 there is no safe trusting to dictionaries and defini- 
 tions. We should more wilHngly fall in with this popular 
 language, if we did not find brutality sometimes awkwardly- 
 coupled with valour in the same vocabulary. The comic 
 writers, with their poetical justice, have contributed not a 
 little to mislead us upon this point. To see a hectoring 
 fellow exposed and beaten upon the stage, has something 
 in it wonderfully diverting. Some people's share of 
 animal spirits is notoriously low and defective. It has 
 not strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of 
 a tolerable bluster. These love to be told that huffing is 
 no part of 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 vanishes. Preten- 
 sions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A 
 modest inoffensive deportment does not necessarily imply 
 valour ; neither does the absence of it justify us in deny- 
 ing that quality. Hickman wanted modesty — we do not 
 mean him of Clarissa — but who ever doubted his courage? 
 Even the poets — upon whom this equitable distribution of 
 
 209 
 
2IO 
 
 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 qualities should be most binding — have thought it agree- 
 able 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 Brown had a shrewder insight into this 
 kind of character than either of his predecessors. He 
 divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a sort 
 of dimidiate pre-eminence : — " Bully Dawson kicked by 
 half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Daw- 
 son.'' This was true distributive justice. 
 
 IL 
 
 THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS. 
 
 The weakest part of mankind have this saying common- 
 est in their mouth. It is the trite consolation administered 
 to the easy dupe, when he has been tricked out of his 
 money or estate, that the acquisition of it will do the 
 owner no good. But the rogues of this world — the pru- 
 denter part of them, at least — know better ; and, if the 
 observation had been as true as it is old, would not have 
 failed by this time to have discovered it. They have 
 pretty sharp distinctions of the fluctuating and the per- 
 manent. Lightly come, lightly go," is a proverb which 
 they can very well afford to leave, when they leave little 
 else, to the losers. They do not always find manors, got 
 by rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away, as the 
 poets will have it ; or that all gold glides, like thawing 
 snow, from the thiePs hand that grasps it. Church land, 
 alienated to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this 
 slippery quality. But some portions of it somehow always 
 
I 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 213 
 
 The first to be tickled ivith it, " 
 
 Stuck SO fast, that the denunciators have been fain to post- 
 pone the prophecy of refundment to a late posterity. 
 
 III. 
 
 THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST. 
 
 The severest exaction surely ever invented upon the 
 self-denial of poor human nature ! This is to expect 
 a gentleman to give a treat without partaking of it ; to 
 sit esurient at his own table, and commend the flavour 
 of his venison upon the absurd strength of his never 
 touching it himself. On the contrary, we love to see 
 a wag taste his own joke to his party ; to watch a quirk, 
 or a merry conceit, flickering upon the lips some seconds 
 before the tongue is delivered of it. If it be good, fresh, 
 and racy — begotten of the occasion ; if he that utters it 
 never thought it before, he is naturally the first to be 
 tickled with it ; and any suppression of such complacence 
 we hold to be churlish and insulting. What does it seem 
 to imply, but that your company is weak or foolish enough 
 to be moved by an image or a fancy, that shall stir you not 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 at all, or but faintly ? This is exactly the humour of the 
 fine gentleman in Mandeville, who, while ^e dazzles his 
 guests with the display of some costly toy, affects himself 
 to " see nothing considerable in it.'' 
 
 IV. 
 
 THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING. THAT IT IS EASY 
 
 TO PERCEIVE HE IS NO GENTLEMAN. 
 
 A speech from the poorer sort of people, which always 
 indicates that the party vituperated is a gentleman. The 
 very fact which they deny, is that which galls and exas- 
 perates them to use this language. The forbearance with 
 which it is usually received, is a proof what interpretation 
 the bystander sets upon it. Of a kin to this, and still less 
 politic, are the phrases with which, in their street rhe- 
 toric, they ply one another more grossly : — He is a poor 
 
 creature, — He has not a rag to cover , ^c» ; though 
 
 this last, we confess is more frequently applied by females 
 to females. They do not perceive that the satire glances 
 upon themselves. A poor man, of all things in the world, 
 should not upbraid an antagonist with poverty. Are there 
 no other topics — as, to tell him his father was hanged — 
 
 his sister, &c. , without exposmg a secret, which 
 
 should be kept snug between them ; and doing an affront 
 to the order to which they have the honour equally to 
 belong ? All this while they do not see how the wealthier 
 man stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both. 
 
 V. 
 
 THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH. 
 
 A smooth text to the latter ; and, preached from the 
 pulpit, is sure of a docile audience from the pews lined 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 with satin. It is twice sitting upon velvet to a foolish 
 squire to be told, that he — and not per 'verse nature^ as the 
 homilies would make us imagine, is the true cause of all 
 the irregularities in his parish. This is striking at the 
 root of free-will indeed, and denying the originality of 
 sin in any sense. But men are not such implicit sheep 
 as this comes to. If the abstinence from evil on the 
 part of the upper classes is to derive itself from no 
 higher principle, than the apprehension of setting ill 
 patterns to the lower, we beg leave to discharge them 
 from all squeamishness on that score ; they may even 
 take their fill of pleasures, where they can find them. 
 The Genius of Poverty, hampered and straitened as 
 it is, is not so barren of invention but it can trade 
 upon the staple of its own vice, without drawing upon 
 their capital. The poor are not quite such servile 
 imitators as they take them for. Some of them are 
 very clever artists in their way. Here and there we 
 find an original. Who taught the poor to steal, to 
 pilfer ? They did not go to the great for schoolmasters 
 in these faculties surely. It is well if in some vices 
 they allow us to be — no copyists. In no other sense 
 is it true that the poor copy them, than as servants 
 may be said to take after their masters and mistresses, 
 when they succeed to their reversionary cold meats. 
 If the master, from indisposition or some other cause, 
 neglect his food, the servant dines notwithstanding. 
 
 " O, but (some will say) the force of example is 
 great." We knew a lady who was so scrupulous on 
 this head, that she would put up with the calls of the 
 most impertinent visitor, rather than let her servant say 
 she was not at home, for fear of teaching her maid to 
 tell an untruth ; and this in the very face of the fact, 
 which she knew well enough, that the wench was one 
 
2i6 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 " She ivould put up tvith the calls of the most impertinent visitor. 
 
 of the greatest liars upon the earth without teaching ; 
 so much so, that her mistress possibly never heard two 
 words of consecutive truth from her in her life. But 
 nature must go for nothing : example must be every- 
 thing. This liar in grain, who never opened her mouth 
 without a lie, must be guarded against a remote inference, 
 which she (pretty casuist!) might possibly draw from 
 a form of words — literally false, but essentially deceiv- 
 ing no one — that under some circumstances a fib might 
 not be so exceedingly sinful — a fiction, too, not at all 
 in her own way, or one that .she could be suspected 
 of adopting, for few servant-wenches care to be denied 
 to visitors. 
 
 This word example reminds us of another fine word 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 217 
 
 which is in use upon these occasions — encouragement, 
 "People in our sphere must not be thought to give 
 encouragement to such proceedings." To such a frantic 
 height is this principle capable of being carried, that 
 we have known individuals who have thought it within 
 the scope of their influence to sanction despair, and 
 give eclat to — suicide. A domestic in the family of 
 a county member lately deceased, from love, or some 
 unknown cause, cut his throat, but not successfully. 
 The poor fellow was otherwise much loved and re- 
 spected ; and great interest was used in his behalf, upon 
 his recovery, that he might be permitted to retain his 
 place ; his word being first pledged, not without some 
 substantial sponsors to promise for him, that the like 
 should never happen again. His master was inclinable 
 to keep him, but his mistress thought otherwise ; and 
 John in the end was dismissed, her ladyship declaring 
 that she " could not think of encouraging any such 
 doings in the county." 
 
 VL 
 
 THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST. 
 
 Not a man, woman, or child in ten miles round Guild- 
 hall, who really believes this saying. The inventor of 
 it did not believe it himself. It was made in revenge 
 by somebody, who was disappointed of a regale. It 
 is a vile cold-scrag-of-mutton sophism ; a lie palmed 
 upon the palate, which knows better things. If nothing 
 else could be said for a feast, this is sufficient, that 
 from the superflux there is usually something left for 
 the next day. Morally interpreted, it belongs to a 
 class of proverbs, which have a tendency to make us 
 
2i8 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 undervalue money. Of this cast are those notable obser- 
 vations, that money is not health ; riches cannot purchase 
 everything ; the metaphor which makes gold to be mere 
 muck, with the morality which traces fine clothing to 
 the sheep's back, and denounces pearl as the unhandsome 
 excretion of an oyster. Hence, too, the phrase which 
 imputes dirt to acres — a sophistry so barefaced, that 
 even the literal sense of it is true only in a wet season. 
 This, and abundance of similar sage saws assuming to 
 inculcate content^ we verily believe to have been the 
 invention of some cunning borrower, who had designs 
 upon the purse of his wealthier neighbour, which he 
 could only hope to carry by force of these verbal 
 jugglings. Translate any one of these sayings out of 
 the artful metonyme which envelopes it, and the trick is 
 apparent. Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarat- 
 ing cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing 
 foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own 
 time to himself, are not much — however we may be pleased 
 to scandalise with that appellation the faithful metal that 
 provides them for us. 
 
 VIL 
 
 OF TWO DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN THE 
 WRONG. 
 
 Our experience would lead us to quite an opposite con- 
 clusion. Temper, indeed, is no test of truth ; but warmth 
 and earnestness are a proof at least of a man's own con- 
 viction of the rectitude of that which he maintains. Cool- 
 ness is as often the result of an unprincipled indifference to 
 truth or falsehood, as of a sober confidence in a man's own 
 side in a dispute. Nothing is more insulting sometimes 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 than the appearance of this philosophic temper. There is 
 httle Titubus, the stammering law-stationer in Lincoln's 
 Inn — we have seldom known this shrewd little fellow 
 engaged in an argument where we were not convinced he 
 had the best of it, if his tongue would but fairly have 
 seconded him. When he has been spluttering excellent 
 broken sense for an hour together, writhing and labouring 
 to be delivered of the point of dispute — the very gist of 
 the controversy knocking at his teeth, which like some 
 obstinate iron-grating still obstructed its deliverance — his 
 puny frame convulsed, and face reddening all over at an 
 unfairness in the logic which he wanted articulation to 
 expose, it has moved our gall to see a smooth portly 
 fellow of an adversary, that c^red not a button for the 
 merits of the question, by merely laying his hand upon 
 the head of the stationer, and desiring him to be calm 
 (your tall disputants have always the advantage), with a 
 provoking sneer carry the argument clean from him in the 
 opinion of all the by-standers, who have gone away 
 clearly convinced that Titubus must have been in the 
 
 wrong, because he was in a passion ; and that Mr , 
 
 meaning his opponent, is one of the fairest, and at the 
 same time one of the most dispassionate arguers breathing. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, BECAUSE THEY WILL 
 NOT BEAR A TRANSLATION. 
 
 The same might be said of the wittiest local allusions. 
 A custom is sometimes as difficult to explain to a foreigner 
 as a pun. What would become of a great part of the wit 
 of the last age, if it were tried by this test ? How would 
 certain topics, as aldermanity, cuckoldry, have sounded to 
 a Terentian auditory, though Terence himself had been 
 
220 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 ^' 'Y'our tall disputants hwue alivays the advantage. 
 
 alive to translate them ? Senator ui janus, with Curruca 
 to boot for a synonyme, would but faintly have done the 
 business. Words, involving notions, are hard enough to 
 render ; it is too much to expect us to translate a sound, 
 and give an elegant version to a jingle. The Virgilian 
 harmony is not translatable, but by substituting harmonious 
 sounds in another language for it. To Latinise a pun, we 
 must seek a pun in Latin, that will answer to it; as, to 
 give an idea of the double endings in Hudibras, we must 
 have recourse to a similar practice in the old monkish 
 doggrel. Dennis, the fiercest oppugner of puns in ancient 
 or modern times, professes himself highly tickled with the 
 ''a stick" chiming to ''ecclesiastic." Yet what is this 
 but a species of pun, a verbal consonance ? 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 22 I 
 
 IX. 
 
 THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST. 
 
 If by the worst be only meant the most far-fetched and 
 startling, we agree to it. A pun is not bound by the laws 
 which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear ; 
 not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which 
 does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the 
 presence, and does not show the less comic for being 
 dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders. What 
 though it limp a little, or prove defective in one leg — all 
 the better. A pun may easily be too curious and artificial. 
 Who has not at one time or other been at a party of pro- 
 fessors (himself perhaps an old offender in that line), 
 where, after ringing a round of the most ingenious con- 
 ceits, every man contributing his shot, and some there the 
 most expert shooters of the day ; after making a poor 
 word run the gauntlet till it is ready to drop ; after 
 hunting and winding it through all the possible ambages 
 of similar sounds ; after squeezing and hauling, and 
 tugging at it, till the very milk of it will not yield a drop 
 further, — suddenly some obscure, unthought-of fellow in 
 a corner, who was never 'prentice to the trade, whom the 
 company for very pity passed over, as we do by a known 
 poor man when a money-subscription is going round, no 
 one calling upon him for his quota — has all at once come 
 out with something so whimsical, yet so pertinent ; so 
 brazen in its pretensions, yet so impossible to be denied ; 
 80 exquisitely good, and so deplorably bad, at the same 
 time, — that it has proved a Robin Hood's shot ; any 
 thing ulterior to that is despaired of ; and the party 
 breaks up, unanimously voting it to be the very worst 
 (that is, best) pun of the evening. This species of wit 
 
222 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 Prithee^ friend^ is that thy oivn hare^ or a ivigF^^ 
 
 is the better for not being perfect in all its parts. What 
 it gains in completeness, it loses in naturalness. The 
 more exactly it satisfies the critical, the less hold it has 
 upon some other faculties. The puns which are most 
 entertaining are those which will least bear an analysis. 
 Of this kind is the following, recorded with a sort ot 
 stigma, in one of Swift's Miscellanies. 
 
 An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carry- 
 ing a hare through the streets, accosts him with this 
 extraordinary question ; " Prithee, friend, is that thy 
 own hare, or a wig ? " 
 
 There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 223 
 
 man might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence 
 of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof. The 
 quibble in itself is not considerable. It is only a new 
 turn given, by a little false pronunciation, to a very 
 common, though not very courteous inquiry. Put by 
 one gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have 
 been vapid ; to the mistress of the house, it would have 
 shown much less wit than rudeness. We must take in 
 the totality of time, place, and person ; the pert look of 
 the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled 
 porter; the -one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on 
 with his burthen ; the innocent though rather abrupt 
 tendency of the first member of the question, with the 
 utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second ; the 
 place — a public street, not favourable to frivolous investi- 
 gations ; the afFrontive quality of the primitive inquiry 
 (the common question) invidiously transferred to the 
 derivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied 
 satire ; namely, that few of that tribe are expected to eat 
 of the good things which they carry, they being in most 
 countries considered rather as the temporary trustees than 
 owners of such dainties, — which the fellow was begin- 
 ning to understand ; but then the tvig again comes in, and 
 he can make nothing of it ; all put together constitute 
 a picture : Hogarth could have made it intelligible on 
 canvas. 
 
 Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very 
 bad pun, because of the defectiveness in the concluding 
 member, which is its very beauty, and constitutes the 
 surprise. The same persons shall cry up for admirable the 
 cold quibble from Virgil about the broken Cremona ^ ; 
 because it is made out in all its parts, and leaves nothing 
 to the imagination. We venture to call it cold ; because 
 1 Swift, 
 
224 
 
 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 of thousands who have admired it, it would be difficult 
 to find one who has heartily chuckled at it. As appeal- 
 ing to the judgment merely (setting the risible faculty 
 aside), we must pronounce it a monument of curious 
 felicity. But as some stories are said to be too good to 
 be true, it may with equal truth be asserted of this 
 bi-verbal allusion, that it is too good to be natural. One 
 cannot help suspecting that the incident was invented to 
 fit the line. It would have been better had it been less 
 perfect. Like some Virgilian hemistichs, it has suffered by 
 filling up. The n 'mlum Vicina was enough in conscience ; 
 the Cremona afterwards loads it. It is in fact a double 
 pun ; and we have always observed that a superfoetation 
 in this sort of wit is dangerous. When a man has said 
 a good thing, it is seldom politic to follow it up. We do 
 not care to be cheated a second time ; or, perhaps, the 
 mind of man (with reverence be it spoken) is not capa- 
 cious enough to lodge two puns at a time. The impres- 
 sion, to be forcible, must be simultaneous and undivided. 
 
 X. 
 
 THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES. 
 
 Those who use this proverb can never have seen Mrs 
 Conrady. 
 
 The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from the 
 celestial beauty. As she partakes more or less of this 
 heavenly light, she informs, with corresponding characters, 
 the fleshly tenement which she choses, and frames to 
 herself a suitable mansion. 
 
 All which only proves that the soul of Mrs Conrady, 
 in her pre-existent state, was no great judge of archi- 
 tecture. 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 225 
 
 To the same effect, in a Hymn in honour of Beauty, 
 divine Spenser platonising, sings : — 
 
 << Every spirit as it is more pure 
 
 And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
 So it the fairer body doth procure 
 To habit in, and it more fairly dight 
 With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 
 For of the soul the body form doth take : 
 For soul is form and doth the body make." 
 
 But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs Conrady. 
 
 These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philosophy ; 
 for here, in his very next stanza but one, is a saving clause, 
 which throws us all out again, and leaves us as much to 
 seek as ever : — 
 
 Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind 
 Dv^rells in deformed tabernacle drown'd, 
 Either by chance, against the course of kind, 
 Or through unaptness in the substance found. 
 Which it assumed of some stubborn ground, 
 That will not yield unto her form's direction. 
 But is performed with some foul imperfection." 
 
 From which it would follow, that Spenser had seen some- 
 body like Mrs Conrady. 
 
 The spirit of this good lady — her previous anima — 
 must have stumbled upon one of these untoward taber- 
 nacles which he speaks of. A more rebellious commo- 
 dity of clay for a ground, as the poet calls it, no gentle 
 mind — and sure hers is one of the gentlest — ever had to 
 deal with. 
 
 Pondering upon her inexplicable visage — inexplicable, 
 we mean, but by this modification of the theory — we have 
 come to a conclusion that, if one must be plain, it is better 
 to be plain all over, than, amidst a tolerable residue of 
 features, to hang out one that shall be exceptionable. No 
 2 p 
 
226 
 
 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 one can say of Mrs Conrady's countenance that it would 
 be better if she had but a nose. It is impossible to pull 
 her to pieces in this manner. We have seen the most 
 malicious beauties of her own sex baffled in the attempt at 
 a selection. The tout ensemble defies particularising. It 
 is too complete — too consistent, as we may say — to admit 
 of these invidious reservations. It is not as if some 
 Apelles had picked out here a lip — and there a chin — out 
 of the collected ugliness of Greece, to frame a model by. 
 It is a symmetrical whole. We challenge the minutest 
 connoisseur to cavil at any part or parcel of the counten- 
 ance in question ; to say that this, or that, is improperly 
 placed. We are convinced that true ugliness, no less than 
 is affirmed of true beauty, is the result of harmony. Like 
 that too it reigns without a competitor. No one ever saw 
 Mrs Conrady, without pronouncing her to be the plainest 
 woman that he ever met with in the course of his life. 
 The first time that you are indulged with a sight of her 
 face, is an era in your existence ever after. You are glad 
 to have seen it — like Stonehenge. No one can pretend 
 to forget it. No one ever apologised to her for meeting 
 her in the street on such a day and not knowing her : the 
 pretext would be too bare. Nobody can mistake her for 
 another. Nobody can say of her, " I think I have seen 
 that face somewhere, but I cannot call to mind where." 
 You must remember that in such a parlour it first struck 
 you — like a bust. You wondered where the owner of the 
 house had picked it up. You wondered more when it 
 began to move its lips — so mildly too ! No one ever 
 thought of asking her to sit for her picture. Lockets 
 are for remembrance ; and it would be clearly superfluous 
 to hang an image at your heart, which, once seen, can 
 never be out of it. It is not a mean face either ; its 
 entire originality precludes that. Neither is it of that 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 227 
 
 order of plain faces which improve upon acquaintance. 
 Some very good but ordinary people, by an unwearied 
 perseverance in good offices, put a cheat upon our eyes ; 
 juggle our senses out of their natural impressions ; and set 
 us upon discovering good indications in a countenance, 
 which at first sight promised nothing less. We detect 
 gentleness, which had escaped us, lurking about an under 
 lip. But when Mrs Conrady has done you a service, her 
 face remains the same ; when she has done you a thousand, 
 and you know that she is ready to double the number, still 
 it is that individual face. Neither can you say of it, that 
 it would be a good face if it were not marked by the 
 small pox — a compliment which is always more admissive 
 than excusatory — for either Mrs Conrady never had the 
 small pox : or, as we say, took it kindly. No, it stands 
 upon its own merits fairly. There it is. It is her mark, 
 her token ; that which she is known by. 
 
 XL 
 
 THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE MOUTH. 
 
 Nor a lady's age in the parish register. We hope we 
 have more delicacy than to do either ; byt some faces 
 spare us the trouble of these dental inquiries. And what 
 if the beast, which my friend would force upon my accept- 
 ance, prove, upon the face of it, a sorry Rosinante, a lean, 
 ill-favoured jade, whom no gentleman could think of setting 
 up in his stables ? Must I, rather than not be obliged to 
 my friend, make her a companion to Eclipse or Light- 
 foot? A horse-giver, no more than a horse-seller, has 
 a right to palm his spavined article upon us for good 
 ware. An equivalent is expected in either case ; and, 
 with my own good will, I would no more be cheated 
 
228 
 
 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 out of my thanks than out of my money. Some people 
 have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, 
 to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them 
 for nothing. Our friend Mitis carries this humour ot 
 never refusing a present, to the very point of absurdity — 
 if it were possible to couple the ridiculous with so much 
 mistaken delicacy, and real good nature. Not an apart- 
 ment in his fine house (and he has a true taste in household 
 decorations), but is stuffed up with some preposterous print 
 or mirror — the worst adapted to his pannels that may be — 
 the presents of his friends that know his weakness ; while 
 his noble Vandykes are displaced, to make room for a set 
 of daubs, the work of some wretched artist of his acquaint- 
 ance, who, having had them returned upon his hands for 
 bad likenesses, finds his account in bestowing them 
 here gratis. The good creature has not the heart to 
 mortify the painter at the expense of an honest refusal. 
 It is pleasant (if it did not vex one at the same time) to 
 see him sitting in his dining parlour, surrounded with 
 obscure aunts and cousins to God knows whom, while 
 the true Lady Marys and Lady Bettys of his own 
 honourable family, in favour to these adopted frights, 
 are consigned to the staircase and the lumber-room. In 
 like manner his goodly shelves are one by one stript 
 of his favourite old authors, to give place to a collec- 
 tion of presentation copies — the flour and bran of modern 
 poetry, A presentation copy, reader, — if haply you are 
 yet innocent of such favours — is a copy of a book which 
 does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish 
 autograph at the beginning of it ; for which, if a 
 stranger, he only demands your friendship ; if a brother 
 author he expects from you a book of yours, which 
 does sell, in return. We can speak to experience, 
 having by us a tolerable assortment of these gift-horses. 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 229 
 
 Not to ride a metaphor to death — we are willing to 
 acknowledge, that in some gifts there is sense. A dupli- 
 cate out of a friend's library (where he has more than one 
 copy of a rare author) is intelligible. There are favours, 
 short of the pecuniary — a thing not fit to be hinted at 
 among gentlemen — which confer as much grace upon 
 the acceptor as the offerer ; the kind, we confess, 
 which is most to our palate, is of those little concilia- 
 tory missives, which for their vehicle generally choose 
 a hamper — little odd presents of game, fruit, perhaps 
 wine — though it is essential to the delicacy of the 
 latter that it be home-made. We love to have our 
 friend in the country sitting thus at our table by proxy ; 
 to apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles may 
 be between us) by a turkey, whose goodly aspect reflects 
 to us his "plump corpusculum ; " to taste him in grouse 
 or woodcock ; to feel him gliding down in the toast 
 peculiar to the latter : to concorporate him in a slice of 
 Canterbury brawn. This is indeed to have him within 
 ourselves ; to know him intimately : such participation is 
 methinks unitive, as the old theologians phrase it. For 
 these considerations we should be sorry if certain restric- 
 tive regulations, which are thought to bear hard upon the 
 peasantry of this country, were entirely done away with. 
 A hare, as the law now stands, makes many friends. 
 Caius conciliates Titius (knowing his gouf^j with a leash 
 of partridges. Titius (suspecting his partiality for them) 
 passes them to Lucius ; who in his turn, preferring his 
 friend's relish to his own, makes them over to Marcius ; 
 till in their ever widening progress, and round of un- 
 conscious cir cum- migration, they distribute the seeds of 
 harmony over half a parish. We are well disposed to 
 this kind of sensible remembrances ; and are the less 
 apt to be taken by those little airy tokens — impalpable 
 
230 
 
 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 to the palate — which, under the names of rings, lockets, 
 keep-sakes, amuse some people's fancy mightily. We 
 could never away with these indigestible trifles. They 
 are the very kickshaws and foppery of friendship. 
 
 XIL 
 
 THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY. 
 
 Homes there are, we are sure, that are no homes ; the 
 home of the very poor man, and another which we shall 
 speak to presently. Crowded places of cheap entertain- 
 ment, and the benches of ale-houses, if they could speak, 
 might bear mournful testimony to the first. To them the 
 very poor man resorts for an image of the home, which he 
 cannot find at home. For a starved grate, and a scanty 
 firing, that is not enough to keep alive the natural heat in 
 the fingers of so many shivering children with their mother, 
 he finds in the depths of winter always a blazing hearth, 
 and a hob to warm his pittance of beer by. Instead of 
 the clamours of a wife, made gaunt by famishing, he meets 
 with a cheerful attendance beyond the merits of the trifle 
 which he can afford to spend. He has companions which 
 his home denies him, for the very poor man has no visitors. 
 He can look into the goings on of the world, and speak a 
 little to politics. At home there are no politics stirring, 
 but the domestic. All interests, real or imaginary, aU 
 topics that should expand the mind of man, and connect 
 him to a sympathy with general existence, are crushed in 
 the absorbing considerations of food to be obtained for the 
 family. Beyond the price of bread, news is senseless and 
 impertinent. At home there is no larder. Here there is 
 at least a show of plenty ; and while he cooks his lean 
 scrap of butcher's meat before the common bars, or 
 
■MS 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 233 
 
 munches his humbler cold viands, his relishing bread 
 and cheese with an onion, in a corner, where no one 
 reflects upon his poverty, he has a sight of the sub- 
 stantial joint providing for the landlord and his family. 
 He takes an interest in the dressing of it ; and while 
 he assists in removing the trivet from the fire, he feels 
 that there is such a thing as beef and cabbage, which 
 he was beginning to forget at home. All this while 
 he deserts his wife and children. But what wife, and 
 what children? Prosperous men, who object to this 
 desertion, image to themselves some clean contented 
 family like that which they go home to. But look 
 at the countenance of the poor wives who follow and 
 persecute their good man to the door of the public 
 house, which he is about to enter, when something like 
 shame would restrain him, if stronger misery did not 
 induce him to pass the threshold. That face, ground 
 by want, in which every cheerful, every conversable 
 lineament has been long effaced by misery, — is that a 
 face to stay at home with ? is it more a woman, or a 
 wild cat ? alas ! it is the face of the wife of his youth, 
 that once smiled upon him. It can smile no longer. 
 What comforts can it share? what burthens can it 
 lighten ? Oh, 'tis a fine thing to talk of the humble 
 meal shared together ! But what if there be no bread 
 in the cupboard? The innocent prattle of his children 
 takes out the sting of a man's poverty. But the children 
 of the very poor do not prattle. It is none of the least 
 frightful features in that condition, that there is no child- 
 ishness in its dwellings. Poor people, said a sensible old 
 nurse to us once, do not bring up their children ; they 
 drag them up. The little careless darling of the wealthier 
 nursery, in their hovel is transformed betimes into a prema- 
 ture reflecting person. No one has time to dandle it, no 
 
 I 
 
234 
 
 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 one thinks it worth while to coax it, to soothe it, to toss 
 it up and down, to humour it. There is none to kiss 
 away its tears. If it cries, it can only be beaten. It has 
 been prettily said that ''a babe is fed with milk and 
 praise." But the aliment of this poor babe was thin, 
 unnourishing ; the return to its little baby-tricks, and 
 efforts to engage attention, bitter ceaseless objurgation. 
 It never had a toy, or knew what a coral meant. It 
 grew up without the lullaby of nurses, it was a stranger to 
 the patient fondle, the hushing caress, the attracting 
 novelty, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper off-hand 
 contrivance to divert the child ; the prattled nonsense (best 
 sense to it), the wise impertinencies, the wholesome lies, 
 the apt story interposed, that puts a stop to present suffer- 
 ings, and awakens the passion of young wonder. It was 
 never sung to — no one ever told to it a tale of the nursery. 
 It was dragged up, to live or to die as it happened. It had 
 no young dreams. It broke at once into the iron realities 
 of life. A child exists not for the very poor as any 
 object of dalliance ; it is only another mouth to be fed, 
 a pair of little hands to be betimes inured to labour. It 
 is the rival, till it can be the co-operator, for food with 
 the parent. It is never his mirth, his diversion, his 
 solace ; it never makes him young again, with recalling 
 his young times. The children of the very poor have 
 no young times. It makes the very heart to bleed to 
 overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and 
 her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a 
 condition rather above the squalid beings which we have 
 been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery books, 
 of summer holidays (fitting that age) ; of the promised 
 sight, or play ; of praised sufficiency at school. It is 
 of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, 
 or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 235 
 
 It has learned to go to market. 
 
 be the very out-pourings of curiosity in idleness, are 
 marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It 
 has come to be a woman, — before it was a child. It 
 has learned to go to market ; it chaffers, it haggles, it 
 
236 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 envies, it murmurs ; it is knowing, acute, sharpened ; it 
 never prattles. Had we not reason to say, that the home 
 of the very poor is no home ? 
 
 There is yet another home, which we are constrained 
 to deny to be one. It has a larder, which the home of 
 the poor man wants ; its fireside conveniences, of which 
 the poor dream not. But with all this, it is no home. 
 It is — the house of the man that is infested with many 
 visitors. May we be branded for the veriest churl, if 
 we deny our heart to the many noble-hearted friends 
 that at times exchange their dwelling for our poor roof! 
 It is not of guests that we complain, but of endless, 
 purposeless visitants ; droppers in, as they are called. 
 We sometimes wonder from what sky they fall. It is 
 the very error of the position of our lodging ; its horo- 
 scopy was ill calculated, being just situate in a medium 
 — a plaguy suburban midspace — fitted to catch idlers from 
 town or country. We are older than we were, and age 
 is easily put out of its way. We have fewer sands in 
 our glass to reckon upon, and we cannot brook to see 
 them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences. At 
 our time of life, to be alone sometimes is as needful as 
 sleep. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. The grow- 
 ing infirmities of age manifest themselves in nothing more 
 strongly, than in an inveterate dislike of interruption. 
 The thing which we are doing, we wish to be permitted 
 to do. We have neither much knowledge nor devices ; 
 but there are fewer in the place to which we hasten. 
 We are not willingly put out of our way, even at a 
 game of nine-pins. While youth was, we had vast 
 reversions in time future ; we are reduced to a present 
 pittance, and obliged to economise in that article. We 
 bleed away our moments now as hardly as our ducats. 
 We cannot bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten and 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 237 
 
 fretted into by moths. We are willing to barter our 
 good time with a friend, who gives us in exchange his 
 own. Herein is the distinction between the genuine 
 guest and the visitant. This latter takes your good 
 time, and gives you his bad in exchange. The guest 
 is domestic to you as your good cat, or household bird ; 
 the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at your window, and 
 out again, leaving nothing but a sense of disturbance, and 
 victuals spoiled. The inferior functions of life begin to 
 move heavily. We cannot concoct our food with inter- 
 ruptions. Our chief meal, to be nutritive, must be 
 solitary. With difficulty we can eat before a guest; 
 and never understood what the relish of public feasting 
 meant. Meats have no sapor, nor digestion fair play, 
 in a crowd. The unexpected coming in of a visitant 
 stops the machine. There is a punctual generation who 
 time their calls to the precise commencement of your 
 dining-hour — not to eat — but to see you eat. Our knife 
 and fork drop instinctively, and we feel that we have 
 swallowed our latest morsel. Others again show their 
 genius, as we have said, in knocking the moment you 
 have just sat down to a book. They have a peculiar 
 compassionate sneer, with which they "hope that they 
 do not interrupt your studies." Though they flutter oflF 
 the next moment, to carry their impertinences to the 
 nearest student that they can call their friend, the tone 
 of the book is spoiled ; we shut the leaves, and, with 
 Dante's lovers, read no more that day. It were well 
 if the eflTect of intrusion were simply co-extensive with 
 its presence ; but it mars all the good hours afterwards. 
 These scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes 
 not hastily. " It is a prostitution of the bravery of friend- 
 ship," says worthy Bishop Taylor, " to spend it upon im- 
 pertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their families, 
 
 r 
 
238 
 
 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 but can never ease my loads." This is the secret of their 
 gaddings, their visits, and morning calls. They too have 
 homes, which are — no homes. 
 
 XIIL 
 
 THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME AND LOVE MY DOG. 
 
 " Good sir, or madam, as it may be — we most willingly 
 embrace the offer of your friendship. We have long known 
 your excellent qualities. We have wished to have you 
 nearer to us ; to hold you within the very innermost fold 
 of our heart. We can have no reserve towards a person 
 of your open and noble nature. The frankness of your 
 humour suits us exactly. We have been long looking for 
 such a friend. Quick — let us disburthen our troubles into 
 each other's bosom — let us make our single joys shine by 
 reduplication — ^xit yapy yap^ yap/ what is this confounded 
 cur ? he has fastened his tooth, which is none of the 
 bluntest, just in the fleshy part of my leg." 
 
 " It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. 
 Here, Test— Test— Test ! " 
 
 " But he has bitten me." 
 
 " Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better ac- 
 quainted with him. I have had him three years. He 
 never bites me." 
 
 Tapy yapy yap I — " He is at it again." 
 
 " Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like 
 to be kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with all 
 the respect due to myself." 
 
 " But do you always take him out with you, when you 
 go a friendship-hunting ? " 
 
 Invariably. 'Tis the sweetest, prettiest, best-con- 
 ditioned animal, 1 call him my test — the touchstone by 
 
POPULAR .FALLACIES 239 
 
 which I try a friend. No one can properly be said to 
 love me, who does not love him.'* 
 
 "Excuse us, dear sir — or madam aforesaid — if upon 
 further consideration we are obliged to decline the other- 
 wise invaluable offer of your friendship. We do not like 
 dogs'' 
 
 " Mighty well, sir — you know the conditions — you 
 may have worse offers. Come along. Test." 
 
 The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, in 
 the intercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions of 
 breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason of these 
 canine appendages. They do not always come in the 
 shape of dogs ; they sometimes wear the more plausible 
 and human character of kinsfolk, near acquaintances, my 
 friend's friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. We 
 could never yet form a friendship — not to speak of more 
 delicate correspondences — however much to our taste, 
 without the intervention of some third anomaly, some 
 impertinent clog affixed to the relation — the understood 
 dog in the proverb. The good things of life are not to 
 be had singly, but come to us with a mixture ; like a 
 schoolboy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it. 
 What a delightful companion is * if he did not 
 always bring his tall cousin with him ! He seems to 
 grow with him ; like some of those double births which 
 we remember to have read of with such wonder and 
 delight in the old " Athenian Oracle," where Swift com- 
 menced author by writing Pindaric Odes (what a be- 
 ginning for him ! ) upon Sir William Temple. There 
 is the picture of the brother, with the little brother peep- 
 ing out at his shoulder ; a species of fraternity, which we 
 have no name of kin close enough to comprehend. When 
 * * * comes, poking in his head and shoulder into 
 your room, as if to feel his entry, you think, surely you 
 
240 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 have now got him to yourself — what a three-hours' chat 
 we shall have ! — but ever in the haunch of him, and 
 before his diffident body is well disclosed in your apart- 
 ment, appears the haunting shadow of the cousin, over- 
 peering his modest kinsman, and sure to overlay the 
 expected good talk with his insufferable procerity of 
 stature, and uncorresponding dwarfish ness of observation. 
 Misfortunes seldom come alone. 'Tis hard when a bless- 
 ing comes accompanied. Cannot we like Sempronia, 
 without sitting down to chess with her eternal brother ? 
 or know Sulpicia, without knowing all the round of her 
 card-playing relations ? must my friend's brethren of 
 necessity be mine also ? must we be hand and glove 
 with Dick Selby the parson, or Jack Selby the calico- 
 printer, because W. S. who is neither, but a ripe wit 
 and a critic, has the misfortune to claim a common 
 parentage with them ? Let him lay down his brothers ; 
 and 'tis odds but we will cast him in a pair of ours 
 (we have a superflux) to balance the concession. Let 
 F. H. lay down his garrulous uncle ; and Honorius 
 dismiss his vapid wife, and superfluous establishment of 
 six boys : things between boy and manhood — too ripe 
 for play, too raw for conversation — that come in, im- 
 pudently staring their father's old friend out of coun- 
 tenance; and will neither aid, nor let alone, the con- 
 ference : that we may once more meet upon equal 
 terms, as we were wont to do in the disengaged state 
 of bachelorhood. 
 
 It is well if your friend, or mistress, be content with 
 these canicular probations. Few young ladies but in this 
 sense keep a dog. But when Rutilia hounds at you her 
 tiger aunt ; or Ruspina expects you to cherish and fondle 
 her viper sister, whom she has preposterously taken into 
 her bosom, to try stinging conclusions upon your con- 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 241 
 
 Superfluous establishment of six boys^ 
 
 stancy ; they must not complain if the house be rather 
 thin of suitors. ScyIJa must have broken off many 
 excellent matches in her time, if she insisted upon all, 
 that loved her, loving her dogs also. 
 
 An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, 
 of Delia Cruscan memory. In tender youth, he loved 
 and courted a modest appanage to the Opera, in truth 
 a dancer, who had won him by the artless contrast 
 between her manners and situation. She seemed to 
 him a native violet, that had been transplanted by some 
 rude accident into that exotic and artificial hotbed. 
 Nor, in truth, was she less genuine and sincere than 
 she appeared to him. He wooed and won this flower. 
 Only for appearance' sake, and for due honour to the 
 bride's relations, she craved that she might have the 
 attendance of her friends and kindred at the approach- 
 ing solemnity. The request was too amiable not to be 
 
242 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 conceded : and in this solicitude for conciliating the 
 good-will of mere relations, he found a presage of 
 her superior attentions to himself, when the golden 
 shaft should have " killed the flock of all affections 
 else." The morning came : and at the Star and Garter, 
 Richmond — the place appointed for the breakfasting — 
 accompanied with one English friend, he impatiently 
 awaited what reinforcements the bride should bring to 
 grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had made. 
 They came in six coaches — the whole corps du ballet — 
 French, Italian, men and women. Monsieur De B., 
 the famous pirouetter of the day, led his fair spouse, 
 but craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The Prima 
 Donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second 
 Buffa were there; and Signor Sc — , and Signora Ch — , 
 and Madame V — , with a countless cavalcade besides 
 of chorusers, figurantes, at the sight of whom Merry 
 afterwards declared, that " then for the first time it 
 struck him seriously that he was about to marry — a 
 dancer.'' But there was no help for it. Besides, it 
 was her day ; these were, in fact, her friends and 
 kinsfolk. The assemblage, though whimsical, was all 
 very natural. But when the bride — handing out of 
 the last coach a still more extraordinary figure than 
 the rest — presented to him as her father — the gentle- 
 man that was to give her away — no less a person than 
 Signor Delpini himself — with a sort of pride, as much 
 as to say, See what I have brought to do us honour ! 
 — the thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite 
 overcame him ; and slipping away under some pretence 
 from the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry 
 took horse from the back yard to the nearest sea-coast, 
 from which, shipping himself to America, he shortly 
 after consoled himself with a more congenial match 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 243 
 
 in the person of Miss Brunton ; relieved from his in- 
 tended clown father, and a bevy of painted BufFas for 
 bridemaids. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK. 
 
 At what precise minute that little airy musician dofFs 
 his night gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable 
 matins, we are not naturalists enough to determine. 
 But for a mere human gentleman — that has no orchestra 
 business to call him from his warm bed to such pre- 
 posterous exercises — we take ten, or half after ten 
 (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice), to 
 be the very earliest hour, at which he can begin to 
 think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we 
 say ; for to do it in earnest, requires another half- 
 hour's good consideration. Not but there are pretty 
 sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gawds, abroad 
 in the world, in summer time especially, some hours 
 before what we have assigned ; which a gentleman may 
 see, as they say, only for getting up. But, having 
 been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist 
 at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. 
 We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's courtiers, 
 to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours 
 of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observ- 
 ances ; which have in them, besides, something Pagan and 
 Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our usual 
 hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called), to go a 
 journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but 
 we suflPered for it all the long hours after in listlessness 
 and headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her 
 
 1^ \ 
 
244 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail 
 waking courses by the measures of that celestial and 
 sleepless traveller. We deny not that there is some- 
 thing sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in 
 these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the 
 start of a lazy world ; to conquer death by proxy in his 
 image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us ; 
 and we pay usually in strange qualms before night falls, the 
 penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the 
 busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, 
 are already up and about their occupations, content to 
 have swallowed their sleep by wholesale ; we choose to 
 linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very time 
 to recombine the wandering images, which night in a 
 confused mass presented ; to snatch them from forget- 
 fulness ; to shape, and mould them. Some people have 
 no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp 
 them too grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to 
 chew the cud of a foregone vision ; to collect the 
 scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, 
 with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies ; to 
 drag into day-light a struggling and half-vanishing 
 night-mare ; to handle and examine the terrors, or 
 the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these 
 spiritual communications, to let them go so lightly. 
 We are not so stupid, or so careless, as that Imperial 
 forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to 
 remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to 
 have as much significance as our waking concerns ; or 
 rather to import us more nearly, as* more nearly we 
 approach by years to the shadowy world, whither we 
 are hastening. We have shaken hands with the world's 
 business ; we have done with it ; we have discharged 
 ourself of it. Why should we get up ? we have neither 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 245 
 
 suit to solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has 
 shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have nothing 
 here to expect, but in a short time a sick bed, and a 
 dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such 
 shadows as night affords. We are already half ac- 
 quainted with ghosts. We were never much in the 
 world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil be- 
 tween us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed 
 grey before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world 
 already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas 
 are composed. We have asked no more of life than 
 what the mimic images in play-houses present us with. 
 Even those types have waxed fainter. Our clock appears 
 to have struck. We are superannuated. In this dearth 
 of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with 
 shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The 
 abstracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to 
 that spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time, we 
 expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little of 
 the usages of that colony ; to learn the language, and the 
 faces we shall meet with there, that we niay be the less 
 awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly 
 call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of 
 their dark companionship. Therefore, we cherish dreams. 
 We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible 
 world ; and think we know already, how it shall be 
 with us. Those uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to 
 flesh and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. We 
 feel attenuated into their meagre essences, and have given 
 the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal being. We 
 once thought life to be something ; but it has unaccount- 
 ably fallen from us before its time. Therefore we choose 
 to dally with visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to 
 light us to. Why should we get up ? 
 
246 
 
 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 XV. 
 
 THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB. 
 
 We could never quite understand the philosophy of this 
 arrangement, or the wisdom of our ancestors in sending us 
 for instruction to these woolly bedfellows. A sheep, when 
 it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, and 
 sleep if he can. Man found out long sixes. — Hail candle- 
 light i without disparagement to sun or moon, the kindliest 
 luminary of the three — if we may not rather style thee 
 their radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon ! — We 
 love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by candle- 
 light. They are every body's sun and moon. This is 
 our peculiar and household planet. Wanting it, what 
 savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, 
 wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses ! They 
 must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the 
 dark. What repartees could have passed, when you 
 must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neigh- 
 bour's cheek to be sure that he understood it ? This 
 accounts for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a 
 sombre cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the 
 tradition of those unlantern'd nights. Jokes came in 
 with candles. We wonder how they saw to pick up a 
 pin, if they had any. How did they sup ? what a melange 
 of chance carving they must have made of it ! — here one 
 had got the leg of a goat, when he wanted a horse's 
 shoulder — there another had dipt his scooped palm in a 
 kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's 
 milk. There is neither good eating nor drinking in 
 fresco. Who, even in these civilised times, has never 
 experienced this, when at some economic table he has 
 commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the flavour 
 
MS 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 till the lights came ? The senses absolutely give and 
 take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the 
 dark ? or distinguish Sherris from pure Malaga ? Take 
 away the candle from the smoking man ; by the glimmer- 
 ing of the left ashes, he knows that he is still smoking, 
 but he knows it only by an inference ; till the restored 
 light, coming in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses 
 the full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs ! how 
 he burnishes ! — There is absolutely no such thing as 
 reading, but by a candle. We have tried the affectation 
 of a book at noon-day in gardens, and sultry arbours ; 
 but it was labour thrown away. Those gay motes in 
 the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so 
 many coquettes, that will have you all to their self, and 
 are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, 
 the writer digests his meditations. By the same light, 
 we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the 
 flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all that is reported of 
 the influential Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its 
 birth to the sun's light. They are abstracted works — 
 
 Things that were born, when none but the still night, 
 And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes." 
 
 Marry, daylight — daylight might furnish the images, the 
 crude material ; but for the fine shapings, the true turn- 
 ing and filing (as mine author hath it), they must be 
 content to hold their inspiration of the candle. The 
 mild internal light, that reveals them, like fires on the 
 domestic hearth, goes out on the sun-shine. Night and 
 silence call out the starry fancies. Milton's Morning 
 Hymn in Paradise, we would hold a good wager, was 
 penned at midnight; and Taylor's rich description of a 
 sunrise smells decidedly of the taper. Even ourself, in 
 these our humbler lucubrations, tune our best measured 
 
250 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 cadences (Prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to 
 the charm of the drowsier watchman, " blessing the 
 doors ; or the wild sweeps of wind at midnight. Even 
 now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted, 
 courts our endeavours. We would indite something 
 about the Solar System. — Betty^ bring the candles, 
 
 XVL 
 
 THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE. 
 
 We grant that it is, and a very serious one — to a 
 man's friends, and to all that have to do with him ; but 
 whether the condition of the man himself is so much to 
 be deplored may admit of a question. We can speak a 
 little to it, being ourself but lately recovered — we whisper 
 it in confidence, reader — out of a long and desperate fit 
 of the sullen. Was the cure a blessing ? The con- 
 viction which wrought it, came too clearly to leave a 
 scruple of the fanciful injuries — for they were mere 
 fancies — which had provoked the humour. But the 
 humour itself was too self-pleasing, while it lasted — we 
 know how bare we lay ourself in the confession — to be 
 abandoned all at once with the grounds of it. We still 
 brood over wrongs which we know to have been ima- 
 ginary ; and for our old acquaintance, N , whom we 
 
 find to be a truer friend than we took him for, we sub- 
 stitute some phantom — a Caius or Titius — as like him as 
 we dare to form it, to wreak our yet unsatisfied resent- 
 ments on. It is mortifying to fall at once from the 
 pinnacle of neglect ; to forego the idea of having been 
 ill-used and contumaciously treated by an old friend. 
 The first thing to aggrandise a man in his own conceit, is 
 to conceive of himself as neglected. There let him fix if 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 e /-Street 
 
 A serious misfortune to a man's friends ^ 
 
 he can. To undeceive him is to deprive him of the 
 most tickling morsel within the range of self-complacency. 
 No flattery can come near it. Happy is he who suspects 
 his friend of an injustice ; but supremely blest, who 
 thinks all his friends in a conspiracy to depress and 
 undervalue him. There is a pleasure (we sing not to 
 the profane) far beyond the reach of all that the world 
 counts joy — a deep, enduring satisfaction in the depths, 
 where the superficial seek it not, of discontent. Were we 
 to recite one half of this mystery, — which we were let 
 into by our late dissatisfaction, all the world would be 
 in love with disrespect ; we should wear a slight for a 
 bracelet, and neglects and contumacies would be the 
 only matter for courtship. Unlike to that mysterious 
 book in the Apocalypse, the study of this mystery 
 is unpalatable only in the commencement. The first 
 sting of a suspicion is grievous ; but wait — out of that 
 wound, which to flesh and blood seemed so difficult, 
 
252 
 
 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 there is balm and honey to be extracted. Your friend 
 passed you on such or such a day — having in his company 
 one that you conceived worse than ambiguously disposed 
 towards you, — passed you in the street without notice. 
 To be sure he is something short-sighted ; and it was in 
 your power to have accosted him. But facts and sane 
 inferences are trifles to a true adept in the science of 
 
 dissatisfaction. He must have seen you ; and S , 
 
 who was with him, must have been the cause of the 
 contempt. It galls you, and well it may. But have 
 patience. Go home, and make the worst of it, and you 
 are a made man from this time. Shut yourself up, and 
 — rejecting, as an enemy to your peace, every whispering 
 suggestion that but insinuates there may be a mistake — 
 reflect seriously upon the many lesser instances which 
 you had begun to perceive, in proof of your friend's dis- 
 affection towards you. None of them singly was much 
 to the purpose, but the aggregate weight is positive ; and 
 you have this last affront to clench them. Thus far the 
 process is anything but agreeable. But now to your relief 
 comes in the comparative faculty. You conjure up all 
 the kind feelings you have had for your friend ; what 
 you have been to him, and what you would have been to 
 him, if he would have suflxred you ; how you defended 
 him in this or that place ; and his good name — his literary 
 reputation, and so forth, was always dearer to you than 
 your own ! Your heart, spite of itself, yearns towards 
 him. You could weep tears of blood but for a restraining 
 pride. How say you ? do you not yet begin to apprehend 
 a comfort? some allay of sweetness in the bitter waters? 
 Stop not here, nor penuriously cheat yourself of your 
 reversions. — You are on vantage ground. Enlarge your 
 speculations, and take in the rest of your friends, as a 
 spark kindles more sparks. Was there one among them, 
 
POPULAR FALLACIES 253 
 
 who has not to you proved hollow, false, slippery as 
 I water ? Begin to think that the relation itself is incon- 
 sistent with mortality. That the very idea of friendship, 
 with its component parts, as honour, fidelity, steadiness, 
 f exists but in your single bosom. Image yourself to your- 
 self, as the only possible friend in a world incapable of 
 that communion. Now the gloom thickens. The little 
 star of self-love twinkles, that is to encourage you through 
 deeper glooms than this. You are not yet at the half 
 point of your elevation. You are not yet, believe me, 
 half sulky enough. Adverting to the world in general, 
 (as these circles in the mind will spread to infinity) 
 reflect with what strange injustice you have been treated 
 in quarters where (setting gratitude and the expectation 
 of friendly returns aside as chimeras), you pretended no 
 claim beyond justice, the naked due of all men. Think 
 the very idea of right and fit fled from the earth, or 
 your breast the solitary receptacle of it, till you have 
 swelled yourself into at least one hemisphere the other being 
 the vast Arabia Stony of your friends and the world afore- 
 said. To grow bigger every moment in your own conceit, 
 and the world to lessen ; to deify yourself at the expense 
 of your species ; to judge the world — this is the acme and 
 supreme point of your mystery — these the true Pleasures 
 of SuLKiNEss. We profess no more of this grand secret 
 than what ourself experimented on one rainy afternoon in 
 the last week, sulking in our study. We had proceeded 
 to the penultimate point, at which the true adept seldom 
 stops, where the consideration of benefit forgot is about 
 to merge in the meditation of general injustice — when a 
 knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the 
 very friend, whose not seeing of us in the morning (for 
 we will now confess the case our own), an accidental 
 oversight, had given rise to so much agreeable generalisa- 
 
254 POPULAR FALLACIES 
 
 tion ! To mortify us still more, and take down the 
 whole flattering superstructure which pride had piled upon 
 
 neglect, he had brought in his hand the identical S , 
 
 in whose favour we had suspected him of the contumacy. 
 Asservations were needless, where the frank manner of 
 them both was convictive of the injurious nature of the 
 suspicion. We fancied that they perceived our em- 
 barrasdment ; but were too proud, or something else, to 
 confess to the secret of it. We had been but too lately 
 in the condition of the noble patient in Argos : — 
 
 Qui se credebat miros audire tragcedos, 
 In vacuo laetus sessor plausorque theatre — 
 
 and could have exclaimed with equal reason against the 
 friendly hands that cured us — 
 
 Pol, me occidistis, amici, 
 Non servastis, ait ; cui sic extorta voluptas, 
 Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error 
 
 THE END.