THE BED-BOOK OF HAPPINESS
THEISSE
[Sidenote: Richter]
In his seventy-second year his face is a thanksgiving for his former life, and a love-letter to all mankind.
RICHTER
[Sidenote: Carlyle]
We have heard that he was a man universally loved, as well as honoured … a friendly, true, and high-minded man; copious in speech, which was full of grave, genuine humour; contented with simple people and simple pleasures; and himself of the simplest habits and wishes.
BROKEN STUDIES
[Sidenote: Richter]
I deny myself my evening meal in my eagerness to work; but the interruptions by my children I cannot deny myself.
THE GREAT CONDÉ
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
The Great Condé passing through the city of Sens, which belonged to Burgundy, and of which he was the governor, took great pleasure in disconcerting the different companies who came to compliment him. The Abbé Boileau, brother of the poet, was commissioned to make a speech to the Prince at the head of the chapter. Condé wishing to disconcert the orator, advanced his head and large nose towards the Abbé, as if with the intention of hearing him more distinctly, but in reality to make him blunder if possible. The Abbé, who perceived his design, pretended to be greatly embarrassed, and thus began his speech: "My lord, your highness ought not to be surprised to see me tremble, when I appear before you at the head of a company of ecclesiastics; were I at the head of an army of thirty thousand men, I should tremble much more." The Prince was so charmed with this sally that he embraced the orator without suffering him to proceed. He asked his name; and when he found that he was brother to M. Despreaux, he redoubled his attentions, and invited him to dinner.
The Prince on another occasion thought himself offended by the Abbé de Voisenon; Voisenon, hearing of this, went to Court to exculpate himself. As soon as the Prince saw him he turned away from him. "Thank God!" said Voisenon, "I have been misinformed, sir; your highness does not treat me as if I were an enemy." "How do you see that, M. Abbé?" said his highness coldly over his shoulder. "Because, sir," answered the Abbé, "your highness never turns your back upon an enemy." "My dear Abbé," exclaimed the Prince and Field-Marshal, turning round and taking him by the hand, "it is quite impossible for any man to be angry with you."
A CLASSICAL ASS
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
The ass, though the dullest of all unlaughing animals, is reported to have once accomplished a great feat in the way of exciting laughter. Marcus Crassus, the grandfather of the hero of that name, who fell in the Parthian War, was a person of such immovable gravity of countenance that, in the whole course of his life, he was never known to laugh but once, and hence was surnamed Agelastus. Not all that the wittiest men of his time could say, nor aught that comedy or farce could produce on the stage, was ever known to call up more than a smile on his iron-bound countenance. Happening one day, however, to stray into the fields, he espied an ass browsing on thistles; and in this there appears to have been something so eminently ridiculous in those days that the man who never laughed before could not help laughing at it outright. It was but the burst of a moment; Agelastus immediately recovered himself, and never laughed again.
MEMORY
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
A player being reproached by Rich for having forgot some of the words in "The Beggar's Opera," on the fifty-third night of its performance, cried out, "What! do you think one can remember a thing for ever?"
"COME IN HERE"
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
Burton, in his "Melancholy," quoting from Poggius, the Florentine, tells us of a physician in Milan who kept a house for the reception of lunatics, and, by way of cure, used to make his patients stand for a length of time in a pit of water, some up to the knees, some to the girdle, and others as high as the chin, pro modo insaniæ, according as they were more or less affected. An inmate of this establishment, who happened, "by chance," to be pretty well recovered, was standing at the door of the house, and, seeing a gallant cavalier ride past with a hawk on his fist, and his spaniels after him, he must needs ask what all these preparations meant. The cavalier answered, "To kill game." "What may the game be worth which you kill in the course of a year?" rejoined the patient. "About five or ten crowns." "And what may your horse, dogs, and hawks stand you in?" "Four hundred crowns more." On hearing this, the patient with great earnestness of manner, bade the cavalier instantly begone, as he valued his life and welfare; "For," said he, "if our master come and find you here, he will put you into his pit up to the very chin."
A POPE INNOCENT
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
When King James I. visited Sir Thomas Pope, knt., in Oxfordshire, his lady had lately brought him a daughter, and the babe was presented to the King with a paper of verses in her hand; "Which," quoth Fuller, "as they pleased the King, I hope they will please the reader."
See, this little mistress here,
Did never sit in Peter's chair,
Or a triple crown did wear,
And yet she is a Pope.
No benefice she ever sold,
Nor did dispense with sins for gold,
She hardly is a se'nnight old,
And yet she is a Pope.
No king her feet did ever kiss,
Or had from her worse look than this;
Nor did she ever hope
To saint one with a rope,
And yet she is a Pope.
A female Pope you'll say, a second Joan!
No, sure she is Pope Innocent, or none!
A GOOD PARAPHRASE
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
On the eve of a battle an officer came to ask permission of the Maréchal de Toiras to go and see his father, who was on his death-bed. "Go," said the general, "you honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land."
IRISH PRIEST
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
An Irish peasant complained to the Catholic priest of his parish that some person had stolen his best pig, and supplicated his reverence to help him to the discovery of the thief. The priest promised his best endeavours; and, his inquiries soon leading him to a correct enough guess as to the offender, he took the following amusing method of bringing the matter home to him. Next Sunday, after the service of the day, he called out with a loud voice, fixing his eyes on the suspected individual, "Who stole Pat Doolan's pig?" There was a long pause, and no answer; he did not expect that there would be any; and descended from the pulpit without saying a word more. A second Sunday arriving without the pig being restored in the interval, his reverence, again looking steadfastly at the stubborn purloiner and throwing a deep note of anger into the tone of his voice, repeated the question. "Who stole Pat Doolan's pig? I say, who stole poor Pat Doolan's pig?" Still there was no answer, and the question was left as before, to work its effect in secret on the conscience of the guilty individual. The hardihood of the offender, however, exceeded all the honest priest's calculations. A third Sunday arrived, and Pat Doolan was still without his pig. Some stronger measure now became necessary. After service was performed his reverence, dropping the question of "Who stole Pat Doolan's pig?" but still without directly accusing any one of the theft, reproachfully exclaimed, "Jimmie Doran! Jimmie Doran! you trate me with contimpt." Jimmie Doran hung down his head, and next morning the pig was found at the door of Pat Doolan's cabin.
A DIGRESSION
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
The celebrated Henderson, the actor, was seldom known to be in a passion. When at Oxford, he was one day debating with a fellow student, who, not keeping his temper, threw a glass of wine in his face. Mr. Henderson took out his handkerchief, wiped his face, and coolly said, "That, sir, was a digression; now for the argument."
FORTUNE-TELLER
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
A fortune-teller was arrested at his theatre of divination, al fresco, at the corner of the rue de Bussy in Paris, and carried before the tribunal of correctional police. "You know to read the future?" said the president, a man of great wit, but too fond of a joke for a magistrate. "In this case," said the judge, "you know the judgment we intend to pronounce." "Certainly." "Well, what will happen to you?" "Nothing." "You are sure of it?" "You will acquit me." "Acquit you!" "There is no doubt of it." "Why?" "Because, sir, if it had been your intention to condemn me, you would not have added irony to misfortune." The president, disconcerted, turned to his brother judges, and the sorcerer was acquitted.
GASCONADES
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
A Gascon, passing one night through a churchyard, thought he saw a spectre drawing forth his sword. He called out aloud, "Aha! do you want to be killed a second time? I am your man."
Another hero of the same country used to say that he could not look into a mirror without being afraid of himself.
When Robespierre had been guillotined at Paris, a Gascon officer in the
French army thus expressed the dread he had entertained of that tyrant:
"As often as the name of Robespierre was mentioned to me, I used to take
off my hat, in order to see if my head was in it."
TRIBUTE TO BEAUTY
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
As the late beautiful Duchess of Devonshire was one day stepping out of her carriage, a dustman, who was accidentally standing by, and was about to regale himself with his accustomed whiff of tobacco, caught a glance of her countenance, and instantly exclaimed, "Love and bless you, my lady, let me light my pipe in your eyes!" It is said the duchess was so delighted with this compliment that she frequently afterwards checked the strain of adulation, which was so constantly offered to her charms, by saying, "Oh! after the dustman's compliment, all others are insipid."
BEGGING QUARTER
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
A French regiment at the battle of Spires had orders to give no quarter.
A German officer, being taken, begged his life. The Frenchman replied,
"Sir, you may ask me for any other favour; but, as for your life, it is
impossible for me to grant it."
GASCON REPROVED
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
A descendant of a family in Gascony, celebrated for its flow of language and love of talking, and not for any deeds of glory, descanted before a numerous company upon the well-known bravery of his ancestors and relations. He then, to show that the race had not degenerated, modestly launched into a faithful description of his own battles, duels, and successes. He was once, he said, a passenger on board a French frigate during the war, and, falling in with an English squadron composed of three seventy-fours, fought with them for five hours, when luckily, the ship taking fire, he was blown up, with ten of his countrymen, and dropped into one of the seventy-fours, the crew of which laid down their arms and surrendered; while the two remaining men-of-war, struck with dismay at the sight of one of their ships in the possession of the enemy, crowded sails and ran away!
Such were his faithful accounts, with which he would still have continued to annoy the company, had not one of his countrymen, more enlightened, frankly acknowledged the natural propensity which leads the inhabitants of Gascony to revel in imaginary scenes, resolved to awe him into silence, and thus addressed him: "All your exploits are mere commonplace, in comparison to those which I have achieved; and I will relate a single one that surpasses all yours."
The babbler opened his ears, no doubt secretly intending to appropriate this story to himself in future time, when none of the hearers should be present, and modestly owned, that all those he had mentioned were mere children's tricks, performed without any exertion, but that he had some in store which might shine unobscured by the side of the most brilliant deeds of ancient ages.
"One evening," said the other, "as I was returning to town from the country, I had to pass through a narrow lane, well known for being infested with highwaymen. My horse was in good order, my pistols loaded, and my broadsword hung at my side; I entered the lane without any apprehension. Scarcely had I reached the middle when a loud shout behind me made me turn my head, and I saw a man with a short gun running fast towards me. I was going to face him with my horse, when two men with large cudgels in their hands, rushing from the hedge, seized the reins, and threatened me with instant death. Undaunted, I took my two pistols; but, before I had time to fire, one was knocked out of my hand, the other went off, and one of the robbers fell. I then drew my sword, and, though bruised by the blows I had received, struck with all my might, and split the head of the other in two. Freed from my danger on their side, I attempted a second time to turn my horse." Here he paused a while; and our babbler, longing to know the end of this adventure, exclaimed, "And the third!" "Oh, the third!" answered the other; "he shot me dead."
ABSENT MAN
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
A celebrated living poet, occasionally a little absent in mind, was invited by a friend, whom he met in the street, to dine with him the next Sunday at a country lodging, which he had taken for the summer months. The address was, "near the Green Man at Dulwich"; which, not to put his inviter to the trouble of pencilling down, the absent man promised faithfully to remember. But when Sunday came, he, fully late enough, made his way to Greenwich, and began inquiring for the sign of the Dull Man! No such sign was to be found; and, after losing an hour, a person guessed that though there was no Dull Man at Greenwich, there was a Green Man at Dulwich, which the absent man might possibly mean! This remark connected the broken chain, and the poet was under the necessity of taking his chop by himself.
PRIDE
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
A Spaniard rising from a fall, whereby his nose had suffered considerably, exclaimed, "Voto, a tal, esto es caminar por la turru!" (This comes of walking upon earth!)
WITTY COWARD
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
A French marquis having received several blows with a stick, which he never thought of resenting, a friend asked him, "How he could reconcile it with his honour to suffer them to pass without notice?" "Poh!" replied the marquis, "I never trouble my head with anything that passes behind my back."
VALUING BEAUTY
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
The Persian Ambassador, Mirza Aboul Hassan, while he resided in Paris was an object of so much curiosity that he could not go out without being surrounded by a multitude of gazers, and the ladies even ventured so far as to penetrate his hotel.
On returning one day from a ride, he found his apartments crowded with ladies, all elegantly dressed, but not all equally beautiful. Astonished at this unexpected assemblage, he inquired what these European odalisques could possibly want with him. The interpreter replied that they had come to look at his Excellency. The Ambassador was surprised to find himself an object of curiosity among a people who boast of having attained the acme of civilisation; and was not a little offended at conduct which, in Asia, would have been considered an unwarrantable breach of good-breeding; he accordingly revenged himself by the following little scheme.
The illustrious foreigner affected to be charmed with the ladies; he looked at them attentively alternately, pointing to them with his finger, and speaking with great earnestness to his interpreter, who, he was well aware, would be questioned by his fair visitants; and whom he therefore instructed in the part he was to act. Accordingly, the eldest of the ladies, who, in spite of her age, probably thought herself the prettiest of the whole party, and whose curiosity was particularly excited, after his Excellency had passed through the suite of rooms, coolly inquired what had been the object of his examination? "Madam," replied the interpreter, "I dare not inform you." "But I wish particularly to know, sir." "Indeed, madam, it is impossible!" "Nay, sir, this reserve is vexatious; I desire to know." "Oh! since you desire, madam, know then that his Excellency has been valuing you!" "Valuing us! how, sir?" "Yes, ladies, his Excellency, after the custom of his country, has been setting a price upon each of you!" "Well, that's whimsical enough; and how much may that lady be worth, according to his estimation?" "A thousand crowns." "And the other?" "Five hundred crowns." "And that young lady with fair hair?" "The same price." "And that lady who is painted?" "Fifty crowns." "And pray, sir, what may I be worth in the tariff of his Excellency's good graces?" "Oh, madam, you really must excuse me, I beg." "Come, come, no concealments." "The Prince merely said as he passed you—" "Well, what did he say?" inquired the lady with great eagerness. "He said, madam, that he did not know the small coin of this country."
PRO ARIS ET FOCIS
[Sidenote: Percy Anecdotes]
At the establishment of volunteer corps, a certain corporation agreed to form a body, on condition that they should not be obliged to quit the country. The proposal was submitted to Mr. Pitt; who said he had no objection to the terms, if they would permit him to add, "except, in case of invasion."
THE GENTLE READER
[Sidenote: Anon.]
No British Museum the fisherman needs:
He simply goes down to the river and reeds.
CLERGYMEN AND CHICKENS
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
Why, let me ask, should a hen lay an egg, which egg can become a chicken in about three weeks and a full-grown hen in less than a twelvemonth, while a clergyman and his wife lay no eggs, but give birth to a baby which will take three-and-twenty years before it can become another clergyman? Why should not chickens be born and clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full-grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already beneficed?
MELCHISEDEC
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
He was a really happy man. He was without father, without mother, and without descent. He was an incarnate bachelor. He was a born orphan.
EATING AND PROSELYTISING
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
All eating is a kind of proselytising—a kind of dogmatising—a maintaining that the eater's way of looking at things is better than the eatee's. We convert the food, or try to do so, to our own way of thinking, and, when it sticks to its own opinion and refuses to be converted, we say it disagrees with us. An animal that refuses to let another eat it has the courage of its convictions, and, if it gets eaten, dies a martyr to them….
It is good for the man that he should not be thwarted—that he should have his own way as far, and with as little difficulty, as possible. Cooking is good because it makes matters easier by unsettling the meat's mind and preparing it for new ideas. All food must first be prepared for us by animals and plants, or we cannot assimilate it; and so thoughts are more easily assimilated that have been already digested by other minds. A man should avoid converse with things that have been stunted or starved, and should not eat such meat as has been overdriven or underfed or afflicted with disease, nor should he touch fruit or vegetables that have not been well grown.
Sitting quiet after eating is akin to sitting still during divine service so as not to disturb the congregation. We are catechising and converting our proselytes, and there should be no row. As we get older we must digest more quietly still; our appetite is less, our gastric juices are no longer so eloquent, they have lost that cogent fluency which carried away all that came in contact with it. They have become sluggish and unconciliatory. This is what happens to any man when he suffers from an attack of indigestion.
Or, indeed, any other sickness, is the inarticulate expression of the pain we feel on seeing a proselyte escape us just as we were on the point of converting it.
ASSIMILATION AND PERSECUTION
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
We cannot get rid of persecution; if we feel at all we must persecute something; the mere acts of feeding and growing are acts of persecution. Our aim should be to persecute nothing but such things as are absolutely incapable of resisting us. Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
NIGHT-SHIRTS AND BABIES
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
On Hindhead, last Easter, we saw a family wash hung out to dry. There were papa's two great night-shirts and mamma's two lesser night-gowns, and then the children's smaller articles of clothing and mamma's drawers and the girls' drawers, all full swollen with a strong north-east wind. But mamma's night-gown was not so well pinned on, and, instead of being full of steady wind like the others, kept blowing up and down as though she were preaching wildly. We stood and laughed for ten minutes. The housewife came to the window and wondered at us, but we could not resist the pleasure of watching the absurdly life-like gestures which the night-gowns made. I should like a Santa Famiglia with clothes drying in the background.
A love-story might be told in a series of sketches of the clothes of two families hanging out to dry in adjacent gardens. Then a gentleman's night-shirt from one garden and a lady's night-gown from the other should be shown hanging in a third garden by themselves. By and by there should be added a little night-shirt.
A philosopher might be tempted, on seeing the little night-shirt, to suppose that the big night-shirts had made it. What we do is much the same, for the body of a baby is not much more made by the two old babies, after whose pattern it has cut itself out, than the little night-shirt is made by the big ones. The thing that makes either the little night-shirt or the little baby is something about which we know nothing whatever at all.
DOES MAMMA KNOW?
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
A father was telling his eldest daughter, aged about six, that she had a little sister, and was explaining to her how nice it all was. The child said it was delightful, and added:
"Does mamma know? Let's go and tell her."
CROESUS AND HIS KITCHEN-MAID
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
I want people to see either their cells as less parts of themselves than they do, or their servants as more.
Croesus's kitchen-maid is part of him, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, for she eats what comes from his table, and, being fed of one flesh, are they not brother and sister to one another in virtue of community of nutriment, which is but a thinly veiled travesty of descent? When she eats peas with her knife, he does so too; there is not a bit of bread and butter she puts into her mouth, nor a lump of sugar she drops into her tea, but he knoweth it altogether, though he knows nothing whatever about it. She is en-Croesused and he en-scullery-maided so long as she remains linked to him by the golden chain which passes from his pocket to hers, and which is greatest of all unifiers.
True, neither party is aware of the connection at all as long as things go smoothly. Croesus no more knows the name of, or feels the existence of, his kitchen-maid than a peasant in health knows about his liver; nevertheless, he is awakened to a dim sense of an undefined something when he pays his grocer or his baker. She is more definitely aware of him than he of her, but it is by way of an overshadowing presence rather than a clear and intelligent comprehension. And though Croesus does not eat his kitchen-maid's meals otherwise than vicariously, still to eat vicariously is to eat: the meals so eaten by his kitchen-maid nourish the better ordering of the dinner which nourishes and engenders the better ordering of Croesus himself. He is fed, therefore, by the feeding of his kitchen-maid.
And so with sleep. When she goes to bed he, in part, does so too. When she gets up and lays the fire in the back kitchen he, in part, does so. He lays it through her and in her, though knowing no more what he is doing than we know when we digest, but still doing it as by what we call a reflex action. Qui facit per alium facit per se, and when the back-kitchen fire is lighted on Croesus's behalf it is Croesus who lights it, though he is all the time fast asleep in bed.
Sometimes things do not go smoothly. Suppose the kitchen-maid to be taken with fits just before dinner-time; there will be a reverberating echo of disturbance throughout the whole organisation of the palace. But the oftener she has fits, the more easily will the household know what it is all about when she is taken with them. On the first occasion Lady Croesus will send some one rushing down into the kitchen; there will, in fact, be a general flow of blood (i.e. household) to the part affected (that is to say, to the scullery-maid); the doctor will be sent for and all the rest of it. On each repetition of the fits the neighbouring organs, reverting to a more primary undifferentiated condition, will discharge duties for which they were not engaged, in a manner for which no one would have given them credit; and the disturbance will be less and less each time, till by and by, at the sound of the crockery smashing below, Lady Croesus will just look up to papa and say:
"My dear, I am afraid Sarah has got another fit."
And papa will say she will probably be better again soon, and will go on reading his newspaper.
In course of time the whole thing will come to be managed automatically downstairs without any references either to papa, the cerebrum, or to mamma, the cerebellum, or even to the medulla oblongata, the housekeeper. A precedent or routine will be established, after which everything will work quite smoothly.
But though papa and mamma are unconscious of the reflex action which has been going on within their organisation, the kitchen-maid and the cells in her immediate vicinity (that is to say, her fellow-servants) will know all about it. Perhaps the neighbours will think that nobody in the house knows, and that, because the master and mistress show no sign of disturbance, therefore there is no consciousness. They forget that the scullery-maid becomes more and more conscious of the fits if they grow upon her, as they probably will, and that Croesus and his lady do show more signs of consciousness, if they are watched closely, than can be detected on first inspection. There is not the same violent perturbation that there was on the previous occasions, but the tone of the palace is lowered. A dinner-party has to be put off; the cooking is more homogeneous and uncertain, it is less highly differentiated than when the scullery-maid was well; and there is a grumble when the doctor has to be paid, and also when the smashed crockery has to be replaced.
If Croesus discharges his kitchen-maid and gets another, it is as though he cut out a small piece of his finger and replaced it in due course by growth. But even the slightest cut may lead to blood-poisoning, and so even the dismissal of a kitchen-maid may be big with the fate of empires. Thus the cook—a valued servant—may take the kitchen-maid's part and go too. The next cook may spoil the dinner and upset Croesus's temper, and from this all manner of consequences may be evolved, even to the dethronement and death of the King himself. Nevertheless, as a general rule, an injury to such a low part of a great monarch's organism as a kitchen-maid has no important results. It is only when we are attacked in such vital organs as the solicitor or the banker that we need be uneasy. A wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing, and many a man has died from failure of his bank's action.
It is certain, as we have seen, that when the kitchen-maid lights the fire it is really Croesus who is lighting it, but it is less obvious that when Croesus goes to a ball the scullery-maid goes also. Still, this should be held in the same way as it should be also held that she eats vicariously when Croesus dines. For he must return from the ball and the dinner-parties, and this comes out in his requiring to keep a large establishment whereby the scullery-maid retains her place as part of his organism and is nourished and amused also.
On the other hand, when Croesus dies it does not follow that the scullery-maid should die at the same time. She may grow a new Croesus, as Croesus, if the maid dies, will probably grow a new kitchen-maid; Croesus's son or successor may take over the kingdom and palace, and the kitchen-maid, beyond having to wash up a few extra plates and dishes at coronation time, will know little about the change. It is as though the establishment had had its hair cut and its beard trimmed; it is smartened up a little, but there is no other change. If, on the other hand, he goes bankrupt, or his kingdom is taken from him and his whole establishment is broken and dissipated at the auction-mart, then, even though not one of its component cells actually dies, the organism as a whole does so, and it is interesting to see that the lowest, least specialised, and least highly differentiated parts of the organism, such as the scullery-maid and the stable-boys, most readily find an entry into the life of some new system, while the more specialised and highly differentiated parts, such as the steward, the old housekeeper, and, still more so, the librarian or the chaplain, may never be able to attach themselves to any new combination, and may die in consequence. I heard once of a large builder who retired unexpectedly from business and broke up his establishment, to the actual death of several of his older employés.
So a bit of flesh, or even a finger, may be taken from one body and grafted on to another, but a leg cannot be grafted; if a leg is cut off it must die. It may, however, be maintained that the owner dies, too, even though he recovers, for a man who has lost a leg is not the man he was.
ADAM AND EVE
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
A little boy and a little girl were looking at a picture of Adam and
Eve.
"Which is Adam and which is Eve?" said one.
"I do not know," said the other, "but I could tell if they had their clothes on."
FIRE
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
I was at one the other night, and heard a man say: "That corner stack is alight now quite nicely." People's sympathies seem generally to be with the fire so long as no one is in danger of being burned.
THE ELECTRIC LIGHT IN ITS INFANCY
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
I heard a woman in a 'bus boring her lover about the electric light. She wanted to know this and that, and the poor lover was helpless. Then she said she wanted to know how it was regulated. At last she settled down by saying that she knew it was in its infancy. The word "infancy" seemed to have a soothing effect upon her, for she said no more, but, leaning her head against her lover's shoulder, composed herself to slumber.
NEW-LAID EGGS
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
When I take my Sunday walks in the country, I try to buy a few really new-laid eggs warm from the nest. At this time of the year (January) they are very hard to come by, and I have long since invented a sick wife who has implored me to get a few eggs laid not earlier than the self-same morning. Of late, as I am getting older, it has become my daughter, who has just had a little baby. This will generally draw a new-laid egg, if there is one about the place at all.
At Harrow Weald it has always been my wife who for years has been a great sufferer and finds a really new-laid egg the one thing she can digest in the way of solid food. So I turned her on as movingly as I could not long since, and was at last sold some eggs that were no better than common shop-eggs, if so good. Next time I went I said my poor wife had been made seriously ill by them; it was no good trying to deceive her; she could tell a new-laid egg from a bad one as well as any woman in London, and she had such a high temper that it was very unpleasant for me when she found herself disappointed.
"Ah! sir," said the landlady, "but you would not like to lose her."
"Ma'am," I replied, "I must not allow my thoughts to wander in that direction. But it's no use bringing her stale eggs, anyhow."
SNAPSHOTTING A BISHOP
[Sidenote: Samuel Butler]
I must some day write about how I hunted the late Bishop of Carlisle with my camera, hoping to shoot him when he was sea-sick crossing from Calais to Dover, and how St. Somebody protected him and said I might shoot him when he was well, but not when he was sea-sick. I should like to do it in the manner of the "Odyssey":
… And the steward went round and laid them all on the sofas and benches, and he set a beautiful basin by each, variegated and adorned with flowers; but it contained no water for washing the hands, and Neptune sent great waves that washed over the eyelet-holes of the cabin. But when it was now the middle of the passage and a great roaring arose as of beasts in the Zoological Gardens, and they promised hecatombs to Neptune if he would still the raging of the waves….
At any rate I shot him and have him in my snap-shot book; but he was not sea-sick.
From the Note-Books of Samuel Butler.
GOETHE'S MOTHER
[Sidenote: G.H. Lewes]
That he was the loveliest baby ever seen, exciting admiration wherever nurse or mother carried him, and exhibiting, in swaddling clothes, the most wonderful intelligence, we need no biographer to tell us. Is it not said of every baby? But that he was in truth a wonderful child we have undeniable evidence, and of a kind less questionable than the statement of mothers and relatives. At three years old he could seldom be brought to play with little children, and only on the condition of their being pretty. One day, in a neighbour's house, he suddenly began to cry and exclaim, "That black child must go away! I can't bear him!" And he howled till he was carried home, where he was slowly pacified; the whole cause of his grief being the ugliness of the child.
A quick, merry little girl grew up by the boy's side. Four other children also came, but soon vanished. Cornelia was the only companion who survived, and for her his affection dated from the cradle. He brought his toys to her, wanted to feed her and attend on her, and was very jealous of all who approached her. "When she was taken from the cradle, over which he watched, his anger was scarcely to be quieted. He was altogether much more easily moved to anger than to tears." To the last his love for Cornelia was passionate.
In old German towns, Frankfurt among them, the ground-floor consists of a great hall where the vehicles were housed. This floor opens in folding trap-doors, for the passage of wine-casks into the cellars below. In one corner of the hall there is a sort of lattice, opening by an iron or wooden grating upon the street. This is called the Geräms. Here the crockery in daily use was kept; here the servants peel their potatoes, and cut their carrots and turnips, preparatory to cooking; here also the housewife would sit with her sewing, or her knitting, giving an eye to what passed in the street (when anything did pass there) and an ear to a little neighbourly gossip. Such a place was, of course, a favourite with the children.
One fine afternoon, when the house was quiet, Master Wolfgang, with his cup in his hand, and nothing to do, finds himself in this Geräms, looking out into the silent street, and telegraphing to the young Ochsensteins who dwelt opposite. By way of doing something, he begins to fling the crockery into the street, delighted at the smashing music which it makes, and stimulated by the approbation of the brothers Ochsenstein, who chuckle at him from over the way. The plates and dishes are flying in this way, when his mother returns: she sees the mischief with a housewifely horror, melting into girlish sympathy, as she hears how heartily the little fellow laughs at his escapade, and how the neighbours laugh at him.
This genial, indulgent mother employed her faculty for story-telling to his and her own delight. "Air, fire, earth, and water I represented under the forms of princesses; and to all natural phenomena I gave a meaning, in which I almost believed more fervently than my little hearers. As we thought of paths which led from star to star, and that we should one day inhabit the stars, and thought of the great spirits we should meet there, I was as eager for the hours of story-telling as the children themselves; I was quite curious about the future course of my own improvisation, and any invitation which interrupted these evenings was disagreeable. There I sat, and there Wolfgang held me with his large black eyes; and when the fate of one of his favourites was not according to his fancy, I saw the angry veins swell on his temples, I saw him repress his tears. He often burst in with 'But, mother, the princess won't marry the nasty tailor, even if he does kill the giant.' And when I made a pause for the night, promising to continue it on the morrow, I was certain that he would in the meanwhile think it out for himself, and so he often stimulated my imagination. When I turned the story according to his plan, and told him that he had found out the dénouement, then was he all fire and flame, and one could see his little heart beating underneath his dress! His grandmother, who made a great pet of him, was the confidante of all his ideas as to how the story would turn out, and as she repeated these to me, and I turned the story according to these hints, there was a little diplomatic secrecy between us, which we never disclosed. I had the pleasure of continuing my story to the delight and astonishment of my hearers, and Wolfgang saw, with glowing eyes, the fulfilment of his own conceptions, and listened with enthusiastic applause." What a charming glimpse of mother and son!
She is one of the pleasantest figures in German literature, and one standing out with greater vividness than almost any other. Her simple, hearty, joyous, and affectionate nature endeared her to all. She was the delight of children, the favourite of poets and princes. To the last retaining her enthusiasm and simplicity, mingled with great shrewdness and knowledge of character, "Frau Aja," as they christened her, was at once grave and hearty, dignified and simple. She had read most of the best German and Italian authors, had picked up considerable desultory information, and had that "mother wit" which so often in women and poets seems to render culture superfluous, their rapid intuitions anticipating the tardy conclusions of experience. Her letters are full of spirit: not always strictly grammatical; not irreproachable in orthography; but vigorous and vivacious. After a lengthened interview with her, an enthusiast exclaimed, "Now do I understand how Goethe has become the man he is!" Wieland, Merck, Bürger, Madame de Staël, Karl August, and other great people sought her acquaintance. The Duchess Amalia corresponded with her as with an intimate friend; and her letters were welcomed eagerly at the Weimar Court. She was married at seventeen to a man for whom she had no love, and was only eighteen when the poet was born. This, instead of making her prematurely old, seems to have perpetuated her girlhood. "I and my Wolfgang," she said, "have always held fast to each other, because we were both young together." To him she transmitted her love of story-telling, her animal spirits, her love of everything which bore the stamp of distinctive individuality, and her love of seeing happy faces around her. "Order and quiet," she says in one of her charming letters to Freiherr von Stein, "are my principal characteristics. Hence I despatch at once whatever I have to do, the most disagreeable always first, and I gulp down the devil without looking at him. When all has returned to its proper state, then I defy any one to surpass me in good humour." Her heartiness and tolerance are the causes, she thinks, why every one likes her. "I am fond of people, and that every one feels directly—young and old. I pass without pretension through the world, and that gratifies men. I never bemoralise any one—always seek out the good that is in them, and leave what is bad to Him who made mankind, and knows how to round off the angles. In this way I make myself happy and comfortable." Who does not recognise the son in those accents? The kindliest of men inherited his loving, happy nature from the heartiest of women.
WHERE—AND OH! WHERE?
[Sidenote: Henry S. Leigh]
Where are the times when—miles away
From the din and the dust of cities—
Alexis left his lambs to play,
And wooed some shepherdess half the day
With pretty and plaintive ditties?
Where are the pastures daisy-strewn
And the flocks that lived in clover;
The Zephyrs that caught the pastoral tune
And carried away the notes as soon
As ever the notes were over?
Where are the echoes that bore the strains
Each to his nearest neighbour;
And all the valleys and all the plains
Where all the nymphs and their love-sick swains
Made merry to pipe and tabor?
Where are they gone? They are gone to sleep
Where Fancy alone can find them;
But Arcady's times are like the sheep
That quitted the care of Little Bo-peep,
For they've left their tales behind them!
THE SECRETS OF THE HEART
[Sidenote: Austin Dobson]
"Le coeur mène où il va"
SCENE—A Chalet covered with honeysuckle
NINETTE NINON
NINETTE
This way—
NINON
No, this way—
NINETTE
This way, then.
(They enter the Chalet)
You are as changing, child,—as men.
NINON
But are they? Is it true, I mean?
Who said it?
NINETTE
Sister Séraphine.
She was so pious and so good,
With such sad eyes beneath her hood,
And such poor little feet,—all bare!
Her name was Eugénie la Fère.
She used to tell us,—moonlight nights,—
When I was at the Carmelites.
NINON
Ah, then it must be right. And yet,
Suppose for once—suppose, Ninette—
NINETTE
But what?
NINON
Suppose it were not so?
Suppose there were true men, you know!
NINETTE
And then?
NINON
Why, if that could occur,
What kind of men should you prefer?
NINETTE
What looks, you mean?
NINON
Looks, voice and all.
NINETTE
Well, as to that, he must be tall,
Or say, not "tall"—of middle size;
And next, he must have laughing eyes;
And a hook-nose,—with, underneath,
Oh! what a row of sparkling teeth!
NINON (touching her cheek suspiciously)
Has he a scar on this side?
NINETTE
Hush!
Some one is coming. No; a thrush:
I see it swinging there.
NINON
Go on.
NINETTE
Then he must fence (ah, look, 'tis gone!)
And dance like Monseigneur, and sing
"Love was a Shepherd,"—everything
That men do. Tell me yours, Ninon.
NINON
Shall I? Then mine has black, black hair …
I mean, he should have; then an air
Half sad, half noble; features thin;
A little royale on the chin;
And such a pale, high brow. And then,
He is a prince of gentlemen;—
He, too, can ride and fence and write
Sonnets and madrigals, yet fight
No worse for that—
NINETTE
I know your man.
NINON
And I know yours. But you'll not tell,—
Swear it!
NINETTE
I swear upon this fan,—
My grandmother's!
NINON
And I, I swear
On this old turquoise reliquaire,—
My great-great-grandmother's!—
(After a pause)
Ninette!
I feel so sad.
NINETTE
I too. But why?
NINON
Alas, I know not!
NINETTE (with a sigh)
Nor do I.
BRITISH FESTIVITIES
[Sidenote: Mark Twain]
Niagara Falls is a most enjoyable place of resort. The hotels are excellent, and the prices not at all exorbitant. The opportunities for fishing are not surpassed in the country; in fact, they are not even equalled elsewhere. Because, in other localities, certain places in the streams are much better than others; but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere, and so there is no use in your walking five miles to fish, when you can depend of being just as unsuccessful nearer home. The advantages of this state of things have never heretofore been properly placed before the public.
The weather is cool in summer, and the walks and drives are all pleasant, and none of them fatiguing. When you start out to "do" the Falls you first drive down about a mile, and pay a small sum for the privilege of looking down from a precipice into the narrowest part of the Niagara river. A railway "cut" through a hill would be as comely if it had an angry river tumbling and foaming through its bottom. You can descend a staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and stand at the edge of the water. After you have done it, you will wonder why you did it; but you will then be too late.
The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw the little steamer, Maid of the Mist, descend the fearful rapids—how first one paddle-box was out of sight behind the raging billows, and then the other, and at what point it was that her smoke-stack toppled overboard, and where her planking began to break and part asunder—and how she did finally live through the trip, after accomplishing the incredible feat of travelling seventeen miles in six minutes, or six miles in seventeen minutes, I have really forgotten which. But it was very extraordinary, anyhow. It is worth the price of admission to hear the guide tell the story nine times in succession to different parties, and never miss a word or alter a sentence or a gesture.
Then you drive over the Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below and the chances of having the railway train overhead smashing down on to you. Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.
On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime Niagara; and a great many people have the ineffable effrontery or the native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime.
Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see stately pictures of papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis, or a couple of country cousins, all smiling hideously, and all disposed in studied and uncomfortable attitudes in their carriage, and all looming up in their grand and awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed and diminished presentment of that majestic presence, whose ministering spirits are the rainbows, whose voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in clouds, who was monarch here dead and forgotten ages before this hackful of small reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world's unnoted myriads, and will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood relations, the other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering dust.
There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to display one's marvellous insignificance in a good strong light, but it requires a sort of superhuman self-complacency to enable one to do it.
When you have examined the stupendous Horseshoe Fall till you are satisfied you cannot improve on it, you return to America by the new Suspension Bridge, and follow up the bank to where they exhibit the Cave of the Winds.
Here I followed instructions, and divested myself of all my clothing and put on a waterproof jacket and overalls. This costume is picturesque, but not beautiful. A guide, similarly dressed, led the way down a flight of winding stairs, which wound and wound and still kept on winding long after the thing ceased to be a novelty, and then terminated long before it had begun to be a pleasure. We were then well down under the precipice, but still considerably above the level of the river.
We now began to creep along flimsy bridges of a single plank, our persons shielded from perdition by a crazy wooden railing, to which I clung with both hands—not because I was afraid, but because I wanted to. Presently the descent became steeper, and the bridge flimsier, and sprays from the American Fall began to rain down on us in fast-increasing sheets that soon became blinding, and after that our progress was mostly in the nature of groping. Now a furious wind began to rush out from behind the waterfall, which seemed determined to sweep us from the bridge, and scatter us on the rocks and among the torrents below. I remarked that I wanted to go home; but it was too late. We were almost under the monstrous wall of water thundering down from above, and speech was in vain in the midst of such a pitiless crash of sound.
In another moment the guide disappeared behind the grand deluge, and, bewildered by the thunder, driven helplessly by the wind, and smitten by the arrowy tempest of rain, I followed. All was darkness. Such a mad, storming, roaring, and bellowing of warring wind and water never crazed my ears before. I bent my head, and seemed to receive the Atlantic on my back. The world seemed going to destruction. I could not see anything, the flood poured down so savagely. I raised my head, with open mouth, and the most of the American cataract went down my throat. If I had sprung a leak now, I had been lost. And at this moment I discovered that the bridge had ceased, and we must trust for a foothold to the slippery and precipitous rocks. I never was so scared before and survived it. But we got through at last, and emerged into the open day, where we could stand in front of the laced and frothy and seething world of descending water, and look at it. When I saw how much of it there was, and how fearfully in earnest it was, I was sorry I had gone behind it.
I said to the guide, "Son, did you know what kind of an infernal place this was before you brought me down here?"
"Yes."
This was sufficient. He had known all the horror of the place, and yet he brought me there! I regarded it as deliberate arson. I then destroyed him.
I managed to find my way back alone to the place from whence I had started on this foolish enterprise, and then hurried over to Canada, to avoid having to pay for the guide.
At the principal hotel I fell in with the Major of the 42nd Fusiliers, and a dozen other hearty and hospitable Englishmen, and they invited me to join them in celebrating the Queen's birthday. I said I would be delighted to do it. I said I liked all the Englishmen I had ever happened to be acquainted with, and that I, like all my countrymen, admired and honoured the Queen. But I said there was one insuperable drawback—I never drank anything strong upon any occasion whatever, and I did not see how I was going to do proper and ample justice to anybody's birthday with the thin and ungenerous beverages I was accustomed to.
The Major scratched his head, and thought over the matter at considerable length; but there seemed to be no way of mastering the difficulty, and he was too much of a gentleman to suggest even a temporary abandonment of my principles. But by-and-by he said:
"I have it. Drink soda-water. As long as you never do drink anything more nutritious, there isn't any impropriety in it."
And so it was settled. We met in a large parlour, handsomely decorated with flags and evergreens, and seated ourselves at a board well laden with creature comforts, both solid and liquid. The toasts were happy, and the speeches were good, and we kept it up until long after midnight. I never enjoyed myself more in my life. I drank thirty-eight bottles of soda-water. But do you know that that is not a reliable article for a steady drink? It is too gassy. When I got up in the morning I was full of gas, and as tight as a balloon. I hadn't an article of clothing that I could wear, except my umbrella.
After breakfast I found the Major making grand preparations again. I asked what it was for, and he said this was the Prince of Wales's birthday. It had to be celebrated that evening. We celebrated it. Much against my expectations, we had another splendid time. We kept it up till some time after midnight again. I was tired of soda, and so I changed off for lemonade. I drank several quarts. You may consider lemonade better for a steady drink than soda-water; but it isn't so. In the morning it had soured on my stomach. Biting anything was out of the question—it was equivalent to lockjaw. I was beginning to feel worn and sad too.
Shortly after luncheon, I found the Major in the midst of some more preparations. He said this was the Princess Alice's birthday. I concealed my grief.
"Who is the Princess Alice?" I asked.
"Daughter of her Majesty the Queen," the Major said.
I succumbed. That night we celebrated the Princess Alice's birthday. We kept it up as late as usual, and really I enjoyed it a good deal. But I could not stand lemonade. I drank a couple of kegs of ice-water.
In the morning I had toothache, and cramps, and chilblains, and my teeth were on edge from the lemonade, and I was still pretty gassy, I found the inexorable Major at it again.
"Who is this for?" I asked.
"His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh," he said.
"Son of the Queen?"
"Yes."
"And this is his birthday—you haven't made any mistake?"
"No; the celebration comes off to-night."
I bowed before the new calamity. We celebrated the day. I drank part of a barrel of cider. Among the first objects that met my weary and jaundiced eye the next day was the Major at his interminable preparations again. My heart was broken, and I wept.
"Whom do we mourn this time?" I said.
"The Princess Beatrice, daughter of the Queen."
"Here, now," I said; "it is time to inquire into this thing. How long is the Queen's family likely to hold out? Who comes next on the list?"
"Their Royal Highnesses the Duke of Cambridge, the Princess Royal,
Prince Arthur, Princess Mary of Teck, Prince Leopold, the Grand-duke of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the Grand-duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Prince
…"
"Hold! There's a limit to human endurance. I am only mortal. What man dare do, I dare; but he who can celebrate this family in detail, and live to tell it, is less or more than man. If you have to go through this every year, it is a mercy I was born in America, for I haven't constitution enough to be an Englishman. I shall have to withdraw from this enterprise. I am out of drinks. Out of drinks, and so many more to celebrate! Out of drinks, and only just on the outskirts of the family yet, as you may say! I am sorry enough to have to withdraw, but it is plain enough that it has to be done. I am full of gas, and my teeth are loose, and I am wrenched with cramps, and afflicted with scurvy, and toothache, measles, mumps, and lockjaw, and the cider last night has given me the cholera. Gentlemen, I mean well; but really I am not in a condition to celebrate the other birthdays. Give us a rest."
SIR JOHN WATERS
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
Amongst the distinguished men in the Peninsular War whom my memory brings occasionally before me, is the well-known and highly popular Quartermaster-General Sir John Waters, who was born at Margam, a Welsh village in Glamorganshire. He was one of those extraordinary persons that seem created by kind nature for particular purposes; and, without using the word in an offensive sense, he was the most admirable spy that was ever attached to an army. One would almost have thought that the Spanish War was entered upon and carried on in order to display his remarkable qualities. He could assume the character of Spaniards of every degree and station, so as to deceive the most acute of those whom he delighted to imitate. In the posada of the village he was hailed by the contrabandist or the muleteer as one of their own race; in the gay assemblies he was an accomplished hidalgo; at the bullfight the toreador received his congratulations as from one who had encountered the toro in the arena; in the church he would converse with the friar upon the number of Ave Marias and Paternosters which could lay a ghost, or tell him the history of every one who had perished by the flame of the Inquisition, relating his crime, whether carnal or anti-Catholic; and he could join in the seguadilla or in the guaracha.
But what rendered him more efficient than all was his wonderful power of observation and acute description, which made the information he gave so reliable and valuable to the Duke of Wellington. Nothing escaped him. When amidst a group of persons, he would minutely watch the movement, attitude, and expression of every individual that composed it; in the scenery by which he was surrounded he would carefully mark every object: not a tree, not a bush, not a large stone, escaped his observation; and it was said that in a cottage he noted every piece of crockery on the shelf, every domestic utensil, and even the number of knives and forks that were got ready for use at dinner.
His acquaintance with the Spanish language was marvellous; from the finest works of Calderon to the ballads in the patois of every province, he could quote, to the infinite delight of those with whom he associated. He could assume any character that he pleased: he could be the Castilian, haughty and reserved; the Asturian, stupid and plodding; the Catalonian, intriguing and cunning; the Andalusian, laughing and merry,—in short, he was all things to all men. Nor was he incapable of passing off, when occasion required, for a Frenchman; but, as he spoke the language with a strong German accent, he called himself an Alsatian. He maintained that character with the utmost nicety; and as there is a strong feeling of friendship, almost equal to that which exists in Scotland, amongst all those who are born in the departments of France bordering on the Rhine, and who maintain their Teutonic originality, he always found friends and supporters in every regiment in the French service.
He was on one occasion entrusted with a very difficult mission by the Duke of Wellington, which he undertook effectually to perform, and to return on a particular day with the information that was required.
Great was the disappointment when it was ascertained beyond a doubt that, just after leaving the camp, he had been taken prisoner before he had time to exchange his uniform. Such, however, was the case; a troop of dragoons had intercepted him, and carried him off; and the commanding officer desired two soldiers to keep a strict watch over him and carry him to headquarters. He was, of course, disarmed, and, being placed on a horse, was, after a short time, galloped off by his guards. He slept one night under durance vile at a small inn, where he was allowed to remain in the kitchen; conversation flowed on very glibly, and, as he appeared a stupid Englishman, who could not understand a word of French or Spanish, he was allowed to listen, and thus obtained precisely the intelligence that he was in search of. The following morning, being again mounted, he overheard a conversation between his guards, who deliberately agreed to rob him, and to shoot him at a mill where they were to stop, and to report to their officer that they had been compelled to fire at him in consequence of his attempt to escape.
Shortly before they arrived at the mill, for fear that they might meet with some one who would insist on having a portion of the spoil, the dragoons took from their prisoner his watch and his purse, which he surrendered with a good grace. On their arrival at the mill they dismounted, and, in order to give some appearance of truth to their story, they went into the house, leaving their prisoner outside, in the hope that he would make some attempt to escape. In an instant Waters threw his cloak upon a neighbouring olive-bush, and mounted his cocked hat on the top. Some empty flour-sacks lay upon the ground, and a horse laden with well-filled flour-sacks stood at the door. Sir John contrived to enter one of the empty sacks and throw himself across the horse. When the soldiers came out of the house they fired their carbines at the supposed prisoner, and galloped off at the utmost speed.
A short time after the miller came out and mounted his steed; the general contrived to rid himself of the encumbrance of the sack, and sat up, riding behind the man, who, suddenly turning round, saw a ghost, as he believed, for the flour that still remained in the sack had completely whitened his fellow-traveller and given him a most unearthly appearance. The frightened miller was "putrified," as Mrs. Malaprop would say, at the sight, and a push from the white spectre brought the unfortunate man to the ground, when away rode the gallant quartermaster with his sacks of flour, which, at length bursting, made a ludicrous spectacle of man and horse.
On reaching the English camp, where Lord Wellington was anxiously deploring his fate, a sudden shout from the soldiers made his lordship turn round, when a figure, resembling the statue in "Don Juan," galloped up to him. The duke, affectionately shaking him by the hand, said:
"Waters, you never yet deceived me; and, though you have come in a most questionable shape, I must congratulate you and myself."
When this story was told at the Club, one of those listeners who always want something more called out, "Well, and what did Waters say?" to which Alvanley replied:
"Oh, Waters made a very flowery speech, like a well-bred man."
LORD WESTMORELAND
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
When I was presented at the Court of Louis XVIII. Lord Westmoreland, the grandfather of the present lord, accompanied Sir Charles Stewart to the Tuileries. On our arrival in the room where the King was we formed ourselves into a circle, when the King good-naturedly inquired after Lady Westmoreland, from whom his lordship was divorced, and whether she was in Paris. Upon this the noble lord looked sullen, and refused to reply to the question put by the King. His Majesty, however, repeated it, when Lord Westmoreland hallooed out, in bad French, "Je ne sais pas, je ne sais pas, je ne sais pas." Louis, rising, said, "Assez, milord; assez, milord."
On one occasion, Lord Westmoreland, who was Lord Privy Seal, being asked what office he held, replied, "Le Chancellier est le grand sceau (sot); moi je suis le petit sceau d'Angle-terre." On another occasion, he wished to say "I would if I could, but I can't," and rendered it, "Je voudrais si je coudrais, mais je ne cannais pas."
COLONEL KELLY AND HIS BLACKING
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
Among the odd characters I have met with, I do not recollect any one more eccentric than the late Lieutenant-Colonel Kelly, of the First Foot Guards, who was the vainest man I ever encountered. He was a thin, emaciated-looking dandy, but had all the bearing of a gentleman. He was haughty in the extreme, and very fond of dress; his boots were so well varnished that the polish now in use could not surpass Kelly's blacking in brilliancy; his pantaloons were made of the finest leather, and his coats were inimitable; in short, his dress was considered perfect.
His sister held the place of housekeeper to the Custom-house, and when it was burnt down, Kelly was burnt with it, in endeavouring to save his favourite boots. When the news of his horrible death became known, all the dandies were anxious to secure the service of his valet, who possessed the mystery of the inimitable blacking. Brummell lost no time in discovering his place of residence, and asked what wages he required; the servant answered, his late master gave him £150 a year, but it was not enough for his talents, and he should require £200; upon which Brummell said, "Well, if you will make it guineas, I shall be happy to attend upon you." The late Lord Plymouth eventually secured this phoenix of valets at £200 a year, and bore away the sovereignty of boots.
JOHN KEMBLE
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
John Kemble had the honour of giving the Prince of Wales some lessons in
elocution. According to the vitiated pronunciation of the day, the
Prince, instead of saying "oblige," would say "obleege," upon which
Kemble, with much disgust depicted upon his countenance, said:
"Sir, may I beseech your Royal Highness to open your royal jaws, and say 'oblige'?"
ROGERS AND LUTTRELL
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
I saw a good deal of the poet Rogers during his frequent visits to Paris; and often visited him in his apartments, which were always on the fourth or fifth story of the hotel or private house in which he lived. He was rich, and by no means avaricious, and chose those lofty chambers partly from a poetic wish to see the sun rise with greater brilliancy, and partly from a fancy that the exercise he was obliged to take in going up and down stairs would prove beneficial to his liver.
I could relate many unpublished anecdotes of Rogers, but they lose their piquancy when one attempts to narrate them. There was so much in his appearance, in that cadaverous, unchanging countenance, in the peculiar low, drawling voice, and rather tremulous accents in which he spoke. His intonations were very much those one fancies a ghost would use if forced by some magic spell to give utterance to sounds. The mild venom of every word was a remarkable trait in his conversation. One might have compared the old poet to one of those velvety caterpillars that crawl gently and quietly over the skin, but leave an irritating blister behind. To those, like myself, who were sans consequence, and with whom he feared no rivalry, he was very good-natured and amiable, and a most pleasant companion, with a fund of curious anecdote about everything and everybody. But woe betide those in great prosperity and renown; they had, like the Roman emperor, in Rogers the personification of the slave who bade them "remember they were mortal."
At an evening party many years since at Lady Jersey's every one was praising the Duke of B——, who had just come in, and who had lately attained his majority. There was a perfect chorus of admiration to this effect: "Everything is in his favour—he has good looks, considerable abilities, and a hundred thousand a year." Rogers, who had been carefully examining the "young ruler," listened to these encomiums for some time in silence, and at last remarked, with an air of great exultation, and in his most venomous manner, "Thank God, he has got bad teeth!"
His well-known epigram on Mr. Ward, afterwards Lord Dudley—
They say that Ward's no heart, but I deny it;
He has a heart, and gets his speeches by it—
was provoked by a remark made at table by Mr. Ward. On Rogers observing that his carriage had broken down, and that he had been obliged to come in a hackney-coach, Mr. Ward grumbled out in a very audible whisper, "In a hearse, I should think," alluding to the poet's corpse-like appearance. This remark Rogers never forgave, and, I have no doubt, pored over his retaliatory impromptu, for he had no facility in composition. Sydney Smith used to say that, if Rogers was writing a dozen verses, the street was strewn with straw, the knocker tied up, and the answer to the tender inquiries of his anxious friends was, that Mr. Rogers was as well as could be expected.
It used to be very amusing in London to see Rogers with his fidus Achates, Luttrell. They were inseparable, though rival wits, and constantly saying bitter things to each other. Luttrell was the natural son of Lord Carhampton, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, and in his youth known as the famous Colonel Luttrell of Junius. I consider him to have been the most agreeable man I ever met. He was far more brilliant in conversation than Rogers; and his animated, bustling manner formed an agreeable contrast with the spiteful calmness of his corpse-like companion. He was extremely irritable, and even passionate; and in his moments of anger he would splutter and stutter like a maniac in his anxiety to give utterance to the flow of thoughts which crowded his mind, and, I might almost say, his mouth.
On one occasion the late Lady Holland took him a drive in her carriage over a rough road, and, as she was very nervous, she insisted on being driven at a foot's pace. This ordeal lasted some hours, and when he was at last released, poor Luttrell, perfectly exasperated, rushed into the nearest club-house, and exclaimed, clenching his teeth and hands, "The very funerals passed us!"
THE PIG-FACED LADY
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
Among the many absurd reports and ridiculous stories current in former days, I know of none more absurd or more ridiculous than the general belief of everybody in London, during the winter of 1814, in the existence of a lady with a pig's face. This interesting specimen of porcine physiognomy was said to be the daughter of a great lady residing in Grosvenor Square.
It was rumoured that during the illuminations which took place to celebrate the peace, when a great crowd had assembled in Piccadilly and St. James's Street, and when carriages could not move on very rapidly, horresco referens! an enormous pig's snout had been seen protruding from a fashionable-looking bonnet in one of the landaus which were passing. The mob cried out, "The pig-faced lady! Stop the carriage—stop the carriage!" The coachman, wishing to save his bacon, whipped his horses, and drove through the crowd at a tremendous pace; but it was said that the coach had been seen to set down its monstrous load in Grosvenor Square.
Another report was also current. Sir William Elliot, a youthful baronet, calling one day to pay his respects to the great lady in Grosvenor Square, was ushered into a drawing-room, where he found a person fashionably dressed, who, on turning towards him, displayed a hideous pig's face. Sir William, a timid young gentleman, could not refrain from uttering a shout of horror, and rushed to the door in a manner the reverse of polite; when the infuriated lady or animal, uttering a series of grunts, rushed at the unfortunate baronet as he was retreating, and inflicted a severe wound on the back of his neck. This highly improbable story concluded by stating that Sir William's wound was a severe one, and had been dressed by Hawkins, the surgeon, in St. Audley Street.
I am really almost ashamed to repeat this absurd story; but many persons now alive can remember the strong belief in the existence of the pig-faced lady which prevailed in the public mind at the time of which I speak. The shops were full of caricatures of the pig-faced lady, in a poke bonnet and large veil, with "A pig in a poke" written underneath the print. Another sketch represented Sir William Elliot's misadventure, and was entitled, "Beware the pig-sty!"
HOBY, THE BOOTMAKER, OF ST. JAMES'S STREET
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
Hoby was not only the greatest and most fashionable bootmaker in London, but, in spite of the old adage, ne sutor ultra crepidam, he employed his spare time with considerable success as a Methodist preacher at Islington. He was said to have in his employment three hundred workmen; and he was so great a man in his own estimation that he was apt to take rather an insolent tone with his customers. He was, however, tolerated as a sort of privileged person, and his impertinence was not only overlooked but was considered as rather a good joke. He was a pompous fellow, with a considerable vein of sarcastic humour.
I remember Horace Churchill (afterwards killed in India with the rank of major-general), who was then an ensign in the Guards, entering Hoby's shop in a great passion, saying that his boots were so ill made that he should never employ Hoby for the future. Hoby, putting on a pathetic cast of countenance, called to his shopman:
"John, close the shutters. It is all over with us. I must shut up shop;
Ensign Churchill withdraws his custom from me."
Churchill's fury can be better imagined than described.
On another occasion the late Sir John Shelley came into Hoby's shop to complain that his top-boots had split in several places. Hoby quietly said:
"How did that happen, Sir John?"
"Why, in walking to my stables."
"Walking to your stables!" said Hoby, with a sneer. "I made the boots for riding, not walking."
Hoby was bootmaker to the Duke of Kent; and, as he was calling on H.R.H. to try on some boots, the news arrived that Lord Wellington had gained a great victory over the French army at Vittoria. The duke was kind enough to mention the glorious news to Hoby, who coolly said:
"If Lord Wellington had had any other bootmaker than myself he never would have had his great and constant successes; for my boots and prayers bring his lordship out of all his difficulties."
One may well say that there is nothing like leather; for Hoby died worth a hundred and twenty thousand pounds.
Hoby was bootmaker to George III., the Prince of Wales, the royal dukes, and many officers in the Army and Navy. His shop was situated at the top of St. James's Street, at the corner of Piccadilly, next to the Old Guards Club. He was bootmaker to the Duke of Wellington from his boyhood, and received innumerable orders in the duke's handwriting, both from the Peninsula and France, which he always religiously preserved. Hoby was the first man who drove about London in a tilbury. It was painted black, and drawn by a beautiful black cob. This vehicle was built by the inventor, Mr. Tilbury, whose manufactory was, fifty years back, in a street leading from South Audley Street into Park Street.
HARRINGTON HOUSE AND LORD PETERSHAM
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
When our army returned to England in 1814 my young friend, Augustus Stanhope, took me one afternoon to Harrington House, in Stable-yard, St. James's, where I was introduced to Lord and Lady Harrington, and all the Stanhopes. On entering a long gallery, I found the whole family engaged in their sempiternal occupation of tea-drinking. Neither in Nankin, Pekin, nor Canton was the teapot more assiduously and constantly replenished than at this hospitable mansion. I was made free of the corporation, if I may use the phrase, by a cup being handed to me; and I must say that I never tasted any tea so good before or since.
As an example of the undeviating tea-table habits of the house of Harrington, General Lincoln Stanhope once told me that, after an absence of several years in India, he made his reappearance at Harrington House, and found the family, as he had left them on his departure, drinking tea in the long gallery. On his presenting himself, his father's only observation and speech of welcome to him was, "Hallo, Linky, my dear boy! delighted to see you. Have a cup of tea?"
LORD ALVANLEY
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
From the time of good Queen Bess, when the English language first began to assume somewhat of its present form, idiom, and mode of expression, to the day of our most gracious sovereign Queen Victoria, every age has had its punsters, humorists, and eloquent conversationalists; but I much doubt whether the year 1789 did not produce the greatest wit of modern times, in the person of William Lord Alvanley.
After receiving a very excellent and careful education, Alvanley entered the Coldstream Guards at an early age, and served with distinction at Copenhagen and in the Peninsula; but, being in possession of a large fortune, he left the Army, gave himself up entirely to the pursuit of pleasure, and became one of the principal dandies of the day. With the brilliant talents which he possessed, he might have attained to the highest eminence in any line of life he had embraced.
Not only was Alvanley considered the wittiest man of his day in England, but, during his residence in France, and tours through Russia and other countries, he was universally admitted to possess, not only great wit and humour, but l'esprit français in its highest perfection; and no greater compliment could be paid him by foreigners than this. He was one of the rare examples (particularly rare in the days of the dandies, who were generally sour and spiteful) of a man combining brilliant wit and repartee with the most perfect good-nature. His manner, above all, was irresistible; and the slight lisp, which might have been considered as a blemish, only added piquancy and zest to his sayings.
In appearance he was about the middle height, and well and strongly built, though he latterly became somewhat corpulent. He excelled in all manly exercises, was a hard rider to hounds, and was what those who do not belong to the upper ten thousand call "a good-plucked one." His face had somewhat of the rotund form and smiling expression which characterises the jolly friars one meets with in Italy. His hair and eyes were dark, and he had a very small nose, to which, after deep potations, his copious pinches of snuff had some difficulty in finding their way, and were in consequence rather lavishly bestowed upon his florid cheek. He resided in Park Street, St. James's, and his dinners there and at Melton were considered to be the best in England. He never invited more than eight people, and insisted upon having the somewhat expensive luxury of an apricot-tart on the sideboard the whole year round.
Alvanley was a good speaker; and, having made some allusion to O'Connell in rather strong terms in the House of Lords, the latter very coarsely and unjustly denounced him, in a speech he made in the House of Commons, as a bloated buffoon. Alvanley thereupon called out the Liberator, who would not meet him, but excused himself by saying, "There is blood already on this hand"—alluding to his fatal duel with D'Esterre.
Alvanley then threatened O'Connell with personal chastisement. Upon this, Morgan O'Connell, a very agreeable, gentlemanlike man, who had been in the Austrian service, and whom I knew well, said he would take his father's place. A meeting was accordingly agreed upon at Wimbledon Common, Alvanley's second was Colonel George Dawson Damer, and our late consul at Hamburgh, Colonel Hodges, acted for Morgan O'Connell. Several shots were fired without effect, and the seconds then interfered and put a stop to any further hostilities.
On their way home in a hackney-coach, Alvanley said, "What a clumsy fellow O'Connell must be, to miss such a fat fellow as I am! He ought to practise at a haystack to get his hand in." When the carriage drove up to Alvanley's door, he gave the coachman a sovereign. Jarvey was profuse in his thanks and said, "It's a great deal for only having taken your lordship to Wimbledon."
"No, my good man," said Alvanley; "I give it you, not for taking me, but for bringing me back."
Everybody knows the story of Gunter, the pastrycook. He was mounted on a runaway horse with the King's hounds, and excused himself for riding against Alvanley by saying, "Oh my lord, I can't hold him, he's so hot!" "Ice him, Gunter—ice him!" was the consoling rejoinder.
In the hunting-field in a northern county, Sir Charles S——, whose married life was not a very happy one, wore one morning at the meet a wonderful greatcoat, with enormous horn buttons. Alvanley, riding up to him, and apparently looking at the buttons with great admiration, said, "A little attention of Lady S——'s, I presume, Sir Charles?"
Alvanley had a delightful recklessness and laisser aller in everything. His manner of putting out his light at night was not a very pleasant one for his host for the time being. He always read in bed, and when he wanted to go to sleep he either extinguished his candle by throwing it on the floor in the middle of the room, and taking a shot at it with the pillow, or else quietly placed it, when still lighted, under the bolster. At Badminton, and other country houses, his habits in this respect were so well known that a servant was ordered to sit up in the passage to keep watch over him.
Alvanley's recklessness in money matters was almost incredible. His creditors having become at last very clamorous, that able and astute man of the world, Mr. Charles Greville, with the energetic and bustling kindness in mixing himself up in all his friends' affairs which still distinguishes him, had undertaken to settle those of Alvanley. After going through every item of the debts, matters looked more promising than Mr. Greville expected, and he took his leave. In the morning he received a note from Alvanley, to say that he had quite forgotten to take into account a debt of fifty-five thousand pounds.
SALLY LUNN
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
Some fifty years back, or thereabouts, Albinia, Countess of Buckinghamshire, lived in her charming villa in Pimlico, surrounded by a large and beautiful garden. It was here she used to entertain the élite of London society with magnificent fêtes, bal champêtres, and public breakfasts. After one of those fêtes, I called one morning to pay my respects; and, on ringing the bell, the servant ushered me into the conservatory, where I found Lady Harrington, the celebrated cantatrice Mrs. Billington, and the Duke of Sussex, who was said to be very much épris with the English "Catalani," as she was called.
Mrs. Billington was extremely beautiful, though it was absurd to compare her to Catalani as a singer; but she was the favourite of the Duke of Sussex, which made her many friends. During my visit, chocolate and tea-cakes were served to our party, when Lady Harrington related a curious anecdote about those cakes. She said her friend Madame de Narbonne, during the emigration, determined not to live upon the bounty of foreigners, found means to amass money enough to enable her to open a shop in Chelsea, not far from the then fashionable balls of Ranelagh.
It had been the custom in France, before the Revolution, for young ladies in some noble families to learn the art of making preserves and pastry; accordingly, Madame de Narbonne commenced her operations under the auspices of some of her acquaintances; and all those who went to Ranelagh made a point of stopping and buying some of her cakes. Their fame spread like lightning throughout the West End, and orders were given to have them sent for breakfast and tea in many great houses in the neighbourhood of St. James's. Madame de Narbonne employed a Scotch maid-servant to execute her orders. The name of this woman was "Sally Lunn," and ever since a particular kind of tea-cake has gone by that name.
Madame de Narbonne, not speaking English, replied to her customers (when they inquired the name of the brioches), "bon." Hence the etymology of "bun," according to Lady Harrington; but I confess that I do not feel quite satisfied with her derivation.
"MONK" LEWIS
[Sidenote: Captain Gronow]
"Monk" Lewis had a black servant, affectionately attached to his master; but so ridiculously did this servant repeat his master's expressions, that he became the laughing-stock of all his master's friends. Brummell used often to raise a hearty laugh at Carlton House by repeating witticisms which he pretended to have heard from Lewis's servant; some of these were very stale; yet they were considered so good as to be repeated at the clubs, and greatly added to the reputation of the Beau as a teller of good things. "On one occasion," said Brummell, "I called to inquire after a young lady who had sprained her ankle. Lewis, on being asked how she was, had said, in the black's presence, 'The doctor has seen her, put her legs straight, and the poor chicken is doing well.' The servant, therefore, told me, with a mysterious and knowing look, 'Oh, sir, the doctor has been here, she has laid eggs, and she and the chickens are doing well.'"
THE CARELESSE NURSE MAYD
[Sidenote: Hood]
I sawe a Mayd sitte on a Bank,
Beguiled by Wooer fayne and fond;
And whiles His flatterynge Vowes she drank,
Her Nurselynge slipt within a Pond!
All Even Tide they Talkde and Kist,
For She was fayre and He was Kinde;
The Sunne went down before She wist
Another Sonne had sett behinde!
With angrie Hands and frownynge Browe,
That deemd Her owne the Urchine's Sinne,
She pluckt Him out, but he was nowe
Past being Whipt for fallynge in.
She then beginnes to wayle the Ladde
With Shrikes that Echo answered round—
O! foolishe Mayd to be soe sadde
The Momente that her Care was drownd!
SHY NEIGHBOURHOODS
[Sidenote: Charles Dickens]
One of the pleasantest things I have lately met with, in a vagabond course of shy metropolitan neighbourhoods and small shops, is the fancy of a humble artist, as exemplified in two portraits representing Mr. Thomas Sayers, of Great Britain, and Mr. John Heenan, of the United States of America. These illustrious men are highly coloured in fighting trim and fighting attitude. To suggest the pastoral and meditative nature of their peaceful calling, Mr. Heenan is represented on emerald sward, with primroses and other modest flowers springing up under the heels of his half-boots; while Mr. Sayers is impelled to the administration of his favourite blow, the Auctioneer, by the silent eloquence of a village church. The humble homes of England, with their domestic virtues and honeysuckle porches, urge both heroes to go in and win; and the lark and other singing birds are observable in the upper air, ecstatically carolling their thanks to Heaven for a fight. On the whole, the associations entwined with the pugilistic art by this artist are much in the manner of Izaak Walton.
But it is with the lower animals of back streets and by-ways that my present purpose rests. For human notes we may return to such neighbourhoods when leisure and opportunity serve.
Nothing in shy neighbourhoods perplexes my mind more than the bad company birds keep. Foreign birds often get into good society, but British birds are inseparable from low associates. There is a whole street of them in St. Giles's; and I always find them in poor and immoral neighbourhoods, convenient to the public-house and the pawnbroker's. They seem to lead people into drinking, and even the man who makes their cages usually gets into a chronic state of black eye. Why is this? Also, they will do things for people in short-skirted velveteen coats with bone buttons, or in sleeved waistcoats and fur caps, which they cannot be persuaded by the respectable orders of society to undertake. In a dirty court in Spitalfields, once, I found a goldfinch drawing his own water, and drawing as much of it as if he were in a consuming fever. That goldfinch lived at a bird-shop, and offered, in writing, to barter himself against old clothes, empty bottles, or even kitchen stuff. Surely a low thing and a depraved taste in any finch! I bought that goldfinch for money. He was sent home, and hung upon a nail over against my table. He lived outside a counterfeit dwelling-house, supposed (as I argued) to be a dyer's; otherwise it would have been impossible to account for his perch sticking out of the garret window. From the time of his appearance in my room, either he left off being thirsty—which was not in the bond—or he could not make up his mind to hear his little bucket drop back into his well when he let it go; a shock which in the best of times had made him tremble. He drew no water but by stealth and under the cloak of night. After an interval of futile and at length hopeless expectation, the merchant who had educated him was appealed to. The merchant was a bow-legged character, with a flat and cushiony nose, like the last new strawberry. He wore a fur cap and shorts, and was of the velveteen race, velveteeny. He sent word that he would "look round." He looked round, appeared in the doorway of the room, and slightly cocked up his evil eye at the goldfinch. Instantly a raging thirst beset that bird; when it was appeased, he still drew several unnecessary buckets of water; and finally, leaped about his perch and sharpened his bill as if he had been to the nearest wine-vaults and got drunk.
Donkeys, again. I know shy neighbourhoods where the donkey goes in at the street-door, and appears to live upstairs, for I have examined the back-yard from over the palings, and have been unable to make him out. Gentility, nobility, royalty, would appeal to that donkey in vain to do what he does for a costermonger. Feed him with oats at the highest price, put an infant prince and princess in a pair of panniers on his back, adjust his delicate trappings to a nicety, take him to the softest slopes at Windsor, and try what pace you can get out of him. Then starve him, harness him anyhow to a truck with a flat tray on it, and see him bowl from Whitechapel to Bayswater. There appears to be no particular private understanding between birds and donkeys, in a state of nature; but in the shy neighbourhood state you shall see them always in the same hands and always developing their very best energies for the very worst company. I have known a donkey—by sight; we were not on speaking terms—who lived over on the Surrey side of London Bridge, among the fastnesses of Jacob's Island and Dockhead. It was the habit of that animal, when his services were not in immediate requisition, to go out alone idling. I have met him a mile from his place of residence, loitering about the streets; and the expression of his countenance at such times was most degraded. He was attached to the establishment of an elderly lady who sold periwinkles, and he used to stand on Saturday nights with a cartful of those delicacies outside a gin-shop, pricking up his ears when a customer came to the cart, and too evidently deriving satisfaction from the knowledge that they got bad measure. His mistress was sometimes overtaken by inebriety. The last time I ever saw him (about five years ago) he was in circumstances of difficulty, caused by this failing. Having been left alone with the cart of periwinkles, and forgotten, he went off idling. He prowled among his usual low haunts for some time, gratifying his depraved tastes, until, not taking the cart into his calculations, he endeavoured to turn up a narrow alley, and became greatly involved. He was taken into custody by the police, and, the Green Yard of the district being near at hand, was backed into that place of durance. At that crisis I encountered him; the stubborn sense he evinced of being—not to compromise the expression—a blackguard, I never saw exceeded in the human subject. A flaring candle in a paper shade, stuck in among his periwinkles, showed him, with his ragged harness broken and his cart extensively shattered, twitching his mouth and shaking his hanging head, a picture of disgrace and obduracy. I have seen boys being taken to station-houses, who were as like him as his own brother.
The dogs of shy neighbourhoods I observe to avoid play, and to be conscious of poverty. They avoid work, too, if they can, of course; that is in the nature of all animals. I have the pleasure to know a dog in a back street in the neighbourhood of Walworth who has greatly distinguished himself in the minor drama, and who takes his portrait with him when he makes an engagement, for the illustration of the playbill. His portrait (which is not at all like him) represents him in the act of dragging to the earth a recreant Indian, who is supposed to have tomahawked, or essayed to tomahawk, a British officer. The design is pure poetry, for there is no such Indian in the piece, and no such incident. He is a dog of the Newfoundland breed, for whose honesty I would be bail to any amount; but whose intellectual qualities in association with dramatic fiction I cannot rate high. Indeed, he is too honest for the profession he has entered. Being at a town in Yorkshire last summer, and seeing him posted in the bill of the night, I attended the performance. His first scene was eminently successful; but, as it occupied a second in its representation (and five lines in the bill), it scarcely afforded ground for a cool and deliberate judgment of his powers. He had merely to bark, run on, and jump through an inn window, after a comic fugitive. The next scene of importance to the fable was a little marred in its interest by his over-anxiety; forasmuch as while his master (a belated soldier in a den of robbers on a tempestuous night) was feelingly lamenting the absence of his faithful dog, and laying great stress on the fact that he was thirty leagues away, the faithful dog was barking furiously in the prompter's box, and clearly choking himself against his collar. But it was in his greatest scene of all that his honesty got the better of him. He had to enter a dense and trackless forest, on the trail of the murderer, and there to fly at the murderer when he found him resting at the foot of a tree, with his victim bound ready for slaughter. It was a hot night, and he came into the forest from an altogether unexpected direction, in the sweetest temper, at a very deliberate trot, not in the least excited; trotted to the foot-lights with his tongue out; and there sat down, panting, and amiably surveying the audience, with his tail beating the boards, like a Dutch clock. Meanwhile the murderer, impatient to receive his doom, was audibly calling to him "Co-o-ome here!" while the victim, struggling with his bonds, assailed him with the most injurious expressions. It happened, through these means, that when he was in course of time persuaded to trot up and rend the murderer limb from limb, he made it (for dramatic purposes) a little too obvious that he worked out that awful retribution by licking butter off his blood-stained hands.
In a shy street behind Long Acre, two honest dogs live who perform in Punch's shows. I may venture to say that I am on terms of intimacy with both, and that I never saw either guilty of the falsehood of failing to look down at the man inside the show, during the whole performance. The difficulty other dogs have in satisfying their minds about these dogs appears to be never overcome by time. The same dogs must encounter them over and over again, as they trudge along in their off-minutes behind the legs of the show and beside the drum; but all dogs seem to suspect their frills and jackets, and to sniff at them as if they thought those articles of personal adornment an eruption—a something in the nature of mange, perhaps. From this Covent-garden window of mine I noticed a country dog only the other day, who had come up to Covent Garden Market under a cart, and had broken his cord, an end of which he still trailed along with him. He loitered about the corners of the four streets commanded by my window; and bad London dogs came up and told him lies that he didn't believe; and worse London dogs came up and made proposals to him to go end steal in the market, which his principles rejected; and the ways of the town confused him, and he crept aside and lay down in a doorway. He had scarcely got a wink of sleep, when up comes Punch with Toby. He was darting to Toby for consolation and advice, when he saw the frill, and stopped, in the middle of the street, appalled. The show was pitched, Toby retired behind the drapery, the audience formed, the drum and pipes struck up. My country dog remained immovable, intently staring at these strange appearances, until Toby opened the drama by appearing on his ledge, and to him entered Punch, who put a tobacco-pipe into Toby's mouth. At this spectacle the country dog threw up his head, gave one terrible howl, and fled due west.
We talk of men keeping dogs, but we might often talk more expressively of dogs keeping men. I know a bull-dog in a shy corner of Hammersmith who keeps a man. He keeps him up a yard, and makes him go to the public-houses and lay wagers on him, and obliges him to lean against posts and look at him, and forces him to neglect work for him, and keeps him under rigid coercion. I once knew a fancy terrier who kept a gentleman—a gentleman who had been brought up at Oxford, too. The dog kept the gentleman entirely for his glorification, and the gentleman never talked about anything but the terrier. This, however, was not in a shy neighbourhood, and is a digression consequently.
There are a great many dogs in shy neighbourhoods who keep boys. I have my eye on a mongrel in Somerstown who keeps three boys. He feigns that he can bring down sparrows and unburrow rats (he can do neither), and he takes the boys out on sporting pretences into all sorts of suburban fields. He has likewise made them believe that he possesses some mysterious knowledge of the art of fishing, and they consider themselves incompletely equipped for the Hampstead ponds, with a pickle-jar and wide-mouthed bottle, unless he is with them and barking tremendously. There is a dog residing in the Borough of Southwark who keeps a blind man. He may be seen most days, in Oxford Street, haling the blind man away on expeditions wholly uncontemplated by, and unintelligible to, the man; wholly of the dog's conception and execution. Contrariwise, when the man has projects, the dog will sit down in a crowded thoroughfare and meditate. I saw him yesterday, wearing the money-tray like an easy collar, instead of offering it to the public, taking the man against his will, on the invitation of a disreputable cur, apparently to visit a dog at Harrow—he was so intent on that direction. The north wall of Burlington House Gardens, between the Arcade and the Albany, offers a shy spot for appointments among blind men at about two or three o'clock in the afternoon. They sit (very uncomfortably) on a sloping stone there, and compare notes. Their dogs may always be observed, at the same time, openly disparaging the men they keep, to one another, and settling where they shall respectively take their men when they begin to move again. At a small butcher's in a shy neighbourhood (there is no reason for suppressing the name; it is by Notting Hill, and gives upon the district called the Potteries), I know a shaggy black-and-white dog who keeps a drover. He is a dog of an easy disposition, and too frequently allows this drover to get drunk. On these occasions it is the dog's custom to sit outside the public-house, keeping his eye on a few sheep, plainly casting up in his mind how many he began with when he left the market, and at what places he has left the rest. I have seen him perplexed by not being able to account to himself for certain particular sheep. A light has gradually broken on him, he has remembered at what butcher's he left them, and in a burst of grave satisfaction has caught a fly off his nose, and shown himself much relieved. If I could at any time have doubted the fact that it was he who kept the drover, and not the drover who kept him, it would have been abundantly proved by his way of taking undivided charge of the six sheep, when the drover came out besmeared with red ochre and beer, and gave him wrong directions, which he calmly disregarded. He has taken the sheep entirely into his own hands, has merely remarked with respectful firmness, "That instruction would place them under an omnibus; you had better confine your attention to yourself—you will want it all"; and has driven his charge away, with an intelligence of ears and tail, and a knowledge of business, that has left his lout of a man very, very far behind.
As the dogs of shy neighbourhoods usually betray a slinking consciousness of being in poor circumstances—for the most part manifested in an aspect of anxiety, an awkwardness in their play, and a misgiving that somebody is going to harness them to something, to pick up a living—so the cats of shy neighbourhoods exhibit a strong tendency to relapse into barbarism. Not only are they made selfishly ferocious by ruminating on the surplus population around them, and on the densely crowded state of all the avenues to cats'-meat; not only is there a moral and politico-economical haggardness in them, traceable to these reflections; but they evince a physical deterioration. Their linen is not clean, and is wretchedly got up; their black turns rusty, like old mourning; they wear very indifferent fur; and take to the shabbiest cotton velvet, instead of silk velvet. I am on terms of recognition with several small streets of cats, about the Obelisk in Saint George's Fields, and also in the vicinity of Clerkenwell Green, and also in the back settlements of Drury Lane. In appearance, they are very like the women among whom they live. They seem to turn out of their unwholesome beds into the street, without any preparation. They leave their young families to stagger about the gutters, unassisted, while they frouzily quarrel and swear and scratch and spit at street corners. In particular, I remark that when they are about to increase their families (an event of frequent recurrence) the resemblance is strongly expressed in a certain dusty dowdiness down-at-heel self-neglect, and general giving up of things. I cannot honestly report that I have ever seen a feline matron of this class washing her face when in an interesting condition.
Not to prolong these notes of uncommercial travel among the lower animals of shy neighbourhoods by dwelling at length upon the exasperated moodiness of the tom-cats and their resemblance in many respects to a man and a brother, I will come to a close with a word on the fowls of the same localities.
That anything born of an egg and invested with wings should have got to the pass that it hops contentedly down a ladder into a cellar, and calls that going home, is a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this connexion to wonder at. Otherwise I might wonder at the completeness with which these fowls have become separated from all the birds of the air—have taken to grovelling in bricks and mortar and mud—have forgotten all about live trees and make roosting-places of shop-boards, barrows, oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and door-scrapers. I wonder at nothing concerning them, and take them as they are. I accept as products of nature and things of course a reduced Bantam family of my acquaintance in the Hackney Road, who are incessantly at the pawnbroker's. I cannot say that they enjoy themselves, for they are of a melancholy temperament; but what enjoyment they are capable of they derive from crowding together in the pawnbroker's side-entry. Here, they are always to be found in a feeble flutter, as if they were newly come down in the world, and were afraid of being identified. I know a low fellow, originally of a good family from Dorking, who takes his whole establishment of wives, in single file, in at the door of the jug department of a disorderly tavern near the Haymarket, manoeuvres them among the company's legs, emerges with them at the Bottle Entrance, and so passes his life. Over Waterloo Bridge there is a shabby old speckled couple (they belong to the wooden French-bedstead, washingstand, and towel-horse-making trade) who are always trying to get in at the door of a chapel. Whether the old lady, under a delusion reminding one of Mrs. Southcott, has an idea of entrusting an egg to that particular denomination, or merely understands that she has no business in the building and is consequently frantic to enter it, I cannot determine; but she is constantly endeavouring to undermine the principal door; while her partner, who is infirm upon his legs, walks up and down, encouraging her and defying the Universe. But the family I have been best acquainted with, since the removal from this trying sphere of a Chinese circle at Brentford, reside in the densest part of Bethnal Green. Their abstraction from the objects among which they live, or rather their conviction that those objects have all come into existence in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted me that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours. After careful observation of the two lords and the ten ladies of whom this family consists, I have come to the conclusion that their opinions are represented by the leading lord and leading lady: the latter, as I judge, an aged personage, afflicted with a paucity of feathers and visibility of quill, that gives her the appearance of a bundle of office-pens. When a railway goods van that would crush an elephant comes round the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck at. Peg-tops and hoops they account, I think, as a sort of hail; shuttlecocks, as rain, or dew. Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun.
DRINKING SONG
[Sidenote: J.K. Stephen]
There are people, I know, to be found,
Who say and apparently think
That sorrow and care may be drowned
By a timely consumption of drink.
Does not man, these enthusiasts ask,
Most nearly approach the divine
When engaged in the soul-stirring task
Of filling his body with wine?
Have not beggars been frequently known,
When satisfied, soaked and replete,
To imagine their bench was a throne
And the civilised world at their feet?
Lord Byron has finely described
The remarkably soothing effect
Of liquor, profusely imbibed,
On a soul that is shattered and wrecked.
In short, if your body or mind
Or your soul or your purse come to grief,
You need only get drunk, and you'll find,
Complete and immediate relief.
For myself, I have managed to do
Without having recourse to this plan,
So I can't write a poem for you,
And you'd better get some one who can.
LETTERS OF T.E. BROWN
[Sidenote: T.E. Brown]
Thank you very much for the satire. Satire is an undoubted branch of poetry; but I do not affect it much. There is a strong, healthy, noble satire, the _sæva indignatio_of the Latin classics. But, short of that, satire seems only an element of discontent and unhappiness.
I know the "pip," the "black pigs" too, know them well; but they are quite beneath contempt; and nothing on earth would induce me to cross the bright blue of my serenity. I have a great notion of being the master of my own happiness, and not suffering it to be contingent on the manners and conduct of other people.
If a man slights me, he does me no harm; but if his conduct is detrimental to the general good, if he is unjust, a villain in high place, a seducer, a poison, a snare to the innocent, then have at him! though, constitutionally I had rather leave him alone.
The sum of happiness in the world is not too large. I would like, if possible, to increase it by the modest contribution of my own store. If so, I must guard it from all disturbance; and poetry enables me to do this, gives me a thousand springs of joy, in none of which there is one drop of bitterness—and thank God for that!
We are here in the I. of Wight, busy comparing it with the I. of Man, of course. It is really a beautiful island, not merely as regards richness of vegetation, an ornament that just now is not available, but also for its configuration. The "lay of the land," the attitude, and gesture of the lines are admirable. The coast is dismally inferior to ours; glens are not to be seen, and streams are puny, but very clean. On the whole we give the preference to Mona, and that upon purely æsthetic, not patriotic, grounds.
I hope you are all well and thriving. Accept my best wishes for the New Year. Your satire discloses perhaps a slight biliary secretion—all satire, I fear, is bile. I hope I may impute it to Christmas festivities rather than to any permanent disorder!
P.S.—I return the verses, as I think you would like to keep them….
* * * * *
I did very well in the Isle of Man; had two good solitary walks, drank deep draughts of—don't know how to describe it—that social brewage which I get nowhere else. Very likely other people get it in their own habitats. But it really does seem to me as if the whole island was quivering and trembling all over with stories—they are like leaves on a tree. The people are always telling them to one another, and any morning or evening you hear, whether you like it or not, innumerable anecdotes, sayings, tragedies, comedies—I wonder whether they lie fearfully. They are a marvellously narrational community. And you've not been there a day before all this closes round you with a quiet familiarity of "use and custom" which is most fascinating. Nothing else in the universe seems of any consequence.
And warly cares, and warly men,
May a' gae tapsalteerie, O!
A week more and I should have become reabsorbed into this medium past recovery and past recognition….
I have been musing a good deal over my "Dooiney-molla"[1]: he is now taking shape, and looms rather large. I believe you will like him, and his fiery little groom. These good souls do well to visit my dreams: they are such a comfort; and, do you know, they positively do "go on" in my dreams. Here are two lines which came tripping at the window of my slumbers last night:
1. "When the sun was jus' puttin' on his shoes" (morning),
for which I instantly seemed to discover a parallel—to wit:
"Sthreelin' oft his golden stockings" (the sun again, evening).
2. "Jus' rags tore off the Divil's ould shirt" (=witches' charms, or spells).
There will be a very good witch in this poem, I promise you: look out! ——[2] are sounding me about "The Doctor";… They would try to make it a popular book. The others tried to make it a drawing-room book, with the result that the few purchasers thereof hid it somewhere behind their book-shelves, and even there trembled for the morals of the housemaids….
* * * * *
We went into the church, and sat at a long service. The curate preached on Judas Iscariot; the vicar conducted a service in the churchyard. "Judas did this, Judas thought that"; then from the churchyard, in stentorian chorus, "Crown Him! crown Him! crown Him! crown Him Lord of all." Thus, you see, there was an element of the comic; but how, how sad it was to me, how incomprehensible! Verily, I am left behind; I can't, after all these years, adjust myself to the dimensions of such a change. The people behaved better than they used to do in our time; but the numbers! the systematisation! the total absence of the native population! the show atmosphere! the "Walk up, gentlemen" style of thing! Over all this Vanity Fair the dear old bells rang out precisely as of old….
* * * * *
Yesterday, at the Kerroo-Kiel, I met a delightfully bright and witty man. He soon got to know who I was, and we had the most glorious talk. The mischief of it is that these worthies are only too glad to get into a coosh with you, and they would talk all day, leaving a spade, or forsaking plough and horses to lean over a hedge, leaning on something at any rate, and talking away. Their talk is bright, aimless, rambling, not without dives into the depths, and pokes into your personality, above all, engouement the most absolute, and desire of intercommunication the most insatiable. And you are up on the mountain-side at the farther limit of plough-range, and the wind whistles just the right sort of accompaniment to such talk.
I think I must have a sail here. But, do you know? the Manx seamen and fishermen tend to become self-conscious: the "strangers" are spoiling them. Not so the farmer; of course no one can make him understand that the visitors do him any good by raising the prices of his produce, so he cares very little about them, and in no way guides himself according to them or their fashions. So far as the outer world comes to him, it is by the channel of the newspapers. He has all the boundless curiosity, the thirst for knowledge miscellaneous, pulpy, and piquant, which characterise those that dwell remote. When he gets hold of you he flies at you, hugs you, gets every blessed thing he can out of you. "Favourable specimen," you will say. That is true; but, as regards the independence and primitive state of mind, what I say applies to almost all. You see, you must get down beneath the gentleman or would-be gentleman-farmer, down to the man who never conceived the idea of ruffling it with gentlefolk. Also, you must not go down to the mere labourer. But they are desperate gossips—gossips not so much in matters local and insular, as in matters universal. The gossiping tone does proceed into the universal, does it not? The hilarity with which they will range the far horizons of thought is so childlike (you know how children are about that); a chatter that sparkles on the surface like their own divers, and then, with an "Aw bless me sowl," or "Aye, man, aye," down into the deepest soundings of the spirit….
* * * * *
A charming Hibernian called on me the other day. Portentous! alarming! He had been sent from Douglas by some evil-disposed friends of mine there, to consult me as the supreme authority on matters Manx. Now of this language I am, if not wholly, yet at least grammatically ignorant. He was a tall, stalwart fellow; black-bearded, not handsome, but with a tremendously Irish face, eyes of fire, nose of peremptory interrogation. Flourishing a wretched grammar in one hand, he proceeded rapidly to demonstrate its ineptness, and sternly to demand my explanation. As my weak-kneedness grew more painfully evident—
So scented the grim feature, and upturned
His nostril wide into the murky air,
Sagacious of his quarry—
he almost shouted with exultation. All the Manx scholars had completely failed—here was another. "Glory be to God! I'll smite him hip and thigh." He was a splendid Irishman, and, of course, kind and generous. He didn't spare me, destructed me utterly; but speedily constructed me upon new lines, and told me a lot about Celtic difficulties and how to overcome them. He spoke Irish like a bird, and, after about three-quarters of an hour, he rushed forth to catch the train, hairy, immense, with some wild wirrasthru of farewell. Imagine a very learned and linguistic Mulligan of Ballymulligan!…
* * * * *
O Wallaston, the delight of this leisure! I read, I write, I play. Good gracious! I shouldn't wonder if my music came to something yet. I have actually gone back to singing, a vice of my youth. Don't mention it at Clifton! I always think the sea the great challenger and promoter of song. Even the mountain is not the same thing. There may always be some d——d fool or another behind a rock. But the sea is open, and you can tell when you are alone, and the dear old chap is so confidential: I will trust him with my secret.
How about Devon! was it good? Did you all bathe and "rux" yourselves well about in the brine? I have not done much in that way: the storms have been so furious—unkind of them, eh? Well, I fancy it is like the boisterous welcome of some great dog—at least I take it in that sense. And the old boy is so strong, and he doesn't know, he thinks I am what I used to be. But I'm not: and every now and then he remembers that, and creeps to my feet so fawningly….
[Sidenote: T.E. Brown]
At a great prayer-meeting requests were being made that divers souls, supposed to be in evil case, should be interceded for. One arose and asked the prayers of the meeting for a little town on the east coast of Scotland, which was "wholly given to idolatry." Such was the expression. A little city, with many schools, also the seat of a University. Having thus mysteriously indicated the place, the excellent individual plainly felt that no mortal could possibly guess what place he meant; and, putting his hand over his mouth, he said to his friends on the platform, in a hoarse whisper distinctly heard over the entire hall, "St. Andrews!" Isn't that consummate? Isn't it Scotland?…
[Sidenote: T.E. Brown]
Walters did an extremely kind thing the other day. Two old things going about with an entertainment (!) of Recitations (really old, for I heard them "at it" thirty-five years ago), took a letter with them from me to Walters. It was the merest chance, I thought, but I suggested that just possibly Walters might give them an evening at the College. By Jove! sir, he did give them an evening, and gave them a substantial fee, and filled their poor trembling cup of Auld lang syne with joy and thanksgiving, and dismissed them with honour, almost reeling with the intoxication of so unwonted a success, the boys giving them a mighty three-times-three which shook the welkin, and stirred amazingly the pulsation of two hearts that have long desisted from the exercise of hope….
[Sidenote: T.E. Brown]
I heard one or two good stories at Braddan when I preached there (last Sunday). One was of a child at the Sunday-school. "What ought you to do on Sunday?" "Go to church." "What ought you to do next?" "Go to chapel." Was it not precisely the story for a vicar to tell? You feel the atmosphere—what?…
[Sidenote: T.E. Brown]
We sat down in some cottages. Some of the people were magnificent, throwing themselves upon you with such vigour of accent, such warmth and fun, and endless receptivity, bright, well pulled together, sonorous, that I nearly staggered under it—not chaff—good heavens! no—but would have been chaff, only it wasn't, for they can't chaff.
Kitty Kermode, alias Kinvig, was the best. She said a very sweet and profound thing (but I can't phrase it as I ought) about the value of friendship, as compared with that of love. A little happy creature of some seventeen giggled in a dark corner, but I let her giggle; the old woman pierced me through and through. Oh fortunati—Oh indeed! And these dear things seemed to know that their lot was a happy one. Quod faustum! Unutterably precious to me is the woman, the native of the hills, almost my own age, or a little younger, whose spirit is set upon the finest springs, and her sympathies have an almost masculine depth, and a length of reflection that wins your confidence and stays your sinking heart.
The lady can't do it. This class, of what I suppose you would call peasant women (I won't have the word), seems made for the purpose of rectifying everything, and redressing the balance, inspiring us with that awe which the immediate presence of absolute womanhood creates in us. The plain, practical woman, with the outspoken throat and the eternal eyes. Oh, mince me, madam, mince me your pretty mincings! Deliberate your dainty reticences! Balbutient loveliness, avaunt! Here is a woman that talks like a bugle, and, in everything, sees God.
[Sidenote: T.E. Brown]
… The wreck of the Drummond Castle is much in my mind. What lovely creatures those French are! The women and children, carrying their poor drowned sisters! that little baby in its coffin decked with roses! Don't you yearn towards those dear souls? What are Agincourt and Waterloo in the presence of such sweetness? Well, I love them anyway, and shall brood over them and pray for them while I live….
[Sidenote: T.E. Brown]
I am generally rather a happy "sort" of man, but your letter makes me very happy. How kind you are! Up in the morning betimes to catch people still in their beds warm with a generous enthusiasm, to surprise their sympathies before they had "faded into the light of common day," and to collect all their "loving" words for me. That was a good and faithful act; and I am deeply grateful.
Yes, the man was right. I do love the poor wastrels, and you are right, I have it from my father. He had a way of taking for granted, not only the innate virtue of these outcasts, but their unquestioned respectability. He, at least, never questioned it. The effect was twofold.
Some of the "weak brethren" felt uncomfortable at being met on those terms of equality. My father might have been practising on them the most dreadful irony; and they were "that shy" and confused. But it was not irony, not a bit of it; just a sense of respect, fine consideration for the poor "sowls," well—respect, that's it, respect for all human beings; his respect made them respectable. Wasn't it grand? To others my father was a perfect Port-y-shee.[3] To be in the same room with him was enough. To be conscious that he was there, that he didn't fight strange of them, that he never dreamt of "scowlin'" them, that they were treated as gentlemen. Oh the comfort, the gerjugh,[4] the interval of repose! Extraordinary, though, was it not? To think of a Pazon respecting men's vices even; not as vices, God forbid! but as parts of them, very likely all but inseparable from them; at any rate, theirs. Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not rebuking. My father would have considered he was "taking a liberty" if he had confronted the sinner with his sin. Doubtless he carried this too far. But don't suppose for a moment that the "weak brethren" thought he was conniving at their weakness. Not they—they saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don't think, do you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating delicacy? God only knows how far down into their depths of misery and degradation the sweetness of that delicacy descends. It haunts the drunkard's dreams, and breathes a breath of purity into the bosom of the abandoned. That is the power of a noble innocence, a respect for our fellow creatures—glib phrases, but how little understood and acted on! With my father it was quite natural…. He was a hot hater, though, I can tell you. He hated hypocrisy, he hated lying, and he hated presumption and pretentiousness. He loved sincerity, truth, and modesty. It seemed as if he felt sure that, with these virtues, the others could not fail to be present. Was he far wrong? Yet how many people would have thought him stern!
One dear old cousin of his comes to my mind. We called him U.T., that is Uncle Tom. He was not our uncle—we never had one—but the uncle of our predecessors at Kirk Braddan. And almost every Sunday evening he spent at the Vicarage—poor old thing! He was quite silent. One thing, though, he would say, as "regglar as clockwork." My mother occasionally apologised for the evening being so exclusively musical (we were great singers). Whenever she did so, the reply was prompt from U.T.: "I'm passionately fond of music." This, to us children, was highly ludicrous. Indeed, my mother was amused—she had no Manx blood in her—but my father accepted U.T.'s assurance with the utmost confidence. His chivalrous nature, more deeply tinged than hers with Celtic tenderness, or the very finest kind of Celtic make-believe (Anglicè—humbug; oh those English!), had no difficulty in accepting U.T.'s "passionately." Passion in U.T.! Well, to us it was a splendid joke. I sometimes wonder whether the vicar, too, at times, had lucid intervals of the bare, naked reality. He had a fine sense of humour, and he would have considered it a baseness to laugh at the poor thing, with its pretence of passion, trying to screen its forlornness. What U.T. felt was not the passion for music, but just the soothing, comforting sense of being at home with us, of being accepted as one of ourselves, of not being "scoulded," of indisputable respectability, of being thought capable of "passion," even so ethereal a passion as that of music. How blessed those hours must have been to U.T.! He sometimes missed them. But it never was my father's fault. Was it U.T.'s? Well, we children had no idea that he drank. But now, of course, I know that when U.T. did not appear on a Sunday, he must have been "hard at it" on Saturday; and into the kingdom of heaven he must have taken the Sundays, not the Saturdays.
Forgive all this. But I have been so much touched with your taking up my reference to the dear old Vicar of Braddan that I could not help extending the portrait a little.
And for the backsliders, the "weak brethren, the outcasts—aw! let's feel for the lek, and 'keep a houl' o' their ban.'"
Do write again. You will do me so much good.
VISIONS
[Sidenote: Calverley]
In lone Glenartney's thickets lies crouched the lordly stag,
The dreaming terrier's tail forgets its customary wag;
And plodding ploughman's weary steps insensibly grow quicker,
As broadening casements light them on toward home, or home-brewed liquor.
It is, in brief, the evening—that pure and pleasant time
When stars break into splendour, and poets into rhyme;
When in the glass of Memory the forms of loved ones shine—
And when, of course, Miss Goodchild's is prominent in mine.
Miss Goodchild!—Julia Goodchild!—how graciously you smiled
Upon my childish passion once, yourself a fair-haired child:
When I was (no doubt) profiting by Dr. Crabb's instruction,
And sent those streaky lollipops home for your fairy suction!
"She wore" her natural "roses, the night when first we met"—
Her golden hair was gleaming 'neath the coercive net:
"Her brow was like the snawdrift," her step was like Queen Mab's,
And gone was instantly the heart of every boy at Crabb's.
The parlour boarder chasséed tow'rds her on graceful limb;
The onyx deck'd his bosom—but her smiles were not for him:
With me she danced—till drowsily her eyes "began to blink,"
And I brought raisin wine, and said, "Drink, pretty creature,
drink!"
And evermore, when winter comes in his garb of snows,
And the returning schoolboy is told how fast he grows;
Shall I—with that soft hand in mine—enact ideal Lancers,
And dream I hear demure remarks, and make impassioned answers:—
I know that never, never may her love for me return—
At night I muse upon the fact with undisguised concern—
But ever shall I bless that day: I don't bless as a rule,
The days I spent at "Dr. Crabb's Preparatory School."
And yet we two may meet again—(be still, my throbbing heart!)—
Now rolling years have weaned us from jam and raspberry-tart.
One night I saw a vision—'twas when musk-roses bloom,
I stood—we stood—upon a rug, in a sumptuous dining-room:
One hand clasped hers—one easily reposed upon my hip—
And "Bless ye!" burst abruptly from Mr. Goodchild's lip:
I raised my brimming eye, and saw in hers an answering gleam—
My heart beat wildly—and I woke, and lo! it was a dream.
"BOSWELL AND JOHNSON"
[Sidenote: Macaulay]
The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when "The Dunciad" was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of "Corsican Boswell." In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London; so curious to know everybody who was talked about that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine; so vain of the most childish distinctions that, when he had been to Court, he drove to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and sword,—such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayer-book and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not scared at Johnson's ugly face, how he was frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle and with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries—all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicings. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.
That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being
"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll."
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others, or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.
Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood….
From nature, he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution, and an irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier years of his manhood had been passed had given to his demeanour, and even to his moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilised beings who were the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion, interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence contrasted with the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the last twenty years of his life, a complete original. An original he was, undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed full information concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should probably find that what we call his singularities of manner were, for the most part, failings which he had in common with the class to which he belonged. He ate at Streatham Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at St. John's Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged clothes. He ate as it was natural that a man should eat who, during a great part of his life, had passed the morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation. He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine; but, when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The roughness and violence which he showed in society were to be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he should be eo immitior, quia toleraverat; that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief; but for the suffering which a harsh world inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity, for it was a kind of suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He had seen and felt so much of sharp misery that he was not affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in his phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because The Good-natured Man had failed, inspired him with no pity. Though his own health was not good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him very little. People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh. He was not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord. Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have sobbed herself to death.
A person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse of society. He could not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy. "My dear doctor," said he to Goldsmith, "what harm does it do to a man to call him Holofernes?" "Pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, "who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably?" Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things. Johnson was impolite, not because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared smaller to him than to people who had never known what it was to live for fourpence halfpenny a day….
Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are worthy of a liberal and enlarged mind. He could discern clearly enough the folly and meanness of all bigotry except his own. When he spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke like a person who had really obtained an insight into the divine philosophy of the New Testament, and who considered Christianity as a noble scheme of government, tending to promote the happiness and to elevate the moral nature of man. The horror which the sectaries felt for cards, Christmas ale, plum-porridge, mince-pies, and dancing bears excited his contempt. To the arguments urged by some very worthy people against showy dress he replied with admirable sense and spirit, "Let us not be found, when our Master calls us, stripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and tongues. Alas! sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one." Yet he was himself under the tyranny of scruples as unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho, and carried his zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities to lengths altogether inconsistent with reason or with Christian charity. He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once committed the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. In Scotland, he thought it was his duty to pass several months without joining in public worship, solely because the ministers of the kirk had not been ordained by bishops. His mode of estimating the piety of his neighbours was somewhat singular. "Campbell," said he, "is a good man, a pious man. I am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many years, but he never passes a church without pulling off his hat: this shows he has good principles." Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious robbers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could easily see that a Roundhead who named all his children after Solomon's singers, and talked in the House of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled villain whose religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt; but a man who took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally consecrated must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles. Johnson could easily see that those persons who looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat as sinful deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God and of the ends of revelation; but with what a storm of invective he would have overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption of mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns!…
Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in Boswell's books than in his own. His conversation appears to have been quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in manner. When he talked, he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his books are written in a learned language; in a language which nobody hears from his mother or his nurse; in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love; in a language in which nobody ever thinks. It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in which he wrote. The expressions which came first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work of which the "Journey to the Hebrides" is the translation; and it is amusing to compare the two versions. "When we were taken upstairs," says he in one of his letters, "a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie." This incident is recorded in the Journal as follows: "Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes Johnson translated aloud. "The Rehearsal" he said, very unjustly, "has not wit enough to keep it sweet"; then, after a pause, "it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction."
Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for example, would be willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant effort, is always offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson.
The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost superfluous to point them out. It is well known that he made less use than any other eminent writer of those strong, plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, must be considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the King's English. His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little things, his hard inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers—all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants till the public has become sick of the subject.
Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, "If you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style. His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia describes her reception at the country-house of her relations in such terms as these: "I was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find, instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, a confused wilderness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every face was clouded, and every motion agitated." The gentle Tranquilla informs us that she "had not passed the earlier part of life without the flattery of courtship and the joys of triumph; but had danced the round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy and the congratulations of applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of love." Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with a worse grace. The reader may well cry out, with honest Sir Hugh Evans, "I like not when a 'oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard under her muffler."
We had something more to say; but our article is already too long, and we must close it. We would fain part in good-humour from the hero, from the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed his task, has at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced us to read Boswell's book again. As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall, thin form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick; Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up—the gigantic body, the huge, massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the question, sir!"
What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case, the most durable. The reputation of those writings which he probably expected to be immortal is every day fading, while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.
THE SUPPER
[Sidenote: Sterne]
A shoe coming loose from the fore-foot of the thill-horse, at the beginning of the ascent of Mount Taurira, the postillion dismounted, twisted the shoe off, and put it in his pocket. As the ascent was of five or six miles, and that horse our main dependence, I made a point of having the shoe fastened on again as well as we could; but the postillion had thrown away the nails, and the hammer in the chaise box being of no great use without them, I submitted to go on.
He had not mounted half a mile higher when, coming to a flinty piece of road, the poor devil lost a second shoe, and from off his other fore-foot; I then got out of the chaise in good earnest, and, seeing a house about a quarter of a mile to the left hand, with a great deal to do, I prevailed upon the postillion to turn up to it. The look of the house, and of everything about it, as we drew nearer, soon reconciled me to the disaster. It was a little farm-house, surrounded with about twenty acres of vineyard, about as much corn, and close to the house, on one side, was a potagerie of an acre and a half, full of everything which could make plenty in a French peasant's house; and, on the other side, was a little wood, which furnished wherewithal to dress it. It was about eight in the evening when I got to the house, so I left the postillion to manage his point as he could; and, for mine, I walked directly into the house.
The family consisted of an old grey-bearded man and his wife, with five or six sons and sons-in-law, and their several wives, and a joyous genealogy out of them.
They were all sitting down together to their lentil-soup, a large wheaten loaf was in the middle of the table, and a flagon of wine at each end of it promised joy through the stages of the repast; 'twas a feast of love.
The old man rose up to meet me, and with a respectful cordiality would have me sit down at the table; my heart was set down the moment I entered the room; so I sat down at once, like a son of the family; and, to invest myself in the character as speedily as I could, I instantly borrowed the old man's knife, and, taking up the loaf, cut myself a hearty luncheon; and, as I did it, I saw a testimony in every eye, not only of an honest welcome, but of a welcome mixed with thanks that I had not seemed to doubt it.
Was it this? or tell me, Nature, what else it was that made this morsel so sweet; and to what magic I owe it, that the draught I took of their flagon was so delicious with it, that they remain upon my palate to this hour.
If the supper was to my taste, the grace which followed it was much more so.
THE GRACE
[Sidenote: Sterne]
When supper was over the old man gave a knock upon the table with the haft of his knife, to bid them prepare for the dance. The moment the signal was given, the women and girls ran off together into a back apartment to tie up their hair, and the young men to the door to wash their faces and change their sabots; and in three minutes every soul was ready upon a little esplanade before the house to begin. The old man and his wife came out last, and, placing me betwixt them, sat down upon a sofa of turf by the door.
The old man had, some fifty years ago, been no mean performer upon the vielle; and at the age he was then of, touched it well enough for the purpose. His wife sang now and then a little to the tune, then intermitted and joined her old man again, as their children and grandchildren danced before them.
It was not till the middle of the second dance, when, for some pauses in the movements wherein they all seemed to look up, I fancied I could distinguish an elevation of spirit different from that which is the cause of the effect of simple jollity. In a word, I thought I beheld religion mixing in the dance; but, as I had never seen her so engaged, I should have looked upon it now as one of the illusions of an imagination which is eternally misleading me, had not the old man, as soon as the dance ended, said that this was their constant way; and that all his life long he had made it a rule, after supper was over, to call out his family to dance and rejoice; "believing," he said, "that a cheerful and contented mind was the best sort of thanks to Heaven that an illiterate peasant could pay"—
"Or a learned prelate either," said I.
HINTS FOR AN HISTORICAL PLAY; TO BE CALLED WILLIAM RUFUS; OR, THE RED
ROVER
[Sidenote: Ingoldsby]
Act 1
Walter Tyrrel, the son of a Norman papa,
Has, somehow or other, a Saxon mama:
Though humble, yet far above mere vulgar loons,
He's a sort of a sub in the Rufus dragoons;
Has travelled, but comes home abruptly, the rather
That some unknown rascal has murder'd his father;
And scarce has he picked out, and stuck in his quiver,
The arrow that pierced the old gentleman's liver,
When he finds, as misfortunes come rarely alone,
That his sweetheart has bolted—with whom is not known.
But, as murder will out, he at last finds the lady
At court with her character grown rather shady:
This gives him the "blues," and impairs the delight
He'd have otherwise felt when they dub him a Knight
For giving a runaway stallion a check,
And preventing his breaking King Rufus's neck.
Act 2
Sir Walter has dress'd himself up like a Ghost,
And frightens a soldier away from his post;
Then, discarding his helmet, he pulls his cloak higher,
Draws it over his ears and pretends he's a Friar.
This gains him access to his sweetheart, Miss Faucit;
But, the King coming in, he hides up in her closet;
Where, oddly enough, among some of her things,
He discovers some arrows he's sure are the King's,
Of the very same pattern with that which he found
Sticking into his father when dead on the ground!
Forgetting his funk, he bursts open the door,
Bounces into the drawing-room, stamps on the floor,
With an oath on his tongue, and revenge in his eye,
And blows up King William the Second sky-high;
Swears, storms, shakes his fist, and exhibits such airs,
That his Majesty bids his men kick him downstairs.
Act 3
King Rufus is cross when he comes to reflect,
That, as King, he's been treated with gross disrespect;
So he pens a short note to a holy physician,
And gives him a rather unholy commission,
Viz., to mix up some arsenic and ale in a cup,
Which the chances are Tyrrel may find and drink up.
Sure enough, on the very next morning, Sir Walter
Perceives, in his walks, this same cup on the altar.
As he feels rather thirsty, he's just about drinking,
When Miss Faucit, in tears, comes in running like winking;
He pauses, of course, and, as she's thirsty too,
Says, very politely, "Miss, I after you!"
The young lady curtsies, and, being so dry,
Raises somehow her fair little finger so high,
That there's not a drop left him to "wet t'other eye";
While the dose is so strong, to his grief and surprise,
She merely says, "Thankee, Sir Walter," and dies.
At that moment the King, who is riding to cover,
Pops in en passant on the desperate lover,
Who has vow'd, not five minutes before, to transfix him—
So he does—he just pulls out his arrow and sticks him.
From the strength of his arm, and the force of his blows,
The Red-bearded Rover falls flat on his nose;
And Sir Walter, thus having concluded the quarrel,
Walks down to the footlights, and draws this fine moral:
"Ladies and gentlemen, lead sober lives:
Don't meddle with other folks' sweethearts or wives!—
When you go out a-sporting take care of your gun,
And—never shoot elderly people in fun!"
IN A VISITOR'S BOOK
[Sidenote: J.K. Stephen.]
Within the bounds of this Hotel,
Which bears the name of Pen-y-Gwryd,
A black and yellow hound doth dwell,
By which my friend and I were worried.
Our object is not to imply
That he assaulted, bit, or tore us;
In fact he never ventured nigh
Except when food was set before us.
But when the scent of ham and eggs
Announced the breakage of our fast,
He came and twined about our legs,
And interrupted our repast.
We drove him from us through the door;
He reappeared; we tried the casement;
He seemed to rise out of the floor,
And importuned us as before,
To our unspeakable amazement.
But timely succour Fortune brought us;
One word of Welsh we chanced to know,
And that a fellow-guest had taught us;
It meant "Unpleasant creature, go!"
Stranger! If you should chance to meet him,
Oh do not pull, or kick, or push,
Or execrate, or bribe, or beat him,
But make a sound resembling "Cwsh"!
LETTERS OF FITZ
[Sidenote: Edward FitzGerald]
Mazzinghi tells me that November weather breeds blue devils—so that there is a French proverb, "In October de Englishman shoot de pheasant; in November he shoot himself." This, I suppose, is the case with me: so away with November, as soon as may be….
Have you got in your "Christian Poet" a poem by Sir H. Wotton—"How happy is he born or taught, that serveth not another's will"? It is very beautiful, and fit for a Paradise of any kind. Here are some lines from old Lily, which your ear will put in the proper metre. It gives a fine description of a fellow walking in spring, and looking here and there, and pricking up his ears, as different birds sing: "What bird so sings, but doth so wail? Oh! 'tis the ravished nightingale: 'Jug, jug, jug, jug, terue,' she cries, and still her woes at midnight rise. Brave prick-song! who is't now we hear? It is the lark so shrill and clear: against heaven's gate he claps his wings, the morn not waking till he sings. Hark, too, with what a pretty note poor Robin Redbreast tunes his throat: Hark, how the jolly cuckoos sing, 'Cuckoo' to welcome in the spring: 'Cuckoo' to welcome in the spring.'" This is very English, and pleasant, I think: and so I hope you will. I could have sent you many a more sentimental thing, but nothing better. I admit nothing into my Paradise, but such as breathe content, and virtue….
The Church, like the Ark of Noah, is worth saving: not for the sake of the unclean beasts that almost filled it, and probably made most noise and clamour in it, but for the little corner of rationality, that was as much distressed by the stink within as by the tempest without….
[Sidenote: Edward FitzGerald]
Some one from this house is going to London: and I will try and write you some lines now in half an hour before dinner. 'I am going out for the evening to my old lady, who teaches me the names of the stars, and other chaste information. You see, Master John Allen, that if I do not come to London (and I have no thought of going yet) and you will not write, there is likely to be an end of our communication: not, by the way, that I am never to go to London again; but not just yet. Here I live with tolerable content: perhaps with as much as most people arrive at, and what if one were properly grateful one would perhaps call perfect happiness. Here is a glorious sunshiny day: all the morning I read about Nero in Tacitus, lying at full length on a bench in the garden, a nightingale singing, and some red anemones eyeing the sun manfully not far off. A funny mixture all this, Nero, and the delicacy of spring, all very human however. Then at half-past one lunch on Cambridge cream cheese: then a ride over hill and dale: then spudding up some weeds from the grass: and then, coming in, I sit down to write to you, my sister winding red worsted from the back of a chair, and the most delightful little girl in the world chattering incessantly. So runs the world away. You think I live in Epicurean ease; but this happens to be a jolly day: one isn't always well, or tolerably good, the weather is not always clear, nor nightingales singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant atrocity. But such as life is, I believe I have got hold of a good end of it….
Give my love to Thackeray from your upper window across the street.
… I am living (did I tell you this before?) at a little cottage close by the lawn gates, where I have my books, a barrel of beer, which I tap myself (can you tap a barrel of beer?), and an old woman to do for me. I have also just concocted two gallons of tar-water under the directions of Bishop Berkeley: it is to be bottled off this very day after a careful skimming, and then drunk by those who can and will. It is to be tried first on my old woman; if she survives, I am to begin; and it will then gradually spread into the parish, through England, Europe, etc., "as the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake."
… Does the thought ever strike you, when looking at pictures in a house, that you are to run and jump at one, and go right through it into some scene-behind-scene world on the other side, as harlequins do? A steady portrait especially invites one to do so: the quietude of it ironically tempts one to outrage it. One feels it would close again over the panel, like water, as if nothing had happened. That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Laurence has given me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the bulls of Bashan butting at it could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude; no wonder his view of Bacon's virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding's forehead. We find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things: you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the Lake of Geneva. We have great laughing over this. The forehead is at present in Pembrokeshire, I believe; or Glamorganshire; or Monmouthshire: it is hard to say which. It has gone to spend its Christmas there….
[Sidenote: Edward FitzGerald]
I wish you would write me ten lines to say how you are. You are, I suppose, at Cambridge, and I am buried (with all my fine parts, what a shame!) here; so that I hear of nobody—except that Spedding and I abuse each other about Shakespeare occasionally, a subject on which you must know that he has lost his conscience, if he ever had any. For what did Dr. Allen … say when he felt Spedding's head? Why, that all his bumps were so tempered that there was no merit in his sobriety—then what would have been the use of a Conscience to him? Q.E.D.
Since I saw you, I have entered into a decidedly agricultural course of conduct: read books about composts, etc. I walk about in the fields also where the people are at work, and the more dirt accumulates on my shoes, the more I think I know. Is not this all funny? Gibbon might elegantly compare my retirement from the cares and splendours of the world to that of Diocletian. Have you read Thackeray's little book—"The Second Funeral of Napoleon"? If not, pray do; and buy it, and ask others to buy it, as each copy sold puts 7-1/2d. in T.'s pocket, which is very empty just now, I take it. I think this book is the best thing he has done. What an account there is of the Emperor Nicholas in Kemble's last Review! The last sentence of it (which can be by no other man in Europe but Jack himself) has been meat and drink to me for a fortnight. The electric eel at the Adelaide Gallery is nothing to it. Then Edgeworth fires away about the Odes of Pindar, and Donne is very æsthetic about Mr. Hallam's book. What is the meaning of "exegetical"? Till I know that, how can I understand the Review?
Pray remember me kindly to Blakesley, Heath, and such other potentates as I knew in the days before they "assumed the purple." I am reading Gibbon, and see nothing but this d——d colour before my eyes. It changes occasionally to bright yellow, which is (is it?) the Imperial colour in China, and also the antithesis to purple (vide Coleridge and Eastlake's "Goethe")—even as the Eastern and Western Dynasties are antithetical, and yet, by the law of extremes, potentially the same (vide Coleridge, etc.). Is this æsthetic? Is this exegetical? How glad I shall be if you can assure me that it is! But, nonsense apart and begged pardon for, pray write me a line to say how you are, directing to this pretty place. "The soil is in general a moist and retentive clay, with a subsoil or pan of an adhesive silicious brick formation; adapted to the growth of wheat, beans, and clover—requiring, however, a summer fallow (as is generally stipulated in the lease) every fourth year, etc." This is not an unpleasing style on agricultural subjects—nor an uncommon one….
* * * * *
You know my way of life so well that I need not describe it to you, as it has undergone no change since I saw you. I read of mornings—the same old books over and over again, having no command of new ones; walk with my great black dog of an afternoon, and at evening sit with open windows, up to which China-roses climb, with my pipe, while the blackbirds and thrushes begin to rustle bedwards in the garden, and the nightingale to have the neighbourhood to herself. We have had such a spring (bating the last ten days) as would have satisfied even you with warmth. And such verdure! white clouds moving over the new-fledged tops of oak-trees, and acres of grass striving with buttercups. How old to tell of, how new to see! I believe that Leslie's "Life of Constable" (a very charming book) has given me a fresh love of spring. Constable loved it above all seasons: he hated autumn. When Sir G. Beaumont, who was of the old classical taste, asked him if he did not find it difficult to place his brown tree in his pictures, "Not at all," said C, "I never put one in at all." And when Sir George was crying up the tone of the old masters' landscapes, and quoting an old violin as the proper tone of colour for a picture, Constable got up, took an old Cremona, and laid it down on the sunshiny grass. You would like the book. In defiance of all this, I have hung my room with pictures, like very old fiddles indeed; but I agree with Sir George and Constable both. I like pictures that are not like nature. I can have nature better than any picture by looking out of my window. Yet I respect the man who tries to paint up to the freshness of earth and sky. Constable did not wholly achieve what he tried at: and perhaps the old masters chose a soberer scale of things as more within the compass of lead paint. To paint dew with lead!…
* * * * *
It is now the 8th of December; it has blown a most desperate east wind, all razors; a wind like one of those knives one sees at shops in London, with 365 blades all drawn and pointed. The wheat is all sown; the fallows cannot be ploughed. What are all the poor folks to do during the winter? And they persist in having the same enormous families they used to do; a woman came to me two days ago who had seventeen children! What farmers are to employ all these? What landlord can find room for them? The law of Generation must be repealed….
DEAR CARLYLE,
[Sidenote: Edward FitzGerald]
I should sometimes write to you if I had anything worth telling, or worth putting you to the trouble of answering me. About twice in a year, however, I do not mind asking you one thing which is easily answered, how you and Mrs. Carlyle are? And yet, perhaps, it is not so easy for you to tell me so much about yourself: for your "well-being" comprises a good deal! That you are not carried off by the cholera I take for granted, since else I should have seen in the papers some controversy with Doctor Wordsworth as to whether you were to be buried in Westminster Abbey, by the side of Wilberforce perhaps! Besides, a short note from Thackeray a few weeks ago told me you had been to see him. I conclude also from this that you have not been a summer excursion of any distance.
I address from the Rectory (_Vicarage_it ought to be) of Crabbe, the "Radiator," whose mind is now greatly exercised with Dr. Whewell's "Plurality of Worlds." Crabbe, who is a good deal in the secrets of Providence, admires the work beyond measure, but most indignantly rejects the doctrine as unworthy of God. I have not read the book, contented to hear Crabbe's commentaries. I have been staying with him off and on for two months, and, as I say, give his address because any letter thither directed will find me sooner or later in my little wanderings. I am at present staying with a farmer in a very pleasant house near Woodbridge, inhabiting such a room as even you, I think, would sleep composedly in; my host a taciturn, cautious, honest, active man whom I have known all my life. He and his wife, a capital housewife, and his son, who would carry me on his shoulders to Ipswich, and a maid-servant, who, as she curtsies of a morning, lets fall the teapot, etc., constitute the household. Farming greatly prospers, farming materials fetching an exorbitant price at the Michaelmas auctions—all in defiance of Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who got returned for Suffolk on the strength of denouncing Corn Law Repeal as the ruin of the country. He has bought a fine house near Ipswich, with great gilded gates before it, and, by dint of good dinners and soft sawder, finally draws the country gentry to him….
Please to look at the September Number of Fraser's Magazine, where there are some prose translations of Hafiz by Cowell which may interest you a little. I think Cowell (as he is apt to do) gives Hafiz rather too much credit for a mystical wine-cup, and cup-bearer; I mean, taking him on the whole. The few odes he quotes have certainly a deep and pious feeling, such as the Man of Mirth will feel at times: none perhaps more strongly.
Some one by chance read out to me the other day at the seaside your account of poor old Naseby village from "Cromwell," quoted in Knight's "Half-Hours," etc. It is now twelve years ago, at this very season, I was ransacking for you; you promising to come down, and never coming. I hope very much you are soon going to give us something: else Jerrold and Tupper carry all before them.
TO "LYDIA LANGUISH"
[Sidenote: Austin Dobson]
"Il me faut des emotions"—Blanche Amory
You ask me, Lydia, "whether I,
If you refuse my suit, shall die."
(Now pray don't let this hurt you!)
Although the time be out of joint,
I should not think a bodkin's point
The sole resource of virtue;
Nor shall I, though your mood endure,
Attempt a final Water-cure
Except against my wishes;
For I respectfully decline
To dignify the Serpentine,
And make hors-d'oeuvres for fishes;
But if you ask me whether I
Composedly can go,
Without a look, without a sigh,
Why, then I answer—No.
"You are assured," you sadly say
(If in this most considerate way
To treat my suit your will is),
That I shall "quickly find as fair
Some new Neæra's tangled hair—
Some easier Amaryllis."
I cannot promise to be cold
If smiles are kind as yours of old
On lips of later beauties;
Nor can I, if I would, forget
The homage that is Nature's debt,
While man has social duties;
But if you ask shall I prefer
To you I honour so,
A somewhat visionary Her,
I answer truly—No.
You fear, you frankly add, "to find
In me too late the altered mind
That altering Time estranges."
To this I make response that we
(As physiologists agree)
Must have septennial changes;
This is a thing beyond control,
And it were best upon the whole
To try and find out whether
We could not, by some means, arrange
This not-to-be-avoided change
So as to change together:
But had you asked me to allow
That you could ever grow
Less amiable than you are now,—
Emphatically—No.
But—to be serious—if you care
To know how I shall really bear
This much-discussed rejection,
I answer you. As feeling men
Behave, in best romances, when
You outrage their affection;—
With that gesticulatory woe,
By which, as melodramas show,
Despair is indicated;
Enforced by all the liquid grief
Which hugest pocket-handkerchief
Has ever simulated;
And when, arrived so far, you say
In tragic accents, "Go,"
Then, Lydia, then … I still shall stay,
And firmly answer—No.
MARK'S BABY
[Sidenote: Mark Twain]
"Mark, one day, was found at home, in his library, dandling upon his knee, with every appearance of fond 'parientness,' the young Twain—so young as not yet to be able to 'walk upright and make bargains.' Mrs. Twain, on showing the visitor into the sanctum, and finding her spouse thus engaged, said:
"'Now, Mark, you know you love that baby—don't you?'
"'Well,' replied Mark, in his slow, drawling kind of way,
'I—can't—exactly—say—I—love it,—but—I—respect—it!'"
THE WISDOM OF G.K.C.
[Sidenote: G.K. Chesterton]
Jesus Christ made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. "Drink," he says, "for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace." So he stands offering us the cup in his hands. And in the high altar of Christianity stands another figure in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. "Drink," he says, "for the whole world is as red as this wine with the crimson of the love and wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle, and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this is My blood of the New Testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I know whence you come and why. Drink, for I know when you go and where."—"Heretics."
[Sidenote: G.K. Chesterton]
Everything is military in the sense that everything depends upon obedience. There is no perfectly epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irresponsible place. Everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat and submission. We may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness; but we are glad that the net-maker did not make the net in a fit of divine carelessness. We may jump upon a child's rocking-horse for a joke; but we are glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of it unglued for a joke.—"Heretics."
[Sidenote: G.K. Chesterton]
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.—"Tremendous Trifles."
[Sidenote: G.K. Chesterton]
In a hollow of the grey-green hills of rainy Ireland lived an old, old woman, whose uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat-race. But in her grey-green hollows, she knew nothing of this; she didn't know that there was a Boat-race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she had heard (I know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple trust. And by and by, in God's good time, it was discovered that this uncle of hers was really not her uncle, and they came and told her so. She smiled through her tears, and said only, "Virtue is its own reward."—"The Napoleon of Notting Hill."
In a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified attitudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, "Life is real, life is earnest," and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.—"The Napoleon of Notting Hill."
[Sidenote: G.K. Chesterton]
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.—"George Bernard Shaw."
[Sidenote: G.K. Chesterton]
Only in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called weather—beautiful and changeable as a woman. The great English landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English) have this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures; it is the subject of their pictures. They paint portraits of the weather. The weather sat to Constable; the weather posed for Turner—and the deuce of a pose it was. In the English painters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering and fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. The tall and terrible protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground. Rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen aganst a dark background, and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against a dim sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the grim garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high-light in the picture, and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the lost red eyes of day, and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun. Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless: that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue, or blanching into white, or breaking into green or gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather on our hills or grey hair on our heads perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.—"Daily News."
[Sidenote: G.K. Chesteron]
Silence is the unbearable repartee.—"Charles Dickens."
[Sidenote: G.K. Chesterton]
For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added. Even for those who cannot do their work in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.—"Tremendous Trifles."
[Sidenote: G.K. Chesterton]
His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of. He will make himself happy in the traps that have been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and sleep. All doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere courage. The whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase—he will be always "taken in." To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance. With torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life. And the sceptic is cast out by it.—"Charles Dickens."
[Sidenote: G.K. Chesterton]
I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism, and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real religions, with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water—an excellent thing if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water—which is a fuss about nothing. Mr. Bernard Shaw's philosophy is exactly like black coffee—it awakens, but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one's contempt for it in stronger terms than that.—"William Blake."
* * * * *
To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Upon any one who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realises one of our visions.—"The Defendant."
"THE VULGAR TONGUE"
[Sidenote: Dean Hole]
First, of abuses. I protest against those sensational adjectives, which are so commonly misapplied—against the union of grand and noble words with subjects of a minute and trivial nature. It is as though a huge locomotive engine were brought out to draw a child's perambulator, or as though an Armstrong gun were loaded and levelled to exterminate a tom-tit.
I heard a tourist say the other day that, when he was at Black Gang
Chine, in the Isle of Wight, he had seen the most magnificent—what do
you think? A sunset, a man-of-war, a thunderstorm? Nothing of the kind.
He had seen the most magnificent prawns he ever ate in his life.
And when I asked another young gentleman, who was speaking of "the most tremendous screw ever made in the world," to which of our great ironclads he referred, he smiled upon me with a benign and courteous pity, as he said that he "was alluding to a screw into the middle pocket, which he had recently seen during a game at billiards between Cook and the younger Roberts."
When you hear one lady informing another that she had just seen simply the most exquisite, the most lovely, the most perfect thing in existence, is she referring to something wonderful in nature, or to something beautiful in art, or can it be only a bonnet? Has she just come home from the glaciers of Switzerland, the lakes of Italy, the mountains of Connemara, or the castles of the Rhine, or can it be that she has been no farther than Marshall and Snelgrove's shop?
Then there's that awful "awful!" Why, if a thousandth part of things which are commonly affirmed to be aweful were aweful, we should go about with our faces blanched, like his who drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night, our teeth chattering, and our hair on end. Everything is aweful—awefully good or awefully bad.
Only last week I handed a plate to a young lady at luncheon, and, looking sweetly upon me, as though I had brought a reprieve from the gallows, she sighed, "Oh thanks! how awfully kind!"
And years ago, I went with John Leech to admire Robson in The Porter's Knot, and when that pathetic little drama was over, and the actor had stirred our souls with pity, an undergraduate in the stalls before us turned to his companion, as the curtain fell, and said, tremulously, with an emotion which did him honour, although his diction was queer, "Awefully jolly! awefully jolly!"
Yes, it amuses, but it pains us more, this reckless abuse and confusion of words, because it tends to lower the dignity and to pervert the meaning of our language; it dishonours the best member that we have. If we use the most startling and impressive words which we can find, when we do not really require them, when the crisis comes in which they are appropriate, they seem feeble and commonplace. We are as persons who, wearing their best clothes daily, are but dingy guests at a feast.
Then comes retribution. They who cry "Wolf!" whenever they see a leveret are not believed when Lupus comes. They who suffer "excruciating agony" whenever a thorn pricks, can say no more under exquisite pain, and their familiar words are powerless to evoke the sympathy which they have repelled so long. They are more likely to receive the severe rebuke administered by a gruff old gentleman to his maudlin, moribund neighbour, who was ever exaggerating his ailments, and who, upon his doleful declaration that "between three and four o'clock that morning he had been at Death's door!" was abruptly but anxiously asked—"Oh, why didn't you go in?"
I protest, in the next place, against the use of long, large words for the gratification of that conceit or covetousness which seeks to obtain, from mere grandiloquence, reputations and rewards to which it is not entitled. Being a gardener, I like to call a spade as spelt; and if any one terms it an horticultural implement, or a mattock, I do not expect him to dig much. I have used the monosyllable "shop," and I will not recall it, though a thousand pairs of gleaming scissors were pointed at my breast, and I was told by an angry army of apprentices to talk shop no more—the word was vulgar, or rather obsolete, superseded by the more graceful terms of mart, emporium, warehouse, repository, bazaar, and lounge.
Plain folk, who sold drugs when I was a boy, were not ashamed to be called druggists, but now they are pharmaceutical chymists, and analytical Homoeopathists; and one is tempted to quote Canning's paraphrase, which he made when Dr. Addington had been complimenting the country party, "I do remember an apothecary, gulling of simples." Persons who cut hair were known as hair-cutters, and they who attended to the feet were called corn-cutters; but now the former are artists in hair, and the latter are chiropodists.
No long time ago I consulted with an intelligent tradesman as to the best way of protecting from frost a long line of standard rose-trees, growing near a wall in my garden, and shortly afterwards I received from him the drawing of a clever design, with a letter informing me that he had now the pleasure of submitting to my inspection his idea of a Cheimoboethus. When I rallied from my swoon, and was staggering towards my lexicon, I remembered that, as [Greek: cheimon] was the Greek for winter, and [Greek: boaethos] for a friend in need, the word was not without appropriate meaning; but I never took heart to order the invention, because I felt convinced that, if I were to inform my gardener that we were going to have a Cheimoboethus, he would say that he would rather leave.
A bird-stuffer is now a plumassier and taxidermist; and when I asked a waiter the meaning of "Phusitechnicon," which I read over a shop opposite his hotel, he told me it meant old china. And he bowed respectfully, as one who knew how to treat a great scholar, when he met him, as I remarked gravely, "Ah yes, I see: no doubt from phusi—the ancients, and technicon—cups and saucers."
Nor can I leave these long Greek words without noticing another objectionable abuse of them, whereby, upon the principle that "what in the captain's but a choleric word, is in the soldier flat blasphemy," a distinction is made between vice in the rich and vice in the poor, and that which in the latter is obstinate depravity, to be handled only by the police, becomes in the former a pitiable weakness or an irresistible impulse to be gently nursed by the physician. If a poor man steals, he is a desperate thief; but if a rich man fancies that which does not belong to him he is a Kleptomaniac, and "the spoons will be returned." If a poor man is addicted to alcohol he is a drunken sot; but if a rich man is oft intoxicated, he is afflicted with Dipsomania! Interesting patient! I should like to prescribe for him. I feel sure I could do him good with my medicines—the crank and water-gruel!
Leaving him at it, I pass on to another mania, which rather provokes amusement than anger—the mania to be called "Esquire." Forty years ago, the title was restricted to those who carried arms. The armiger, no longer toiling after his knight with heavy helmet and shield, bore his own arms, as he drove along, proudly and pleasantly upon his carriage door. People who became rich, and found themselves shut out from "genteel society" because they had only letters upon their spoons, instead of birds and beasts, arms with daggers, and legs with spurs, were delighted to discover, on application at the Heralds' Office, that one of their ancestors had undoubtedly exercised the functions of a groom in the establishment of William the Conqueror, and that they were consequently entitled to bear upon their arms a stable-bucket azure, between two horses current, and to wear as their crest a curry-comb in base argent, between two wisps of hay proper, they and their descendants, according to the law of arms. But the luxury was expensive: a lump sum to the Heralds, and two pound two to the King's taxes; and so, as time went on, men of large ambition, but of limited means, began to crave for some more economical process by which they might become esquires. They met together, and they solved the difficulty. They conferred the title upon each other, and they charged no fee. And now the postal authorities will tell you that the number of the "esquires" not carrying arms, not having so much as a leg to stand on (in the matter of legal claims), is something "awful!" But the process is so charmingly cheap and easy that we may expect a further development. Why should we not all be baronets? Why should we not raise ourselves, every man of us, on his own private hoist, to the Peerage?
We have all been ladies and gentlemen so long that a little nobility, with its attendant titles, cannot fail to make a pleasant change. Bessie Black, who cleans the fire-irons, has for some years been Miss Cinderella, with a chignon and a lover on Sundays; and Bill, who weeds in the garden, is Mr. Groundsell with a betting-book and a bad cigar. A quotation from the newspapers will exemplify the comprehensiveness of those terms "ladies and gentlemen," which had once such definite and narrow restrictions. A witness, giving evidence at a trial, says: "When I see that gentleman in the hand-cuffs a-shinning and a-punching that lady with the black eye, I says to my missus, 'Them's ways,' I says, 'as I don't hold to'; and she makes answer to me, 'You better hadn't.'"
Let me not be misunderstood to mean that none are ladies and gentlemen who do not eat with silver forks, or that all persons that go about in carriages deserve those gracious names. I have met with persons calling themselves gentlemen, who evidently thought it manly and high-spirited to swear at their servants, and who were incapable of appreciating any anecdote which was not profane or coarse; and I have met, as all who go amongst the poor have met, men who well deserved that noble epithet in cottages and corduroy. Who has not seen illustrious snobs in satin, and sweet, modest gentlewomen in homely print and serge? A gentleman! There's no title shouted at a reception so grand in my idea as this; and yet, methinks, that any man may win and wear it who is brave, and truthful, and generous, and pure, and kind—who is, in one word, a Christian!
Some people think to make themselves gentlemen by tampering with their patronymics, and by altering their family name. Brown has added an e to his; and greedy Green, though he had two already, has followed his example; and White spells his with a y; and Bob Smith calls his son and heir Augustus Charlemagne Sacheverel Smythe; and Tailor calls himself Tayleure. And one day Tailor went out a-hunting, and he worried a whipper-in, who had plenty of work on his hands, with a series of silly questions, until, upon his asking the name of a hound, he received an answer which put an end to the discourse: "Well, sir," said the Whip, "we used to call him Towler; but things has got so fine and fashionable we calls him Tow-leure."
Passing from abuse to disuse, I would not refer to words which are gradually becoming obsolete, but which some of us, partly from admiration of the words themselves, and partly from old associations, would not willingly let die. Beginning alphabetically, the adjective ask is one of those grand old English monosyllables which convey the sense in the sound, It speaks to you of a day in March, when the wind is in the east, and all the clouds are of a dull slate colour, and the roads are white, and the hedges black, and the fallows are dry and hard as bricks, and a bitter, searching, piercing wind whistles at your sealskins and Ulsters, your Lindseys and Jerseys, your foot-warmers and muffatees, and you feel, with Miggs, "as though water were flowing aperiently down your back," and sit shuddering—dithering (there's another word rarely used, but with a sufficient amount of chilliness in it to ice a bottle of champagne) "dithering in the ask, ungenial day."
Then I like abear (the penultimate a pronounced as e)—"I can't abeer him"; addled—"Bill's addled noat a three week"; agate—"I see you've agate on't"; among-hands—"Tom schemed to do it among-hands"; all along of—"It was all along of them 'osses"; etc.
Of B's there is a swarm: beleddy (a corruption, as most men know, of "by our lady"), and I can only notice a few of the Queens. Botch is a word which, though found in Shakespeare and Dryden, and other authors, is rarely used by us; and yet, methinks, in these days, when the great object seems to be to get quantity in place of quality, and to make as much display as we can at the price—when so much is done by contract, and there is, in consequence, strong temptation to daub with untempered mortar, to use green timber, to put in bad material where it will not be seen, the verb to botch is only too appropriate to all such scampish proceedings.
And what do you think of bofen-yed? I once heard a farmer, shouting from the garden fence, with the vocal powers of a Boanerges, to a labourer at work about a quarter of a mile away, "Yer gret bofen-yed, can ter ear noat?" (Anglicè, "You ox-headed lout, are you stone deaf?"); and more frequently the terms, pudding-yed and noggen-yed have been addressed in my hearing to obtuse and stupid folk. The former requires no comment, and an explanation of the latter—noggen, hard, rough, coarse—may be found in Johnson. "Nay, I did na say thee wor a noggen-yed; I said Lawyer said thee were a noggen-yed," was a poor apology, once spoken in Lancashire. And there also, in time-honoured Lancaster, was made the following illustrative speech. A conceited young barrister, with a nez retroussé and a new wig, had been bullying for some time a rough, honest Lancashire lad, who was giving evidence in a trial, and at last the lawyer, thinking that he saw his opportunity, turned sharply upon the witness and said, "Why, fellow, only a short time ago you stated so and so." To which came the indignant answer, "Why, yer powder-yedded monkey, I never said noat o' sort; I appeal to th' company!"
I have a loving faith in children. Mixing with them daily—in church, in school, and at their play—I think that I know something about them; and I maintain that a disagreeable child is a sorrowful exception to the rule, and the result of mismanagement and foolish indulgences on the part of parents and teachers. But when this abnormal nuisance is found, a peevish, fretful child—a child who is always wanting to taste, a child who ignores the admirable purposes for which pocket-handkerchiefs were designed, such an enfant terrible as he who told the kindly mother, offering to bring her 'Gustus to join him in his play, that "if you bring your 'Gustus here I shall make a slit in him with my new knife, and let out his sawdust"—when, I repeat, we come in contact with such an obnoxious precocity as this, what word can describe him so satisfactorily as the monosyllable—brat?
More detestable, because more powerful to do hurt, and with less excuse for doing it, is the Blab; the unctuous, tattling Blab, who creeps to your side with words softer than butter, but having war in his heart; he "always thought that Sam Smith was such a friend of yours, and" (hardly waiting for your "So he is") "was surprised and rather disgusted by his remarks at the Club last Thursday." And then he tells you something which, for a moment, and until principle prevails over passion, suggests the removal by violence of several of Sam's teeth, and he leaves you distressed and distrustful, until you discover, as you most probably will, that there has been cruel misrepresentation. Ah, if poor Jeannette's desire were realised, and they who make the quarrels were the only men to fight, how nice it would be to sit upon an eminence and watch the Battle of the Blabs!
There was a battle once on a small scale, the only rational duel ever fought, in which a brace of Blabs were sweetly discomfited. They had succeeded in separating "very friends," and had arranged a hostile meeting; but, through the intervention of better men, and without their cognisance, the principals entered into explanation, and, finding that they had been misled, mutually agreed to fire at the seconds, who had made the mischief. One Blab received a bullet in the calf of his leg, and the other a ping close to his whiskers; and then the combatants said that their honour was satisfied, and the party broke up.
Some years ago there lived in our village an individual who was known to us as Brawnging Bill. Does not the epithet describe the man? As you pronounce it, does not William's photograph present itself to your mental eye? A large, obese, idle hulk of a man (fine old Saxon word, that hulc!) lounging about with his hands in his pockets and a pipe in his mouth; a man who talks at the top of his voice, and laughs the loud laugh which tells the vacant mind, and lies with such volubility that you would think truth was a fool. Eloquent, didactic, imperious was he in the taproom and by the blacksmith's forge, in the quoit-yard and in the alley of skittles, and yet, whene'er his tongue led him into trouble, and there was whisper of peril to that fat form of his, at the first utterance of a threat, the first sign of aggressive anger, there was a dissolving view of our Brawnging Bill.
From B to C.—Whenever the fairer sex enter Parliament (breathes there a man with ears so deaf as to doubt their powers of parlance?) and we have a House of Ladies as well as a House of Lords, I anticipate that among the first measures introduced will be a coercive Bill for Regulating in the Clay Districts the scraping, wiping, and cleaning of men's boots on their return from the garden or the field. A sore provocation it must surely be to those who love order and brightness to find slabs of dirt upon their new oil-cloth, Indian mats, and bright encaustic tiles. Justly may the gentlest spirit chunter and complain while the guilty husband, from his dressing-room hard by, vainly essays to evade his shame by a quotation—"Would my darling have me come bootless home—home without boots, and in wet weather, too?" Better to give the real, the only excuse, and say that the soil is so—no, not adhesive, not sticky, not tenacious, but, to use a word ten thousand times more expressive than these, so clarty.
And do you not remember (on we go, voyaging among the C's,) a time, a happy time, before you knew what digestion meant, when you delighted to cranch the unripe gooseberry, until you heard the clomp of the paternal tread on the causey, and crouched lest you should catch it, hid to escape a hiding; and how, nevertheless, swift retribution followed upon the track of crime, and you suffered those internal pains, which were vulgarly known as colly-wobbles, and were coddled, in consequence, upon your mother's knee?
Going on to D—Dickens, in a description of a street row, represents one of the lady disputants as saying to her adversary, "You go home, and, when you are quite sober, mend your stockings"; and he adds that these allusions, not only to her intemperate habits but to the state of her wardrobe, were so exasperating to the accused party that she proceeded to comply, not with the suggestion of her accuser, but with the request of the bystanders, and to "pitch in" with considerable alacrity. Assuming that her hose was as reported, let us hope that she had the worst of the combat, for there is something in the idea of a dowdy which is hateful to the manly mind. How life-like the portrait which the word paints for us! a coarse, fat female, her dingy cap, with its faded ribbons, awry upon her unkempt hair; eyes hookless, holes buttonless, upon her shabby gown; a boot-lace trailing on the ground. When we clergy visit Mrs. Dowdy's home, or the residence of her sister, Mrs. Slattern, and find that, though it is towards evening, they have not tidied either self or house, we know why the children are unhealthy and untaught, and why the husband prefers the warmth and cleanliness of "The Manor Arms" to his own miserable hut. As a house-keeper, Mrs. Dowdy could only "please the pigs"; and this reminds me what an apt word we have in dunky for a rotund, obese, little porket. I do not find the latter in Johnson, but dowdy in Shakespeare, and slattern is from the Swedish.
No word suggests itself as I stand at E's, and I therefore proceed with a sonata in F, composed, not by Beethoven, but by a horse-breaker, with certain amplifications of my own: "The young horse was in famous fettle, and framed splendidly over the flakes; but he seemed all of a flabber-gaster when he caught sight of the water, put himself into a regular fandango, and the more I flanked him the more he funked, till in he went with a flop."
I come now to a gem of purest ray serene. To me the monosyllable gorp is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. Take a youth, who has passed his life as an underling on some secluded farm, to an exhibition of wax figures, gorgeously attired, rolling their eyes and lifting up their arms to slow music, and you shall see him gorp. Or go with that young man to a display of fireworks, and when the first asteroid rocket sends out its glowing stars you shall see that wide-mouthed, wobbling agriculturist so gorp as to make it almost impossible for the descending stick to go anywhere save down his throat.
But we are all of us naturally fond of gorping. We abstain in our sensitive days, because somebody said it was vulgar; but, as we grow older and wiser, and that bell-wether Fashion tinkles vainly in our ears, we flatten our happy noses upon the shop-windows once again, and thoroughly enjoy our gorp.
At Oxford, I remember, it was considered very low indeed to gorp. In fact, we did not allow ourselves to be astonished at anything, unless it was the audacity of trades-people with reference to the payment of their little bills. Wherefore I the more honour the conduct and courage of a college friend who, honest himself, and as free from humbug as any man I know, was bored, especially in London, by the society of an affected coxcomb, who persisted in attaching himself whenever they met, giving himself all sorts of silly airs, enlarging upon his intimacy with titled folks, and asserting himself to be, like Mrs. Jarley's show, the delight of the nobility and gentry of the day. "Gradually," said my friend to me, "I discovered a process by which I might execute a deed of separation. First, I rattled my stick against the area railings, and I saw him wince; then I whistled an Ethiopian serenade, and 'o'er his face a tablet of unutterable thoughts was traced'; but when I set my hat well on the back of my head, and gorped with open mouth at six legs of pork in a butcher's shop, he fled, and I saw him no more."
Thus did my friend successfully assume the lineaments of a gawk, and the deportment of a gorby, that he might evade the oppressive attentions of a companion given to gawster. The enemy whom he so adroitly dispersed bore a strong family likeness to a fraternal nuisance, whom we recently inspected, being, in fact, a new edition, on toned paper and elegantly bound, of the braggart, "Brawnging Bill," and exhibiting the same feeble powers of resistance when his silly conceits were thwarted. Honest men, hoping reformation, rejoice to see him slink away, rejoice to see the gawsterer subdued, as when Theodore Hook rushed across Fleet Street to one, who was walking as proudly down it as though the Bank of England was his counting-house and St. Paul's his private Chapel, and, almost breathless with admiring awe, gasped his anxious question—"O sir, O pray sir, may I ask, sir—are you anybody in particular?" Certainly it is either a great amusement or a great irritation (as the weather, or disposition, or digestion may influence), to meet with persons in parks, promenades, esplanades, and spas who ostensibly expect you to look at them in an ecstasy of wonder, as though they were a sunset on Mont Blanc or the Balaklava Charge.
Only in three exceptional cases is it permissible, as I think, to gawster. I like to see a drum-major, with my grandmother's carriage-muff on his head, and a baton in his hand as long as a bean-rod, swaggering at the head of his regiment, as though he had only to knock at the gates of a besieged city and the governor would instantly send the keys. Secondly, I was disappointed the other day at the stolid behaviour of a sheep, who went on grazing with a sublime indifference when a peacock, having marched some distance for the purpose, wheeled round within a yard of his nose, displaying his brilliant charms in vain; and all the eyes of Argus seemed to pale their ineffectual fire, as when Mercury, with his delightful music, in accordance with the command of Jupiter, and with Lemprière's dictionary, made them wink in a delicious drowse. And, thirdly, in the case of a game bantam, once my property, who flew up every morning to the top of a tall pump, and challenged Nottinghamshire to fight, I could not but admire the gawstering spirit, because he so thoroughly meant all that he said, and would have gladly matched himself against a mad elephant, or would have crowed defiance, midway between the rails, as the express rushed on at speed.
But in other animals I would pitilessly suppress proclivities to gawster. I would ask power from Parliament to whip, when mild persuasion failed, the precocious prig, "neither man nor boy," who struts about on Sundays, scoffing at religion, and polluting the air with bad tobacco and worse talk; and I would authorise the police to supervise, and to send home at their discretion, those small giggling girls who, having lost the shame which is a glory and a grace, and coveting every adornment but one, the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, are seen in our streets, with nearly half a year's wage upon their backs, and the change on their faces—in brass.
To gawster, in fine, is a sure indication of moral and physical debility. He who gawsters is like a show, which has enormous pictures and clanging cymbals, and gongs, and drums, and an obese showman, in his shirt-sleeves, lying through a speaking-trumpet at the top of his voice, outside, and little more than a three-headed puppy, or a seven-legged lamb (not in vigorous life, as shown upon the canvas, but in glass and spirits of wine) within. When, for example, you hear a man gawster about his horsemanship, you may be sure that he will never be first over a fence, unless it be some wee obstacle, which you could almost arrange on a rocking-horse, and then he will rush wildly at it, as though he had made up his mind to die; or, if his boasting be of cricket, you may expect next morning to see him miss the first easy catch which comes.
I need hardly ask whether you have known, my reader, what it is to feel yourself gloppened, as when in boyhood (if feminine, please ask your brother), you had just finished your first pipe of the herb called shag, and on your face a tablet of unutterable thoughts was traced, as represented in that marvellous sketch by John Leech, "Old Bagshawe under the influence of tobacco"; when you went forth with your mother for an innings, as you hoped, at the confectioner's, and a second ditto at the toyshop, and saw her ringing the dentist's bell; when you had carefully adjusted that cracker to Mr. Nabal's knocker, and were lighting the lucifer within the quiet seclusion of your cap, and suddenly the knuckles of Mr. Nabal's left pressed rudely on your nape, and the thumb and finger of his right essayed to meet each other through the lobe of your ear; when your dearest friend, in the strictest confidence, and having sworn you to secrecy, showed you a lock of gleaming hair, given to him by the girl whom you adored.
And it was you, my Thomas, you,
The friend in whom my soul confided,
Who dared to gaze on her—to do,
I may say, much the same as I did.
Or when, in after-years, unequally mated, you groaned, with Parolles, under the subjection of a stronger will, "a man that's married is a man that's marred"; and it might be said of you, as once it was said by a labourer of one of his neighbours (so have I read in a book about roses, a charming volume, which should be on every table), "Bill has been and married his mestur, and she has gloppened him a goodish bit."
I remember an occasion when a gawsterer was gloppened sorely. There was an ancient mansion, wainscoted and floored with shining oak, glib—I have not heard that apposite, terse little monosyllable since I went slurring with the village boys—glib as glass; and in that ancient mansion there was a banquet; and to that banquet came, with other guests, "a fop in a gay coat," a coxcomb wearing the bright vestment of the hunter, albeit in the hour of chase he only hunted gates and gaps; and upon the white satin lining of his "pink" there was a tiny button-hole bouquet, such as Mab might have held with her fairy fingers at the time of her coronation; and in collar, if in nothing else, he resembled the immortal Shakespeare; and his bosom was broad and snowy as the swan's; and his pumps were glossy as the raven's wing; and he was going dinnerward, with a winsome damsel on his arm and a complacent smile of self-conceit upon his countenance, when the smooth soles of these new and shining shoes suddenly performed a rapid evolution, as though they were skates upon ice; and there was a little shriek from the winsome damsel in particular, and a large "Oh!" from the procession in general, and a flash of horizontal scarlet, as when a soldier falls in battle; and then the bruised and bewildered dandy picked himself up, as best he could, to perform a part for which his qualifications were small—the personification of a man who had a relish for pain; and I sympathised with, though I did not love him—not so much because his feelings, as because his raiment was torn, and he, who was generally the most lively and locomotive of all, was now depressed and sedentary, like the lover of Constance, brooding upon his silent grief, as on its nest the dove, while we remained at the dinner-table, and finally backing out of the drawing-room at an early hour, as though our hostess were the queen.
And his involuntary gymnastics remind me, as I pass on to that "terrible thoroughbred" letter H (I have heard men speak of others who ignored it in conversation as though they must be capable of any crime), of a stout old lady in the manufacturing districts, whose husband had been very successful in business, and had purchased a fine old country residence from some dilapidated squire. She was complaining to a visitor of the difficulty which she had in walking upon the polished floors. "First I sluther," she said, "and then I hutch; and then I sluther, and then I hutch; and the more I hutch the more I sluther."
Only one other specimen (for I must hurry on helter-skelter and harum-scarum) from words beginning with H—to be, or cause others to be, on the hig, that is, to go about, or cause others to go about, in a fume, angrily excited, menacing revenge. "Betty," I asked one of my parishioners, "why do you make these ill-natured, irritating speeches to your next-door neighbour?" "Oh, bless yer," was the reply I received, "I only said 'em just to set old Sally on the hig." She knew that not to many was it given to hear resignedly the bitter word, that not to many was given in its reality the resignation affected by another of my old women, who (one of those wretched combinations of religion and rancour, "who think they're pious when they're only bilious") accosted me with the startling intelligence—"Oh, Mestur 'Ole, I've got another lift towards 'eaven. Bowcocks" (tenants of the cottage adjoining her own), "Bowcocks has been telling more lies; blessed are the parsecuted!" Better open war than this dismal affectation of peace! Better to confess ourselves hity-tity, and to raise a hullabaloo, than such humbug as this!
I, the egotist, has for once nothing to say; but J recalls to me an extract from a conversation which took place during one of my parochial visitations.
Pastor.—"Did I not see old Nanny Smith talking with you at your door just now?"
Parishioner.—"Oh yes, she wor' here not three minutes sin', and jabbering, as usual, like a clamm'd [famished] jay in a wood; but when she see your reverence coming up th' lane, th' old lass wor' gone in a jiffey."
K makes no suggestions, and L but few. "I'll lay," has no reference to eggs or to a recumbent posture, but implies a wager. Some years ago, I was riding to the meet, and came up inaudibly, upon the wayside grass, with two grooms on their masters' hunters, peering over their pummels at a mounted horse in the distance before them and anxiously discussing his identity. Just as I was passing the disputants, the one turned to the other and said, "I shall lay yer three threepenny gins to one as it's Colonel's rat-tailed 'oss."
Lig is still commonly used for "lie." "Our Bob has ligabed sin' Monday." "The moon wor ligging behind a cloud, so they couldn't see keepers coming." To lorp is to move awkwardly or idly, and the word suggests a noble line for the alliterative poet:
Lo, lazy lubbers loutish, lorp and loll.
In the days of my boyhood I was perplexed conjecturing by what process of the rustic mind moles had changed their names into Mouldi-warps; but I have since discovered that in this instance, as in countless others, the bucolic brain was not so mollified by beans and bacon as some would have us believe. The mould—and very fine mould it is—is warped, turned up by the mole; and this reminds me of a mole-catcher, whose principles were warped also, and whose occupation was gone awhile in our parts, when it was discovered that he carried a collection of dead moles about with him, with which, the morning after his traps had been set, he made a grand display on some contiguous hedge, inducing his employer fondly to imagine that his enemies (as he thought of them) had been all destroyed in a night.
Flying onwards—for this is a very fugitive piece—I would ask admiration for the adjective muggy, as exquisitely descriptive of weather, not uncommon in this climate, where a fog gives one the idea, suggested by Dickens, that nature is brewing on an extensive scale outside, and there's dampness everywhere, taking the curl from ringlet and whisker, and causing our adhesive envelopes to fasten themselves on our writing-table, as though practising the duties of their post.
No sun, no moon,
No morn, no noon,
No dawn, no dusk, no proper time of day—
No sky, no earthly view,
No distance looking blue.
No road, no street, no t'other side the way—
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member,
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No … vember!
I love, though not as licensed victuallers love, the little monosyllable nip. What a nimble agility, what a motive power, in that curt, imperative word!—the pistol-shot which starts the boat-race, the brief, shrill whistle which starts the train. "Just nip off your horse and pull out that stake." "You nipped out o' the army," said a snob to a friend of mine, who had retired some years before the Crimean invasion, and who, in his magisterial capacity, had offended the snob; "you know'd t' war wor' a-coming; you nipped out, you didn't relish them Rooshan baggonets a-prodding and a-pricking. You nipped out o' th' army; you know'd t' war wor' coming. Good morning. I think you were right."
When the wind bloweth in from the Orient, or when our discretion has collapsed before a lobster salad (that claw looked so innocently pink, and that lettuce so crisp and green!) then is poor human nature but too prone to be querulous; we disagree, like the lobster, with our fellow creatures; we are peevishly disposed to nag. "My mestur has been a good husband to me," said one of the matrons of my flock, "but he can chime in nasty when he wants to nag."
Times of refinement are probably at hand when, under the sacred influence of School Boards, the rural tongue shall cease to substitute the word no-at for nought, or nothing. I am not sorry that when that epoch comes I shall no longer be attached to this machine. I cling to those expressions, which I have heard from childhood: "He's like a _no-at." "_He's up to no-at." One day, years ago, we waited for the train at, not Coventry, but Ratcliffe-on-Trent, and while we waited a weary workman, with his bag of tools on his back, came and sat on the bench beside. Presently we were joined by a third person in the garrulous phase of inebriety, and he pestered the tired artisan with his _bosh_and gibberish (two words which should have been introduced at an earlier period of my history) until he provoked the righteous expostulation, "Oh, don't bother me; you're drunk." Then, with an air of outraged dignity, and with a stern solemnity, which, if he had not wobbled in his gait and stammered in his utterance, might have suggested the idea that he had just been appointed Professor of Philosophy for the Midland Districts, he delivered an oration: "Now just you listen to me. Do you suppose as a Mighty Power 'ud mak the barley to grow, and the 'ops to grow, and then put it into the minds of other parties to mak' 'em foment, and me not meant to drink 'em? why, you know no-at!" Whereupon the apt rejoinder: "I know this—that a Mighty Power never meant the barley to grow, nor the hops to grow, for you to take and turn yoursen into a be-ast."
Nobbut is still common in these parts, in abbreviation of "nothing but." I congratulated an invalid parishioner on the presence of the doctor, and he said dolefully, "Oh yes, sir; thank yer, sir—but it's nobbut th' 'prentice."
My limits do not allow me to mind my L's and Q's and R's, or I might have enlarged upon such words as palaver, and pawling, and peart, and prod, and_romper_, and ramshackle, and rawm; and I can only dwell upon one selection from the S's, of which there is a long Sigmatismus, such as snag ("Billy and Sally's always at snags"), and scuft, and scrawl ("he wor' just a glass over the scrawl," i.e. the line of sobriety), and scrawm, and slape, and snigger, and slive ("I see that _shack a-sliving and a_-skulking about"), and slare, and_slawmy_, and sneck, and snoozle, and spank, and stodge, and stunt, and swish.
The word which I would illustrate is skimpy. It signifies something mean and defective; and in the following history, told to me by a clerical friend, it refers to an attenuated and bony female. When a curate in a remote country parish, he took a raw village lad into his service, to train him for some better place; and, when his education was sufficiently advanced, and he had made some progress in the art of writing, he was permitted to accompany his master to a large dinner-party given by a neighbouring squire. Next morning he communicated his experiences to the housekeeper, and she treacherously repeated them to my friend. "'Oh,' he said, 'it just wor' grand. Me and t'other gentlemen in livery we stood i' th' 'all, and they flung open folding-doors, and out comes the quality tu and tu, harm i' harm, all a-talking and a-grinning, and as smart as ninepence. I wor' quite surprised at mestur. He come out last of all, with a _skimpy_old woman. I should say she wor' sisty off, and there were squire's daughter, looking as bewtifle as bewtifle, and dressed up as gay as waxwork. I never made no mistake, except giving one gentleman mustard wrong side, and just a drop or so o' gravy down a hunbeknown young lady's back.'" I have reached the length of my tether, and will go no longer a-tweing after words, lest I put my readers in a tiff, and leave them in a tantrum. I will yark off. Said an underkeeper who had just shot at a snipe: "It yarked up and screeted, and I nipped round and blazed; but I catched my toe on a bit of a tussock, and so, consarn it, I missed." Let me hope that I have not so completely failed in my aim, while firing my small shot against certain abuses and disuses connected with The Vulgar Tongue.
THE SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD WITH HIS SON
[Sidenote: Calverley]
O what harper could worthily harp it,
Mine Edward! this wide-stretching wold
(Look out wold) with its wonderful carpet
Of emerald, purple, and gold?
Look well at it—also look sharp, it
Is getting so cold.
The purple is heather (erica);
The yellow, gorse—call'd sometimes "whin."
Cruel boys on its pickles might spike a
Green beetle as if on a pin,
You may roll in it, if you would like a
Few holes in your skin.
You wouldn't? Then think of how kind you
Should be to the insects who crave
Your compassion—and then, look behind you
At yon barley-ears! Don't they look brave
As they undulate (undulate, mind you,
From unda, a wave).
The noise of those sheep-bells, how faint it
Sounds here—(on account of our height)!
And this hillock itself—who could paint it,
With its changes of shadow and light?
Is it not—-(never, Eddy, say "ain't it")—
A marvellous sight?
Then yon desolate eerie morasses,
The haunts of the snipe and the hern—
(I shall question the two upper classes
On aquatiles when we return)—
Why, I see on them absolute masses
Of felix, or fern.
How it interests e'en a beginner
(Or tiro) like dear little Ned!
Is he listening? As I am a sinner,
He's asleep—he is wagging his head.
Wake up! I'll go home to my dinner,
And you to your bed.
The boundless ineffable prairie;
The splendour of mountain and lake,
With their hues that seem ever to vary;
The mighty pine-forests which shake
In the wind, and in which the unwary
May tread on a snake;
And this wold, with its heathery garment,
Are themes undeniably great.
But—although there is not any harm in't—
It's perhaps little good to dilate
On their charms to a dull little varmint
Of seven or eight.
TARTARIN DE TARASCON
[Sidenote: Daudet]
At the time of which I am speaking, Tartarin of Tarascon was not the Tartarin that he is to-day, the great Tartarin of Tarascon, so popular throughout the South of France. However—even then—he was already king of Tarascon.
Let me tell you whence this kingship.
You must know, first, that every one there is a huntsman, from the greatest to the smallest.
So, every Sunday morning, Tarascon takes arms and leaves the walls, game-bag on the back, gun on the shoulder, with a commotion of dogs, ferrets, trumpets, and hunting-horns. It is a superb sight. Unfortunately, game is wanting, absolutely wanting.
However stupid animals may be, in the end they had become wary.
For five leagues round Tarascon warrens are empty, nests deserted. Not a thrush, not a quail, not the least little rabbit, not the smallest leveret.
And yet these pretty Tarascon hillocks are very tempting, perfumed with myrtle, lavender, and rosemary; and these fine muscat grapes, swollen with sweetness, which grow by the side of the Rhone, extremely appetising too—yes, but there is Tarascon behind, and in the little world of fur and feather Tarascon has an evil fame. The birds of passage themselves have marked it with a big cross on their maps of the route, and when the wild-ducks, descending towards Camargue in long triangles, see the steeples of the town in the distance, the leader screams at the top of his lungs, "There is Tarascon!—There is Tarascon!" and the whole flight turns.
In short, as far as game is concerned, only one old rogue of a hare remains, who has escaped by some miracle from the September massacres of the Tarasconners, and who insists on living there. In Tarascon this hare is well known. They have given him a name. He is called "The Express." It is known that his form is in M. Bompard's ground—which, by the way, has doubled and even trebled its price—but so far no one has been able to get at it.
At the present moment there are one or two desperate fellows who have set their hearts upon him.
The others have made up their minds that it is hopeless, and "The
Express" has become a sort of local superstition, although the
Tarasconners are not very superstitious and eat swallows in a salmi when
they can get them.
"But," you object, "if game is so rare in Tarascon, what do the Tarascon sportsmen do every Sunday?"
What do they do?
Well, bless me! they go out into the open country two or three leagues from the town. They gather into little groups of six or seven, stretch themselves tranquilly in the shadow of an old wall, an olive-tree, take out of their game-bags a great piece of beef seasoned with daube, some uncooked onions, a large sausage, some anchovies, and begin an interminable luncheon, moistened by one of those nice little Rhone wines which make a man laugh and sing.
After that, when one has laid in a good stock of provisions, one rises, whistles the dogs, loads the guns, and the chase begins. That is to say, each gentleman takes his cap, flings it into the air with all his might, and fires at it.
He who puts most shots into his cap is proclaimed king of the hunt, and returns in the evening to Tarascon in triumph, with his peppered cap on the end of his gun, amidst yappings and fanfares.
Needless to say, there is a great trade of caps in the town. There are even hatters who sell caps torn and full of holes for the use of the clumsy. But hardly any one but Bézuquet, the chemist, buys them. It is dishonouring!
As a cap-hunter, Tartarin of Tarascon has no equal. Every Sunday morning he starts with a new cap; every Sunday evening he returns with a rag. At the little house with the baobab-tree the greenhouses were full of the glorious trophies. For this reason all the Tarasconners recognised him as their master, and as Tartarin knew the code of a sportsman through and through, had read all the treatises, all the manuals of every conceivable hunt, from the pursuit of caps to the pursuit of Bengal tigers, these gentlemen made him their great sporting justicier, and appointed him arbitrator in all their discussions.
Every day, from three to four, at Costecalde's the gunsmith, a fat man was to be seen, very grave, with a pipe between his teeth, sitting in a chair covered with green leather, in the middle of a shop full of cap-hunters, all standing and wrangling. It was Tartarin of Tarascon administering justice, Nimrod added to Solomon.