DR KITCHINER.
SECOND COURSE.
Above all things, continues Dr Kitchiner, "avoid travelling through the night, which, by interrupting sleep, and exposing the body to the night air, is always prejudicial, even in the mildest weather, and to the strongest constitutions." Pray, Doctor, what ails you at the night air? If the night air be, even in the mildest weather, prejudicial to the strongest constitutions, what do you think becomes of the cattle on a thousand hills? Why don't all the bulls in Bashan die of the asthma—or look interesting by moonlight in a galloping consumption? Nay, if the night air be so very fatal, how do you account for the longevity of owls? Have you never read of the Chaldean shepherds watching the courses of the stars? Or, to come nearer our own times, do you not know that every blessed night throughout the year, thousands of young lads and lasses meet, either beneath the milk-white thorn—or on the lea-rig, although the night be ne'er sae wet, and they be ne'er sae weary—or under a rock on the hill—or—no uncommon case—beneath a frozen stack—not of chimneys, but of corn-sheaves—or on a couch of snow—and that they are all as warm as so many pies; while, instead of feeling what you call "the lack of vigour attendant on the loss of sleep, which is as enfeebling and as distressing as the languor that attends the want of food," they are, to use a homely Scotch expression, "neither to haud nor bind;" the eyes of the young lads being all as brisk, bold, and bright as the stars in Charles's Wain, while those of the young lasses shine with a soft, faint, obscure, but beautiful lustre, like the dewy Pleiades, over which nature has insensibly been breathing a mist almost waving and wavering into a veil of clouds?
Have you, our dear Doctor, no compassion for those unfortunate blades, who, nolentes-volentes, must remain out perennially all night—we mean the blades of grass, and also the flowers? Their constitutions seem often far from strong; and shut your eyes on a frosty night, and you will hear them—we have done so many million times—shivering, ay, absolutely shivering under their coat of hoar-frost! If the night air be indeed what Dr Kitchiner has declared it to be—Lord have mercy on the vegetable world! What agonies in that field of turnips! Alas, poor Swedes! The imagination recoils from the condition of that club of winter cabbages—and of what materials, pray, must the heart of that man be made, who could think but for a moment on the case of those carrots, without bursting into a flood of tears!
The Doctor avers that the firm health and fine spirits of persons who live in the country, are not more from breathing a purer air, than from enjoying plenty of sound sleep; and the most distressing misery of "this Elysium of bricks and mortar," is the rareness with which we enjoy "the sweets of a slumber unbroke."
Doctor—in the first place, it is somewhat doubtful whether or not persons who live in the country have firmer health and finer spirits than persons who live in towns—even in London. What kind of persons do you mean? You must not be allowed to select some dozen or two of the hairiest among the curates—a few chosen rectors whose faces have been but lately elevated to the purple—a team of prebends issuing sleek from their golden stalls—a picked bishop—a sacred band the élite of the squirearchy—with a corresponding sprinkling of superior noblemen from lords to dukes—and then to compare them, cheek by jowl, with an equal number of external objects taken from the common run of Cockneys. This, Doctor, is manifestly what you are ettling at—but you must clap your hand, Doctor, without discrimination, on the great body of the rural population of England, male and female, and take whatever comes first—be it a poor, wrinkled, toothless, blear-eyed, palsied hag, tottering horizontally on a staff, under the load of a premature old age (for she is not yet fifty), brought on by annual rheumatism and perennial poverty;—Be it a young, ugly, unmarried woman, far advanced in pregnancy, and sullenly trooping to the alehouse, to meet the overseer of the parish poor, who, enraged with the unborn bastard, is about to force the parish bully to marry the parish prostitute;—Be it a landlord of a rural inn, with pig eyes peering over his ruby cheeks, the whole machinery of his mouth so deranged by tippling that he simultaneously snorts, stutters, slavers and snores—pot-bellied—shanked like a spindle-strae—and bidding fair to be buried on or before Saturday week;—Be it a half-drunk horse-cowper, swinging to and fro in a wraprascal on a bit of broken-down blood that once won a fifty, every sentence, however short, having but two intelligible words, an oath and a lie—his heart rotten with falsehood, and his bowels burned up with brandy, so that sudden death may pull him from his saddle before he put spurs to his sporting filly that she may bilk the turnpike man, and carry him more speedily home to beat or murder his poor, pale, industrious char-woman of a wife;—Be it—not a beggar, for beggars are prohibited from this parish—but a pauper in the sulks, dying on her pittance from the poor-rates, which altogether amount in merry England but to about the paltry sum of, more or less, six millions a-year—her son, all the while, being in a thriving way as a general merchant in the capital of the parish, and with clear profits from his business of £300 per annum, yet suffering the mother that bore him, and suckled him, and washed his childish hands, and combed the bumpkin's hair, and gave him Epsoms in a cup when her dear Johnny-raw had the belly-ache, to go down, step by step, as surely and as obviously as one is seen going down a stair with a feeble hold of the banisters, and stumbling every foot-fall down that other flight of steps that consist of flags that are mortal damp and mortal cold, and lead to nothing but a parcel of rotten planks, and overhead a vault dripping with perpetual moisture, green and slobbery, such as toads delight in crawling heavily through with now and then a bloated leap, and hideous things more worm-like, that go wriggling briskly in and out among the refuse of the coffins, and are heard, by imagination at least, to emit faint angry sounds, because the light of day has hurt their eyes, and the air from the upper world weakened the rank savoury smell of corruption, clothing, as with a pall, all the inside walls of the tombs;—Be it a man yet in the prime of life as to years, six feet and an inch high, and measuring round the chest forty-eight inches (which is more, reader, than thou dost by six, we bet a sovereign, member although thou even be'st of the Edinburgh Six Feet Club), to whom Washington Irving's Jack Tibbuts was but a Tims—but then ever so many gamekeepers met him all alone in my lord's pheasant preserve, and though two of them died within the month, two within the year, and two are now in the workhouse—one a mere idiot, and the other a madman—both shadows—so terribly were their bodies mauled, and so sorely were their skulls fractured;—yet the poacher was taken, tried, hulked; and there he sits now, sunning himself on a bank by the edge of the wood whose haunts he must thread no more—for the keepers were grim bone-breakers enough in their way—and when they had gotten him on his back, one gouged him like a Yankee, and the other bit off his nose like a Bolton Trotter—and one smashed his os frontis with the nailed heel of a two-pound wooden clog, a Preston Purrer;—so that Master Allonby is now far from being a beauty, with a face of that description attached to a head wagging from side to side under a powerful palsy, while the Mandarin drinks damnation to the Lord of the Manor in a horn of eleemosynary ale, handed to him by the village blacksmith, in days of old not the worst of the gang, and who, but for a stupid jury, a merciful judge, and something like prevarication in the circumstantial evidence, would have been hanged for a murderer—as he was—dissected, and hung in chains;—Be it a red-haired woman, with a pug nose, small fiery eyes, high cheekbones, bulging lips, and teeth like swine-tusks,—bearded—flat-breasted as a man—tall, scambling in her gait, but swift, and full of wild motions in her weather-withered arms, all starting with sinews like whipcord—the Pedestrian Post to and fro the market town twelve miles off—and so powerful a pugilist that she hit Grace Maddox senseless in seven minutes—tried before she was eighteen for child-murder, but not hanged, although the man-child, of which the drab was self-delivered in a ditch, was found with blue finger-marks on its windpipe, bloody mouth, and eyes forced out of their sockets, buried in the dunghill behind her father's hut—not hanged, because a surgeon, originally bred a sow-gelder, swore that he believed the mother had unconsciously destroyed her offspring in the throes of travail, if indeed it had ever breathed, for the lungs would not swim, he swore, in a basin of water—so the incestuous murderess was let loose; her brother got hanged in due time after the mutiny at the Nore—and her father, the fishmonger—why, he went red raving mad as if a dog had bitten him—and died, as the same surgeon and sow-gelder averred, of the hydrophobia, foaming at the mouth, gnashing his teeth, and some said cursing, but that was a calumny, for something seemed to be the matter with his tongue, and he could not speak, only splutter—nobody venturing, except his amiable daughter—and in that particular act of filial affection she was amiable—to hold in the article of death the old man's head;—Be it that moping idiot that would sit, were she suffered, on, on, on—night and day for ever, on the self-same spot, whatever that spot might be on which she happened to squat at morning, mound, wall, or stone—motionless, dumb, and, as a stranger would think, also blind, for the eyelids are still shut—never opened in sun or storm;—yet that figure—that which is now, and has for years been, an utter and hopeless idiot, was once a gay, laughing, dancing, singing girl, whose blue eyes seemed full of light, whether they looked on earth or heaven, the flowers or the stars—her sweetheart—a rational young man, it would appear—having leapt out upon her suddenly, as she was passing through the churchyard at night, from behind a tombstone, in a sack which she, having little time for consideration, and being naturally superstitious, supposed to be a shroud, and the wearer thereof, who was an active stripling of sound flesh and blood, to be a ghost or skeleton, all one horrid rattle of bones; so that the trick succeeded far beyond the most sanguine expectation of the Tailor who played the principal part—and sense, feeling, memory, imagination, and reason, were all felled by one blow of fear—as butcher felleth ox—while by one of those mysteries, which neither we, nor you, nor anybody else, can understand, life remained not only unimpaired, but even invigorated; and there she sits, like a clock wound up to go a certain time, the machinery of which being good, has not been altogether deranged by the shock that sorely cracked the case, and will work till the chain is run down, and then it will tick no more;—Be it that tall, fair, lovely girl, so thin and attenuated that all wonder she can walk by herself—that she is not blown away even by the gentle summer breeze that wooes the hectic of her cheek—dying all see—and none better than her poor old mother—and yet herself thoughtless of the coming doom, and cheerful as a nest-building bird—while her lover, too deep in despair to be betrayed into tears, as he carries her to her couch, each successive day feels the dear and dreadful burden lighter and lighter in his arms. Small strength will it need to support her bier! The coffin, as if empty, will be lowered unfelt by the hands that hold those rueful cords!
In mercy to our readers and ourselves, we shall endeavour to prevent ourselves from pursuing this argument any further—and perhaps quite enough has been said to show that Dr Kitchiner's assertion, that persons who live in the country have firmer health and finer spirits than the inhabitants of towns—is exceedingly problematical. But even admitting the fact to be as the Doctor has stated it, we do not think he has attributed the phenomenon to the right cause. He attributes it to "their enjoying plenty of sound sleep." The worthy Doctor is entirely out in his conjecture. The working classes in the country enjoy, we don't doubt it, sound sleep—but not plenty of it. They have but a short allowance of sleep—and whether it be sound or not, depends chiefly on themselves; while as to the noises in towns and cities, they are nothing to what one hears in the country—unless, indeed, you perversely prefer private lodgings at a pewterer's. Did we wish to be personal, we could name a single waterfall who, even in dry weather, keeps all the visitors from town awake within a circle of four miles diameter; and in wet weather, not only keeps them all awake, but impresses them with a constantly recurring conviction during the hours of night, that there is something seriously amiss about the foundation of the river, and that the whole parish is about to be overflowed, up to the battlements of the old castle that over-looks the linn. Then, on another point, we are certain—namely, that rural thunder is many hundred times more powerful than villatic. London porter is above admiration—but London thunder below contempt. An ordinary hackney-coach beats it hollow. But, my faith! a thunderstorm in the country—especially if it be mountainous, with a few fine Woods and Forests, makes you inevitably think of that land from whose bourne no traveller returns; and even our town readers will acknowledge that country thunder much more frequently proves mortal than the thunder you meet with in cities. In the country, few thunderstorms are contented to pass over without killing at least one horse, some milch-kine, half-a-dozen sucking pigs or turkeys, an old woman or two, perhaps the Minister of the parish, a man about forty, name unknown, and a nursing mother at the ingle, the child escaping with singed eyebrows, and a singular black mark on one of its great toes. We say nothing of the numbers stupified, who awake the day after, as from a dream, with strange pains in their heads, and not altogether sure about the names or countenances of the somewhat unaccountable people whom they see variously employed about the premises, and making themselves pretty much at home. In towns, not one thunderstorm in fifty that performs an exploit more magnanimous than knocking down an old wife from a chimney-top—singeing a pair of worsted stockings that, knit in an ill-starred hour, when the sun had entered Aries, had been hung out to dry on a line in the backyard, or garden as it is called—or cutting a few inches off the tail of an old Whig weathercock that for years had been pecking the eyes out of all the airts the wind can blaw, greedy of some still higher preferment.
Our dear deceased author proceeds to tell his Traveller how to eat and drink; and remarks, "that people are apt to imagine that they may indulge a little more in high living when on a journey. Travelling itself, however, acts as a stimulus; therefore less nourishment is required than in a state of rest. What you might not consider intemperate at home, may occasion violent irritation, fatal inflammations, &c., in situations where you are least able to obtain medical assistance."
All this is very loosely stated, and must be set to rights. If you shut yourself up for some fifty hours or so in a mail-coach, that keeps wheeling along at the rate of ten miles an hour, and changes horses in half a minute, certainly for obvious reasons the less you eat and drink the better; and perhaps an hourly hundred drops of laudanum, or equivalent grain of opium, would be advisable, so that the transit from London to Edinburgh might be performed in a phantasma. But the free agent ought to live well on his travels—some degrees better, without doubt, than when at home. People seldom live very well at home. There is always something requiring to be eaten up, that it may not be lost, which destroys the soothing and satisfactory symmetry of an unexceptionable dinner. We have detected the same duck through many unprincipled disguises, playing a different part in the farce of domestic economy, with a versatility hardly to have been expected in one of the most generally despised of the web-footed tribe. When travelling at one's own sweet will, one feeds at a different inn every meal; and, except when the coincidence of circumstances is against you, there is an agreeable variety both in the natural and artificial disposition of the dishes. True that travelling may act as a stimulus—but false that therefore less nourishment is required. Would Dr Kitchiner, if now alive, presume to say that it was right for him, who had sat all day with his feet on the fender, to gobble up, at six o'clock of the afternoon, as enormous a dinner as we who had walked since sunrise forty or fifty miles? Because our stimulus had been greater, was our nourishment to be less? We don't care a curse about stimulus. What we want, in such a case, is lots of fresh food; and we hold that, under such circumstances, a man with a sound Tory Church-and-King stomach and constitution cannot over-eat himself—no, not for his immortal soul.
We had almost forgot to take the deceased Doctor to task for one of the most free-and-easy suggestions ever made to the ill-disposed, how to disturb and destroy the domestic happiness of eminent literary characters. "An introduction to eminent authors may be obtained," quoth he slyly, "from the booksellers who publish their works."
The booksellers who publish the works of eminent authors have rather more common sense and feeling, it is to be hoped, than this comes to—and know better what is the province of their profession. Any one man may, if he chooses, give any other man an introduction to any third man in this world. Thus the tailor of any eminent author—or his bookseller—or his parish minister—or his butcher—or his baker—or his "man of business"—or his house-builder—may, one and all, give such travellers as Dr Kitchiner and others, letters of introduction to the said eminent author in prose or verse. This, we have heard, is sometimes done—but fortunately we cannot speak from experience, not being ourselves an eminent author. The more general the intercourse between men of taste, feeling, cultivation, learning, genius, the better; but that intercourse should be brought about freely and of its own accord, as fortunate circumstances permit, and there should be no impertinent interference of selfish or benevolent go-betweens. It would seem that Dr Kitchiner thought the commonest traveller, one who was almost, as it were, bordering on a Bagman, had nothing to do but call on the publisher of any great writer, and get a free admission into his house. Had the Doctor not been dead, we should have given him a severe rowing and blowing-up for this vulgar folly; but as he is dead, we have only to hope that the readers of the Oracle who intend to travel will not degrade themselves, and disgust "authors of eminence," by thrusting their ugly or comely faces—both are equally odious—into the privacy of gentlemen who have done nothing to exclude themselves from the protection of the laws of civilised society—or subject their fire-sides to be infested by one-half of the curious men of the country, two-thirds of the clever, and all the blockheads.