FUGITIVE LINES ON PAWNING MY WATCH.
“Aurum potabile:”—Gold biles the pot.—FREE TRANSLATION.
FAREWELL then, my golden repeater,
We’re come to my Uncle’s old shop;
And hunger won’t be a dumb-waiter,
The Cerberus growls for a sop!
To quit thee, my comrade diurnal,
My feelings will certainly scotch;
But oh! there’s a riot internal,
And Famine calls out for the Watch!
Oh! hunger’s a terrible trial,
I really must have a relief,—
So here goes the plate of your dial
To fetch me some Williams’s beef!
As famish’d as any lost seaman,
I’ve fasted for many a dawn,
And now must play chess with the Demon,
And give it a check with a pawn.
I’ve fasted, since dining at Buncle’s,
Two days with true Perceval zeal—
And now must make up at my Uncle’s.
By getting a duplicate meal.
“OH MY PROPHETIC SOUL—MY UNCLE!”
No Peachum it is, or young Lockit,
That rifles my fob with a snatch;
Alas! I must pick my own pocket,
And make gravy-soup of my watch!
So long I have wander’d a starver,
I’m getting as keen as a hawk;
Time’s long hand must take up a carver,
His short hand lay hold of a fork.
Right heavy and sad the event is,
But oh! it is Poverty’s crime;
I’ve been such a Brownrigg’s Apprentice,
I thus must be “out of my Time.”
Alas! when in Brook Street the Upper,
In comfort I lived between walls,
I’ve gone to a dance for my supper;
But now I must go to Three Balls!
Folks talk about dressing for dinner,
But I have for dinner undrest;
Since Christmas, as I am a sinner,
I’ve eaten a suit of my best.
I haven’t a ram or a mummock
To fetch me a chop or a steak;
I wish that the coats of my stomach
Were such as my uncle would take!
When dishes were ready with garnish
My watch used to warn with a chime—
But now my repeater must furnish
The dinner in lieu of the time!
My craving will have no denials,
I can’t fob it off, if you stay,
So go,—and the old Seven Dials
Must tell me the time of the day.
Your chimes I shall never more hear ’em,
To part is a Tic Douloureux!
But Tempus has his edax rerum,
And I have my Feeding-Time too!
Farewell then, my golden repeater,
We’re come to my Uncle’s old shop—
And Hunger won’t be a dumb-waiter,
The Cerberus growls for a sop!
THE LIFE OF ZIMMERMANN.
(BY HIMSELF).
“This, this, is solitude.”—LORD BYRON.
I WAS born, I may almost say, an orphan; my Father died three months before I saw the light, and my Mother three hours after—thus I was left in the whole world alone, and an only child, for I had neither Brothers nor Sisters; much of my after passion for solitude might be ascribed to this cause, for I believe our tendencies date themselves from a much earlier age, or rather, youth, than is generally imagined. It was remarked that I could go alone at nine months, and I have had an aptitude to going alone all the rest of my life. The first words I learnt to say, were “I by myself, I”—or thou—or he—or she—or it—but I was a long time before I could pronounce any personals in the plural; my little games and habits were equally singular. I was fond of playing at Solitary or at Patience, or another game of cards of my own invention, namely, whist, with three dummies. Of books, my favourite was Robinson Crusoe, especially the first part, for I was not fond of the intrusion of Friday, and thought the natives really were Savages to spoil such a solitude. At ten years of age I was happily placed with the Rev. Mr. Steinkopff, a widower, who took in only the limited number of six pupils, and had only me to begin with; here I enjoyed myself very much, learning in a first and last class in school hours, and playing in play time at hoop, and other pretty games not requiring partners. My playground was, in short, a garden of Eden, and I did not even sigh for an Eve, but, like Paradise, it was too happy to last. I was removed from Mr. Steinkopff’s to the University of Göttingen, and at once the eyes of six hundred pupils, and the pupils of twelve hundred eyes, seemed fastened upon me: I felt like an owl forced into day-light; often and often I shammed ill, as an excuse for confining myself to my chamber, but some officious would-be friends, insisting on coming to sit with me, as they said, to enliven my solitude, I was forced as a last resource to do that which subjected me, on the principle of Howard’s Prison Discipline, to solitary confinement. But even this pleasure did not last; the heads of the College found out that solitary confinement was no punishment, and put another student in the same cell; in this extremity I had no alternative but to endeavour to make him a convert to my principles, and in some days I succeeded in convincing him of the individual independence of man, the solid pleasures of solitude, and the hollow one of society,—in short, he so warmly adopted my views, that in a transport of sympathy we swore an eternal friendship, and agreed to separate for ever, and keep ourselves to ourselves as much as possible. To this end we formed with our blanket a screen across our cell, and that we might not even in thought associate with each other, he soliloquised only in French, of which I was ignorant, and I in English, to which he was equally a stranger. Under this system my wishes were gratified, for I think I felt more intensely lonely than I ever remember when more strictly alone. Of course this condition had a conclusion; we were brought out again unwillingly into the common world, and the firm of Zimmermann, Nobody, and Co., was compelled to admit—six hundred partners. In this extremity, my fellow prisoner Zingleman and myself had recourse to the persuasions of oratory. We preached solitude, and got quite a congregation, and of the six hundred hearers, four hundred at least became converts to our Unitarian Doctrine; every one of these disciples strove to fly to the most obscure recesses, and the little cemetery of the College had always a plenty of those who were trying to make themselves scarce. This of course was afflicting; as in the game of puss in a corner, it was difficult to get a corner unoccupied to be alone in; the defections and desertions from the College were consequently numerous, and for a long time the state gazette contained daily advertisements for missing gentlemen, with a description of their persons and habits, and invariably concluding with this sentence: “of a melancholy turn,—calls himself a Zimmermanian, and affects solitude.” In fact, as Schiller’s Robbers begot Robbers, so did my solitude beget solitudinarians, but with this difference, that the dramatist’s disciples frequented the Highways, and mine the Byeways!
The consequence was what might have been expected, which I had foreseen, and ardently desired. I was expelled from the University of Göttingen. This was perhaps the triumph of my life. A grand dinner was got up by Zingleman in my honour, at which more than three hundred were present, but in tacit homage to my principles, they never spoke nor held any communication with each other, and at a concerted signal the toast of “Zimmermann and Solitude” was drunk, by dumb show, in appropriate solemn silence. I was much affected by this tribute, and left with tears in my eyes, to think, with such sentiments, how many of us might be thrown together again. Being thus left to myself, like a vessel with only one hand on board, I was at liberty to steer my own course, and accordingly took a lodging at Number One, in Wilderness Street, that held out the inviting prospect of a single room to let for a single man. In this congenial situation I composed that my great work on Solitude, and here I think it necessary to warn the reader against many spurious books, calling themselves “Companions to Zimmermann’s Solitude,” as if solitude could have society. Alas, from this work I may date the decline which my presentiment tells me will terminate in my death. My book, though written against populousness, became so popular, that its author, though in love with loneliness, could never be alone. Striving to fly from the face of man, I could never escape it, nor that of woman and child into the bargain. When I stirred abroad mobs surrounded me, and cried, “Here is the Solitary!”—when I staid at home I was equally crowded; all the public societies of Göttingen thought proper to come up to me with addresses, and not even by deputation. Flight was my only resource, but it did not avail, for I could not fly from myself. Wherever I went Zimmermann and Solitude had got before me, and their votaries assembled to meet me. In vain I travelled throughout the European and Asiatic continent: with an enthusiasm and perseverance of which only Germans are capable, some of my countrymen were sure to haunt me, and really showed by the distance they journeyed, that they were ready to go all lengths with me and my doctrine. Some of these Pilgrims even brought their wives and children along with them, in search of my solitude; and were so unreasonable even as to murmur at my taking the inside of a coach, or the cabin of a packet-boat to myself.
From these persecutions I was released by what some persons would call an unfortunate accident, a vessel in which I sailed from Leghorn, going down at sea with all hands excepting my own pair, which happened to have grappled a hen-coop. There was no sail in sight, nor any land to be seen—nothing but sea and sky; and from the midst of the watery expanse it was perhaps the first and only glimpse I ever had of real and perfect solitude, yet so inconsistent is human nature, I could not really and perfectly enter into its enjoyment. I was picked up at length by a British brig of war, and, schooled by the past, had the presence of mind to conceal my name, and to adopt the English one of Grundy. Under this nom de guerre, but really a name of peace, I enjoyed comparative quiet, interrupted only by the pertinacious attendance of an unconscious countryman, who, noticing my very retired habits, endeavoured by daily lectures from my own work, to make me a convert to my own principles. In short, he so wore me out, that at last, to get rid of his importunities, I told him in confidence that I was the author himself. But the result was anything but what I expected; and here I must blush again for the inconsistency of human nature. While Winkells knew me only as Grundy, he painted nothing but the charms of Solitude, and exhorted me to detach myself from society; but no sooner did he learn that I was Zimmermann, than he insisted on my going to Lady C——’s rout and his own conversazione. In fact, he wanted to make me, instead of a Lion of the Desert, a Lion of the Menagerie. How I resented such a proposition may be supposed, as well as his offer to procure for me the first vacancy that happened in the situation of Hermit at Lord P——’s Hermitage; being, as he was pleased to say, not only able to bear solitude, but well-bred and well-informed, and fit to receive company. The effect of this unfortunate disclosure was to make me leave England, for fear of meeting with the fate of a man or an ox that ventures to quit the common herd. I should immediately have been declared mad, and mobbed into lunacy, and then put into solitary confinement, with a keeper always with me, as a person beside himself, and not fit to be left alone for a moment. As such a fate would have been worse to me than death, I immediately left London, and am now living anonymously in an uninhabited house,—prudence forbids me to say where.
“Sare, I am at where?—”
“Well, I know you be!”
THE PORTRAIT:
BEING AN APOLOGY FOR NOT MAKING AN ATTEMPT ON MY OWN LIFE.
THE late inimitable Charles Mathews, in one of his amusing entertainments, used to tell a story of a certain innkeeper, who made it a rule of his house, to allow a candle to a guest, only on condition of his ordering a pint of wine. Whereupon the guest contends, on the reciprocity system, for a light for every half-bottle, and finally drinks himself into a general illumination.
Something of the above principle seems to have obtained in the case of a Portrait and a Memoir, which in literary practice have been usually dependent on each other—a likeness and a life,—a candle and a pint of wine. The mere act of sitting, probably suggests the idea of hatching; at least an author has seldom nestled in a painter’s chair, without coming out afterwards with a brood of Reminiscences, and accordingly, no sooner was my effigy about to be presented to the Public, than I found myself called upon by my Publisher, with a finished proof of the engraving in one hand, and a request for an account of myself in the other. He evidently supposed, as a matter of course, that I had my autobiography in the bottle, and that the time was come to uncork and pour it out with a Head.
To be candid, no portrait, perhaps, ever stood more in need of such an accompaniment. The figure opposite has certainly the look of one of those practical jokes whereof the original is oftener suspected than really culpable. It might pass for the sign of “The Grave Maurice.” The author of Elia has declared that he once sat as substitute for a whole series of British Admirals,[2] and a physiognomist might reasonably suspect that in wantonness or weariness, instead of giving my head I had procured myself to be painted by proxy. For who, that calls himself stranger, could ever suppose that such a pale, pensive, peaking, sentimental, sonneteering countenance—with a wry mouth as if it always laughed on its wrong side—belonged bonâ fide to the Editor of the Comic—a Professor of the Pantagruelian Philosophy, hinted at in the preface to the present work? What unknown who reckons himself decidedly serious, would recognise the head and front of my “offending,” in a visage not at all too hilarious for a frontispiece to the Evangelical Magazine! In point of fact the owner has been taken sundry times, ere now, for a Methodist Minister, and a pious turn has been attributed to his hair—lucus a non lucendo—from its having no turn in it at all.[3] In like manner my literary contemporaries who have cared to remark on my personals, have agreed in ascribing to me a melancholy bias; thus an authority in the New Monthly Magazine has described me as “a grave anti-pun-like-looking person,” whilst another—in the Book of Gems—declares that “my countenance is more grave than merry,” and insists, therefore, that I am of a pensive habit, and “have never laughed heartily in company or in rhyme.” Against such an inference, however, I solemnly protest, and if it be the fault of my features, I do not mind telling my face to its face that it insinuates a false Hood, and grossly misrepresents a person notorious amongst friends for laughing at strange times and odd places, and in particular when he has the worst of the rubber. For it is no comfort for the loss of points, by his theory, to be upon thorns. And truly what can be more unphilosophical, than to sit ruefully as well as whistfully, with your face inconsistently playing at longs and your hand at shorts,—getting hypped as well as pipped,—“talking of Hoyle,” as the City lady said, “but looking like winegar,” and betraying as keen a sense of the profit and loss, as if the pack had turned you into a pedlar.
“ON THE CARD-RACK.”
But I am digressing; and turning my back, as Lord Castlereagh would have said, on my face. The portrait, then, is genuine—“an ill-favoured thing, Sir,” as Touchstone says, “but mine own.” For its quarrel with the rules of Lavater there is precedent. I remember seeing on Sir Thomas Lawrence’s easel, an unfinished head of Mr. Wilberforce, so very merry, so rosy, so good-fellowish, that nothing less than the Life and Correspondence recently published could have persuaded me that he was really a serious character. A memoir, therefore, would be the likeliest thing to convince the world that the physiognomy prefixed to this number is actually Hood’s Own:—indeed a few of the earlier chapters would suffice to clear up the mystery, by proving that my face is only answering in the affirmative, the friendly enquiry of the Poet of all circles—“Has sorrow thy young days shaded?”—and telling the honest truth of one of those rickety constitutions which, according to Hudibras, seem
“—— as if intended
For nothing else but to be mended.”
To confess the truth, my vanity pricked up its ears a little at the proposition of my Publisher. There is something vastly flattering in the idea of appropriating the half or quarter of a century, mixing it up with your personal experience, and then serving it out as your own Life and Times. On casting a retrospective glance, however, across Memory’s waste, it appeared so literally a waste that vanity herself shrank from the enclosure act, as an unpromising speculation. Had I foreseen, indeed, some five-and-thirty years ago, that such a demand would be made upon me, I might have laid myself out on purpose, as Dr. Watts recommends, so as “to give of every day some good account at last.” I would have lived like a Frenchman, for effect, and made my life a long dress rehearsal of the future biography. I would have cultivated incidents “pour servir,” laid traps for adventures, and illustrated my memory like Rogers’s, by a brilliant series of Tableaux. The earlier of My Seven Stages should have been more Wonder Phenomenon Comet and Balloon-like, and have been timed to a more Quicksilver pace than they have travelled; in short, my Life, according to the tradesman’s promise, should have been “fully equal to bespoke.” But alas! in the absence of such a Scottish second-sight, my whole course of existence up to the present moment would hardly furnish materials for one of those “bald biographies” that content the old gentlemanly pages of Sylvanus Urban. Lamb, on being applied to for a Memoir of himself, made answer that it would go into an epigram; and I really believe that I could compress my own into that baker’s dozen of lines called a sonnet. Montgomery, indeed, has forestalled the greater part of it, in his striking poem on the “Common Lot,” but in prose, nobody could ever make anything of it, except Mr. George Robins. The lives of literary men are proverbially barren of interest, and mine, instead of forming an exception to the general rule, would bear the application of the following words of Sir Walter Scott, much better than the career of their illustrious author. “There is no man known at all in literature, who may not have more to tell of his private life than I have. I have surmounted no difficulties either of birth or education, nor have I been favoured by any particular advantages, and my life has been as void of incidents of importance as that of the weary knife-grinder—‘Story! God bless you, I have none to tell, Sir.’”
Thus my birth was neither so humble that, like John Jones, I have been obliged amongst my lays to lay the cloth, and to court the cook and the muses at the same time; nor yet so lofty, that, with a certain lady of title, I could not write without letting myself down. Then, for education, though on the one hand I have not taken my degree, with Blucher; yet on the other, I have not been rusticated, at the Open Air School, like the poet of Helpstone. As for incidents of importance, I remember none, except being drawn for a soldier, which was a hoax, and having the opportunity of giving a casting vote on a great parochial question, only I didn’t attend. I have never been even third in a duel, or crossed in love. The stream of time has flowed on with me very like that of the New River, which everybody knows has so little romance about it, that its head has never troubled us with a Tale. My own story then, to possess any interest, must be a fib.
Truly given, with its egotism and its barrenness, it would look too like the chalked advertisements on a dead wall. Moreover, Pope has read a lesson to self-importance in the Memoirs of P.P., the Parish Clerk, who was only notable after all amongst his neighbours as a swallower of loaches. Even in such practical whims and oddities I am deficient,—for instance, eschewing razors, or bolting clasp-knives, riding on painted ponies, sleeping for weeks, fasting for months, devouring raw tripe, and similar eccentricities, which have entitled sundry knaves, quacks, boobies, and brutes, to a brief biography in the Wonderful Magazine. And, in the absence of these distinctions, I am equally deficient in any spiritual pretensions. I have had none of those experiences which render the lives of saintlings, not yet in their teens, worth their own weight in paper and print, and consequently my personal history, as a Tract, would read as flat as the Pilgrim’s Progress without the Giants, the Lions, and the grand single combat with the Devil.
To conclude my life,—“upon my life,”—is not worth giving or taking. The principal just suffices for me to live upon; and of course, would afford little interest to anyone else. Besides, I have a bad memory; and a personal history would assuredly be but a middling one, of which I have forgotten the beginning and cannot foresee the end. I must, therefore, respectfully decline giving my life to the world—at least till I have done with it—but to soften the refusal, I am willing, instead of a written character of myself, to set down all that I can recall of other authors, and, accordingly, the next number will contain the first instalment of
[2] He perhaps took the hint from Dibdin, who lays down the rule in his Sea Songs, that a Naval Hero ought to be a Lion in battle, but afterwards a Lamb.
[3] On a march to Berlin, with the 19th Prussian Infantry, I could never succeed in passing myself off as anything but the Regimental Chaplain.