The Works of Thomas Hood; Vol. 02 (of 11) / Comic and Serious, in Prose and Verse, With All the Original Illustrations

by Thomas Hood

SOME ACCOUNT OF WILLIAM WHISTON.

“That boy is the brother of Pam——.”—JOSEPH ANDREWS.

“WILLIAM certainly is fond of whist!”

This was an admission drawn, or extracted, as Cartwright would say, like a double tooth from the mouth of William’s mother; an amiable and excellent lady, who ever reluctantly confessed foibles in her family, and invariably endeavoured to exhibit to the world the sunny side of her children.

There can be no possibility of doubt that William was fond of whist. He doted on it. Whist was his first passion—his first love; and in whist he experienced no disappointment. The two were made for each other.

CARDY MUMS.

William was one of a large bunch of children, and he never grew up. On his seventh birthday a relation gave him a miniature pack of cards, and made him a whist-player for life. Our bias dates much earlier than some natural philosophers suppose. I remember William, a mere child, being one day William of Orange, and objecting to a St. Michael’s because it had no pips.

At school he was a total failure; except in reckoning the odd tricks. He counted nothing by honours, and the schoolmaster said of his head what he has since said occasionally of his hand that “it held literally nothing.”

At sixteen, after a long maternal debate between the black and red suits, William was articled to an attorney: but instead of becoming a respectable land-shark, he played double-dummy with the Common-Law Clerk, and was discharged on the 6th of November. The principal remonstrated with him on a breach of duty, and William imprudently answered that he was aware of his duty, like the ace of spades. Mr. Bitem immediately banged the door against him, and William, for the first time in his life—to use his own expression, “got a slam.”

William having served his time, and, as he calls it, followed suit for five years, was admitted as an attorney, and began to play at that finessing game, the Law. Short-hand he still studied and practised; though more in parlours than in court.

William at one period admired Miss Hunt, or Miss Creswick, or Miss Hardy, or Miss Reynolds; a daughter of one of the great card-makers, I forget which—and he cut for partners, but without “getting the Lady.” His own explanation was that he “was discarded.” He then paid his addresses to a Scotch girl, a Miss MacNab, but she professed religious scruples about cards, and he revoked. I have heard it said that she expected to match higher; indeed William used to say she “looked over his hand.”

William is short, and likes shorts. He likes nothing of longs, but the St. John of them: and he only takes to him, because that saint is partial to a rubber. Whist seems to influence his face as well as form; it is like a knave of clubs. I sometimes fancy whist could not go on without William, and certainly William could not go on without whist. His whole conversation, except on cards, is wool-gathering; and on that subject is like wool—carded. He “speaks by the card,” and never gives equivocation a chance. At the Olympic once he had a quarrel with a gentleman about the lead of Madame Vestris or Miss Sydney: he was required to give his card, and he gave the “Deuce of Hearts.” This was what he termed “calling out.”

Of late years William only goes out like a bad rushlight, earlyish of a night, and quits every table that is not covered with green baize with absolute disgust. The fairies love by night to “gambol on the green,” and so does William, and he is constantly humming with great gusto,

“Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands.”

The only verses, by the way, he ever got by heart. He never cared to play much with the Muses. They stick, he used to say, at Nine.

William can sit longer—drink less—say as little—pay or receive as much—shuffle as well—and cut as deeply as any man on earth. You may leave him safely after dinner, and catch him at breakfast time without alteration of attitude or look. He is a small statue erected in honour of whist, and like Eloquence, “holds his hand well up.” He is content to ring the changes on thirteen cards a long Midsummer night; for he does not play at cards—he works at them, and considering the returns, for very low wages. William never was particularly lucky; but he bears the twos and threes with as much equanimity as any one, and seems, horticulturally speaking, to have grafted Patience upon Whist. I do not know whether it is the family motto, but he has upon his seal—with the great Mogul for a crest—the inscription of “Packs in Bello.”

William is now getting old (nearly fifty-two), with an asthma; which he says makes him rather “weak in trumps.” He is preparing himself accordingly to “take down his score,” and has made his will, bequeathing all he has or has not, to a whist club. His funeral he directs to be quite private, and his gravestone a plain one, and especially “that there be no cherubims carved thereon, forasmuch,”—says this characteristic document, “that they never hold Honours.”

A DOUBLE AT LONG’S.

THE FOX AND THE HEN.
A FABLE.

Speaking within compass, as to fabulousness I prefer Southcote to Northcote.—PIGROGROMITUS.

ONE day, or night, no matter where or when,

Sly Reynard, like a foot-pad, laid his pad

Right on the body of a speckled Hen,

Determined upon taking all she had;

And like a very bibber at his bottle,

Began to draw the claret from her throttle;

Of course it put her in a pretty pucker.

And with a scream as high

As she could cry,

She called for help—she had enough of sucker.

Dame Partlet’s scream

Waked, luckily, the house-dog from his dream,

And with a savage growl

In answer to the fowl,

He bounded forth against the prowling sinner.

And, uninvited, came to the Fox Dinner.

NATIVES OF THE SILLY ISLANDS.

Sly Reynard, heedful of the coming doom,

Thought, self-deceived,

He should not be perceived,

Hiding his brush within a neighbouring broom;

But quite unconscious of a Poacher’s snare,

And caught in copper noose,

And looking like a goose,

Found that his fate “had hung upon a hare;”

His tricks and turns were rendered of no use to him,

And, worst of all, he saw old surly Tray

Coming to play

Tray-Deuce with him.

Tray, an old Mastiff bred at Dunstable,

Under his Master, a most special constable,

Instead of killing Reynard in a fury,

Seized him for legal trial by a Jury;

But Juries—Æsop was a sheriff then—

Consisted of twelve Brutes and not of Men.

But first the Elephant sat on the body—

I mean the Hen—and proved that she was dead,

To the veriest fool’s head

Of the Booby and the Noddy.

Accordingly, the Stork brought in a bill

Quite true enough to kill;

And then the Owl was call’d—for mark,

The Owl can witness in the dark.

To make the evidence more plain,

The Lynx connected all the chain.

In short there was no quirk or quibble

At which a legal Rat could nibble;

The Culprit was as far beyond hope’s bounds,

As if the Jury had been packed—of hounds.

Reynard, however, at the utmost nick,

Is seldom quite devoid of shift and trick;

Accordingly our cunning Fox,

Through certain influence, obscurely channel’d,

A friendly Camel got into the box,

When ’gainst his life the Jury was impanel’d.

Now, in the Silly Isles such is the law,

If Jurors should withdraw,

They are to have no eating and no drinking,

Till all are starved into one way of thinking.

Thus Reynard’s Jurors, who could not agree,

Were lock’d up strictly, without bit or mummock,

Till every beast that only had one stomach,

Bent to the Camel who was blest with three.

To do them justice, they debated

From four till ten, while dinner waited

When thirst and hunger got the upper,

And each inclined to mercy, and hot supper:

“Not guilty” was the word, and Master Fox

Was freed to murder other hens and cocks.

MORAL.

What moral greets us by this tale’s assistance

But that the Solon is a sorry Solon,

Who makes the full stop of a Man’s existence

Depend upon a Colon?

PRO BONO PUBLICO.

THE COMET.
AN ASTRONOMICAL ANECDOTE.

“I cannot fill up a blank better than with a short history of this self-same Starling.”—STERNE’S SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.

AMONGST professors of astronomy,

Adepts in the celestial economy,

The name of H*******l’s very often cited,

And justly so, for he is hand and glove

With ev’ry bright intelligence above;

Indeed, it was his custom so to stop,

Watching the stars upon the house’s top,

That once upon a time he got be-knighted.

In his observatory thus coquetting

With Venus—or with Juno gone astray,

All sublunary matters quite forgetting

In his flirtations with the winking stars,

Acting the spy—it might be upon Mars—

A new André;

Or, like a Tom of Coventry, sly peeping,

At Dian sleeping;

Or ogling thro’ his glass

Some heavenly lass

Tripping with pails along the Milky Way;

Or looking at that Wain of Charles the Martyrs:—

Thus he was sitting, watchman of the sky,

When lo! a something with a tail of flame

Made him exclaim,

“My stars!”—he always put that stress on my—

“My stars and garters!”

“A comet, sure as I’m alive!

A noble one as I should wish to view;

It can’t be Halley’s though, that is not due

Till eighteen thirty-five.

Magnificent!—how fine his fiery trail!

Zounds! ’tis a pity, though he comes unsought—

Unask’d—unreckon’d,—in no human thought—

He ought—he ought—he ought

To have been caught

With scientific salt upon his tail!”

“POSSE COMETATIS.”

“I look’d no more for it, I do declare,

Than the Great Bear!

As sure as Tycho Brahe is dead,

It really enter’d in my head

No more than Berenice’s Hair!”

Thus musing, Heaven’s Grand Inquisitor

Sat gazing on the uninvited visitor

Till John, the serving-man, came to the upper

Regions, with “Please your Honour, come to supper.”

“Supper! Good John, to-night I shall not sup

Except on that phenomenon—look up!”

“Not sup!” cried John, thinking with consternation

That supping on a star must be starvation,

Or ev’n to batten

On Ignes Fatui would never fatten,

His visage seem’d to say,—that very odd is,—

But still his master the same tune ran on,

“I can’t come down,—go to the parlour, John,

And say I’m supping with the heavenly bodies.”

“The heavenly bodies!” echoed John, “Ahem!”

His mind still full of famishing alarms,

“’Zooks, if your Honour sups with them,

In helping, somebody must make long arms!”

He thought his master’s stomach was in danger,

But still in the same tone replied the Knight,

“Go down, John, go, I have no appetite;

Say I’m engaged with a celestial stranger.”—

Quoth John, not much au fait in such affairs,

“Wouldn’t the stranger take a bit down stairs?”

“No,” said the master, smiling, and no wonder,

At such a blunder,

“The stranger is not quite the thing you think,

He wants no meat or drink,

And one may doubt quite reasonably whether

He has a mouth,

Seeing his head and tail are joined together.

Behold him,—there he is, John, in the South.”

John look’d up with his portentous eyes,

Each rolling like a marble in its socket.

At last the fiery tad-pole spies,

And, full of Vauxhall reminiscence, cries,

“A rare good rocket!”

“A what! A rocket, John! Far from it!

What you behold, John, is a comet;

One of those most eccentric things

That in all ages

Have puzzled sages

And frighten’d kings;

With fear of change that flaming meteor, John,

Perplexes sovereigns, throughout its range”—

“Do he?” cried John;

“Well, let him flare on,

I haven’t got no sovereigns to change!”

THE HARVEST MOON.

LITERARY REMINISCENCES.
No. III.

MY first acquaintance with the press—a memorable event in an author’s experience—took place in Scotland. Amongst the temporary sojourners at our boarding-house, there came a legal antiquarian who had been sent for from Edinburgh, expressly to make some unprofitable researches amongst the mustiest of the civic records. It was my humour to think, that in Political as well as Domestic Economy, it must be better to sweep the Present than to dust the Past; and certain new brooms were recommended to the Town Council in a quizzing letter, which the then editor of the Dundee Advertiser or Chronicle, thought fit to favour with a prominent place in his columns. “’Tis pleasant sure,” sings Lord Byron, “to see one’s self in print,” and according to the popular notion I ought to have been quite up in my stirrups, if not standing on the saddle, at thus seeing myself, for the first strange time, set up in type. Memory recalls, however, but a very moderate share of exaltation, which was totally eclipsed, moreover, by the exuberant transports of an accessory before the fact, whom, methinks, I still see in my mind’s eye, rushing out of the printing-office with the wet sheet steaming in his hand, and fluttering all along the High Street, to announce breathlessly that “we were in.” But G. was an indifferent scholar, even in English, and therefore thought the more highly of this literary feat. It was this defective education, and the want of a proper vent for his abundant love nonsense in prose or verse, that probably led to the wound he subsequently inflicted on his own throat, but which was luckily remedied by “a stitch in time.” The failure of a tragedy is very apt to produce something like a comedy, and few afterpieces have amused me more than the behaviour of this Amicus Redivivus, when, thus dramatising the saying of “cut and come again,” he made what ought to have been a posthumous appearance amongst his friends. In fact, and he was ludicrously alive to it, he had placed himself for all his supplementary days in a false position. Like the old man in the fable, after formally calling upon Death to execute a general release, he had quietly resumed his fardel, which he bore about, with exactly the uneasy ridiculous air of a fine-would be gentleman, who is sensitively conscious that he is carrying a bundle. For the sake of our native sentimentalists who profess dying for love, as well as the foreign romanticists who affect a love for dying, it may not be amiss to give a slight sketch of the bearing of a traveller who had gone through half the journey. I had been absent some months, and was consequently ignorant of the affair, when lo! on my return to the town, the very first person who accosted me in the market-place was our felo-de-se; and truly, no Bashful Man, “with all his blushing honours thick upon him,” in the presence of a damp stranger, could have been more divertingly sheepish, and awkwardly backward in coming forward as to manner and address. Indeed, something or the embarrassment of a fresh introduction might naturally be felt by an individual, thus beginning again, as the lawyers say, de novo, and renewing ties he had virtually cast off. The guilty hand was as dubiously extended to me as if it had been a dyer’s,—its fellow meanwhile performing sundry involuntary motions and manipulations about his cravat, as if nervously mistrusting the correctness of the ties or the stability of a buckle. As for his face, there was a foolish, deprecatory smile upon it that would have puzzled the pencil of Wilkie; and even Liston himself could scarcely have parodied the indescribable croak with which, conscious of an unlucky notoriety, he inquired “if I had heard”—here, a short husky cough—“of anything particular?”

“Not a word,” was the answer.

“Then you don’t know”(—more fidgeting about the neck, the smile rather sillier, the voice more guttural, and the cough worse than ever)—“then you don’t know”—but, like Macbeth’s amen, the confession literally stuck in the culprit’s throat; and I was left to learn, an hour afterwards, and from another source, that “Jemmy G*** had fought a duel with himself, and cut his own weazand, about a lady.”

For my own part, with the above figure, and all its foolish features vividly imprinted on my memory, I do not think that I could ever seriously attempt “what Cato did, and Addison approved,” in my own person. On the contrary, it seems to me that the English moralist gave but an Irish illustration of “a brave man struggling with the storms of fate,” by representing him as wilfully scuttling his own hold, and going at once to the bottom. As for the Censor, he plainly laid himself open to censure, when he used a naked sword as a stomachic—a very sorry way, by the way, when weary of conjectures, of enjoying the benefit of the doubt, and for which, were I tasked to select an inscription for his cenotaph, it should be the exclamation of Thisby, in the Midsummer Night’s Dream—

“This is old Ninny’s tomb.”

Mais revenons à nos moutons, as the wolf said to her cubs. The reception of my letter in the Dublin Newspaper encouraged me to forward a contribution to the Dundee Magazine, the Editor of which was kind enough, as Winifred Jenkins says, to “wrap my bit of nonsense under his Honour’s Kiver,” without charging anything for its insertion. Here was success sufficient to turn a young author at once into “a scribbling miller,” and make him sell himself, body and soul, after the German fashion, to that minor Mephistopheles, the Printer’s Devil! Nevertheless, it was not till years afterwards, and the lapse of term equal to an ordinary apprenticeship, that the Imp in question became really my Familiar. In the meantime, I continued to compose occasionally, and, like the literary performances of Mr. Weller Senior, my lucubrations were generally committed to paper, not in what is commonly called written hand, but an imitation of print. Such a course hints suspiciously of type and antetype, and a longing eye to the Row, whereas, it was adopted simply to make the reading more easy, and thus enable me the more readily to form a judgment of the effect of my little efforts. It is more difficult than may be supposed to decide on the value of a work in MS., and especially when the handwriting presents only a swell mob of bad characters, that must be severally examined and re-examined to arrive at the merits or demerits of the case. Print settles it, as Coleridge used to say; and to be candid, I have more than once reversed, or greatly modified a previous verdict, on seeing a rough proof from the press. But, as Editors too well know, it is next to impossible to retain the tune of a stanza, or the drift of an argument, whilst the mind has to scramble through a patch of scribble scrabble, as stiff as a gorse cover. The beauties of the piece will as naturally appear to disadvantage through such a medium as the features of a pretty woman through a bad pane of glass; and without doubt, many a tolerable article has been consigned hand over head to the Balaam Box for want of a fair copy. Wherefore, O ye Poets and Prosers, who aspire to write in Miscellanies, and above all, O ye palpitating Untried, who meditate the offer of your maiden essays to established periodicals, take care, pray ye take care, to cultivate a good, plain, bold, round text. Set up Tomkins as well as Pope or Dryden for a model, and have an eye to your pothooks. Some persons hold that the best writers are those who write the best hands, and I have known the conductor of a magazine to be converted by a crabbed MS. to the same opinion. Of all things, therefore, be legible; and to that end, practise in penmanship. If you have never learned, take six lessons of Mr. Carstairs. Be sure to buy the best paper, the best ink, the best pens, and then sit down and do the best you can; as the schoolboys do—put out your tongue, and take pains. So shall ye haply escape the rash rejection of a jaded editor; so, having got in your hand, it is possible that your head may follow; and so, last not least, ye may fortunately avert those awful mistakes of the press which sometimes ruin a poet’s sublimest effusion, by pantomimically transforming his roses into noses, his angels into angles, and all his happiness into pappiness.

THE OCEAN.
CONSIDERED PER SE.

“A man whom both the waters and the wind, in that vast tennis-court have made the ball for them to play upon, entreats you pity him.”—PERICLES.

IT was during a voyage to Margate, many summers ago—before steam was—that the little episode occurred which I am going to relate, by way of text, to some observations on the ocean.

The importance of the Mariner’s Compass to the sailor is as well known universally as the utility of the little one-eyed instrument, for which Whitechapel is so famous, to the tailor: but its mode of action, and the manner of its application, must be far less generally understood. Whether the plougher of the deep mends his checked shirts with the Needle, or sews the canvas into sails with it, or uses it, after a battle, to extract the splinters from his hard tarry hand, are speculations likely enough to be entertained by the plougher of the land; at least by those clod-compelling turners of the furrows, mid-county born and bred, who, despite of their predilection for such naval ballads as Tom Bowling and Jack Junk, have never set their simple eyes on ship or sailor, or the sea which they subdue. To many Londoners even, who jostle the tar in the streets, and behold tier after tier of masted vessels from their lower Bridge,—who have perchance stood and stared at the Compass itself in some shop-window of Leadenhall, or the still more maritime Minories, the Card with its Card-inal Points, is an undeciphered hieroglyphic. It did not violently surprise me, therefore, to see a simple-looking creature of this latter class go and take a long wondering look into the binnacle, like a child peeping at the tortoise in an Italian’s show-box; and doubtless, to his callow apprehension, the veering Guide was as much a thing of life and instinct as the outlandish reptile to the urchin. It was not until after a tedious poring at it—long enough, if there were any truth in animal magnetism, for the Needle and the Man to have understood one another by mutual sympathy—that the wonderer made up to the steersman, and begged for an elucidation of the marine mystery. Fortunately for the querist, the helmsman, along with all the characteristic good-nature of his fraternity, had none of the coyness, as to the secrets of the craft, with which the ripe sailor is apt to treat the raw voyager; perhaps not without cause. The nautical truths, masonic, may deserve to be obtained by degrees of probation: in the present case the unreserved communication of occult knowledge led to anything but a satisfactory result. No one could take more pains—call them pleasures rather—than the honest man at the wheel, to explain the use and properties of the Compass: he boxed it again and again for the benefit of the gaping neophyte; a benevolent smile, and the twinkling of his blue eyes, declaring that he felt amply repaid by the supposed proficiency of his pupil,—when, all of a sudden, his well-earned pride was dashed to the deck by the pupil’s turning away on his heel, with a hunch of his shoulders, a blank look, and a dissatisfied grunt, exclaiming,

“Well, arter all, I don’t see how the turning round of that ’ere little needle can move about the rudder!”

I should have been no Christian man, but a brute beast, had I not sympathised with the feelings of the steersman. Contempt took the lead. All “the dismal hiss of universal scorn,” ascribed to Milton’s devils, seemed condensed into his whistle. Next came Resentment, wishing back the Cockney-Tailor to his shop-board, sitting on his own needle—and then came Pity, inducing the milder reflection,

“I wonder the poor gentleman’s friends allows him to go about by himself!”

I doubt whether the force of contempt and pity could further go: and yet—to confess a truth—shall I?—dare I?—say, that to the intense sea-ignorance which incurred the scorn, anger, and compassion of our Palinurus, I look back with ENVY?

Methinks, every British Heart of Oak recoils, and every British head of the same material shakes itself, at such an avowal! Every lip that ever helped to chorus Rule Britannia, curls itself up—noses which never sniffed sea-weed tacitly snub me,—eyes which never glimpsed the ocean avert themselves in disgust. I am bespattered with salt-water oaths and tobacco-juice. The Thames Yacht Clubs, on the strength of having learned to bellow “Elm a-lee!”—“Ard-hup!” and “Oist-away!” agree to run me down. The very clerks of the Navy Pay Office propose to seize me up to the dingy fresh-water Neptune in their fore-court. Captain Basil Hall swears, on his best anchor-button, to keel-haul me daily, for six months, in “the element which never tires.” The last of the Dibdins asks for my card. Campbell flares up with the “Meteor Flag of England,” and vows to knock me down with its staff;—nay, our Sailor King himself repudiates me, as a subject, for not relishing his High Seas!

It can’t be helped. When one is confessing, there is no place under the sun like the Ocean for “making a clean breast of it:”—and am not I here staggering and tumbling—soberly tipsy—aboard a lubberly Dutch-built hull, becalmed in a heavy swell—dreaming, when I can sleep, that I am a barrel-churn, revolving with my inside full of half-turned cream or incipient butter;—and finding, when I awake, that dreams do not go so altogether by contraries?

If this perpetual motion hold, the cargo of cheeses we shipped at Dordrecht, flat as single Glo’sters, will be delivered in London spherical as bowls! The Jung Vrouw herself, before she reaches the Nore, will be a washing-tub! I have doubts whether the salt beef, produced at this day’s luncheon, was, originally, a round. The leathern conveniency that I brought aboard, a fair and square trunk, is already almost a portmanteau;—and, what is worse, every several morsel I have swallowed this blessed day without bliss, seems rolling itself into a bolus or a pill,—whether of opium or ipecacuanha, I leave you to divine. If the calm should continue, I may become—who knows?—a Ball myself—a Master Biffin! Every half-hour, on feeling my knees and elbows, I find joints by this friction losing some of their asperities, and getting obtuser. A little more, and I shan’t have a good point about me!

Is such as this a season to be squeamishly retentive in delivering one’s sentiments? Or, rather, is not open candour inevitable; seeing that you cannot have any reserve even with the merest stranger? It is impossible to keep your feelings to yourself. In spite, then, of Britannia, the Yacht Club, the Navy Pay,—of Dibdin, Campbell, and Basil Hall,—of the Lords of the Admiralty, with Portsmouth, Devonport, and Gosport, to boot—in spite of the Royal William, nay, in spite of my very self, the truth will out!—not sneaking out, or stepping out, or backing out, but bolting out, in a plain unequivocal straightforward style. I DO envy the simple man, with his sheer ignorance about rudders and compasses. I do detest and abominate the ocean—or to phrase it more mildly—the sea and I cannot agree with each other—there is sure to be falling-out between us—we can never be bosom friends.

The Marine Society must despise me for it; my Elder Brethren of the Trinity House will long to dispose of me as Joseph was made away with by his elder Brethren; Boatswain Smith will preach, write Tracts and distribute them, against me: the Greenwich Pensioners will bind themselves by a round robin to kick me with me with their knottiest legs; Long Tom Coffin himself will be for fetching me, with a shroud in one hand, and a dead-light in the other; but I cannot eat my words.

SEE-SAW.

It is no time, when you cannot keep your legs, to “stand bandying compliments with your sovereign,” that is, Neptune. If he were present at this moment, in this cabin, I would tell him, from this my seat on its floor, that he might very much improve his paternal estate, to wit, by levelling, and still more by draining it. I would flatly say to him, lying flat on my face as it now happens, that a few little gravel walks, merely across and across it, would be of rare advantage both for show and use. For ’tis a sorry pleasure-garden that is all fish-pond; and, finally, I would broadly hint to him, from the broad of my back, as I am at this present—— But this is bullying Taurus behind his back. There is no sea-god present, only the Skipper. How he skips in such weather, give him his pick of all the ropes in the ship, is a miracle I would fain see ere I believe in it. For my own part I cannot even step deliberately over a thread. Perhaps, without going too curiously into the Doctrine of Predestination, as regards the soul, it may hold good as concerns the body. Undoubtedly there be some men born to sit fast upon horses; others to fall off therefrom as if they had soaped saddles. Some to slide and skate upon the ice; others only to slip, straddle, and sprawl upon it. Some to walk, or at least waddle, on ships’ decks; others to flop, flounder, wallow, and grovel thereon. That is my destiny. None can be more safe on the Serpentine, or sure in the saddle;—but Fate, long before my great-great-great-grandfather was put to his feet, forbade me sea-legs. An average pedestrian on land, on the caulked plank I am a born cripple, hopeless of cure. Put me apprentice to the Goodwin, or the Dudgeon Light, at the end of my term you shall find me as unsafe on my soles as when I first paid my footing. Even now, whilst Hans Vandergroot and his crew are comfortably promenading, I rock and totter, balancing one end against the other, like a great rickety babe, until, after some posturing and scrambling, I trip up over nothing, and fall flat on everything. An earthquake in London, when its streets are what is called greasy, could not more puzzle my centre of gravity; if, indeed, I was not born a mathematical monster, devoid of that material point!

By way of clincher, Fate, who never does things by halves, whilst foredooming me incapable of standing my ground at sea, has also denied me the power of settling it. A camp-stool is sure to decamp with me; a chair, as if it stood on Siberian ice, suddenly throws itself on its back, and behold me in an extempore sledge! Barrels roll from under me; coils of rope shuffle me off. Even on the plain bare hard deck, or cabin floor, I throw demi-summersets, as if I had been returned to Parliament to represent the Antipodes by sitting on the back of my head.

To complete the Sea Curse,—there are three Fates, and each had a boon for me at my birth—it was ordained that, like the great Nelson, I should never sail from fresh water into salt, without knowing it by a general rising and commotion, which might be called figuratively, a Mutiny at the Nore.

Like the standing and sitting infirmity, it is incurable. On my voyage outwards I tried every popular recipe; the hard ones first, to wit, raw carrots, raw onions, sailors’ biscuit with Dutch cheese, hard-boiled eggs, hard dumplings, raw stockfish. Next the easy ones: namely, cream cheese, Welsh rabbits, maccaroni, very hasty pudding, and insupportable soup. Then the neutrals: such as chewed blotting-paper, dry oatmeal, pounded egg-shells, scraped chalk, and unbaked dough.

To wash these down, I took, by prescription, tea without milk, coffee without sugar, bark without wine, water without brandy; and these formulæ all failing, I then tried them, as witches pray, backwards; brandy without water, wine without bark, and so forth. The experimental combinations followed; rum and milk, and mustard; eggs and wine, and camomile tea; gin and beer, and vinegar; sea-water and salad-oil, mulled, with sugar and nutmeg. Of which last, I drank by advice most prodigiously, the Doctors of the Marine College dispensing always on the Homœopathic principle, that a large dose of anything, whereof a little would set you wrong on the land, will set you right on the sea.

I need hardly say that, with my predisposed necessitarian viscera, all these infallible remedies failed of any effect, except to aggravate my case. Nothing short of liquid lead, maybe, or potable plaster of Paris, would have proved a settler.

Happy the man who hath never been driven in his despair to test, detest, invoke, evoke, swallow, and unswallow, such drugs and draughts of the naval Pharmacopœia! Thrice happy civic simpleton who hath never learned how the rudder revolveth, at the risk of turning round himself!

Vandergroot is visibly in course of transformation. At every visit to the cabin he looks more and more like a Dutch-pin. He talks to me roundly, and gets blunter and blunter! The last time I felt, I had no small to my back. If I may guess at my own figure, it is now about an oval. I must look like one of Leda’s babies, just emerged, with their insignificant buds of legs and arms, from the egg! From an oval to a circle is but a step. Heaven help me when I get landed, round and sound, as they say of cherries! How shall I get home—how get up—(there will be a short way down)—mine own stairs? How shall I sit? Instead of my old library chair, I must borrow its three-legged stool of the terrestrial globe!

Either my head swims, or the cabin is getting circular! I shall roll about in it like a bolus in its box! If I am not merely giddy, I am already as spherical as the earth; a little flatted, or so, that is, towards the poles. What a horrible rough calm! I will down on my knees, if I have knees, and with clasped hands, if hands remain to me, pray, beg, and supplicate for a dismal storm to batter me into shape again, though it be but nine-bobble-square!

I get more and more candid and communicative every moment. I can keep nothing to myself: you shall have my whole heart. I abhor, loathe, execrate, the sea! If I could throw up my hat, my cry would be “Land for ever!” A fico for Tom Tough! Down with Duncan Howe, and Jervis! No Dibdin!

If ever I get ashore, able to chalk upon a wall, you shall read—Ask for Stoke Pogis! Try Lupton Parva! If ever I get to a dry desk again, to write verse upon,—and the poetry of the ocean is all on the land, its prose only upon the sea, you shall have a rare new melody, published by Power, to some such strain as this:—

The sea! the D——!

The terrible horrible sea!

The stormy, tumbling,

Qualmy-jumbling,

Spirit-humbling,

Shingle-stumbling,

Sea-weed fumbling,

Wearing, crumbling,

Mischief-mumbling,

Growling, grumbling,

Like thunder far off rumbling— —

That last line halteth in its feet, as well it may, when the poet cannot keep his legs. Oh! it is well for Cornwall, born perchance “with one foot on sea and one foot on shore” at the Land’s End,—I have seen a picture of it by Turner, a bare bleak rocky promontory, with some nineteen gulls and cormorants sitting thereon, each with its tail turned contemptuously towards the barren granite, feldspar, and like sordid soils which there represent land.—It is well enough for him to chaunt laudations of the briny element, and cry up those amphibia, his first cousins almost, the Nereids and Tritons. Or it may become those others, born in a berth, and christened in brine, with Neptune for sponsor, to sing slightingly of the dry ground, on which they cannot claim even a parish. But my nativity was otherwise cast—I am a grass lamb, yeaned on the green sward—oh sweet sweet sweet Cropton-le-Moor, down in dear dear Wiltshire!

“HOW ARE YOU OFF FOR MONEY?”
“WHY I’M OFF WITH ALL MY MASTER’S.”

That pastoral reminiscence hath made me worse. It has given me an appetite—for acres. Methinks I yearn and long and crave for nice clay, delicious mould, and crisp pebbles, in a paroxysm of that strange bulimy that attacks the African Dirt Eater. Something of Nebuchadnezzar’s grazing propensity comes along with it. Gracious Heaven! can it be possible that, after having been battered and shaken out of all shape,—a mere mass of living flesh, like the unlicked ursine cub,—this same Circean Jung Vrouw has taken it into her figure-head to beat, bang, bump, and rumbledy-thump me into another form, a horse, a ram, or a brindled bull!

Thrice brute and beast-hyæna! Were-wolf! Dragon! horned Devil! that thou wast, my Land-steward, Peter Stuckey! after counselling me before thy last audit to abate my rents, to volunteer to reduce them thyself by absconding, across sea, with the whole receipt! Thrice Soland goose, booby, noddy, sea-calf, land-donkey, and loggerhead turtle was I, thus impoverished, instead of economising, to pursue thee on an element where I cannot control my out-goings!

Donner and Blitzen! what a crash! my rash prayer was heard: there is a storm coming—as the Powers proposed to storm Angiers in King John’s days—from all the four quarters at once! I must needs turn in: but how vilely this bed is made with the foot two yards higher than the head! No, the head is highest—perpendicular. I designed to lie down, and here I am standing bolt erect on my heels—no, on my head. It must be getting cold: the very trunks, stools and tables are making a move towards the stove—nay, now we are in some sudden peril, for they are all doing their best to rush up the cabin-stair. Whew—that sea last shipped must needs have put all the Dutchmen’s pipes out. Another plunge; and a flood of brine soaks me through, shirt, sheet, and blankets. There is no washing put out here, I perceive; ’tis all done at home. What a complex, chaotic motion,—the ship tosses and flings like a wild desert-born horse, that is trying to rear, kick up behind, turn round and round, and roll on his back at one and the same moment. This is no Dutch ship, but a Dutch fair—with the drums, gongs, speaking-trumpets, and other discords, all braying together; and I am on the rocking-horse, the round-about, in the up-and-down, and each of the swings, all at once! Another crash! The Jung Vrouw is bereaved of her little one, alias the long-boat. How kind of Vandergroot to come down to tell me of it, direct through the sky-light, instead of going round by the stair! How kind of that table, lying on its back, to catch him in its legs! Angels of grace be near us! He tells me, as he sways up and down, partly in High, partly in Low Dutch, that the Jung Vrouw herself is washed overboard! But no—I misconstrued him. ’Tis only her great ruddy staring figure-head—which the blundering Holland shipwrights had stuck astern, on the crown of the tiller—that is gone adrift. Oh how I wish from my soul of souls that I could see the Commodore of the Thames Yachts now pulling, within hail, in the Wenus! Or, the last Dibdin taking a chair—or the chair taking him—in this cabin! Or, Campbell essaying to write down a new sea-song on yon topsy-turvy table! And oh! to behold the author of “The deep deep Sea” sitting on the poop, singing to that floating Young Woman’s head and bust, taken by mistake for a mermaid’s!

Another shout. Pieter Pietersoon, in heaving the lead, hath chucked himself in along with it! I do not wonder; he heaveth after my own fashion, by wholesale. Have I not within the last two hours rejected, discharged, and utterly cast from me in disgust, the whole ocean, nay all the oceans, German, Atlantic, Pacific—the Arctic last, its solid calms, the next best things to Terra Firma, not so violently disagreeing with me as the rest. And do I not know and feel that I am now about to give up Neptune, trident and all, with the whole salt-water mythology? I warrant, ere ten minutes to come, there shall not remain within me so much as a syren’s mirror, or her tortoise-shell comb:—not one solitary Triton will be left on my stomach. Some unsavoury odour about the cabin—marvellously like the smell of oil paint—hath just given me a new turn, by conjuring up all the nauseous pictures of marine allegories, which even on steady dry land, used to stir and provoke my spleen.

Oh! that they were all here, President, R.A., and A.R.A., in a string, climbing after me up this perilous slippery stair, to the more perilous slippery deck, there to crawl on all-fours to the ship’s side, and clinging like cats or monkeys to the quarter boards, take a trembling peep at what Vandergroot calls “den wild zee!” What an awful sight! The tempest-tost sky is as troubled as the ocean: whilst betwixt the jagged base of the low black cloud, and the still jaggeder crest of the sea, the red angry lightning restlessly darts to and fro, as if in search of whatever presuming mortal dares fare between them! Oh tell me, Mister Elias Martin—if you a’nt dead—is the tossing crest of yonder mad black billow, that comes racing after us, at all like the black worsted fringe which your brethren are apt to hang on the necks of their marine Arabians? But hush, yonder comes Neptune himself, in his state-coach—aye, hats off—the wind hath taught ye manners. Lo! yonder he stands,—Pshaw! no, no, no,—Zounds! you are all gaping at honest Hans Vandergroot. Look to starboard—to the left hand! That’s the gentleman, without his castor, nor indeed overwell togged otherwise for wet weather—with his beard lather’d but not shaved—standing up in an oyster-shell drag, and attempting, like a sorry whip as he is, to tool his team of bokickers with a potato-fork. Did you ever see four such unbroke brutes as he hath to keep together—neither reined-up, nor down, nor indeed, any ribbons to hold at all—and as I would have laid a pony to nothing, there they go, no pace at all, cause why? they are just come to some invisible sea obelisk, and each horse is for going down a road of his own. Did you ever set eyes on such action? No stepping out—but all pawing and prancing and putting their feet down again where they picked them up, like Ducrow’s dancing stud; as sure as I’m a judge, they have all got the string-halt in their fore-legs, because they can’t have it in their hinder ones! You may swear safely that they have four bad colds besides, and look what a rabble of naked postillions are hanging on by their manes, because they have no saddles, and if they had, they would never be able to sit in them with those salmon tails! Between ourselves, Elias, ’tis no great shakes of a show; the Lord Mayor’s pageant on the water beats it all to sticks; and if you make a picture of it, you will be a fool for your pains. Yet have I seen paintings by first-rate hands as like to this same trumpery Sadlers’ Wells water spectacle——

Murder! murder! Help! help! O Lord! A surgeon and a shutter, if there be such comfortable things in this unneighbourly neighbourhood. O! oh! oh! oh! Woe is me! I am not—I am now certain and sure I am not a Ball! I have limbs and members! legs and arms! like other people’s, only they’re broke; and a very distinct back. My head! Oh! my head, my head; there are nine lumps thereon, and there are nine cabin stairs.

The real Sea-King, in resentment, I suppose, of my untimely caricature of him and his state-coach, after spitting nine gallons of foam in my face, knocked me flat with a wave, and then kicked me down stairs; and here I am again trying to anoint my bruises with trunks, and bind them up with stools and tables, on the hard-hearted oak planks of the cabin-floor. Yet is it easier with me than I first feared. My legs are not broken but merely bent. I am only bandy and not lame for life; but my sea-sickness is not cured. Am I likely to put up, better or worse, think you, with Neptune and his satellites, for this unhandsome usage?

“FRIEND! DOST THEE CALL THIS THE PACIFIC?”

The Jung Vrouw, meanwhile, is as giddy as ever, nay, worse ten times told. She hath taken a tinge of high-flying, deep-living, German Romanticism into her wooden head, and is trying, plunge after plunge, to drown herself, and to make me commit wilful suicide along with her, whether I will or not. After that, there is no hope; but oh! yet oh, my Fates, let me die upon land. I have a horror of shipboard! The idea of severing all ties in this cabin is trebly agonising. Why, the very table is tied to the floor, the candlestick to the table, the snuffers to the candlestick, the extinguisher to the snuffers. Only the burning candle is unattached, and there—there it jumps into bed! No matter; it could as soon set fire to the Thames. Another squall! How she groans, creaks, squeaks, strains, grinds, and squeezes, like a huge walnut in Neptune’s crackers? Accursed Jung Vrouw! thou wilt be the widowing of my poor dear old one! Accursed Peter Stuckey, thou wilt be the murdering of my poor deaf old self!

I know not, for a surety, by reason that everything about me is quaking and shaking, but I suspect I am trembling like an aspen. It is impossible to hear, in the midst of this universal hubbub, but methinks, I am wailing and weeping aloud. But one may as well make a manly exit. Like other men, in such sea extremities, I would fain betake me to the rum-cask; but either Hans Vandergroot sails on Temperance principles, or I have looked in the wrong place. I will try a stave or two instead.

“Full fathom five—”

THE BEST BOWER ANCHOR.

Alas! it will not go down. I am too much out of sorts for even the “delicate Ariel.” It was one thing for Shakspeare, sailing, hugging the shore, never out of sight of land, on the safe serene coasts of Bohemia, to compose such a sea song for the wood and canvas Tempests of the stage; but it is another guess thing to hear it, as I do, howled through hoarse ship-ropes, by Boreas himself, in a real storm. What comfort to me that everything about me shall suffer a sea-change?—that my bones shall turn, forsooth, into coral? I would not give a bad doit, with some of these poor metacarpal bones of mine to be rubbing the gums of the Royal Infant of Spain. I am not so blindly ambitious as to wish that these two precious useful balls of mine, turned into pearls, should shine in the British crown itself, or, what is more tempting, in the hair of the beautiful Countess of B. What if some economical jeweller—I think I feel him at it—should take it into his head to split them, for setting in a ring? As for the Syren’s knell, I would as lief have it as long hereafter as may be, from the plain prosaic old sexton of St. Sepulchre’s. I have no depraved yearning to be first wet-nursed to death, and then “lapped in Elysium,” by Mermaids, the most cold, flabby, washy, fishy, draggletails ever invented to give any human fancy the ague—half-and-half monsters, neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring. A whole cargo of them, nay a glut of them, leaping alive, unfit for loving or eating, is not worth one loveable real woman at Billingsgate, or one of the eatable maids on her stall. I could never imagine the boldest and gallantest boatswain encountering such a sea-witch, on a lone beach—combing the shrimps out of her wet sandy mud-coloured hair, and wriggling her foolish tail about, curling, or stretching it, or trying to put it into her pocket, forgetting that she has no pockets, as a shy man in company does not know what to do with his hands—I could never fancy him looking on such a creature, however attached to the fair sex, without his recoiling till he tumbled over his own pigtail, singing out, with a slight variation of a line of Dibdin’s,

“Avert yon ’oman, gracious Heaven!”

For other sea-temptations, I would not give my old white pony, that stumbles over every stone in his road, and some out of it, to ride like that Lord Godolphin Arion over the seas on the fairest fish that was ever foaled. Speaking under fear of death, I would rather, waving all the romance, ride in a rill by a roadside on a stickle-back. On my solemn word, I would far liefer bestride even a pond perch with his dorsal fin erect. But hark! What means that dreadful cry? Our death-bell is tolling in Dutch—“Del, del, is verlooren!”

I must scramble, crawl, haul myself, spite of my sprained ankles, up unto the deck how I may. Next best unto witnessing our own funeral is the seeing how we are done to death.

What a sight! Here is the tiller tied hard a-port, or hard a-lee, as hard as they can tie it. Further back is the Skipper himself, entangled dismally by some cord or other to the stern-rails; and yonder is his mate, with a hundred and fifty turns of rope round himself and the mizen-mast, which he seems trying to strengthen. The gunner, as I take him to be, with a preposterous superfluity of breeching, is made fast to look through a hole, which seems to have been meant for a window to a cannon; and the carpenter, well pinioned and tethered by a stout rope to the back-stay, is sheepishly dangling therefrom, whenever his side of the ship is uppermost, like unto the Lamb of the Order of the Golden Fleece. The cook, having given away both his hands, is spliced, as if for life, unto the capstan. Adam Vaart is double-turned and double-knotted to the main-mast, and Hendrick his brother is belayed down, on the broad of his back, in the place of the lost long-boat. Should the anchor be dropped, Jan Bart is sure, even from head to foot, to go along with it. Poor little Yacob Yops, the apprentice, hath been turned over, and re-bound into a ring-bolt, by articles which are called rope-yarns; and lo, up yonder, lashed by his legs to the rattlines, hangs Diedrick Dumm-Kopf, head downwards, like a split cod left there to dry, in the main shrouds!

Oh! that I were bound myself round and round all the ribs, from the top to the bottom, with good six-twist, lest even thus, in articulo mortis, I burst, split my sides, and die with excess of laughter. The Skipper, honest Hans, with much difficulty, for he grievously mistrusts his breathing to the beating of the wave, opening his mouth when it comes, and sealing up his lips when it is gone, hath let me into the whole secret. Considering the wild sea, he saith, and that no man can tie himself so surely as another man can, to some more steadfast substance, they had been all fastened, at their own special wish and agreement, to such hold-fasts as pleased them best, by Diedrick Dumm-Kopf, who was afterwards to provide for his safety as he judged surest, in order that he might liberate them again when the storm should be blown over. That accordingly, after first tying them all as securely as he was able, the said Diedrick betook himself to the main rigging, about half way up, to which he lashed himself by the ankles, holding on likewise with his hands, and his great clasp-knife in his mouth. That the Jung Vrouw driving before the wind and sea, they made shift, as they were to navigate her pretty comfortably for some twenty minutes or thereby, when all of a sudden they saw Diedrick, being seized with a vertigo, let go his hold and drop into his present posture, from which he could never recover himself; and it was that dismal sight which had extorted the universal outcry that I heard.

I am sicker of the sea than ever! Is the safety of a Christian man’s life, and soul maybe, of no more interest than to be gambled away by such a set of Dutch Bottoms with Asses’ heads on their shoulders! Oh! that the worthy Chairman and all the Underwriters of Lloyd’s were here present on this deck—the mere sight of the Skipper’s countenance there, with not so much meaning in it as a smoked pig’s face, for that means to be eaten, would scare them from all sea-risks for ever!

Thanks be to Heaven! yonder’s a sail. It makes straight towards us—they come aboard. A Pilot?—well said! Oh, honest, good, dear Pilot, as you love a distressed poor countryman—as you understand the compass and how rudders are turned—if you know what a rope’s end is,—take the biggest bit of a cable you can pick, and give yonder Dutch sea-calves a round dozen a piece; ’twill cost you no great pains, seeing they are tied up ready to your hand. Pish! never mind their offence; they have mutinied against themselves. Smite, and spare not. I will go ashore meanwhile, in your boat. Hollo there! help me down. Take heed to my footing. Catch me, all of you, in your arms. Now I am in. No, I an’t! I an’t! I an’t!

If ye had not hauled me in again with that same boat-hook, I was drown’d. My shoulder bleeds for it, but I forgive. Never heed me: look to your helms and sails. ’Tis only a gallon or two of sea-water, just swallowed, that is indisposed to go on shore with me. I am used to it, indeed I am. Pray, what is the name of this blessed boat? The Lively Nancy. Lively indeed! The Jung Vrouw was a Quakeress to her! At every jump she takes, my heart leaps also. Pray, pray, pray take in some canvas. You think you be sailing, but you are committing suicide. They mind me no more than stones. Oh! oh! I am out of Danger’s frying-pan into its fire! Peter Stuckey will be a murtherer after all!

What a set of dare-devils! They grin like baboons whilst she is driving with half her deck under water! I will shut mine eyes and hold fast by something. I am worse than ever. I give myself up. Oh! oh! what an awful roaring, hissing, grinding noise we are come into! The bottom of the sea is coming out, or else the bottom of the boat! Hah! Help! help! I am heels upward! Why did not some kindly soul forewarn me that she was going to stop short on the beach? Stand all aside, and let me leap upon the sand. Ah! I have made my nose spout gore in my over-haste to kiss my native land!

“WHY DON’T YOU LOOK OUT FOR WORK?”

Blessed be dry ground! Farewell, ocean! farewell, Jung Vrouw and Lively Nancy! Take my advice, and get married both of you to young farmers. Farewell, ye hang-dogs that saved me! Share my blessing amongst you; ’tis all I have upon me or in me. Farewell, Neptune! We’ll part friends. If you ever come to Cropton-le-Moor, I shall be glad to see you, and not till then. Hans! Jan! Pieter! farewell one and all of you; “and if a merry meeting may be wished, God prohibit it.” Now for a sweet, safe, still, silent land-bed! Set me but within a run and a jump of one, and in two clipped current minutes I will be fast asleep in it, even like the Irishman who forgot to say his prayers, but remembered to say amen.