CHAPTER X.
“He cherished his friend, and he relished a bumper,
Yet one fault he had, and that one was a thumper—
Then what was his failing? come, tell it, add burn ye,
He was, could he help it? a special attorney.”
Goldsmith’s Retaliation.
The female readers of these rambling chapters have already been considering—no doubt—how some kind of a plot may be divined from the foregoing hints; but this arises from a total misconception of my plan.
Blessed ladies! toward whom, as viewed in imagination, my heart warms, and live coals stir among the hoary embers, I write not a romance or even a story. These are reminiscences, memorandums, odd leaves torn from the volume of recollection. Thanks to the modern way of publishing by piece-meal, my fair critics cannot be cheated of the agrodolce of the denouement by any perverse brother or nephew peeping into the last pages, and forestalling the catastrophe. No, the winding-up is not to be preposterously revealed. This were as disappointing as for a chemist to see some grand discovery which he longs for printed in the daily sheet before his investigations are half done. You remember Montaigne’s story of the ancient philosopher and the dish of figs which had been laid in honey.
Bent on learning, and not a little conceited in regard to my small and fragmentary acquisitions, I rode about the county in search of some congenial characters, and certainly I alighted on some odd ones. The straggling village around our court-house comprised a church, a school, a doctor’s house and laboratory, a store, several mechanics’ shops, and two lawyers’ offices. In one of the last mentioned lived Gideon Stowe.
Rumor says that Stowe was the son of an overseer; but he was in my day a man of wide-spread reputation at the bar. A strong savor of his plebeianism adhered to him, which he rather cherished than concealed. I see him now, a strong-built man of fifty or thereabout; large-headed, bald and glabrous on the crown, with curly gray-hair gathered around his thick neck. He wore blue broad-cloth, and a white neck-cloth, and his low shoes displayed the blue yarn stockings, which covered a sturdy leg even in summer. Of the graces he made small account. All dignity but that of sinewy argumentation he held far beneath him. I have seen him sit for hours on a court-day, on the counter of the country store, with his feet dangling, as he whittled off pecks of splinters and shavings from a bludgeon of soft pine, as he discoursed on constitutional law to the group who listened and admired. Stowe was the resort of desperate culprits, for an hundred miles around. He loved plantation-talk, was a thriving agriculturist, a wealthy man, and the father of numerous accomplished daughters. If the English of the highway was in any case stronger than the dialect of books he seized on it, as Cobbet used to do.
The collision of sturdy talk daily, for years, had so disciplined him, that his colloquies—when he found a fit antagonist—were like a game at quarter-staff: there was little breathing and there were hard knocks. Stowe was a devourer of books, not only in his own profession, but in history, politics, and theology. He knew little Greek, and no modern language but our own, but had taught himself Latin, which a prodigious memory enabled him to quote with force, though with a contempt of all quantity. He loved to crack the bones of tough places in Persius and Tacitus. His English favorites were Bentley, Warburton, Churchill, and the colloquial effusions of Johnson. The attractions to his house, even leaving five blooming girls out of the question, I found irresistible. But it was a fearful pleasure; for, until repeated floorings had taught me my place, he would bring me down with a momentum, as often as I dared to encounter him.
Anne Stowe, the third daughter, possessed the grace and gentleness of her mother—whom I never knew,—together with some decided traits of the father’s keenness and power. There are circles in which Anne would have been voted a bas-bleu; but singular beauty, and several accomplishments of the gayer sort attempered the severer tones of character. Her voice was an organ which subdued whole coteries into attention by its dulcet charm. She sung, she painted, she rode the great horse, she was a gipsy queen in pic-nics and aquatic adventures. Exquisitely susceptible of humorous impressions, and familiar with the purest writers of satire, Anne was never betrayed into a sarcasm; and her lofty sweetness repelled the forward trifling which is common among half-educated young lawyers. Altogether, she stood as a beautiful contrast to her Herculean parent.
When I look back over the days of my youth, I find few greener spots than the long winter evenings spent at the Maples. It was a huge, shambling, unfinished house, open to all comers, with fires worthy of a Saxon castle, and tables groaning with Homeric joints. These were not—alas! for Gideon Stowe—the times of “thin potations.” When the ladies had retired, and the host called for hot-water and the “materials,” his tongue was loosed, and he gloried in—what were to him—the “noctes, cænaeque deorum.”
The short, broken, insufficient visits of a city, and the thronged assemblies of fashion, afford no specimens of, what used to be called in the period of Burney and Garrick, conversation. This must be sought where journals are rare, where hospitality is primitive, and where friends—who know one another—prize the continuous flow, and take time for it.
If I may venture a judgment, where there is room for bias and prepossession, I will declare my belief that these conditions no where meet in more perfection than among the educated proprietors of the South. Animated dialogue, from the necessity of the case, takes the place of purchased evening amusements. Wit and beauty are not confined to the sons and daughters of New England; nor will we readily yield to them in that glow, frankness and impulsion, which give electric force to countenance, voice, and gesture. Many a soirée have we kept up till the small hours, when a dozen horses were in the stables, and a tribe of swarthy retainers were making the joists ring in the neighboring dependencies. Here it was that in my heyday I forgot all the grammarians, from Priscian to Adam, all the classics, and all the marvels of the old world; but I was learning much of mankind in its best aspect, and not a little of myself.
Mme. Anne Stowe has been dead twenty years, and three of her sons have families near me. Her husband was a wealthy planter; but before he gained her hand she gave more than one refusal to an aspiring young fellow whose name I am not free to mention.