The Lord Mayor then scattered abroad some hundred newly-coined sixpences, and after repeated cheering, returned on board the barge.
We need not be surprised to hear that “at three o’clock the party sat down in the cabin of the State Barge to a cold collation; after which some speeches were made.” By half-past eight they landed at Richmond, where the carriages were in waiting, and the sunburned Gilpins “returned to their respective homes.” His lordship, it is recorded, reached the Mansion House “a few minutes before ten” on this Saturday night; but future ages are left to guess at what hour he went to bed. The worthy chaplain, long laid to deeper rest, would surely turn in his grave could he know how he had taken pains to put in a ludicrous light that truly august Corporation, worshipful up and down the river for a hundred miles, though its practical power be now in the farther-reaching hands of the Thames Conservancy.
IX
BEATING THE BOUNDS
LIKE that corporation party, both writer and reader might now go home, having reached the limit of their companionship. But one more ramble we may take, if not tired of each other. We have viewed Middlesex from its most familiar eminence, and we have radiated through it by its highroads from London. There remains to bind up our short wayfarings by perambulating the bounds of this little county, as some future Lord Mayor may be able to do from his state-balloon.
A barge will not serve us all the way here so well as a broomstick. On three sides Middlesex is enclosed by natural boundaries—the Thames on the south, the Lea on the east, and the Colne on the west. It is on the north side that the frontier becomes an arbitrary one, and, in fact, presents such a jagged outline as sometimes to suggest that whoever shore off this division of England must have been staggering from one tap of strong ale or mead to the next in any direction. A more creditable explanation refers such irregularity to spiritual rather than spirituous influences, the lands of two bishops, we are told, having thus dovetailed into each other in the days when bishops had power to bind and loose on earth. Here it must be no trivial sport to beat the parish bounds—on the outside coincident with those of the county—as to which the oldest inhabitant could perhaps tell us how they were literally beaten into his memory in boyhood by blows or stripes administered at this or that spot, a custom that still may linger in playful survivals. What the oldest inhabitant will not know is that the rough custom of his youth seems to have been an attenuated form of bloodier sacrifices, which went more than skin deep in the propitiation of invisible spirits of term and boundary.