A most complete picture of retribution in a moral essay, set forth in the most denunciatory lines.
In the whole range of poetry there is nothing that so well lends itself to a cold, calculated vituperation as the heroic couplet. You can pile detail upon detail, like an inventory-clerk, so long as rhymes last; and thus an impeachment of this sort has a very formidable air.
HOUSE WHERE THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM DIED, KIRKBY MOORSIDE.
But it has been denied that the profligate Duke ended in such misery. However that may be, he maintained his peculiar reputation to the last; for, according to Dr. Lowth, Bishop of London, he “died between two common girls,” at the house of one of his tenants in the Yorkshire village of Kirkby Moorside. That house is still wearily pointed out to the insistent stranger by the uninterested Kirkby Moorsiders, who, as Yorkshiremen with magnificent thirsts, are uninterested, chiefly by reason of its being no longer an inn; and, truth to tell, its old-time picturesque features, if it ever had any, are wholly overlaid by furiously ugly modern shop-fronts. Now, if it were only the “Swan,” some little way up the street, still, in the midst of picturesque squalor, dispensing drink of varied sorts to all and sundry, for good current coin of the realm, one might conceive some local historic and literary enthusiasm. The “Swan,” however, has no associations, and is merely, with its projecting porch, supported upon finely carved but woefully dilapidated seventeenth-century Renaissance pillars, a subject for an artist. The odd, and ugly, encroachment of an adjoining hairdresser’s shop is redeemed, from that same artistic point of view, by that now unusual object, a barber’s pole, projecting across.
The robust pages of Fielding and Smollett are rich in incidents of travel, and in scenes at wayside inns, where postboys, persecuted lovers, footpads, and highwaymen mingle romantically. The “Three Jolly Pigeons,” the village ale-house of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, must not be forgotten, while the “Black Bear” in Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, is prominent. Marryat, Theodore Hook, Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Lever, Bulwer Lytton, all largely introduced inns into their novels. Dickens, of course, is so prolific in his references to inns and taverns that he requires special chapters. Thackeray’s inns are as the poles asunder from those of Dickens, and are superior places, the resorts of superior people, and of people who, if not superior, endeavour to appear so. In short, in their individual treatment of inns, Dickens and Thackeray are thoroughly characteristic and dissimilar. Thackeray’s waiters and the waiters drawn by Dickens are very different. Thackeray could never have imagined the waiter at the “Old Royal,” at Birmingham, who, having succeeded in obtaining an order for soda-water from Bob Sawyer, “melted imperceptibly away”; nor the preternaturally mean and cunning waiters at Yarmouth and at the “Golden Cross,” in David Copperfield—own brothers to the Artful Dodger. I don’t think there could ever have existed such creatures.
THE “BLACK SWAN,” KIRKBY MOORSIDE.
Thackeray’s waiters are not figments of the imagination; they are drawn from the life, as, for example, John, the old waiter in Vanity Fair, who, when Dobbin returns to England, after ten years in India, welcomes him as if he had been absent only weeks, and supposes he’ll have a roast fowl for dinner.
But in the amazing quantity of drink they consume, the characters of Dickens and Thackeray are on common ground. Mr. Pickwick could apparently begin drinking brandy shortly after breakfast, and continue all day, without being much the worse for it; and in Pendennis we read how Jack Finucane and Mr. Trotter, dining at Dick’s Restaurant with Mr. Bungay, drank with impunity what would easily suffice to overthrow most modern men.