The barber's chair; and, The hedgehog letters

by Douglas William Jerrold

Letter XVI.—To Mrs Hedgehog, New York.

Dear Grandmother,—The Maynooth Grant is granted, and the British Lion has once more gone to sleep. When either Sir Culling Smith, Mr M’Neile, or Dr Croly shall pinch his tail and make him roar again, you shall have due notice of the danger. I think, however, that the Lion is safe to sleep until next May, when, of course, he’ll again be stirred up for the folks at Exeter Hall. In the meantime he must be tired, very drowsy, after the speeches that have been made at him; so let him sleep on.

Yes, Maynooth College has got the new grant; nevertheless, to the astonishment of the Duke of Newcastle and company, the sun rises every morning as if nothing had happened; and, so hard does the love of shillings make men’s hearts, London tradesmen still smile behind their counters, never thinking that their tills are threatened with an earthquake. Newcastle and other peers—just out of consolation to their shades—have written what’s called a “Protest” against the grant; and a hundred years hence, when England is blown to atoms by the measure, very comfortable it will be to their ghosts, as they walk among the ruins, to see men reading the aforesaid “Protest,” and hear them crying, “A prophet!” “a prophet!”

And now, grandmother, comes the Roman Catholic Bishops. They won’t have Peel’s plan of education unless all the masters are to be of their own faith. For they say “the Roman Catholic pupils could not attend the lectures on history, logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, geology, or anatomy, without exposing their faith or morals to imminent danger—unless a Roman Catholic professor shall be appointed for each of those chairs.” You see, the lecturer on history, if a Protestant, might be making Queen Mary—Bloody Mary, as I was taught to call her at day-school—a very cruel wretch, indeed; whereas the Queen Mary of the Catholic might be a very nice woman, who never could abide fagots, and never knew where Smithfield was. And then for logic (you must, as I’ve said before, look dictionary for hard words); logic, it seems, is a matter of religion. What’s logic to a Protestant isn’t to a Catholic, or a Mahometan, or a Chinese! In the same way, I suppose, that a straight line in London would be what they call a curve in Dublin, and perhaps a whole circle at Canton. And then for “geology” and “anatomy,” why, we all know that there’s nothing certain in anatomy; that it’s all a matter of faith. Thus, if a Catholic anatomist lectured, we’ll say, upon the body of a Protestant pluralist, he might, out of blindness, declare that the said body never had a single atom of heart; that such pluralists always lived without the article. While on the other side, the real Protestant lecturer, discussing on the self-same corcup, might declare that it was all heart, like a summer cabbage! “Professors’ chairs!” when I read these things, I somehow do think of the baby-chair that I used to be set up in to take my meals, with a stick run through the arms to keep me from tumbling out, the talk is so childish!

You ask me about your pet, the Bishop of Exeter. Well, the clergy of his diocese have just suffered what’s called his “charge;” a charge, grandmother, in which the Bishop generally contrives to put in a lot of small-shot to pepper about him right and left. As usual, he talked a good deal about himself; making Exeter out such a soft gentle person—such a lump of Christian butter—that in this hot weather it’s wonderful he hasn’t melted long ago. Ha, grandmother! what a lawyer was spoiled in that bishop! what a brain he has for cobwebs! How he drags you along through sentence after sentence—every one a dark passage—until your head swims, and you can’t see your finger close to your nose! He talked about this Puseyite stuff—this play-acting of the Church—for I don’t know how long; but whether he very much likes it or very much hates it, it’s more than any cabman’s brains can make out. I never read one of Exeter’s charges, that I don’t think of a sharp lawyer quite spoiled; but this last is a greater tangle than all. He talked a great deal about “the apostolical succession,” the truth of which he would defend. How I should like to hear him trace himself—Henry of Exeter—upwards! He then came to the new Bill that was to take the right of divorce out of the hands of the Church. He said, “Let the Liberalism of the age be content with what it had already achieved. It was enough for one generation that men and women might be coupled together in a Registrar’s Office, with as total an absence of all religious sanction as if one huckster were coupled up in partnership with another.” Here the Bishop’s right enough, no doubt. For if the Bishops’ Court loses cases of divorce, what lots of fees go from them to the mere lawyers! A wedding-ring and a licence are things almost dog-cheap; but, O grandmother! what a lot of money it takes to break that ring!—what a heap of cash to tear up the licence! and that’s the reason that divorce, like green peas at Christmas, can only be afforded by the rich. Next, the Bishop had a fling at what he called “the unhappy beings who went to mechanics’ institutes and lecture-rooms.” He said they wanted “the discipline of the heart, and the chastening influence of true religion.” I’m an ignorant cabman, grandmother; but if so many “millions,” as the Bishop said, want this, I must ask, What do we pay the Church for? If so many of us are no better, as Exeter said, than “any of the wildest savages who devoured one another in New Zealand,” for what, in the name of pounds, shillings, and pence, do we pay church-rates? Why don’t the bishops and the high preachers of the Church come more among us? Why, thinking of “the apostolical succession,” don’t they copy more than they do the fishermen and tentmakers who are their forefathers? I can’t help asking this, though, as I said, I know I’m an ignorant cabman.

The Bishop, however, after scolding a good deal, tried to end mildly and like a Christian. I’ve read at some bookstall of an Indian leaf. One side of it acts as a blister; then take it off, turn it, and the other side serves for the salve. The Bishop of Exeter, to my mind, always tries to make his charge a leaf of this sort; though I must say it, one side is generally stronger than the other—better for blistering than healing.—So no more from your affectionate grandson,

Juniper Hedgehog.

Letter XVII.—To Michael Hedgehog, Hong-Kong.

Dear Brother,—You’ll be glad to hear that at last Ministers have remembered there’s such a man in the world as Sir Henry Pottinger. The Queen has sent her compliments to Parliament, commanding a pension for him. We’ve given him £1500 a year for life; to my mind a shabby sum. La! Michael, only think how those six clerks of Chancery Lane, with their thousands a year—the chaps who had nothing to do but to play tricks with what they call equity—only think of them retired with a pension, every one of ’em living like a pot-bellied mouse in a ripe Stilton! How they must turn up their noses at poor Sir Henry! He has opened, I may say, a new world, for rivers of gold to flow out of it into the banks of Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow—I can’t tell where. And he gets £1500 a year! I think we gave something more than that to Lord Keane for blowing up a pair of gates. But then folks turn a better penny upon war than peace. Blood and fire, and misery of all kinds, are more profitable than treaties of trade, no matter how glorious. The sword—the bloodier the better, too—weighs down the goose-quill; however, Sir Henry has a reward of some sort, and I’m heartily glad of it. May he live a hundred years—and his heart be as green as laurel when his head’s as white as cotton!!

But I’m coming to another part of the business. Sir J. C. Hobhouse, who, after all, has not lost his speech, as was for a long time supposed, lifted up his voice for Sir Henry. What do you think he said? “If he” (Sir Henry, mind) “were refused the reward now asked, the result would be this: he was only a lieutenant-colonel, although he had the brevet of major-general, and he would be obliged to leave England; he could not live here.” At this the House cheered, and I’m afraid, Mike, Hobhouse spoke the truth. As I’m an honest cabman who never takes less than his fare, if I didn’t blush like a poppy when I read this. Why, what a shabby, mean, outside set of folks we must be! Supposing Sir Henry had not got this pension—supposing that, wanting to stay in England, he had lived in a smallish house, had not given grand parties, but, content with the thoughts of the great things he had done, he had jogged on plainly and humbly, would folks have looked down upon him? Would the hicky do-nothings, born to their tens of thousands a year, have forgotten all about the Chinese peace and ransom, and tremendous trade opened by Sir Henry, unless they saw him in a crack carriage, and knew that he lived in a first-rate mansion? Wouldn’t it have been enough for them to know that a great and good head—one of the heads that rule the world, though the world won’t acknowledge it, at least until the aforesaid head may be rolled about by boys in the churchyard—that such a head had all its laurels about it, even though sometimes it went under a cotton umbrella? Wouldn’t they have acknowledged this? No, Michael; no, no, no! The great man, in the eyes of our English world, would have been lost in the smallness of his income.