| PAGE | |
|---|---|
| Mr. Cadet Gernon, anxious to discover a Royal Bengal Tiger, falls in with a Bear | [60] |
| General Capsicum on board the Rottenbeam Castle | [66] |
| Griff, on Landing, besieged by Baboos | [74] |
| Returning from the Hog hunt | [151] |
| Ensign Rattleton receiving Morning Reports from the Fat Lord and the Red Lion | [177] |
| The Native Court-Martial | [202] |
| Griffin Mudlarking in the Jheels | [246] |
| Colonel Heliogabalus Bluff and Orderly taking Morning Stroll | [253] |
| Griffin Marching to Join in Patriarchal Style | [336] |
| The Last Night of his Griffinage—Marpeet Royal | [372] |
MEMOIRS OF A GRIFFIN.
CHAPTER I.
Pleasant days of my Griffinhood!—green oasis of life’s desert waste!—thoughtless, joyous, happy season, when young Hope told “her flattering tale,” and novelty broke sweetly upon a heart unsated by the world, with what fond and regretful emotions do I now look back upon you through the long, dim, dreary vista of five-and-twenty years!
But I think I hear a raw reader exclaim, “Griffins!—are there griffins in the East?” “Assuredly, sir. Did you never hear of the law of Zoroaster quoted in Zadig, by which griffins’ flesh is prohibited to be eaten? Griffins are so common at the different presidencies of India that nobody looks at them, and most of these animals are very tame.” I will not, however, abuse the traveller’s privilege.
Griffin, or more familiarly a Griff, is an Anglo-Indian cant term applied to all new-comers, whose lot has been cast in the “gorgeous East.” Whether the appellation has any connection with the fabulous compound, the gryps or gryphon of armorial blazoning, is a point which I feel myself incompetent to decide.[[2]] A griffin is the Johnny Newcome of the East, one whose European manners and ideas stand out in ludicrous relief when contrasted with those, so essentially different in most respects, which appertain to the new country of his sojourn. The ordinary period of griffinhood is a year, by which time the novus homo, if apt, is supposed to have acquired a sufficient familiarity with the language, habits, customs, and manners of the country, both Anglo-Indian and Native, so as to preclude his making himself supremely ridiculous by blunders, gaucheries, and the indiscriminate application of English standards to states of things to which those rules are not always exactly adapted. To illustrate by example:—a good-natured Englishman, who should present a Brahmin who worships the cow with a bottle of beef-steak sauce, would be decidedly “griffinish,” particularly if he could be made acquainted with the nature of the gift; nevertheless, beef steak, per se, is an excellent thing in an Englishman’s estimation, and a better still with the addition of the before-mentioned condiment. But to return to our subject.
At the termination, then, of the above-mentioned period, our griffin, if he has made the most of his time, becomes entitled to associate on pretty equal terms with those sun-dried specimens of the genus homo, familiarly called the “old hands:”—subs of fifteen years’ standing; grey-headed captains, and superannuated majors, critics profound in the merits of a curry, or the quality of a batch of Hodgson’s pale ale. He ceases to be the butt of his regiment, and persecutes in his turn, with the zeal of a convert, all novices not blessed with his modicum of local experience.
Youth is proverbially of a plastic nature, and the juvenile griffin, consequently, in the majority of instances, readily accommodates himself to the altered circumstances in which he is placed; but not so the man of mature years, to whose moral and physical organization forty or fifty winters have imparted their rigid and unmalleable influences. Griffins of this description, which commonly comprises bishops, judges, commanders-in-chief, and gentlemen sent out on special missions, &c., protract their griffinage commonly during the whole period of their stay in the country, and never acquire the peculiar knowledge which entitles them to rank with the initiated. The late most excellent Bishop Heber, for example, who to the virtues of a Christian added all the qualities which could adorn the scholar and gentleman, was nevertheless an egregious griffin, as a perusal of his delightful travels in India, written in all the singleness of his benevolent heart, must convince any one acquainted with the character of the country and the natives of India.
Autobiographers love to begin ab ovo, and I see no reason why I should wholly deviate from a custom doubly sanctioned by reason and established usage. It is curious sometimes to trace the gradual development of character in “small” as well as in “great” men; to note the little incidents which often determine the nature of our future career, and describe the shootings of the young idea at that vernal season when they first begin to expand into trees of good or evil. In an old manor-house, not thirty miles from London, on a gloomy November day, I first saw the light. Of the home of my infancy I remember little but my nursery, a long, bare, whitewashed apartment, with a tall, diamond-paned window, half obscured by the funereal branches of a venerable yew-tree. This window looked out, I remember, on the village churchyard, thickly studded with the moss-grown memorials of successive generations. In that window-seat I used to sit for many a weary hour, watching the boys idling on the gravestones, the jackdaws wheeling their airy circles round the spire, or the parson’s old one-eyed horse cropping the rank herbage, which sprouted fresh and green above the silent dust of many a “village Hampden.” The recollections of infancy, like an old picture, become often dim and obscure, but here and there particular events, like bright lights and rich Rembrandt touches, remain deeply impressed, which seem to defy the effects of time; of this kind is a most vivid recollection I have of a venerable uncle of my mother’s, an old Indian, who lived with us, and whose knee I always sought when I could give nurse the slip. My great uncle Frank always welcomed me to his little sanctum in the green parlour, and having quite an Arab’s notion of the sacred rights of hospitality, invariably refused to give me up when nurse, puffing and foaming, would waddle in to reclaim me. I shall never forget the delight I derived from his pleasant stories and the white sugar-candy, of which he always kept a stock on hand. Good old man! he died full of years, and was the first of a long series of friends whose loss I have had to lament.
My father was, truly, that character emphatically styled “an Irish gentleman,” in whom the suavity of the Frenchman was combined with much of the fire and brilliancy of his native land. Though of an ancient family, his fortune, derived from an estate in the sister kingdom, was very limited, the “dirty acres” having somehow or other, from generation to generation, become “small by degrees, and beautifully less.” He was of a tender frame, and of that delicate, sensitive, nervous temperament, which, though often the attendant on genius, which he unquestionably possessed, little fits those so constituted to buffet with the world, or long to endure its storms. He died in the prime of manhood, when I was very young, and left my mother to struggle with those difficulties which are always incident to a state of widowhood, with a numerous family and a limited income. The deficiency of fortune was, however, in her case, compensated by the energies of a masculine understanding, combined with an untiring devotion to the interest and welfare of her children.