JACK RASPER’S WAGER.—[p. 92.]
THE OVERFLOWINGS OF THE LATE PELLUCID RIVERS, Esq.
Edited by Edmund H. Yates.
In submitting to the public some of the productions of my lamented friend Rivers, I think it right to endeavour to sketch some faint outline of the career of their illustrious author. “The world knows nothing of its greatest men,” says Philip Van Artevelde, and its general ignorance of Rivers clearly proves the truth of the remark.
Born of poor but respectable parents, in the parish of St. Pancras, at an early age Rivers evinced symptoms of that poetic talent which, in later life, made him so renowned—I mean, which would have made him so renowned, had he not been crushed by the wretched blindness and illiberality of the publishers of the metropolis. He could not have been more than five years of age when he first burst forth in metrical numbers; it was at the family dinner-table, when, pointing first to the smoking joint, then to the domestic implement by which he was conveying a portion of it to his mouth, he exclaimed—
“Pork!
Fork!”
A moment after, indicating the beer jug, his juvenile “poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,” he continued, “chalk!” His meaning on this point was vague, but it is generally considered he implied that the liquid was not paid for at the time, but was chalked up behind the door to the family account—a custom prevalent, I have ascertained, in many parts of the United Kingdom. From that period until his death he was constantly engaged in writing;—though his name never appeared to any of his productions, they were most extensively read; indeed, one of his minor poems—
“Dearest maid, I thee do love;