Thus, while in the heart of mighty London vice filled model prisons with the recklessly depraved, or, far worse, the recklessly hypocritical—while hospital-wards teemed with those comparatively fortunate victims of disease and improvidence whom some good Samaritan had thus far rescued, when a frightful majority were dying untended in reeking alleys and other hotbeds of pestilence—while covetousness and hatred were scarcely restrained from breaking forth into rapine and murder by the strong arm of the law—my Lord Alfred Courtland, and the leeches who sought to prey upon his youth and inexperience, drove down to Blackwall to nibble a small fry of ridiculous little fishes, enveloped in batter, called whitebait, and esteemed, for some undiscoverable reason, a delicacy.
Exactly as the clock struck five, a dark, well-appointed drag, with three bays and a chestnut—all thorough-bred, or thereabouts—drew up at the entrance to the Pandemonium. Captain O’Brien, handing the reins to a dark-whiskered, good-looking young fellow, who was his companion on the box, descended, and entering the club, was introduced by D’Almayne to Lord Alfred Courtland and Jack Beaupeep; the first mentioned individual acknowledging his salutation by the slightest possible removal of the hat, together with an all but invisible motion of the head, the latter by a profound salaam, together with the diffident remark—
“Sir, you do me proud.”
“Not at all, sir, not at all; on the contrary, it’s proud I am to make your acquaintance, and you a mimber of the government, too. Did ye know Smith O’Brien, now?” Not waiting a reply, he continued—“Oh, he’s a great legislathur entirely; and sure them that don’t die first will live to see him prime-minister of this country, one of these fine mornings; and a prime minister he’ll make, sure! ‘Justice to Ireland’ will be found engraved in copper-plate on his heart, by any gentleman who may have the pleasure of attending the post-mortem examination of his remains, and long life to ’em!”
“Are we waiting for any one?” inquired Horace, fearful lest his Hibernian associate should disgust Lord Alfred by his offensive familiarity at first starting. “Guillemard has, I see, already taken his seat. Have you any objection to pull up at the Guards’ Club, O’Brien? There are three or four army men who have promised to come, and your drag will carry them easily.”
The Captain agreeing to this—as indeed he appeared willing to agree to any and everything suggested by D’Almayne—they took their places; O’Brien insisting on Lord Alfred succeeding to the box-seat, vacated for that purpose by the dark-whiskered, hawkeyed youth, who was none other than Phil Tirrett, the horse-breeder’s son, whom Horace D’Almayne had designated as a very promising young scoundrel—a style of character which he was so well able to recognise, and so thoroughly competent to form an opinion upon, that we feel convinced he only did the young gentleman’s merits justice.
By no means captivated by O’Brien’s manners or address, Lord Alfred was at first haughty and monosyllabic; but perceiving that D’Almayne was us scrupulously polite to this son of Erin as to the most polished member of the fashionable world, it occurred to him that in his character of man-about-town the correct thing was to assume a general languid citizen-of-the-worldship; and, as a duty to his presumed imperturbability, to appear, not all things to all men, but the same thing to every man. Thus, rousing himself, he paid a die-away and meaningless compliment to the workmanlike manner in which Captain O’Brien—“Ar—put his team along, and—ar—the correct style of the whole affair.”
This led to an equestrian and sporting rhapsody on the part of the Hon. Terence, interspersed with anecdotes—strange, if true—of the dams and the sires, and the own brothers and sisters, of the individual members of the team, and especially of the chestnut, which had been—“The sweetest thing, sir, across a stiff country that ever man rode; no day was too long and no burst too fast for him, bedad! and the bitterest moment ever I, Terence O’Brien, knew (barring the loss of me maternal grandmother, by spontaneous combustion, from fortuitously sitting down upon a lighted cinder, which had providentially popped out of the fire for that purpose), was when I staked him above the near hock at Melton, last season; and he’s never been fit to gallop since, or it isn’t in harness ye’d see him now—and him costing me a cool £400, and worth all the money now, if he was but sound,” &c. &c.
The witty author of Tristram Shandy, in introducing to the reader that most lovable of humorists, my Uncle Toby, has discoursed eloquently on the various hobby-horses which take possession of, and enslave, the mind of man. Fortification, which was my Uncle Toby’s mania, engrossed his thoughts, and influenced his conversation, until nothing but his simplicity and kindness of heart saved him from degenerating into a complete bore; but when a man’s hobby-horse is the equine animal itself, you can no more unhorse him than if he were—as assuredly he ought to have been, if mind and body had borne a proper affinity to each other—a centaur. O’Brien was a centaur, and having once mounted his hobby, he rode him all the way to Blackwall, to Lord Alfred’s extinction, or thereabouts; but considering that a certain amount of “turf” adheres to the character of a man-about-town, he bore the infliction like a—well, suppose, though we have foresworn slang as low, we for this once say—a brick.
Three guardsmen, and a young heavy dragoon, who lived to consume beer and cigars, and produce moustachios and stupidity were duly added to the party; and by the time they reached Blackwall everybody grew hungry, and prepared to do ample justice to the whitebait. Of course, everybody has at some period of their earthly career eaten a Blackwall dinner, and such feeds are all exactly alike. First appears a course of fish, enough to constitute a dinner in itself: sea-fish, river-fish, pond-fish—fishes boiled, fried, stewed, and bedeviled in various ways, which it would require the knowledge of the supposed inventor of cooks himself to detail; then come the wonderful whitebait themselves, their stupid little bodies enveloped in skeleton dresses of batter; and then fishes are ignored, and develop, according to the “Vestiges of Creation” theory, into the higher forms of animal, into which the highest form of all—man—pitches cannibal-like, until the culinary cosmos is resolved into its pristine chaotic elements. And around this hecatomb of slaughtered zoology and feasting humanity skip nimble waiters, furnished with bottles of every shape and hue; for, since Noah first discovered the seductive beverage, wine-bibbing has been a levelling principle, by means of which the lords of the creation have been accustomed to assimilate themselves to their subjects the brutes, despite the hydraulic pressure of Father Matthew, and all others who have pledged themselves to cold-water such degrading customs. And, indeed, we fear that of the two parties whose respective mottoes might be “in vino veritas” and “truth lies at the bottom of a well,” the latter will continue to constitute the minority until the end of the chapter; or, as Jack Beaupeep expressed the same sentiment, when D’Almayne propounded to him a somewhat similar theory, be “safe to kick the bucket, if they don’t put their foot in it in any other way:” but that misguided young man not only made, but rejoiced in shocking bad puns.