CHAPTER THE SEVENTH.
OF CERTAIN TICKLISH UPS AND DOWNS IN MY LIFE: AMONGST OTHERS OF MY BEING PRESSED FOR SERVICE IN THE FLEET.
The best of Friends, says the Proverb, must part, and so must the worst, or the most indifferent of companions. By this time, I apprehend,—that is to say, the year 1728, Messieurs Pinchin, Hodge, and Dangerous had had quite enough of each other's company, and 'twas ripe Time for 'em to Part. Not but what there were some difficulties in the way. 'Twas not to be denied that my little Master was a parcel curmudgeon, very vain and conceited, very difficult of management in his Everlasting Tempers, and a trifle Mad, besides; but his service—apart from the inconvenience of bearing with a tetchy, half Lunatic Ape of Quality, was light and easy; the victuals were abundant and the Wages were comfortable. There must be two parties to make a quarrel, and when Master and servant propose to part, there should be a perfect agreement between them as to the manner of their going asunder. A Hundred times, vexed by the follies and exactions of the little man, I had sworn that I would doff his livery, and have nothing more to do with him; but then came the Reflection of the certain Bite and Sup, and I withheld my abandonment of Service. It may be that the Chaplain, Mr. Hodge, was very much of the same mind as your Humble. He said often, that he had been bearleader quite long enough to this young Cub, and was sick alike of his savage hugs, and uncouth gestures, when he had a mind to dance. Yet was he wise enough in his generation to acknowledge the commodity of a fat Pasty and a full Flask every day in the year, and of a neverfailing crown piece in the pouch in the morning for a draught to cool one's throat, when the bottle had been pushed about pretty briskly overnight. Parson Hodge was a philosopher. "I don't like the kicks," quoth he; "but when halfpence come along with 'em, they cease to be intolerable."
However, all our nice weighings of Pros and Cons were brought to a very abrupt standstill upon our arrival at Dover (having taken a post chariot from Ramsgate) by the Inconceivable Behaviour of Mr. Pinchin. This young Gentleman, utterly forgetting the claims of Duty, of Honour, of Honesty, and of Gratitude, fairly Ran away from us, his faithful and Attached Domestics. Without with your leave or by your leave he showed us a clean pair of Heels. He left a very cool Letter for the Chaplain in the hands of the master of the Inn where we put up, in which he repeated his old uncivil Accusation, that we had eaten him out of House and Home, that we were Leeches, Pirates, bloodsucking vampires, and the like—myself he even did the honour to call a Designing Cockatrice—and that he had fled from us to save the small remains of his Fortune from being Devoured, and intended to rejoin his long-neglected Mamma. Mr. Hodge read me this letter with a very long face, and asked me what I intended to do. I answered that I should be better able to tell him when he had read me the Postscript to the letter, for that I hardly fancied that Squire Pinchin would behave in so Base and Mean a manner as to run away without paying his Body Servant's wages. Upon this the Reverend Gentleman hems and ha's somewhat, and gave me to understand that Mr. Pinchin had enclosed a draft upon a Goldsmith in Change Alley in part disbursement of his debt to him, Mr. Hodge, and that out of that—although no special provision had been made for me by Mr. Pinchin—he thought he could spare me a matter of Ten Pound. Now as he kept the letter very tight in his hand, and was, withal, a Strong Man, who would have resisted any attempt of mine to wrest it from him, I was fain to take his statement for granted, and in a very Sulky manner agreed to accept the Ten Pound in full of all demands, stipulating only that my Travelling charges to London should be defrayed. This Mr. Hodge boggled at for awhile; but, seeing me Resolute he gave way, and at last said that there was no need for me to trouble with going to the Goldsmith in London to get the Draft changed—"If, indeed," says he, "the unhappy young spendthrift be not proclaimed a Bankrupt before I get this slip of paper cashed;" and that having a small store of Gold by him, he would give me the Ten Pound down, together with a couple of Pieces to bear my Expenses to the Town. To this I agreed; and his Reverence handing me over the ready, we cried Quits.
"And now, Sir," says I, "as you are no longer a Led-Parson, and I am no longer a Lacquey, we are both, till we get Fresh Places, Gentlemen at large, and Jack is as good as his Master, I shall be happy to crack a bottle of Lisbon with you, and whether you pay or I pay shall be decided by the flinging up of a Jacobus."
He declared that I was an Impudent young Fellow, with more Wickednesses in my Heart than I had hairs in my Head; but he accepted my Invitation to crack the bottle of Lisbon very readily, and won the Toss of me with much Affability. So, after a joyous Rouse (which my young Head could then stand, but I am a sad Skinker at the bottle now), the Landlord standing in, we drank Mr. Pinchin's health and better manners to him; and his Reverence dismissed me with a Buss and his Benediction.
"When you reach London, which is a wicked place," says he; "I prithee get you to Highgate, and without more ado cause yourself to be sworn upon the Horns there, never to drink Small Ale when you can get Strong, and never to Kiss the Maid when you can Kiss the Mistress. After that, with your Face, and your Figure, and your Foreign Travel, to say nothing of your Amazing Impudence, and your Incorrigible habit of Lying, I think you will do pretty well. Go thy ways, my son, and if ever you come to be hanged, send for Parson Hodge, and he will (with the Ordinary's permission) do everything for you in the cart that a True Blue Church and State Man can wish. Vale: that is to say, get off, you vagabond," with which in his merry way he half pushes me out of the room at the Inn, and I dare say that he had given a sufficiently liberal construction to Mr. Pinchin's postscript as to cheat me out of Twenty Pound.
And now on this worthy I must bestow a brace of Paragraphs ere I dismiss him for good and all, premising that the knowledge of what I am about to set down did not come upon me at this period of my History, but was gathered up, in Odds and Ends in subsequent epochs of my career:—some of it, indeed, many years afterwards. Parson Hodge had managed—all losses allowed for—to feather his nest pretty well out of his attendance on Squire Bartholomew Pinchin, and the ten or twelve pound he doled out to me (whether the story about the draft on the Goldsmith was a Cock and Bull one or not) must have been but a mere fleabite to him. I heard that he went down to the Bath, and dropping his Clerical Dignity for awhile, set up for a fashionable Physician of High Dutch extraction that was to cure all ailments. Doctor Von Hoogius I think he called himself; and his travelling about with my little Master had given him just such a smattering of Tongues as to enable him to speak Broken English with just so much of a foreign accent as to make it unlike a Brogue or a Burr. The guineas came in pretty quickly, and I believe that he cured several people of the Quinsy with pills made of dough, hogslard, cinnamon, and turmeric, and that he was highly successful in ridding ladies of fashion of the vapours by means of his Royal Arabian Electuary, which was nothing more than white Jamaica Rum coloured pink and with a flavouring of Almonds. The regular Practitioners, however, grew jealous of him, and beginning to ask him impertinent questions about his Diploma, he was fain to give up Legitimate practice, and to pick up a dirty Living as a mere Quack, and Vendor of Pills, Potions, Salves, Balsams, and Elixirs of Life. Then he came down in the world, owing to a Waiting Gentlewoman whose fortune he must needs tell, and whom, 'tis said, he cozened out of three quarters' wages; so, for fear of being committed by the justices as a Rogue and Vagabond, he then kept a Herb Shop for some time, with great success, until he got into trouble about a Horse, and being clearly Tart of that crime, very wisely shifted his quarters to the Kingdom of Ireland. I have heard that by turns he was, in his New Sphere, a Player at the Dublin Theatre, a Drawer at a Usquebaugh Shop in Cork, a hedge-schoolmaster among the Bogtrotters—a wild, savage kind of People, that infest the Southern parts of that fertile but distracted kingdom—a teacher of the Mathematics in Belfast, and a fiddler going about to wakes and weddings in the county of Galway. 'Twas whilst pursuing this last and jovial vocation that he was fortunate enough to run away with an Heiress of considerable Fortune. He managed it by a sort of Rough and Ready process they call over there an Abduction, two or three of the Wild Irishes being killed while he was getting the young lady on the car to take her away to be married; and she, happening to be a Ward in Chancery, he fell into Contempt, and was committed to Newgate in the City of Dublin, where he might have lain till his heels rotted off, but for the Favourable Renown into which he grew by his Bold and Gallant Feat of Abduction, and which brought him into such sympathetic notice, that interest was made with the Chancellor to purge him of his contempt, and he was honourably Discharged therefrom by means of escaping from Newgate at night by means of a Silver Key agreed upon betwixt him and the Warden. By the way, he had the sagacity at this time to conceal his being an Englishman, and passed very easily by the name of O'Hagan. A subscription was made for him among the Quality after his Enlargement, and he was charitably advised to push his fortune among the Saxons in England, his good friends little suspecting that he had already pushed his Fortune there, at different times, to a very pretty tune. But for his unfortunate—or rather fortunate, for him—collision with justice, he might have obtained employment as a Tithe Proctor with some of the dignified and non-resident Established Clergy in Ireland, who were very anxious to have able and Unscrupulous Men to collect their Dues for 'em; but the Sister Isle being, on several accounts, too hot for Mr. Hodge, Von Hoogius, O'Hagan, he took shipping with a purse full of guineas, collected for him by his kind friends, for Liverpool in Lancashire. Here he prospered indifferently for a time, now as a Schoolmaster, now as a Quack Doctor, under his old High Dutch alias, and now as an Agent for the crimping of children for the West India plantations, which last traffic I have ever held, for reasons personal, to be utterly Indefensible and Abominable. A Bill of Indictment before the Grand Jury speedily, however, put an end to the chaplain's dealings in flesh and blood; so he made what haste he could to town, where squandering what means he had with him in Riot and Unthrift, and being unluckily recognised by an old acquaintance in the Tailoring line, he was arrested on civil process, and clapped into the Fleet Prison. But here his ever-soaring genius took a new Flight. Those half surreptitious and wholly scandalous Nuptials known as Fleet Marriages, were then very rife, and the adventurer had wit enough to discover that it was to his interest to resume his cassock and bands, and to become the Reverend Mr. Hodge once more. Not much was wanted to set him up in business. Canonicals were to be had cheap enough in Rag Fair for the sending for 'em; a greasy Common Prayer Book and a chandler's-shop ledger to serve as a Register, did not cost much; so with these, and an inimitably Brazen face, behold our worthy equipped as a perfect Fleet Parson. He had to maintain at first a ragged regiment of cads and Runners to tout for him and bring him customers, but he soon became notorious, and formed a very fine connexion. Judgements by the score had been obtained, and Detainers lodged against him at the gate, since his incarceration at the suit of his acquaintance, the Tailor; but 'twas not long ere he contrived, by the easy process of joining people's hands, to gain enough to pay all the claims against him, and by permission of the Warden of the Fleet, to set up a Chapel and Liquor Shop within the rules of the prison. Punch, Geneva, poisonous wine, brandy, bitters, Rum, and Tobacco, were sold below stairs, and the Order for the Solemnization of Matrimony was performed on the first floor. It became quite a fashionable thing to go and be married by Parson Hodge, and at last it would be said of him, that if he extorted money from you beforehand, he did not pick your pocket afterwards, as too many of the Fleet Parsons in those shameful days were in the habit of doing. He continued at this merry game for many years, being in his way quite as popular as Orator Henley, and coining a great deal more money than that crack-brained Fanatic—for I have always been at pains to discover whether Henley was more Rogue or Fool—till at last his lucrative but unholy trade was put an end to by an Act of Parliament, called for by the righteous indignation of all peaceable and loyal subjects of the King, who did not desire to be married in haste and to repent at leisure. I believe that Parson Hodge retired with a comfortable fortune, and, going down into Somersetshire, purchased a small estate there, and died, much respected, in the odour of many pigs, and in the Commission of the Peace.
As for poor little Bartholomew Pinchin, his career was not nearly so prosperous, nor his end so happy. You will learn, a little further on, what scurvy tricks Fortune played him, and how at last his poor little brains succumbed to the rough toasting of that graceless jade. I had always thought him Mad, and Mad, indeed, as a March hare he proved to be in the long run.