“My bodye is a bankrupt’s shop,
My grim creditor is death,”
who, like a stern sergeant, lays his hand on my collar, and bids me follow him to jail in the king’s name. I wish I were Punch, for he not only “jockeyed” the ghost, but the hangman, and the beadle, and Mr. Shallabalah, and his wife, and the very deuce himself. I wish I were in a land where time is indeed made for slaves, or where there are no clocks to cast honest men off their hobbies.
“I wish I were a geese,
For they lives and dies in peace,
And accumulates much grease,
Over there.”
But I am not a Punch nor a “geese,” to endorse the touching transatlantic locution, however much I may merit the singular application of the name. I am only your humble servant to command, and this is the last hour of “Twice Round the Clock,” so I must e’en essay to make a good end of it.
We have not been so badly off for public amusements during our journeyings. We have been to the opera, to the theatre, a dancing-academy, and to hear an oratorio. We have supped at Evans’s, and “assisted” at a late debate in the House of Commons; yet I acknowledge, mournfully, that scores of places of recreation exist in London to which I could have taken you, and where we might have enjoyed ourselves very rationally and harmlessly. I should have liked to induct you to the mysteries of Canterbury Hall, the Polytechnic, Christy’s Minstrels, and Madame Tussaud’s waxwork show. For I hold to this creed, sternly and strongly, that public amusements—indoor and outdoor amusements—are eminently conducive to public morals, and to the liberty and happiness of the people. Music, dancing, and dramatic representations, free from grossness and turbulence, are as healthful and innocent recreations as Temperance Halls, lectures on the comet’s tail, or monster meetings dedicated to the deification of the odium theologicum. From my little parlour window at Brighton, I can see a huge yellow placard disfiguring a dead wall with this inscription:—“Protestants! attend the Great Meeting to-night!” Bother the Protestants, (on platforms) I say, and the Pope of Rome too. What have we done that we are to be perpetually set together by the ears by belligerent Protestants and rampant Romanists? Is the whole framework of society to be shaken by controversies about the cardinal’s red stockings or the rector’s shovel hat? They had best both be swept into the dust-hole, I think, as having no more to do with religion than my poodle, Buffo, has with the Gunpowder Plot. Will all these roaring meetings—Protestants and Romanist, or Mumbo-Jumboical—where blatant stump-orators, paid for their theology by the night, rant, and stamp, and cook up those eternal Smithfield fires, help the sacred cause of Christianity one iota? It is long since Sheridan expressed a hope that there might be no more “scandal about Queen Elizabeth,” and now, I see, they can’t let that poor old woman rest in her grave. Some zealous people want to get up a sort of rider to “Guy Fawkes’s Day,” to commemorate the tri-centenary of her accession. You stupid firebrands! Of course “the Reformation was a blessing;” but do you know what will be the result of this raking up of the Elizabethan scandal? Do you know that there are such books as “Cobbett’s Legacy to Parsons,” and “Lingard’s History,” besides “Foxe’s Martyrs,” and a “Thunderbolt for Rome”? Do you know that it may be proved just six of one and half-a-dozen of the other about Queen Bess? that while to some she is the Great Protestant Sovereign, the Egeria of the Reformation, the Heroine of Tilbury Fort, to others she is a vain, cruel, arrogant old beldame, no better than she should be? who butchered Mary Stuart, and had Leicester poisoned; and who for every Protestant her gloomy sister burned, had at least two Papists hanged, drawn, and quartered, with the pleasant addition of their entrails being torn out and consumed before their eyes! Eh! laissons la these horrible reminiscences, and thank Heaven that we live under the sway of good Victoria, not that of ruthless Elizabeth or bloody Mary. Did the wise, and merciful, and bounteous Creator, who made this smiling earth, who has gladdened us with an infinity of good things for our solace and enjoyment, and for all quit-rent has laid this law upon us that we should love one another, in testimony of our greatest love for Him, who is all love and tenderness; did He send us here to squabble and fight and predict eternal perdition to one another, because there fall into our hearts a differently-coloured ray of the divine Effulgence? There is a flaming Protestant here with a broad-brimmed hat, and who is a vessel of much consequence among his fellow-bigots, who told an honest butcher some days since that if the Maynooth grant were renewed we should have “the thumbscrews in three months;” whereupon the affrighted butcher plastered all his joints over with handbills of the great Protestant Meeting, thus, of course, losing all his customers of the other persuasion. I wish those bells which are eternally jangling invitations for us to come and thank Heaven that we are not “as that publican,” would ring a little tolerance and charity into men’s hearts; would ring out a little more oblivion of phylacteries and pew-rents in high places, and of the sepulchral whitewash brushes. If the people who make all this noise and clamour, and who howl out against rational amusements, led pure and virtuous lives, and set good examples to their neighbours, this voice should not be raised; but, alas! here is brother Dolorous at the bar of the court of Queen’s Bench for peculation; here is Sister Saintly scourging her apprentice; here are Messrs. Over-righteous in trouble for adulteration of their wares.
It is by no means incompatible, I hope, with the broad line of argument I have striven to adopt in these papers, if I honestly declare that the tableau I am about to describe has not in any way my approval, nay is, in many respects, much to be reprobated and deplored. I describe it—in its least repulsive details—simply because it is a very noticeable feature in modern London life. To have passed it over would have been dishonest and hypocritical, and I set it down in my catalogue of subjects at the outset of my task, actuated then, as I am now, by a determination to allow no squeamishness to interfere with the delineation of the truth—so long as that truth could be told without offence to good manners and in household language. A modern masquerade in London is, to tell the honest truth, anything but an edifying spectacle. There is certainly no perceptible harm in some hundreds of persons, of both sexes, accoutred in more or less fantastic dresses, meeting together in a handsome theatre, and, to the music of a magnificent band, dancing till three or four o’clock in the morning. But the place is not harmless: people go there to dissipate, and do dissipate. The salle de danse of a grand masquerade is a re-union of epicurean passions—an epitome of vice painted and spangled. And I take a masquerade triumphantly as an argument against the precisians and sour-faces, who would curtail the amusements of the people, and viciously thwart them in their every effort to amuse themselves. Look you here, gentlemen of the vestry—arch moralists of the parish! look you here, good Mr. Chaplain of Pentonville, who have got your pet garotter safe in hold for his sins! This is no penny-gaff, no twopenny theatre, no cheap concert or dancing academy—not so much as a “free-and-easy” or a “sixpenny hop.” Shopboys don’t rob the till to come to a bal masqué at her Majesty’s Theatre. Your pet garotter didn’t throttle the gentleman in the Old Kent Road in order to procure funds to dance with Mademoiselle Euphrosine de la Galette, of the Rue Nôtre Dame de Lorette, Paris, and attired in a ravishing débardeur costume. There is, to be sure, a floating population of Bohemians—citizens of the world of London, belonging to the theatres, enfants perdus of the newspaper press, and so on, who are admitted gratis to a masquerade: these last Zouaves of social life, have free admission to coroners’ inquests, public dinners, ship launches, private views of picture exhibitions, night rehearsals of pantomimes, and royal marriages. The modern newspaper man is, in print, the embodiment of Mr. Everybody; in private he is Mr. Nobody, and doesn’t count at all. Lord Derby is afraid of the journalist in print, but in the flesh his Lordship’s footman would look down upon him. “Honly a littery man, let him knock agin,” Jeames would say. So we go everywhere, even as though we were in the “receipt of fern seed.” Even the House of Commons has invented a pleasant fiction for the benefit of the gentlemen of the press, and humorously ignores their presence during the debates. The Empress Julia bathed before her male slave. “Call that a man,” she cried, contemptuously. In the like manner, no account is taken of the journalist’s extra card of admission or extra knife and fork. He goes under the head of “sundries,” though he makes sometimes a rather formidable figure in the aggregate.