When public opinion was in the balance respecting the South American War, Mr. Reverdy Johnson and a Copperhead colleague arrived in London and began to do a respectable business in public mystification. From information supplied to me I wrote letters explaining the real nature of that sinister mission, in consequence of which the two emissaries of slavery made tracks for New York.
But of instances, as of other things, there must be an end.
CHAPTER IV. FIRST STEPS IN LITERATURE
Surely environment is the sister of heredity? Mr. Gladstone once said to me that "The longer he lived the more he thought of heredity." Next to heredity is environment—the moulder of mankind. My first passion was to be a prize-fighter. Nature, however, had not made me that way. I had no animosity of mind, and that form of contest was not to my taste. But prize-fighting was part of the miasma the Napoleonic war had diffused in England. It was in the air; it was the talk of the street "Hammer" Lane, so called from the iron blow he could deliver, was the local hero of the Ring in the Midlands in my youth. He was a courtier of my eldest sister, and created in me a craving for fistic prowess. I fought one small battle, but found that a lame wrist, which has remained permanent, cut me off from any prospect of renown in that pursuit Next, to be a circus jester seemed to me the very king of careers. My idea was to leap into the arena exclaiming:—
"Well, I never! Did you ever? I never did."
"Never did what?" the clown was to ask me, when my reply was to be:—
"I could only disclose that before a Royal Commission"—alluding to a political artifice then coming into vogue in Parliament When a Minister did not know what to say to a popular demand, or found it inconvenient to say it if he did know, he would suggest a Commission to inquire into it, as is done to this day.
Then the clown would demand, "What is the good of a Royal Commission?" when the answer would be: "Every good in the world to a Ministry, for before the Commission agreed as to the answer to be given, the public would forget what the question was." Under this diversion of the audience, no one noticed that no answer was given to the original question put to the jester. Whether I could have succeeded in this walk was never decided. It was found that I lacked the loud, radiant, explosive voice necessary for circus effects, and I ceased to dream of distinction there.
I suppose, like many others who could not well write anything, I thought poetry might be my latent—very latent—faculty. So I began. For all I knew, my genius, if I had any, might lie that way. To "body forth things unknown," which I was told poets did, must be delightful. To "build castles in the air"—as my means did not enable me to pay ground rent—was at least an economical project. So I began with a question, as new Members of Parliament do, until they discover something to say. My first production, which I hoped would be mistaken for a poem, was in the form of a "Question to a Pedestrian":—