One crowded hour of glorious life
Was worth an age without a name!
But my mother soothed and calmed, if she failed to alter my views. Ever ready to console and advise with gentleness, she led my soul from angry bitterness and useless repining to purer hopes and holier wishes; and the knowledge that she loved me so dearly, and that her kind heart was full of maternal affection, anxiety, and hope for us, would make me resolve to bear all for her sake, till next day perhaps, when some new act of insolence or oppression on the part of my underbred taskmasters would again rouse all my slumbering fury.
Amid all this, my day-dreams would come again and again; my visions of being a soldier, or anything else but what I was then.
Now I was ploughing the deep green ocean, the white sails of an imaginary ship swelling out in the pure sea-breeze, the waves rolling around me in foam and sunshine—ploughing it to lands that were covered with waving foliage, with brilliant verdure and glowing fruit—to sunny isles that lay I knew not where—but
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been.
Certainly the island of Robinson Crusoe stood most vividly out among them, with Amy Lee, however, as a substitute for his dingy comrade Friday. Now I was an actor—a successful one, of course—amid the glare of tinsel and the footlights, bringing down thunders of applause from the gods and wreaths of laurel from the boxes. Now I was a shepherd, as we find him pourtrayed by Watteau or described in the pastorals of Virgil, cased in hairy buskins, enjoying his otium under a spreading oak, crowned with dark-green ivy, playing to his flocks on an oaten reed and enjoying curds and cream with Corydon and Thyrsis. Occasionally I thought that being a captain of Sicilian or Italian banditti, in easy circumstances, inhabiting a picturesque cavern, in front of which girls were always dancing with tambourines and tabors, while I wore a handsome dress with bell-buttons, bandaged legs, and a steeple-crowned hat, disporting long flowing ribbons—or that figuring as a buccaneer, with a cocked hat and brace of pistols (like Paul Jones in the popular prints), might not be an unpleasant mode of life; but amid all these vagaries, the old stereotyped idea of being a soldier ever came vividly forth, as the most favourite of my boyish dreams. Then I was in uniform—a sword in my hand and the sharp blast of the trumpet in my ear. I was on the march to imaginary fields of fame and honour. Thus a thousand bright shadows were ever floating before me, and my reading fed this fancy, folly if you will, rendering me careless of work, and embroiling me yet further with those who entrusted it to me.
The bronzed but kind and jovial faces of my father's men—the men of "the regiment" far away—men who had nursed me, toyed with me, and borne me on their backs in sportive merriment, were never forgotten. My heart swelled with the memory, and the sight of a red-coat ever brought them all before me; for, as dear old Corporal Trim said of the son of Le Fevre, the poor dying lieutenant, "I had been bred up from an infant in the army, and the name of a soldier sounded in my ears like the name of a friend."
CHAPTER IX.
SEQUEL TO THE STORY OF THE WILL.
One morning it had come to the ears of Mr. Nathaniel Macfarisee that I had been discovered in the pit of the Theatre Royal, seeing Stephen Kemble and the Queen Katherine of Mrs. Siddons—that, in addition to being in this place of sin, which Mr. Pawkie weekly denounced as the avenue to a very hot climate indeed, I had applauded, by clapping my hands in an unseemly manner, and in the exuberance of my agitation or excitement during the dying scene, had snatched off the well-powdered wig of an old gentleman who sat before me, "a most grave and reverend signior," Mr. Macrocodile, the City Chamberlain, and tossed it up to the great lustre, amid the crystal labyrinths of which it remained: all of which enormities drew upon me a most severe lecture, interlarded with many texts of scripture, from our upright and good Nathaniel, who professed the greatest horror of playhouses, and valued a Siddons or a Kemble no more than the painted mountebank who plays with bowls and balls, or the Chinese who swallows a barrowfull of paper shavings, and emits thereafter a hundred yards of fine satin ribbon.