“Lord bless you, sir, what is life but a jest? I jest to live, and I live but to jest. And so I shall continue to do, until I am put to bed by the shovel.”
“Your father was a reputed jester, was he not?” asked Mr. Seymour.
“He was, God bless his memory! and it was his constant prayer that his son Neddy might turn out as sharp a man as his father; and if there be any truth in the adage that ‘dogs bark as they are bred,’ I certainly had as good a chance of success as most people. Momus rocked my cradle; I ate fire before I was seven years old; and so anxiously did my father superintend my education, that he never suffered me to cut a morsel, until I had cut a joke. ‘Neddy,’ he used to say, ‘I perceive you are like my bagpipes, never audible except your pouch is full of wind; for after a good meal you are as mum as a mouse in a mill; so remember, my lad, no joke no pudding.’ Thus schooled, I became, through necessity, a wit, and earned every mouthful by a pun; in short, after a little time, my genius illumined every dish, and, like the fire of London, blazed from Pudding Lane to Pie Corner.”
“And you afterwards appeared on the stage, as a candidate for popular applause, which you were fortunate enough to obtain; how came you to desert your calling?” said the major.
“He who licks honey from thorns pays too dearly for it,” replied the wit. “So I packed my wardrobe in a pocket handkerchief, and trudged off to Cockneyshire.”
“And what was your object?” asked the major.
“To carry my wit to a better market; and instead of retailing it at country fairs, to offer it wholesale to some of the great publishers, from whom I immediately received considerable orders. The profit which rewarded my poetry soon convinced me, notwithstanding all that had been said to the contrary, that there were still some gold mines in Parnassus. I lived for the first week on liquid blacking. I well remember it was winter, and although I contrived by my eulogies of the jet polish, to obtain a daily meal from a neighbouring chop-house, I was compelled to sit in my chamber at night without fire or candle, until the publication of my song, ‘Ah let my muse a flame inspire,’ lighted a cheerful blaze in my grate, and enabled me to purchase a few pounds of rush-lights. In short, gentlemen, without exhausting your patience with a long recital of my adventures, suffice it to say, that I have always been able to keep my pipe smoking by my puffs, my pot boiling by the ebullition of my wit, and my grate blazing by the fire of my genius; while paste and scissors have never failed to secure a constant supply of cabbage, upon which I have thrived like any caterpillar.”
Here Hopkins returned to the porch, and took a draught as deep as ever Bitias drank, or the Athenian Diotimus, nicknamed the Funnel, ever swallowed.
“Did I not say,” resumed the wag, “that my pipe was the nurse of wit? I ought to have called her the dry nurse. It is a hard case, gentlemen, but I am in the situation of the flying-fish, incapable of keeping myself up, unless I occasionally moisten my wings.”
“If you persist in this dreadful habit,” said Mr. Seymour, “you will assuredly destroy the coat of your stomach!”