“When Sir Richard Steele was asked how it happened that his countrymen made so many bulls, he replied, ‘It is the effect of climate, sir; if an Englishman were born in Ireland, he would make as many.’” However, great mistakes are sometimes made by the wisest of the English; for it is reported of Sir Isaac Newton, that after he had caused a great hole to be made in his study door for his cat to creep through, he had a small one for the kitten.
When the present writer gave this Irishman a shilling for standing for his portrait, he exclaimed, “Thanks to your honour, an acre of performance is worth the whole land of promise.”
GINGERBREAD NUTS, OR JACK’S LAST SHIFT.
Plate XXIII.
The etching in front of the present Plate, was taken from Daniel Clarey, an industrious Irishman, well known to the London schoolboy as a gingerbread-nut lottery office keeper. Dan had fought for his country as a seaman, and though from some unlucky circumstance he is not entitled to the comforts of Greenwich Hospital, still he boasts of the honour of losing his leg in an engagement on the “Salt Seas.” Rendered almost destitute by the loss of his limb, he was nevertheless not wanting in wit to gain a livelihood, and became a vendor of gingerbread-nuts, which he disposed of by way of lottery, and humourously calls this employment, “Jack’s last Shift.” Though Dan is inferior in some respects to his lively countryman McConwick, who has afforded theme for the preceding pages, yet he is blessed with a sufficient memory to recollect what he has heard, and has persuasive eloquence enough to assure the boys that his lottery is no “South Sea Bubble,” where, as he tells them, “not even saw-dust was produced, when deal boards were promised; but that every adventurer in his scheme is sure of having a prize from seven to one hundred nuts, there being no blanks to damp the courage of any enterprizing youth; that some of his gingerbread shot are so highly seasoned that they are as hot as the noble Nelson’s balls when he last peppered the jackets of England’s foes.” The manner of obtaining these gingerbread prizes is as follows:—The hollow box held by Clarey has twenty-seven holes variously numbered, and any one of the strings at the bottom of the box being pulled, causes a doll’s head to appear at the hole, which decides, according to its number, the good or ill fortune of the halfpenny adventurer. He acknowledges to his surrounding visitors that he “knows nothing of the lingo of his predecessors, the famed Tiddy Dolls of their day, but that he is quite certain that if their gingerbread rolled down the throat like a wheel-barrow, his nuts are far superior, for that, should any one of his noble friends prove so fortunate as to draw a prize of one hundred of them, he would be entitled to those of half the usual size, so delicately small that they would be no bigger than the quack doctor’s pills, who chalks his name on the walls far and near about London; and as for the innocency of these little pills, he had been assured by a leading member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, who was very fond of tasting them, that they would do no harm to an infant babe, no, not even if they were given it on a Sunday within church time.” This mode of gulling the boys with nuts of half the size, if they won a double prize, was equalled by a well-known churchwarden, within these few years, who, upon his coming into office, ordered threepenny loaves to be made instead of sixpenny, so that he might be respectfully saluted by as many more poor people as he passed through the church-yard on a Sunday after his distribution, and thereby obtain popularity. Nor is the device in question very dissimilar to the mode adopted in some modern private lotteries, where there are no blanks to chagrin the purchasers.
The simpleton who attempts to sell gingerbread-nuts gains but little custom compared with the man of dashing wit; and there have been many of the latter description on the town within memory, particularly, about thirty-five years ago, a short red-nosed fellow in a black bushy wig, who trundled a wheel-barrow through St. Martin’s Court, Cranbourn Alley, and the adjacent passages. This man, who was attended by a drab of a wife to take the money, was master of much drollery; he would contrast the heated polities of the day with the mildness of his gingerbread, to the no small amusement of Mr. Sheridan, who, when on his way to the election meetings held at the Shakspeare tavern, in favour of his friend Mr. Fox, was once seen to smile and pouch this fellow a shilling; that distinguished mark of approbation from the author of the “School for Scandal” being gained by this gingerbread man by means of the following couplet:
“May Curtis, with his “Speedy Peace, and soon,”
Send gingerbread up to the man in the moon.”