Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

All her cities and towns are rejoicing in the welcome Winter; and mind, invigorated by holidays, is now at work, like a giant refreshed, in all professions. The busy bar growls, grumphs, squeaks, like an old sow with a litter of pigs pretending to be quarrelling about straws. Enter the Outer or the Inner House, and you hear eloquence that would have put Cicero to the blush, and reduced Demosthenes to his original stutter. The wigs of the Judges seem to have been growing during the long vacation, and to have expanded into an ampler wisdom. Seldom have we seen a more solemn set of men. Every one looks more gash than another, and those three in the centre seem to us the embodied spirits of Law, Equity, and Justice. What can be the meaning of all this endless litigation? On what immutable principles in human nature depends the prosperity of the Fee-fund? Life is strife. Inestimable the blessing of the great institution of Property! For without it, how could people go together by the ears, as if they would tear one another to pieces? All the strong, we must not call them bad passions, denied their natural element, would find out some channels to run in, far more destructive to the commonweal than lawsuits, and the people would be reduced to the lowest ebb of misery, and raised to the highest flow of crime. Our Parliament House here is a vast safety-valve for the escape of the foul steam that would otherwise explode and shatter the engine of the State, blowing the body and members of society to smash. As it is, how the engine works! There it goes! like Erickson's Novelty or Stephenson's Rocket along a railroad; and though an accident may occur now and then, such as an occasional passenger chucked by some uncalculated collision into the distant horizon, to be picked up whole, or in fragments, by the hoers in some turnip-field in the adjacent county, yet few or none are likely to be fatal on a great scale; and on goes the Novelty or Rocket, like a thought, with many weighty considerations after it, in the shape of waggons of Christians or cottons, while Manufactures and Commerce exult in the cause of Liberty and Locomotion all over the world.

But to us utter idlesse is perfect bliss. And why? Because, like a lull at sea, or lown on land, it is felt to descend from Heaven on man's toilsome lot. The lull and the lown, what are they when most profound, but the transient cessation of the restlessness of winds and waters—a change wrought for an hour of peace in the heart of the hurricane! Therefore the sailor enjoys it on the green wave—the shepherd on the greensward; while the memory of mists and storms deepens the enchantment. Even so, Idlesse can be enjoyed but by those who are permitted to indulge it, while enduring the labours of an active or a contemplative life. To use another, and a still livelier image—see the pedlar toiling along the dusty road, with an enormous pack, on his excursion; and when off his aching shoulders slowly falls back on the bank the loosened load, in blessed relief think ye not that he enjoys, like a very poet, the beauty of the butterflies that, wavering through the air, settle down on the wildflowers around him that embroider the wayside! Yet our pedlar is not so much either of an entomologist or a botanist as not to take out his scrip, and eat his bread and cheese with a mute prayer and a munching appetite—not idle, it must be confessed, in that sense—but in every other idle even as the shadow of the sycamore, beneath which, with his eyes half-open—for by hypothesis he is a Scotsman—he finally sinks into a wakeful, but quiet half-sleep. "Hallo! why are you sleeping there, you idle fellow?" bawls some beadle, or some overseer, or some magistrate, or perhaps merely one of those private persons who, out of season and in season, are constantly sending the sluggard to the ant to learn wisdom—though the ant, Heaven bless her! at proper times sleeps as sound as a sick-nurse.

We are now the idlest, because once were we the most industrious of men. Up to the time that we engaged to take an occasional glance over the self-growing sheets of The Periodical, we were tied to one of the oars that move along the great vessel of life; and we believe that it was allowed by all the best watermen, that

"We feather'd our oars with skill and dexterity."

But ever since we became an Editor, our repose, bodily and mental, has been like that of a Hindoo god. Often do we sit whole winter nights, leaning back on our chair, more like the image of a man than a man himself, with shut eyes, that keep seeing in succession all the things that ever happened to us, and all the persons that we ever loved, hated, or despised, embraced, beat, or insulted, since we were a little boy. They too have all an image-like appearance, and 'tis wondrous strange how silent they all are, actors and actresses on the stage of that revived drama, which sometimes seems to be a genteel comedy, and sometimes a broad farce, and then to undergo dreadful transfiguration into a tragedy deep as death.

We presume that the Public read in her own papers—we cannot be but hurt that no account of it has appeared in the "Court Journal"—that on Thursday the 12th current, No. 99 Moray Place was illuminated by our annual Soireé, Conversazione, Rout, Ball, and Supper. A Ball! yes—for Christopher North, acting in the spirit of his favourite James Thomson,—

"No purpose gay,
Amusement, dance, or song he sternly scorns;
For happiness and true philosophy
Are of the social, still, and smiling kind."

All the rooms in the house were thrown open, except the cellars and the Sanctum. To the people congregated outside, the building, we have been assured, had all the brilliancy of the Bude Light. It was like a palace of light, of which the framework or skeleton was of white unveined marble. So strong was the reflection on the nocturnal heavens, that a rumour ran through the City that there was a great fire in Moray Place, nor did it subside till after the arrival and departure of several engines. The alarm of some huge conflagration prevailed during most part of the night all over the kingdom of Fife; while, in the Lothians, our illumination was much admired as an uncommonly fine specimen of the Aurora Borealis.

"From the arch'd roof,
Pendent by subtle magic, many a row
Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed
With naphtha and asphaltus, yielded light
As from a sky. The hasty multitude
Admiring enter'd."

We need not say who received the company, and with what grace SHE did so, standing at the first landing-place of the great staircase in sable stole; for the widow's weeds have not yet been doffed for the robes of saffron—with a Queen-Mary cap pointed in the front of her serene and ample forehead, and, to please us, a few pearls sprinkled among her hair, still an unfaded auburn, and on her bosom one star-bright diamond. Had the old General himself come to life again, and beheld her then and there, he could not have been offended with such simple ornaments. The weeds he would have felt due to him, and all that his memory was fairly entitled to; but the flowers—to speak figuratively—he would have cheerfully acknowledged were due to us, and that they well became both face and figure of his lovely relict. As she moved from one room to another, showering around her serene smiles, we felt the dignity of those Virgilian words,