[VAGABONDIANA.]
CERTAIN words sound like caresses. "Thou vagabond!" must have been at some time or other a gentler appellation than our rude transition would make it. Why not? "Rogue" and "truant" have yet their playful uses. Though we translate illy such endearments of antiquity, we may read in Gascoigne:—
"O Abraham's brats! O brood of blessèd seed!"
The "goodly and virtuous young imps" of old citation, we should also construe but saucily. Besides, "vagabond" lendeth itself gracefully to the affectionate diminutives of alien tongues, which, to a philologist, may be as good as an argument: what can be tenderer than vagaböndchen, vagabondellino, and a like musical play of syllables over the solid English rock?
The vagabond is the modern representative of the knight-errant, shorn of his romance, inasmuch as both fall neatly under the definition of a stroller, a free lance, whom the domestic Lar does not allure or attach to any one fireside. The immortal Don of la Mancha, revived in this age, should figure as a tramp in the police station, before he had adorned public life twenty-four hours. But the vagabond proper has an Asiatic cousin, who gets princelier treatment. The Rônin of chivalrous Japan is a gentleman of leisure, who, not averse to a chance of seasonable employment, roams at large, settling his private differences, and serving Heaven unmolested, according to his lights. Vagabonds are legally denominated "such as wake on the night, and sleep on the day; and haunt customable taverns and ale-houses, and rout about; and no man wots whence they come nor whither they go:" a comprehensive statement in three parts, which has, moreover, a covert whimsical reference categorically to actors, politicians, and bank-clerks. A vagabond, primarily, was merely an idle person; and if his name has come to imply variations of decorum, and a questionable standing in polite circles, it is to be accounted for only on the worn adage that Satan takes personal care of undedicated energies.
Our friend is vagrant as the swallow, "born in the eighth climate, and framed and constellated unto all." He is the world's freeman. He strays at his fancy, sign-boards and mile-stones his only ritual, and changes of weather the sole political economy of his study, by which he abides. Everybody's property is his in fief. Terminus and his stakes were never set up for him. He has no particular reason for moving on the first of May, nor for passing the winter in warm quarters. When he is very weary, since he has no tent to strike, nor bed to make, he unconcernedly "lays his neck on the lap of his mother." Neither landlord nor tenant is he; and never has he known a spring-cleaning, nor packed a trunk, nor priced a door-plate. He trolls out that joyful strophe which Richard Brome wrote for his forefathers, as he swings past inland villages:
"Come away! why do we stay?
We have no debt or rent to pay,
No bargains or accompts to make,
Nor land nor lease, to let or take:
Or if we had, should that remore us,
When all the world's our own before us,
And where we pass and make resort,
There is our kingdom and our court!"