Observing Lady Blessington’s faultless equipage standing at the door of the Cosmorama, I went in and saw her Ladyship for a moment. She said she was suffering from recent illness, but I thought her looking far better than when I was last in England. Her two beautiful nieces were with her, and Lord ——; and the celebrated Vidocq (for this was what they had come to see,) was showing them the disguises he had worn in his wonderful detections of criminals, the weapons he had taken from them, and all the curiosities of his career—himself the greatest. I looked at the Prince of Policemen with no little interest of course, after reading his singular memoirs. He is a fat man, very like the outline of Louis Phillippe’s figure, and his head, enormously developed in the perceptive organs, goes up so small to the top, as to resemble the pear with which the King of the French is commonly caricatured. Vidocq’s bow to me when I came in was the model of elegant and respectful suavity, but I could not repress a feeling of repugnance to him, nevertheless.
I made a couple of calls before I went home. The chief topic of conversation at both houses was the charms and eccentricities of an American belle who had lately married into a noble family. She seems to have enchanted the exclusives by treating them with the most un-deferential freedom. A few evenings since, she chanced to be surrounded by a half-dozen high bred admirers, and conversation going rather heavily, she proposed a cock-fight. Dividing the party into two sides, she tied the legs of the young men together, and set them to a game of fisticuffs—ending in a very fair representation of an action between belligerent roosters! One of her expressions was narrated with great glee. She chanced to have occasion to sneeze when sitting at dinner between two venerable noblemen. “La!” she exclaimed, “I hope I didn’t splash either of you!” I have mentioned only the drolleries of what I heard. Several instances of her readiness and wit were given, and as those who mentioned them were of the class she is shining in, their admiring tone gave a fair reflection of how she is looked upon—as the most celebrated belle and notability of high life for the present season.
LETTER III.
S—— Vicarage.
I took yesterday an afternoon’s country-drive to a neighboring town, with no idea of finding anything of note-worthy interest, but it strikes me that one or two little matters that made a mark in my memory, may be worth recording. England is so paved and hedged with matter to think about, that you can scarce stir without pencilling by the way.
I strolled towards a very picturesque church while the ladies of my party were shopping. The town (Abingdon) is a tumbled-up, elbowy, crooked old place, with the houses all frowning at each other across the gutters, and the streets narrow and intricate. The church was a rough antique, with the mendings of a century or two on the originally beautiful turrets and windows, but as I walked around it, I came upon the church-yard, hemmed in at awkward angles by three long and venerable buildings. Two of these seemed to have been built with proper reference to the climate, for the lower stories were faced with covered galleries, wherein the occupants might take the air, and yet be sheltered from the rain. Through the low arches of one of the galleries, I saw a couple of old men pacing up and down, and on inquiring of one of them, I found it was a poor-house, of curious as well as ancient endowment—the funds being devoted to the support of twenty-five widowers and as many widows. What else, (beside being left destitute) was necessary to make one a recipient of the charity, I could not learn of my informant. He ushered me, however, into his apartment, and a charming little rubbishy, odd-angled, confused cupboard it was! I could not but mentally congratulate him on the difference between his snuggery for one, (for each man had a niche to himself,) and the dreadfully whitewashed halls, like new churches that have never been prayed in, in which the poor are elsewhere imprisoned. He had old shoes lying in one corner, and a smoked print stuck against the wall, and things hung up and stuffed away untidily, here and there—in short, it looked like a home! The whole building was but a row of these single rooms—a long, one-storied and narrow structure, and behind was a garden with a portion divided off to each pensioner—his window so near that he could sit in-doors and inhale the fragrance from flowers of his own tending. I rather think every man was his own turnkey and superintendent.
But we visited in the course of the afternoon, a poor-house which was in direct contrast to this. Abingdon is distinguished for possessing the model work-house of the new Union System, which has diminished the burthensome cost of the poor, to the country, one half. It used to be customary to give the helpless paupers two shillings a week, and let them shift for themselves, if they preferred it. Now, the poor of half a dozen villages, more or less, are provided for in one “improved” work-house, and if they do not live in it, they can receive nothing. And, to live in it, they must work and submit to the discipline.
The new work-house was a building of three long wings, in the form of a Y; the superintendent’s room placed in the crotch, and his windows commanding a complete view of the two sides of each wing. The gardens and workshops were in the angles, and there was scarce an inch of the premises that was not overlooked from the centre. We were kindly shown over the different apartments. The cleanliness was enough to discourage a fly. A smell of soap-and-water’s utmost completely impregnated the atmosphere. The grain of the scrubbed tables stood on end. The little straight beds looked as if it must be a bold man who would crook his legs in them. The windows were too high for a child or a short person to look out. It was like an insane hospital or a prison. In one of the first rooms we entered, was a delicate and pretty child of seven or eight years of age, a new inmate. Her mother, who was her only relative, had just died in a neighboring village, and left her quite alone in the world. She was shut up in a room with an old woman, for by the “regulations,” she was to be separated some days from the other children, to make sure that she brought no disease into the work-house. But the sight of the poor little sobbing thing, sitting on the middle of a long clean bench, with no object to look at within the four white walls, except a table and a soured old woman, looked very little like “charity.” And the hopeless down-hill of her sob sounded as if she felt but little like one newly befriended. “She’s done nothing but cry all the day long!” said the old woman. Fortunately I had a pocket full of sweets, intended for a happier child, and I was able to make one break in her long day’s monotony.
In another room we found ten or twelve old women, who were too decrepid for work of any kind. But they had laps left![[6]] And in each one’s lap lay a baby. The old knees were trotting with the new-born of pauper mothers, and but for its dreadful uniformity—each old trunk grafted with a bud, and trunks and buds dressed and swathed in the poor-house uniform—this room full of life’s helpless extremities would have seemed the happiest of all. They cuddled up their druling charges as we approached the benches on which they sat, and chirruped their toothless “tsup! tsup! tsup!” as if each was proud of her charge. One of the old women complained bitterly of not being allowed to have a pinch of snuff. The reason why, was because the others would want it too, or demand an equivalent, paupers being cared for by system. The unhappy and improvident creature had educated a superfluous want!
The sick rooms were marked with the same painful naked neatness. Old people, disposed of to die, economically tucked up in rows against the wall, with no person to come near them except the one to nurse a dozen, form a dreadful series. Really, there should be some things sacred from classification. The fifth acts of dramas, like whole human lives, should not pass like the shelving of utensils that are one degree short of worthless. I stood looking for a minute or two at an old man whose only reply to “well, how are you now?” was a hopeless lifting and dropping of the eyelids, and I wondered whether a life was worth having, that had such possible terminations in its dark lottery.