Sunday was wont to be a very precious day to H——,—far too good to be lost in idle dram-drinking at home. On Saturday nights he generally made a point of insuring stock to the amount of half-a-crown in his landlady’s hands, and proposed a tour of jollity for next morning to a few of his companions. These were, for the most part, poor devils like himself, who, with few lucid intervals of sobriety or affluence—equally destitute of industry, prudence, and care for the opinion of the world—contrive to fight, drink, and roar their way through a desperate existence, in spite of the devil, their washerwoman, and the small-debt-court—perhaps even receiving Christian burial at last like the rest of their species. With one or two such companions as these, H—— would issue of a Sunday morning through the Watergate, on an expedition to Newhaven, Duddingstone, Portobello, or some such guzzling retreat,[13]—the termination of their walk being generally determined by the consideration of where they might have the best drink, the longest credit, or where they had already least debt. Then was it most delightful to observe by what a special act of Providence they would alight upon “the last rizzer’d haddock in the house,” or “the only hundred oysters that was to be got in the town;” and how gloriously they would bouse away their money, their credit, and their senses, till, finally, after uttering, for the thousand and first time, all their standard Parliament-House jokes—after quarrelling with the landlord, and flattering the more susceptible landlady up to the sticking-place of “a last gill,”—they would reel away home, in full enjoyment of that glory which, according to Robert Burns, is superior to the glory of even kings!
Nevertheless, H—— was not utterly given up to Sunday debauches, nor was he destitute of a sense of religion. He made a point of always going to church on rainy Sundays—that is to say, when his neckcloth happened to be in its honey-moon, and the button-moulds of his vestments did not chance to be beyond their first phase. He was not, therefore, very consistent in his devotional sentiments and observances; for the weather shared with his tailor the credit of determining him in all such matters. He was like Berwick smacks of old, which only sailed, “wind and weather permitting.” When, however, the day was favourably bad, he would proceed to the High Church of St. Giles (where, excepting on days of General Assembly, there are usually enow of empty seats for an army), and, on observing that the Lords of Session had not chosen to hold any sederunt that day, he would pop into their pew. In this conspicuous seat, which he perhaps considered a sort of common property of the College of Justice, he would look wonderfully at his ease, with one threadbare arm lolling carelessly over the velvet-cushioned gallery, while in the other hand he held his mother’s old black pocket Bible—a relic which he had contrived to preserve for an incredible number of years, through a thousand miraculous escapades from lodgings where he was insolvent, in memory of a venerable relation, whom he had never forgot, though oblivious of every other earthly regard besides.
Mr. H——’s Shadow, whom we mentioned a few pages back, however unsubstantial he may seem from his sobriquet, was a real person, and more properly entitled Mr. Nimmo. He had long been a dependant of H——’s, whence he derived this strange designation. Little more than the shadow of a recollection of him remains as materiel for description. He bore somewhat of the same relation to his principal which Silence bears to Shallow, in Henry IV.,—that is, he was an exaggerated specimen of the same species, and exhibited the peculiarities of H——’s habits and character in a more advanced stage. He was a prospective indication of what H—— was to become. H——, like Mr. Thomas Campbell’s “coming events,” cast his “shadow before;” and Nimmo was this shadow. When H—— got new clothes, Nimmo got the exuviæ or cast-off garments, which he wore on and on, as long as his principal continued without a new supply. Therefore, when H—— became shabby, Nimmo was threadbare; when H—— became threadbare, Nimmo was almost denuded; and when H—— became almost denuded, Nimmo was quite naked! Thus, also, when H——, after a successful course of practice, got florid and in good case, Nimmo followed and exhibited a little colour upon the wonted pale of his cheeks; when H—— began to fade, Nimmo withered before him; by the time H—— was looking thin, Nimmo was thin indeed; and when H—— was attenuated and sickly, poor Nimmo was as slender and airy as a moonbeam. Nimmo was in all things beyond, before, ahead of H——. If H—— was elevated, Nimmo was tipsy; if H—— was tipsy, Nimmo was fou; if H—— was fou, Nimmo was dead-drunk; and if H—— persevered and got dead-drunk also, Nimmo was sure still to be beyond him, and was perhaps packed up and laid to sleep underneath his principal’s chair. Nimmo, as it were, cleared the way for H——’s progress towards destruction—was his pioneer, his vidette, his harbinger, his avant-courier—the aurora of his rising, the twilight of his decline.
Nimmo naturally, and to speak of him without relation to the person of whom he was part and parcel, was altogether so inarticulate, so empty, so meagre, so inane a being, that he could scarcely be reckoned more than a mere thread of the vesture of humanity—a whisper of Nature’s voice. Nobody knew where he lived at night: he seemed then to disappear from the face of the earth, just as other shadows disappear on the abstraction of the light which casts them. He was quite a casual being—appeared by chance, spoke by chance, seemed even to exist only by chance, as a mere occasional exhalation of chaos, and at last evaporated from the world to sleep with the shadows of death,—all by chance. To have seen him, one would have thought it by no means impossible for him to dissolve himself and go into a phial, like Asmodeus in the laboratory at Madrid. His figure was in fact a libel on the human form divine. It was perfectly unimaginable what he would have been like in puris naturalibus, had the wind suddenly blown him out of his clothes some day—an accident of which he seemed in constant danger. It is related of him, that he was once mistaken, when found dead-drunk in a gutter, on the morning after a king’s birth-day, for the defunct corpse of Johnnie Wilkes,[14] which had been so loyally kicked about the streets by the mob on the preceding evening; but, on a scavenger proceeding to sweep him down the channel, he presently sunk from the exalted character imputed to him, by rousing himself, and calling lustily, “Another bottle—just another bottle, and then we’ll go!” upon which the deceived officer of police left him to the management of the stream.
Besides serving Mr. H—— in the character of clerk or amanuensis, he used to dangle at his elbow on all occasions, swear religiously to all his charges, and show the way in laughing at all his jokes. He was so clever in the use of his pen in transcription, that his hand could travel over a sheet at the rate of eleven knots an hour, and this whether drunk or sober, asleep or awake. Death itself could scarcely have chilled his energies, and it was one of his favourite jokes, in vaunting of the latter miraculous faculty, to declare that he intended to delay writing his will till after his decease, when he would guide himself in the disposal of his legacies by the behaviour of his relations. We do not question his abilities for such a task; but one might have had a pretty good guess, from Nimmo’s appearance, that he would scarcely ever find occasion, either before or after death, to exercise them.
These sketches, from the quaint flippancy of their style, may be suspected of fancifulness and exaggeration; yet certain it is, that out of the ten thousand persons said to be employed in this legal metropolis in the solicitation, distribution, and execution of justice, many individuals may even yet be found, in whom it would be possible to trace the lineaments we have described. Such persons as H—— and Nimmo dangle at the elbows of The Law, and can no more be said to belong to its proper body than so many rats in a castle appertain to the garrison.
H—— continued in the course of life which we have attempted to describe till the year 1808, when his constitution became so shattered, that he was in a great measure unfitted for business or for intercourse with society. Towards the end of his life, his habits had become still more irregular than before, and he seemed to hasten faster and faster as he went on to destruction, like the meteor, whose motion across the sky seems to increase in rapidity the moment before extinction. After the incontestable character of the greatest wit and the utmost cleverness had been awarded to him,—after he had spent so much money and constitution in endeavouring to render his companions happy, that some of them, more grateful or more drunken than the rest, actually confessed him to be “a devilish good-natured foolish sort of fellow,”—after he had, like certain Scottish poets, almost drunk himself into the character of a genius,—it came to pass that—he died. A mere pot-house reveller like him is no more missed in the world of life than a sparrow or a bishop. There was no one to sorrow for his loss—no one to regret his absence—save those whose friendship is worse than indifference. It never was very distinctly known how or where he died. It was alone recorded of him, as of the antediluvian patriarchs, that he died. As his life had become of no importance, so his death produced little remark and less sorrow. On the announcement of the event to a party of his old drinking friends, who, of course, were all decently surprised, etc., one of them in the midst of the Is it possibles? Not-possibles! and Can it be possibles? incidental to the occasion, summed up his elegy, by trivially exclaiming, “Lord! is Rab dead at last! Weel, that’s strange indeed!—not a week since I drank six half-mutchkins wi’ him down at Amos’s! Ah! he was a good bitch! (Then raising his voice) Bring us in a biscuit wi’ the next gill, mistress! Rab was ay fond o’ bakes!” And they ate a biscuit to his memory!
It is somewhat remarkable that the deaths of Crosbie and H—— should have been produced by causes and attended by circumstances nearly the same, though a period of full twenty years had intervened between the events. Both were men of great learning and abilities,—they were drawn down from the height in which their talents entitled them to shine by the same unfortunate propensities,—and while, in their latter days, both experienced the reverse of fortune invariably attendant upon imprudence, they at length left the scene of their notoriety, equally despised, deserted, and miserable.
Both cases are well calculated to illustrate the lesson so strenuously inculcated by Johnson,—that to have friends we must first be virtuous, as there is no friendship among the profligate.
Mr. Crosbie’s death presents the more trite moral of the two—for in it we see little more than the world forsaking an unfortunate man, as crowds fly from the falling temple, to avoid being crushed in the ruins. But the moral of Mr. H——’s death is striking and valuable. In him we see a man of the brightest genius gradually losing that self-respect, so necessary, even when it amounts to pride, for the cultivation and proper enjoyment of superior mental powers,—becoming in time unsettled in his habits, and careless of public estimation,—losing the attachment of friends of his own rank, and compensating the loss by mixing with associates of the lowest order:—next, become incapable of business, we see him dejected and forlorn as poverty itself, by turns assuming every colour and every aspect of which the human countenance and figure is susceptible, till the whole was worn down to a degree of indiscriminate ruin—the ne plus ultra of change:—at length, when every vulgar mode of enjoyment had been exhausted, and when even the fiercest stimulants had grown insipid, we see him lost at once to sensibility and to sensation, encountering the last evils of mortality in wretchedness and obscurity, unpitied by the very persons for whom he had sacrificed so much, and leaving a name for which he expected to acquire the fame of either talent or misfortune,