CHAPTER XXIII. P. I.
ROWLAND DIXON AND HIS COMPANY OF PUPPETS.
| Alli se ve tan eficaz el llanto, las fabulas y historias retratadas, que parece verdad, y es dulce encanto. * * * * * Y para el vulgo rudo, que ignorante aborrece el manjar costoso, guisa el plato del gracioso extravagante; Con que les hartas de contento y risa, gustando de mirar sayal grossero, mas que sutil y candida camisa. JOSEPH ORTIZ DE VILLENA. |
Were it not for that happy facility with which the mind in such cases commonly satisfies itself, my readers would find it not more easy to place themselves in imagination at Ingleton a hundred years ago, than at Thebes or Athens, so strange must it appear to them that a family should have existed in humble but easy circumstances, among whose articles of consumption neither tea nor sugar had a place, who never raised potatoes in their garden nor saw them at their table, and who never wore a cotton garment of any kind.
Equally unlike any thing to which my contemporaries have been accustomed, must it be for them to hear of an Englishman whose talk was of philosophy moral or speculative not of politics; who read books in folio and had never seen a newspaper; nor ever heard of a magazine, review, or literary journal of any kind. Not less strange must it seem to them who if they please may travel by steam at the rate of thirty miles an hour upon the Liverpool and Manchester rail-way, or at ten miles an hour by stage upon any of the more frequented roads, to consider the little intercourse which in those days was carried on between one part of the kingdom and another. During young Daniel's boyhood, and for many years after he had reached the age of manhood, the whole carriage of the northern counties, and indeed of all the remoter parts was performed by pack-horses, the very name of which would long since have been as obsolete as their use, if it had not been preserved by the sign or appellation of some of those inns at which they were accustomed to put up. Rarely indeed were the roads about Ingleton marked by any other wheels than those of its indigenous carts.
That little town however obtained considerable celebrity in those days as being the home and head quarters of Rowland Dixon, the Gesticulator Maximus, or Puppet-show-master-general, of the North; a person not less eminent in his line than Powel whom the Spectator has immortalized.
My readers must not form their notion of Rowland Dixon's company from the ambulatory puppet shows which of late years have added new sights and sounds to the spectacles and cries of London. Far be it from me to depreciate those peripatetic street exhibitions, which you may have before your window at a call, and by which the hearts of so many children are continually delighted: Nay I confess that few things in that great city carry so much comfort to the cockles of my own, as the well-known voice of Punch.