He don't put no side on in his dress.
For, though he owns castles and palaces and houses,
He wears, just like you and me, coats and waistcoats and trousis.
The character of the genial Edward in four lines. Could it have been better said?
Not to know Spring argues yourself unknown. He might have stepped from the covers of Dekker's Gull's Hornbook. He was a child of nature. I can't bring myself to believe that he was born of woman. I believe the fairies must have left him under the gooseberry—no, under the laurel bush, for he wore the laurel, the myrtle, and the bay as one born to them. He also, on occasion, wore the vine-leaf; and surely that is now an honour as high as the laurel, since all good fellowship and kindliness and conviviality have been sponged from our social life. We have been made dull and hang-dog by law. I wonder what Spring would have said about that law in his unregenerate days—Spring, who was "in" thirty-nine times for "D. and D." He would have written a poem about it, I know: a poem that would have rung through the land, and have brought to camp the numerous army of Boltists, Thresholdists, and Snortists.
Oh, Spring has been one of the boys in his time, believe me. But in his latter years he was dull and virtuous; he kept the pledge of teetotalism for sixteen years, teetotalism meaning abstention from alcoholic liquors. This doesn't mean that he wasn't like all other teetotalers, sometimes drunk. The pious sages who make our by-laws seem to forget that it is as easy to get drunk on tea and coffee as on beer; the only difference being that beer makes you pleasantly drunk, and tea and coffee make you miserably drunk.
If you knew Spring in the old days, you wouldn't have known him towards the end—and I don't suppose he would have known you. For in his old age he was a Person. He was odd messenger at Thames Police Court. In November, 1898 Spring, who was then the local reprobate, took to heart the kindly admonitions of Sir John Dickinson, then magistrate at Thames, and signed the pledge of total abstinence. Ever afterwards, on the anniversary of that great day. Spring would hand to the magistrate a poem in celebration of the fact that he had "kept off it" for another year.
I visited Spring just before his death in his lodging—lodging stranger than that of any Montmartre poet.
The Thames Police Court is in Arbour Square, Stepney, and Spring lived near his work. Through many mean streets I tracked his dwelling, and at last I found it. I climbed flights of broken stairs in a high forbidding house. I stumbled over steps and unexpected turns, and at last I stood with a puffy, red-faced, grey-whiskers, stocky old fellow, in a candle-lit garret whose one window looked over a furtively noisy court.
It was probably his family name of Waters that drove him to drink in his youth, since when, he has been known as the man who put the tea in "teetotal." In his room I noticed a bed of nondescript colour and make-up, a rickety chest of drawers (in which he kept his treasures), two doubtful chairs, a table, a basin, and bits of food strewn impartially everywhere. A thick, limp smell hung over all, and the place seemed set a-jigging by the flickering light of the candle. There I heard his tale. He sat on the safe chair while I flirted with the other.