A Page by Macaulay.
(From the History of the Beadleship of Brown.)
When Brown grasped the staff of office, he was in need of the staff of life. Raised at once from want to wealth, from obscurity to renown, from the practice of submission to the habit of command, he did his work sternly; but not too sternly to do it well. The unexpectedly chosen Beadle became a correspondingly energetic Beadle. The new broom swept clean. A week had not passed ere abuses were remedied—the indolence of one portion of the parish officers pricked into action—the disaffection of another crushed into obedience. A benevolent despotism is the best form of government—Brown was despotic, benevolent, and a Beadle.
Let us review the state of affairs as they existed when he first assumed the cocked hat of office as Beadle of St. Tomkins. Apple-women usurped the pavement. Piemen obstructed the roadway. Professed beggars demanded alms at every door—impostors exhibited artificial sores at every corner. What the parish of St. Giles is to the parish of St. James, the parish of St. Tomkins was to the parish of St. Giles. Nuisances of another nature throve also and waxed great from day to day. The pew opener grumbled; the turncock muttered to himself; the churchwardens squabbled, and the rate-payers complained. There was murmured disaffection in the vestry—open revolt amongst the charity boys. It was a time of mutual recrimination—of mutual dissatisfaction. Jones abused Smith, Smith retorted upon Jones. Robinson hated Thomson, Thomson repaid the compliment with interest to Robinson. There was an unruly license of tongue, a general saturnalia of speech. Whispered scandals grew into outspoken charges, and the malicious reports hatched from the tea and muffins of old maidish parties were repeated with envenomed aggravations over the port and sherry of parish dinners. Then it was that short weights were publicly attributed to Smith, and a false steelyard confidently asserted to belong to Jones. Johnson, heated with gin, said that Jackson beat his wife—Jackson, inflamed with rum, said that Mrs. Johnson beat her husband. Charges, counter-charges, insinuations, inuendos, ran riot. No man looked with complacency on his neighbour; no husband looked with confidence upon his wife; no wife looked with respect upon her husband. As yet the band of Reformers who were shortly to arise was unheard of. Thomas Styles was but sixteen; John Nookes but thirteen-and-a-half. The pen of the great Smythe Smithers was yet employed upon half text. No word indicating his future destiny had fallen from Tomkin’s lips—Gubbins had not yet been born—Snooks was in long clothes—and Trother yet unemancipated from parish leathers.
On Brown then it alone devolved to grapple with the task. He was the dauntless pioneer of a dauntless army, a champion destined to show the world that the glitter of a Beadle’s staff may outshine the splendours of a Marichall’s baton, if it did not dim the magnificence of a Monarch’s sceptre.
From The Man in the Moon, edited by Angus B. Reach. February, 1849.
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(From what we “Macaulay” History of our own.)
The King had been thrown from his horse at Hampton Court, and was dead. Great were the rejoicings in Paris and Rome on receipt of the tidings, and the hopes of the Jacobite party rose; however, the accession of the second daughter of the last Stuart monarch to the throne as Anna Regina once more clouded their prospects. Her Court, adorned by Marlborough (who did not sell his pictures), Bolingbroke and Swift, would have been as nothing without the genius of one whose name does not figure in the accepted histories of that reign, but whose influence at Court not even the imperious Sarah Jennings, nor her rival, Lady Masham, nor any of the Whigs or Tories of that distracted period, could afford to ignore. A peaceful citizen, whose Hair Preparations gave that graceful brilliancy and tone to the brown hair of the Sovereign, and whose marvellously manufactured Wigs adorned the heads of the noblest in the land, was not one to be lightly passed by, and thus it was Professor Browne was the ruling spirit at the Court of Queen Anne. No Wigs could equal his in form, graceful folds, and luxuriant masses of hair; they covered the heads of the wisest and best in the land, so that it was no wonder the Professor, who had long studied the heads of the people, was universally consulted on all matters of such vital importance. Unfortunately, however, Prince Eugene of Savoy, who at this time came over on a secret mission from the Emperor to the Queen, foolishly declined to pay a visit to Fenchurch Street, and procured from some opposition hairdresser a short campaigning Wig in which to appear at Court. The same evening, the Prince, smoking his cigar at his hotel, happened to be trying on this new head gear when the Hanoverian Minister, Baron Hoffman, called, and seeing that neither in style, make, nor effect was it equal to Browne’s, endeavoured to induce the Prince, but in vain, to discard it and patronize F. B. Bye and bye Bolingbroke, who had a secret partiality for the Jacobites, and mistrusted the Prince’s mission, arrived, and affected such admiration for the periwig that the Prince actually did wear it the next day in the throne-room, to the horror of the Lord Chamberlain and Gentlemen Ushers, while the crafty Bolingbroke took care himself to appear in one of Browne’s most artistic and luxuriant head-coverings that could possibly be procured; the result being a perfect triumph for the Professor. The Queen expressed high disapproval of the Prince’s Wig, whose mission thereby failed, and once again the hopes of the Jacobites fluttered. At length the wily Bolingbroke was dismissed from Office, and Her Majesty, who had secured the succession to the Crown of the son of her cousin Sophia, ordered that Professor Browne, should henceforth be appointed Wig Maker in ordinary to the British Public.