At these parties, a strange and talented group never failed to present themselves. All were men of genius, but exhibited, in their respective persons, proofs of the amazing rancour that subsists between genius and gentility. Among them was a lively Irishman, named O’Blarney, a reporter for the daily press, with sandy hair, a nose that turned up like a fish-hook, and a mouth which, from its extensive dimensions, afforded the most copious facilities for grinning. This promising young Papist, whose estates unfortunately lay in the most Protestant part of Ireland, was the very gem of Mr. Spimkins’ parties; and as he mixed much in fashionable society, and could beat even a negro in dancing, his presence never failed to create a lively sensation at Crutched-Friars. Another of the old gentleman’s guests was a rising versifier of twenty-two, whose appearance would have been sentiment itself, had not a pair of dingy whiskers, which grew back towards his ears, as if enamoured of the latter’s unusual length, given him a slight touch of the grotesque. As it was, his fine, open, full-blown face, resembled a cherub on a country tomb-stone. It would be injustice to acknowledged ability were I here to omit the mention of another poet, whose genius taking an uxorious turn, exploded in admiring apostrophes to his wife. This bard displayed infinite sweetness of versification—as the extracts from the different reviews, inserted, accidentally, at the end of his volume—assured him. There were no intemperate sallies, no startling originality, no audacious imagery in his rhymes; all was sweetly and agreeably uniform, like the features on a barber’s block. Such, with the addition of three historians from St. Mary Axe, two political economists from Long Acre, a pastoral writer from Wapping, and an essayist from Houndsditch, were the literati whose dazzling abilities illumined the fortunate neighbourhood of Crutched-Friars. Old Spimkins, meanwhile, to whom the whole scene was a novelty that well nigh took away his breath, kept moving backwards and forwards among his guests, oscillating in spirits, between a sigh and a smile; at one moment looking grave and dignified, like the Scotch Highlander at a tobacconist’s; at another, simpering sweetly and benignly, and perpetrating, whenever he ventured on a remark, the strangest possible blunders. The three French consuls he invariably mistook for the three per cent, consols; quoted Moore’s Almanack in illustration of Moore’s Melodies; inquired whether those two great poets, Hogg and Bacon, were not of the same family; and, when asked his opinion of Crabbe, gave a decided preference to lobster.
This sort of work had continued for the best part of a year, during which time the good-natured old grocer had been subjected to every species of expence and annoyance; when one morning, towards the close of October, news arrived that a literary gentleman, for whom his son had persuaded him to become bail to a pretty considerable amount, had presented him in return, with what is termed leg-bail—a species of gratitude whereby the locomotive powers are exercised at the expense of principle. The same post brought a letter from Miss Spinks at Newington, with the intelligence that Sophy—the sprightly Sophy Spimkins—who had been on a visit there for some days, had just set out with O’Blarney, on a hasty visit of inspection to the latter’s estates at Monaghan. This letter enclosed another from the fair fugitive herself, in which she implored her father’s forgiveness for the “rash step” she had taken; but assured him that immediately on her arrival at the old family castle, she should become Mrs. O’Blarney, and return home the very instant that her husband had secured his election for the county. The epistle concluded with affectionate remembrances to the family circle, and a hope that, when things were a little in order, her eldest sister would be prevailed upon to accompany her back to Monaghan.
This intelligence, notwithstanding his son’s very sanguine anticipations on the subject, annoyed poor Mr. Spimkins exceedingly; while, as if to fill up the measure of his tribulation, his former acquaintance at Crutched-Friars, finding that, for months past, he had shewn evident symptoms of a wish to cut them, began in self-defence, to set up reports injurious to his reputation. Rumours so circulated soon obtained belief. First one customer dropped off—then a second—then a third—then a fourth, fifth, and sixth—until at length the whole neighbourhood set it down, confidently down in their minds, that the Spimkinses were a losing family. Even the parish-clerk himself, a person of considerable local authority, was heard to observe that they were getting too clever for business—an opinion which, pronounced gravely and oracularly by a gentleman in a double chin, produced an instantaneous effect.
But where all this time were the Spinkses? Where were they whose patronage should have shielded, and whose kindness should have cherished, the unfortunate but still interesting Spimkinses? Alas! they had set out, only a few weeks before, for the Holy Land, with the avowed intention of taking furnished lodgings for at least six months at Jerusalem.
As if this, of itself, were not sufficiently vexatious, Miss Spimkins took it into her head to espouse a gentleman for the very last thing a lady usually thinks of looking for in a husband—his intellect. The origin of her amour is curious. She had read in the Gentleman’s Magazine, the “Confessions of a Wanderer,” who had been shipwrecked on the Thames, at night-fall, off Chelsea Reach; which Confessions were penned in so poetic a spirit, and described so feelingly the horrors of the catastrophe, the hoarse dash of the waves—the howling of the winds—and the subsequent encounter of the vessel against the fourth arch of Battersea bridge, that the susceptible Miss Spimkins was on thorns till she became acquainted with the author. This, by her brother’s intervention, was soon brought about; an invitation to dinner confirmed the intimacy; the lady, like Desdemona, loved the Wanderer “for the perils he had passed;” and he, like Othello, “loved her that she did pity them.” It has been well said, one marriage makes many: scarcely had his sister embraced the nuptial state, when Thomas handed to the same altar a widow lady, whom he had accidentally met at Margate, and had mistaken for a person of quality, but who had since turned out to be the leading tragic actress of Sadler’s Wells, at a rising salary of eighteen shillings per week, exclusive of benefits. It is but justice to add, that if this young lady brought her husband no fortune, she brought him, what to a sensitive mind is infinitely preferable, two fine boys, one of whom was breeched, the other yet in petticoats.
Such accumulated incidents—calamities he ungratefully called them—occurring to old Spimkins at a period when the mind, having lost the first elasticity of youth, is not yet mellowed down into the philosophy of age, but stands, restless and unsettled, between the two, in a sort of crepuscular condition, heaped “sackcloth and ashes on his head.” He neglected his ledger, he neglected his house, he neglected himself, and, worst of all, he neglected his customers. In fact, for months together, he did nothing but sigh and swear. His family, even in this exigency, could render him not the slightest assistance. His daughter, who still lived with him, had, by a diligent cultivation of the intellect, long since forgotten the household duties of a wife; her husband, as the old man used often to remark, “was of no more use than a cargo of damaged coffee;” and even Thomas—the inspired Thomas himself—had dwindled down into a mere mortal, and now dwelt in aerial seclusion up two pair of stairs at Pentonville. Thus widowed in his age—for his wife, I should observe, had, three months since, transferred herself from his to Abraham’s bosom—the disconsolate grocer abruptly sold his business, pensioned off his daughter and her “Wanderer,” and retired alone, on a small annuity, to a back street in Islington—a memorable illustration of’ the March of Mind and its very peculiar concomitants.
Here it was that I first became acquainted with him, and gleaned the particulars of the history I have just ventured to sketch. Our intimacy continued upwards of a year, during which period I will do my old friend the justice to say, that I heard the anecdote of the poetic apprentice who had robbed him, at least a dozen times. Now and then, when I ventured to express my astonishment that a tradesman of his good sense, who held such proper notions on the score of poetry and punctuality, should have so far forgotten himself as to have encouraged the one, and abandoned the other, to his own manifest ruin, the venerable sage would answer, “True Sir, but it was all my wife’s doing. She kept perpetually telling me that the Spinkses—who, one would have thought must have been good judges, for they were capital customers, and always paid their way—had pronounced my son to be a genius, and that it was a shame to thwart his abilities; so I was over-persuaded, you see, to send him to college, when, had he but stuck to business, who knows but he might have become a common-councilman; or, perhaps, even in time a sheriff! But there’s no doing any thing with poets. I remember an apprentice of mine, once—— But I see you’re affected!”—and here the old man would pause, shake the ashes from his pipe, and then revert to some less ungracious topic. It was on one of these occasions, when, having concluded a longer story than usual, he had stopped to take his customary allowance of breath, that on waking from a nap which his affecting anecdotes rarely failed to bring on, I found him stretched in an apoplectic fit upon the floor. With some difficulty he was brought to his senses; but, a relapse occurring in a few days, it became but too evident that, like the late John Wesley, he had had a call—that, in short, his closing hour was come. I was with him in his last extremity, and have every reason to be satisfied with the Christian character of his exit. He swore most incredibly at all poets; left Thomas his blessing and six half-crowns; his daughter a MS. Essay, by the political economist of Houndsditch; and then, with a convulsive jerk of his left leg, which lamed the bed-post for life, set out on his travels to eternity, with the story of the apprentice on his lips.
Of his three children, Thomas is the sole survivor. The “Wanderer’s” wife was taken off, about a fortnight since, by dyspepsia, the consequence of inordinate indulgence in tripe and toast-and-water; while her sprightly sister, Sophy, threw herself headlong into a mill-pond at Holyhead (having previously tied down her petticoats at the ankles), on being informed by O’Blarney, in one of those confidential moments which brandy-and-water seldom fails to elicit, that he was already the devoted husband of three wives and a proportionate abundance of pledges, and had quitted London, not so much with a view to visit any Irish estates—which, as a matter of course, existed only in his fancy—as to obviate the personal inconveniences likely to arise from the circumstance of his having, in a moment of forgetfulness, appropriated to his own use the purse and pocket-book of one of his most intimate and valued acquaintances. The poor girl’s body was fished up, a few days afterwards, by a Welsh clergyman, who was trolling in spectacles for pike: and a coroner’s inquest having been summoned, the evidence of O’Blarney was taken, from which it clearly appeared that the deceased was at times insane, and, only two hours before her death, had made three attempts to swallow a salt-cellar. The young Irishman deposed to these and other facts with so much feeling, earnestness, and simplicity, that the coroner complimented him highly on his humanity; and an account of the inquest having been furnished by himself for the North Wales Chronicle, it soon afterwards made the round of the London newspapers, under the title of “Distressing Suicide.”
Of poor Thomas, my account, I grieve to say, must be equally disheartening. An epic poem, on which he had been some months engaged, having not only failed, but even contributed to introduce its publisher to ready-furnished lodgings in the Fleet, he is now driven to the necessity of jobbing for minor periodicals, thereby adding one more to the already swollen catalogue of those who, mistaking the ignis fatuus of vanity for the sober radiance of intellect, start off prematurely on the voyage of life, without pilot to steer, compass to direct, or ballast to steady their course.
When I called on the young man, a few mornings since, I was much struck with his more than usually picturesque condition. Being always fond of air, he had hired a back attic, overlooking two charming gardens filled with clothes’-lines, and commanding a distant view of some brick-fields, a pig, and an Irish hodman from Carrickfergus. His wife was seated at the fire, watching a leg of mutton as it pirouetted before the grate, at the end of a bit of whipcord: Fernando, her eldest boy, was riding with manifest ecstacy on the back of an old chair: and her two other darling babes, Alphonso and Eleonora, were fast asleep, on a turn-up bedstead, in an adjoining room. Close by Thomas, who was busy writing reviews at a deal table with three legs, was an elderly cotton shirt, hanging to dry on a small wooden horse, quite a pony in its dimensions; and at the further end of the room, near the door, stood a pot of half-and-half, a pen’orth of pickled cabbage in a tea-cup, a twopenny French roll, a black horn dinner knife, and a fork with two prongs, both of which were broken. On observing these evident symptoms of domestic conviviality, I abruptly hastened my departure; but, on my return home by way of Crutched-Friars, could not refrain from stopping an instant in order to survey my old friend’s establishment. It was in the most deplorable condition possible. The voice of its till was mute; the very fixtures themselves were removed; and advertisements, three deep, specifying in large red characters the virtues of Daffy’s Elixir, were posted up, on door, wall, and window-shutter. Altogether, the scene was of the most affecting character, and forcibly impressed on my mind the calamities attendant on what Shakspeare calls “ill-judged ambition.”