AND OF SCOTLAND.
THE DOMESTIC GRIEFS OF GUSTAVUS M’IVER.
CHAPTER I.
GUSTAVUS’S ANTECEDENTS.
In a little house in the Canongate of Edinburgh, there lived, not very long ago, Mr Gustavus M’Iver—(for he never would allow himself to be called Ensign M’Iver, though that was his proper professional designation),—as good a man as ever God put breath in, and as faithful a soldier as ever Lord Wellington commanded in the Peninsula. That is, doubtless, no small praise to one conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity; and heaven knows if it were not as true as Jove’s oath, it would never have been awarded by us. But he was remarkable in other respects than being honest; for he was six feet five without the aid of sock or buskin; and, if any man were to say that he was not four feet from acromion to acromion, he would assuredly be a big liar. But it is the head and face of a man that we like to look at; for, after all, what signifies (except in a warlike view, and ours is a peaceable one) a cart-load of mere bone and muscle, bound together with thick whangs of gristle, and yielding nothing but brute force, if it be not surmounted by a good microcosm of a head, with a good dial-plate to let a man know what is going on within. Do we not see every day great clocks put on the tops of big steeples, and yet, though they are nearer the sun than the little time-piece with the deuce a body at all, they go like an intermitting fever, telling us at one time that we are hurrying to the grave, and at another, that time has nothing to do with us at all. So is it with men; and, for our part, we could never discover any proper legitimate sympathetic accordance between the trunk and cranium of mortals, any more than if (like pins) they had been made in pieces and one head clapped on a body just as the occipital condyles suited the straps to which they are attached.
The opinion now expressed is well justified by the example of the subject of our story; for, while the big limbs of him seemed to set at defiance all regular laws of motion, either horizontal or perpendicular, going, as one might say without a paradox, wherever and however they choose, his head was as methodical as that of a drill sergeant, and the like of him for regularity might not be seen from Lerwick to Berwick. Nor was his face ever known to be at fault as a faithful indicator; and verily there was no great wonder in that, for nothing short of the pulleys he carried in his brain could ever have moved a single hair-breadth up or down, to the right or to the left, the big jaw-bone which he seldom condescended to impart any living motion to, except at meal times, or when (and that occurred very seldom) he had an idea to express sufficient in size and importance to warrant such an excess of labour.
We have said that Gustavus M’Iver had been in the Peninsula; and we may be believed or not, just as suits the reader’s credulity with our credibility; but he was a luckless wight who dared to doubt that fact in the personal presence of the hero himself; better by far he had been at St Sebastian, for the never a one we ever heard of, that had the temerity to express any scepticism on the point that did not live to repent it. There can be no doubt, however, on the subject; for Gustavus was not only in the Peninsula, but he fought there very well; and no great thanks to him either, for he had the entire charge of the mess—a post of honour he had acquired from an indisputable superiority in culinary lore, and a most indefatigable perseverance as well as an unexampled adroitness in the art of carving both for himself and others. The praise he got for fighting was, in so far as regarded the immense heaps of hungry Frenchmen he hewed down with his falchion, true enough; the bulletin writer recorded the fact just as it was reported to him, that the great Goliath Gustavus did actually perform very wonderful feats of sheer killing; and we cannot help thinking, notwithstanding of the sneers of his brother officers, that it would not have become the dignity of a despatch to have made any allusion whatever to the manner in which he had kept up his body and his courage.
When the war was done, he came home filled with glory; and as, when the world speaks of a man, it is unnecessary for him to speak of himself, he seldom (for he was a sensible man) ever thought of speaking either of himself or any other person or thing. Conceit is the foundation of speech; where a man is filled to the very throat with glory, there is little occasion for him ever opening his mouth; and therefore it was that Gustavus, in addition to his other peculiarities, seldom deigned to hold converse with the creatures of the earth, unless it were in his capacity of paymaster of pensions (an office his prowess had secured to him), when he was compelled to speak, to make others hold their tongues—an operation in which he succeeded to a miracle, from the accumulated load of authority he derived from his silence.