Bentley's Miscellany, Volume I

by Various

"No hand to close thy eyes, No eye to see thy grave, No grave to give thee rest,— Strange Being!

Dead; resembling Death, yet keeping thy place among the dead and the living; thy end shall not be an ending, and every one shall know that thou art and art not!"

With this fearful prophecy the Gipsies took to their heels; and Jack, with an oath at their impudent mummery, shied half a half-quartern loaf at their retreating heads. The iced punch was speedily resumed; but, so strong is the hold of superstition upon us, even when wine and punch have infused a factitious courage, it was found impossible to re-animate the convivial festival, and the party returned to town, either in silent abstraction, or reverting to and commenting on the oddness of the Gipsy foolery!

Old Roger Pooledoune was one of the busiest and most substantial of hosiers in the ward of Cheap; a respectable citizen, whose heart and soul were in his business, to which he attended from morning to night as if, instead of toil, it were pleasure; and indeed it did comprehend the mighty pleasure of profit, the be-all and the end-all of many a cit. Stockings, stocks, and socks, braces, collars, gloves, nightcaps, and garters, were all the same to honest Roger; and he would serve his customers with equal cordiality with every one of these articles, from the price of a grey groat to the cost of sterling gold. Thus he dealt and throve. His shop was never empty, for his commodities were reputed to be of good quality; and, in process of years, his industry was rewarded with such increase, that his neighbours declared him to be a warm man, and guessed his worth at no less than thirty thousand pounds. Nor were they far wrong.

Roger, like a man ignorant of Malthus, had in the midst of all his occupations found leisure to court and win a wife; and, in due process, a certain portion of the stock in the warehouse, namely, some very small socks, gaiters, &c. had to be transferred gratis to the nursery, where Isabella, Matilda, and Margaret, and last, John Pooledoune, the only son, the fruits of his marriage-bed, required such equipments from their fond father,—the fonder in consequence of the last family event having made him a widower. Twenty years had elapsed since that period of mingled joy and woe, of birth and death,—the conjunction of the two extremes of human life,—when it occurred to the corporation of the city of London that it would be a vast improvement in the approaches thereto, and accommodation to the traffic thereof, to have a new bridge thrown across the bosom of old Father Thames, just where it suited a company of keen-sighted, speculative, and money-making gentry to have that operation performed for the public and their own benefit. It so happened that the site so agreeable to them was exceedingly disagreeable to Roger Pooledoune, inasmuch as it created a necessity for carrying a street, as it were the string of a bow, direct to the bridge, not only leaving his shop at the farthest bend of the said bow, but plunging it into an unfrequented valley, or cul de sac, at which it was irksome to look from the popular balustrades of the recent direct and splendid erections. Old Roger, it is true, claimed and received a handsome,—a very handsome, and neighbourly, and citizen-like compensation: for his loss in the daily sale of nightcaps and garters was estimated at the sum of fourteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-seven pounds sixteen shillings and fivepence three farthings: but, like Othello, his occupation was gone. The money obtained in a lump was not like the money gained by slow and minute degrees. He became uncomfortable, uneasy, irritable; he would gaze up towards the new street to the new bridge, and, counting the passing crowds, would calculate on the proportional passing demand for ready-made hosiery of every description. The whole was diverted into another channel: he could not bear the sight, he could not endure the idea; and so he pined, and he sickened, and he died, for want of a brisk retail.

The disposition of the defunct hosier's property was such as might be expected from a wealthy and prudent tradesman. He had sunk the fourteen thousand and odd pounds in annuities on his three daughters, and so tied them up, that none but themselves—nor brother, nor friend, nor husband, nor lover—could receive the half-yearly dividends; and, if loan or mortgage were attempted upon them, they were forfeited for ever. Thus were they provided with inalienable competencies for the terms of their natural lives. To John was left the residue, which, when the good will of the shop was with good will disposed of for nothing, everything else settled, and affairs wound up, was ascertained to amount to the neat round sum of two-and-thirty thousand pounds; and thus warmly provided, the gipsy foredoomed Victim of Improvements began the world, his own master, and for himself alone.

John Pooledoune had received what is called a first-rate "commercial and classical education," at a boarding-school near Deptford, where these identical words were painted in capital letters on a board which ran along the entire façade of the building. He had thus been prepared for more general and severer pursuits; and accordingly, about that era when the first drum was beat for the March of Intellect, he enrolled himself in the ranks for the diffusion of knowledge, and, to speak comparatively, soon reached the distinction of a halbert in the cause. He became a leading man in the Mechanics' Institutes, attended lectures on every possible subject at least five evenings in every week, was elected a member of the Society of Arts and of the Statistical Society, joined the British Association at Bristol,[104] and, in fine, adopted the most admired course to become a utilitarian of the first water. He was acknowledged to be an independent, and sensible, and well-informed individual; he needed neither favour nor assistance, had plenty of ready money in the funds, and was courted and caressed accordingly. He was, in short, a faultless monster.

But not only had Fortune been kind to him; Nature was equally liberal: he was well-proportioned in lith and limb; stout, healthy, and well-looking. If not a perfect, but, rather, as George the Fourth would say, an ungentlemanly gentleman, he was not a vulgar plebeian; and, altogether, hardly ever did a man start in the middle walks of life with so fair a promise of prosperity and happiness. John Pooledoune had the silver spoon to his mouth,—the salt of the earth to his portion.

With such qualities, and to such a character, inactivity was impossible. Inclination and means led to projects of utility, and John was determined to benefit mankind by his efforts in promoting the ingenious conceptions of the clever and the "talented." His apartments were encumbered with models, his chairs and his tables laden with plans; nay, he even fancied at times that he was himself an inventor. It was, to be sure, only in a small way, but it kept the ruling passion in a blaze; and when he took out his first patent for a broom to eat its own dust, his ecstasies had nearly laid him with the dust, to which he was thus made doubly akin.

It is wonderful to behold how many of our species, full of the most extraordinary and indubitable inventions, from which indescribable riches must accrue, languish in abject poverty: to such, a John Pooledoune is a god-send, even though it may be that in the issue he is reduced to fraternization. He was the friend of projectors, the believer in perfectibility, but singularly unlucky in nearly all his undertakings. Of these we must mention a few, the leading incidents of a brief career.