As we descend, we diminish in the eyes of those to whom we were distinguished objects whilst dwelling on the same or a higher elevation:—do we not really become less and less? Pooledoune's pursuits continued to be similar in character, in opinions, in expectations; but, ah! how different in worldly esteem! At the Mechanics' Institutes he was no longer promoted to the front-seats,—at the Society of Arts he was no more invited to deliver his sentiments,—his little contribution of insulated facts was unsought by the Statisticals,—and the British Association was too far off, with its Edinburgh and Dublin festivities, to meet his conveniency. Yet he devoted himself to the confusion of knowledge; and, in order to obtain larger interest on his fading capital, he dabbled in Mexican and Payous, and Greek loans.
Perfecting a fulminating powder to supersede the use of gunpowder, which could not explode except by the touch of a particular preparation, an ounce of it accidentally ignited one day, and blew out his right eye.
John's hair grew prematurely grey with such crosses, and he invented a dye to render it beautifully black. Most of those whom he persuaded to give it a trial were turned most curiously grizzle, green, or yellow;[105] but, perhaps from using an inordinate quantity, his own scalp was utterly removed, and his scull rendered as bald and shining as a polished pewter plate, whence the meat had been removed, but not the gravy.
He patronised Mechi's razor-strops and Hubert's roseate powder, in consequence of which all the lower features of his face became a mass of purulent offence.
He took to an infallible dentifrice, which preserved the enamel, and whitened without injuring the teeth. It was a noble specific, and did not contradict its advertisement: but all John's teeth fell out; and though the enamel was preserved, and they were white, his gums were exposed, empty, and red. He supplied his loss with a set of china ornaments, which made him grin and nod like a Mandarin, but with which he could not eat like a Christian, nor sleep like a savage.
John got poorer and poorer, shabbier and shabbier, sicklier and sicklier. He had been blown up by gas, burnt down by steam, ruined by railroads, cursed by every improvement on the whole pack of cards. He was crippled in his limbs, deficient of an eye, disfigured in face and person, and, worse than worst of all, his friends knew that he had but little left, and less to hope for. It was not four years since John Pooledoune had begun his career with a sound constitution, and two-and-thirty thousand pounds of ready money,—worth sixty thousand in any other way! Surely he was the "Victim of Improvement."
Nearly at last, when seen in the streets, John would point to his waterproof shoes, and hat the better for being soaked twenty-four hours in a washing-tub; and one noticed that his ugly-looking outer garment was a proof Macintosh, and his patent spectacles set in cases of india-rubber. And even his sorry truckle-bed, to which the late squire of Hurlépoer Hall now nightly sought his obscure and darkling way, was surmounted by a patent tick (it was double tick, for he had it on credit from an old philosophical crony,) filled with hot water,—as had been the brief course of the unfortunate to whom it could afford no rest.
Whether from the Macintosh preservative cloak, the waterproof shoes, the water-filled bed, the india-rubber, or the rubs of the weather, we have not ascertained; but poor John caught a horrid cold, and his cough was sadly aggravated by a contrivance in his chimney for consuming its own smoke. This the chimney resolutely refused; and, like all other quarrels, got so incensed that it would not even carry the smoke up. Cold, asthma, suffocation and starvation, were then the miserable companions of the quondam wealthy John Pooledoune.
In the misery of his heart, the wretched man took to drinking. That resource, under any circumstances, must very quickly have brought on the crisis; but true to the last, John resorted to patent British brandy, and his fate was astonishingly accelerated.
One dusky evening, in a state of inebriety, the ragged philosopher walked, or rather staggered out. The cool air breathed upon his fevered brow; he saw the streets illumed with gas, he witnessed the smoke ascending from steam-engines, and, overcome by his emotions, when a Gravesend steamer, having beautifully run down another a hundred yards below, swept into the Adelaide Wharf he threw himself over London Bridge, and sank in the disturbed bosom of the silver, insulted, and persecuted Thames.