And now, it only remains for us to bid our entertaining fellow-traveller heartily farewell. Although, especially in the first volume, we have felt disposed to quarrel with his style occasionally, we have found his good-humour, his thoughtful sentiment, and his reckless wit, at last irresistible. His very imperfections often prove his fidelity, and his apparent contradictions his innate truthfulness. We commend to him a little more study of the art of composition, and a good deal more care; but we shall consider ourselves fortunate when we meet with another author of as many faults, if they are atoned for by as many merits.
THE CHAMPIONS OF THE RAIL.
A History of the English Railway: its Social Relations and Revelations. By John Francis. 2 vols. London.
A good many years ago, a late correspondent and writer in this Magazine, Dr M'Nish of Glasgow, published a work entitled The Anatomy of Drunkenness. The book was an excellent one: most perfect in its portraiture of the different phenomena which accompany and succeed a debauch; and in the hands of a regular tee-totaller, it was undeniably worth some reams of vapid sermons. The preacher, who never, we are bound to believe, had experienced the vinous or spirituous excitement in his own person, was enabled from it to hold forth, with all the unction of reality, to his terrified audience, upon the awful effects of intemperance. Old ladies, who rarely in their lives had transgressed beyond a second glass of weak negus at some belated party, when whist or commerce had been suggested to while away the weary hours, listened to the warnings of the gifted apostle of temperance, and hied them home in the tremendous conviction that they had only escaped, by the merest miracle, the horrors of delirium tremens. Dyspeptic gentlemen were rendered wretched, as they reflected that, for years past, they had been accustomed to wash down their evening Finnan haddock, or moderate board of oysters, with a pint of Younger's prime ale, or, mayhap, a screeching tumbler. The enormity of their offence became visible to their eyes, and they incontinently conceived amendment.
But we doubt very much whether the Anatomy would have been pleasant reading to a gentleman who overnight had imbibed "not wisely but too well." How could he bear to be told, not only of the sensations of the previous evening, minutely traced through the gradations of each consecutive decanter, but of the state of thirst and unnatural discomfort to which he was presently a victim? Would it relieve his headach to assure him that, after swallowing three bottles of claret, most men are apt to be out of sorts? Could he, the sufferer, derive any assuagement of his pains by knowing—if he did not know it already—that unlimited brandy and water, however agreeable during consumption, was clearly prejudicial to the nerves? Sermons may come too soon. The sufferer ought to be allowed at least a day or two to recover, before his offence is laid before him in all its huge deformity. Give him time to be ashamed of himself. A man's own conscience is his best accuser; and, unless the vice be absolutely inherent, or totally beyond the hope of remedy, his own misery will be more likely to effect a cure than any amount of philosophical dissertations upon its nature.
These thoughts have been irresistibly suggested to us by a perusal of the two ponderous tomes of Mr Francis, entitled, A History of the English Railway: its Social Relations and Revelations. A more unfortunate kind of apocalypse could hardly have been hazarded at the present time. Most people are tolerably well aware, without the aid of Mr Francis, of the changes in social relations which have been worked by the British railway; and as for revelations, a good many would give a trifle to have these entirely suppressed. We have not yet arrived at the time when the history of the "'45" of this century can be calmly or dispassionately written. Too many of us, still remanent here, have burned our fingers, and too many of our kith and kin have been sent to exile, in consequence of that notable enterprise. Since the standard was last unfurled in the vale of Glenmutchkin, a considerable number of the population have been bitten by the sod, if they did not literally bite it. That system of turning over turfs, by the aid of silver spades and mahogany wheelbarrows, was more fatal to the peace of families than the accumulation of any number of Celtic bagpipers whatever. It was a grand interment of capital. Who has forgotten the misery of those times, when letters of railway calls arrived punctually once a quarter? Two pound ten per share might be a moderate instalment; but if you were the unfortunate holder of a hundred shares, you had better have been boarded with a vampire. Repudiation, though a clear Christian duty to yourself and your family, was utterly impossible. It mattered not that the majority of the original committeemen and directors had bolted; you, the subscriber, were tied to the stake. The work was begun, the contracts opened, and money must be had at all hazards and sacrifices. You found yourself in the pitiable situation of an involuntary philanthropist. Threescore hulking Irish navvies were daily fed, liquored, and lodged at your expense. Your dwindling resources were torn from you, to make the fortunes of engineers and contractors. So long as you had a penny, or a convertible equivalent, you were forced to surrender it. Your case was precisely similar to that of the Jew incarcerated in the vaults beneath the royal treasury of King John. One by one all your teeth were drawn. If you managed to survive the extraction of the last grinder, and to behold the opening of the line, your position was not one whit improved. Dividend of course there was none. That awful and mysterious item of charge, "working expenses," engulfed nearly the whole revenue. What was over went to pay interest on preference debentures. That gallant body of men, the directors, laid before you, with the utmost candour, a state of the affairs of the company; from which it appeared that they had exceeded their borrowing powers by perhaps a brace of millions, and had raised the money by interposing their own individual security. These obligations you were, of course, expected to redeem; and an appeal was made to your finer feelings, urging you to consent to a further issue of stock!
It is no great consolation to the men who have suffered more woes from the railways, than fell to the lot of the much-enduring Ulysses from the relentless anger of the deities, to know that they have rendered perfect a vast chain of internal communication throughout the country. We doubt whether the Israelites, who built them, took any especial pride in surveying the pile of the pyramids. The gentleman in embarrassed circumstances, who is pondering over the memory of his perished capital, is not likely to feel his heart expand with enthusiasm at the thought that through his agency, and that of his fellows, thousands of bagmen are daily being whirled along the rails with the velocity of lightning. He may even be pardoned if, in the sadness and despondency of his soul, he should seriously ask himself what, after all, is the use of this confounded hurry? Is a man's life prolonged because he can get along at the rate of forty or fifty miles an hour? Is existence to be measured by locomotion? In that case Chifney, who passed the best part of his life in the saddle, ought to have been considered as a rival to Methuselah, and a stoker on the Great Western lives in one week far longer than the venerable Parr! Is enjoyment multiplied? That, too, will admit of a serious doubt. In a railway carriage you have no fair view of the fresh aspect of nature: you dash through the landscape—supposing that there is one—before its leading features are impressed upon your mind. There is no time for details, or even for reflection. You must accommodate your thought to your pace, otherwise you are left behind, and see nothing whatever for at least a couple of stations. But for the most part your way lies between embankments and cuttings, representing either sections of whinstone, or bare banks of turf, dotted over with brown patches, where the engine has effected arson. Even furze will not willingly flourish in such an uncomfortable locality. Then you roar through tunnels, the passage of which makes your flesh creep—for you cannot divest yourself of a horrid idea that you may possibly be encountered in the centre of the darkness by an opposing engine, and be pounded into paste by the shock of that terrific tilt; or that a keystone of the arch may give way, and the whole train be buried in the centre of the excavated mountain. Sensual gratification there is none. If you do not condescend to the iniquity of carrying sandwiches along with you—in which case your habiliments are certain to be grievously defiled with buttered crumbs—you are driven by the pangs of sheer hunger into the refreshment-room at some station, and find yourself at the bar of an inferior gin-palace. Very bad is the pork-pie, for which you are charged an exorbitant ransom. Call ye this sherry, my masters? If it be so, commend us for the future to Bucellas. The oranges look well outside, but the moment you have penetrated the rind, you find that they have been boiled and are fozy. Do not indulge in the vain hope that you may venture on a glass of anything hot. Hot enough you will find it with a vengeance; for, the instant that you receive the rummer, the bell is sure to ring, and you must either scald your throat by gulping down two mouthfuls of mahogany-water raised to a temperature which would melt solder, or consign the prepaid potion to the leisure of the attendant Hebe. Smoking is strictly prohibited. Even if you are alone in a carriage, you cannot indulge in that luxury without rendering yourself liable to a fine; and, if your appetite should overcome your prudence, and you should venture to set the law at defiance, before you have inhaled two whiffs, a railway guard appears as if by magic at the window—for those fellows have the scent of the vulture, and can race along the foot-boards as nimbly as a cat along a gutter—and you are ordered to abandon your Havanna. Under such circumstances, literature is a poor resource. You read the Times twice over, advertisements and all, and then sink into a feverish slumber, from which you are awakened by a demand from a ruffian in blue livery, with a glazed leather belt across his shoulder, for the exhibition of your ticket. Talk of the inconvenience of passports abroad! The Continental system is paradisaical compared with ours. At length, after fingering your watch with an insane desire to accelerate its movement, you run into the ribs of something, which resembles the skeleton of a whale—the train stops—and you know that your journey is at an end. You select your luggage, after having undergone the scrutiny of a member of the police force, who evidently thinks that he has seen you before under circumstances of considerable peculiarity, ensconce yourself in a cab, and drive off, being favoured at the gate of the station by a shower of diminutive pamphlets, purporting to be poetical tributes to the merits of Messrs Moses and Hyams. You have done the distance in twelve hours, but pleasure you have had none.
Mr Francis, who is gifted with no more imagination than an ordinary tortoise, though he asserts the superiority of the hare, begins his book with an exceedingly stupid dissertation upon the difficulties of ancient travel. Broken bridges, impassable quagmires, and ferocious highwaymen constitute leading features in his picture; and, as you read him, you marvel, between your fits of yawning, what manner of men our ancestors must have been to brave so many dangers. Sheer drivel all of it! The old roads were uncommonly good, and the bridges kept in splendid repair from the time they were built by the Romans. Who ever heard of a quagmire on a turnpike? As for a casual encounter with Turpin, Duval, or any other of the minions of the moon, we are decidedly of opinion that such incidents must have added much to the excitement of the journey. A stout fellow, well mounted, usually carried about him both pops and a cutlass, and, if he was cool and collected, might very easily square accounts with the most ardent clerk of St Nicholas. Does Mr Francis really suppose that the author of Jack Sheppard likes railway travelling? Not he. Dearer to his soul is a prancing prad upon Hounslow Heath than all the engines that ever whistled along a line. Mount him upon Black Bess, arm him with a brace of barkers, and in the twinkling of an eye there would be daylight through the carcase of the Golden Farmer. Is adventure nothing? Had the road no joys? Are we to consider the whole universe worthless, except those black dots which in the maps represent cities? Was nature made in vain, in order that men might hasten from town to town, at the tail of a shrieking engine, regardless of all the glorious scenery which intervenes? To our taste, the old mode of travelling—nay, the oldest—was infinitely superior to the present sickening system. You rose by times in the morning; took a substantial breakfast of beef and ale—none of your miserable slops—and mounted your horse between your saddle-bags, in time to hear the lark carolling on his earliest flight to heaven. Your way ran through dingle and thicket, along the banks of rivers, skirting magnificent parks, rich in the possession of primeval oaks, under which the deer lay tranquilly and still. You entered a village, stopped at the door of the public-house, and cooled your brow in the foam of the wholesome home-brewed. You dined at mid-day, in some town where the execrable inventions of Arkwright and Watt were unknown; where you encountered only honest, healthy, rosy-cheeked Christians, who went regularly once a-week to church, and identified the devil with the first dissenter—instead of meeting gangs of hollow-eyed lean mechanics, talking radicalism, and discussing the fundamental points of the Charter. You moved through merry England as a man ought to do, who is both content with his own lot and can enjoy the happiness of others. As you saw the sun rising, so you saw him set. The clouds reddened in the west—you heard the sweet carol of the thrush from the coppice, and lingered to catch the melody. The shades of evening grew deeper. The glow-worms lit their tiny lanterns on the bank, the owl flitted past with noiseless wing, the village candles began to appear in the distance; and as you dismounted at the door of your humble inn, and surrendered your weary beast to the hands of the careful hostler, you felt that you were the richer by a day spent in the fresh air and gladsome sunshine, and made happy by all the sounds and sights which are dear to the heart of man.