But inscribed on the pedestal was an epitaph, which I transferred to my memoranda.
EPITAPH.
Bacchus! thy wonders fill the wondering world!
Thrones in the dust have by thy cups been hurl’d.
Yet, still thou had’st for mankind one surprise:
There was one honest drawer! and here he lies.
Sam Simpson, of the Swan, who, forced to wink
At drinking hard in others, did not drink.
A man who, living all his life by sots,
Yet fairly drew, and fairly fill’d his pots.
Steady and sure, his easy way held on,
Nor let his chalk score two, when called for one.
If man’s best study is his fellow man,
Reader, revere this hero of the Can.
’Twere well for kings, if many a king had been
Like him who sleeps beneath yon Churchyard-green.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” saith Solomon; and as the late Lord Mayor said, “I am quite of Solomon’s opinion.” Here is Crabbe, fifty years before he was born. Here is his pomp and his particularity; his force and his facility; his pungency and his picturesque. Is the theory of transmigration true? and has the Blackwall tavern-keeper only reappeared in the Rutlandshire parson? Let the antiquarians settle it among them. I leave it to occupy the life of some future Ritson, to poison some future Stephens with his own ink; and to give the whole race of the Malones the shadow of an excuse for their existence in this world.
But, I hear the snort of the locomotive; I see the cloud of steam rushing towards the pier. The bell rings, the chaos of trunks and passengers is rolled on board. I follow, and Blackwall fades in the distance, as the poets say, “like a dream of departed joys.”
——Came in sight of a promontory, Purfleet, flanked by an immense row of dark-roofed ominous-looking buildings,—these are the gunpowder depôts of the navy and army of the empire. I pretend to no exclusive poltroonery; but I must acknowledge that I highly approved of the speed which carried us past them. If they had blown up at the moment, in what region of the atmosphere should we have been, steamer and all, in five seconds after. Yet, how many things might have turned our whole cargo into gas and carbon at the instant? a flash of lightning; the wire of a Voltaic machine, apparently as harmless as a knitting needle in the hands of an old spinster; the spark of a peasant’s pipe; the scrape of a hob-nailed shoe! Within a hundred yards of us there lay, in “grim repose,” a hundred thousand barrels of gunpowder. We might have lighted them from the sparks of our funnel, and committed an involuntary suicide on the most comprehensive scale.
But we should not have perished unknown. As the maid, in Schiller’s famous Monologue, sings,—
Even in the solitudes
Of the Transatlantic woods,
Where the elk and bison stalk,
Men of that dark day should talk.
Old men by their fireside sitting,
Maidens in the sunset knitting,
Still should think of that dark day.
Till the world itself grew gray.
If the magazine at Purfleet were to explode, the Thames would be routed out of its bed, and carried into Tunbridge Wells; Woolwich would be a cinder, Gravesend an ash-pit, Chatham a cemetery, Blackwall a nonentity, the Tunnel a tomb, and one half of the mighty metropolis itself but a recollection.
Yet human beings actually live at Purfleet! actually eat, drink, and sleep, with this volcano beside their pillows; Essex picnics are eaten within sight of this earth-shaker. Nay, balls have been given; and creatures, calling themselves rational, have danced quadrilles, with the salient temerity of the incurably insane. What a short-sighted and saltatory thing is human nature!