The salary of a puisne judge of the Court of Session in Scotland! A profitable commencement of life that of dealing in sponges, seeing that it endows the vender with the absorbent qualities of the marine vegetable! And mark the consequences which may befall those who connive at such iniquity by their custom! We still quote from the same pamphlet, not to deaf ears we trust, while telling them of the calamity which such conduct may bring home to their own hearths, as it has done already to that of hundreds who worship Cheapness as a god.
"Men ought to know the condition of those by whose labour they live. Had the question been the investment of a few pounds in a speculation, these gentlemen would have been careful enough about good security. Ought they to take no security, when they invest their money in clothes, that they are not putting on their backs accursed garments, offered in sacrifice to devils, reeking with the sighs of the starving, tainted—yes, tainted indeed, for it now comes out that diseases numberless are carried home in these same garments, from the miserable abodes where they are made. Evidence to this effect was given in 1844; but Mammon was too busy to attend to it. These wretched creatures, when they have pawned their own clothes and bedding, will use as a substitute the very garments they are making. So Lord ----'s coat has been seen covering a group of children blotched with smallpox. The Rev. D—— suddenly finds himself unrepresentable from a cutaneous disease, little dreaming that the shivering dirty being who made his coat, has been sitting with his arms in the sleeves for warmth, while he stitched at the tails. The charming Miss C—— is swept off by typhus or scarlatina, and her parents talk about 'God's heavy judgment and visitation:' had they tracked the girl's new riding-habit back to the stifling undrained hovel where it served as a blanket to the fever-stricken slop-worker, they would have seen why God had visited them, seen that His judgments are true judgments, and give His plain opinion of the system, which 'speaketh good of the covetous whom God abhorreth'—a system, to use the words of the Morning Chronicle's correspondent, 'unheard of and unparalleled in the history of any country—a scheme so deeply laid for the introduction and supply of under-paid labour in the market, that it is impossible for the working man not to sink and be degraded by it into the lowest depths of wretchedness and infamy'—a system which is steadily and gradually increasing, and sucking more and more victims out of the honourable trade, who are really intelligent artisans, living in comparative comfort and civilisation, into the dishonourable or sweating trade, in which the slopworkers are generally almost brutified by their incessant toil, wretched pay, miserable food, and filthy homes."
But we must return to Alton Locke, whom we left speechless with astonishment and overpowered with nausea on his first admission to the sight and odours of a stitching Pandemonium. We are told, and we believe it to be true, that of late years several of the first-rate London tradesmen of the West End have effected important and salutary improvements as regards the accommodation of their men, and that the men themselves have assumed a better tone. We must, however, accept the sketch as given; and of a truth it is no ways savoury. Some of Alton's comrades are distinct Dungs—drunken, lewd, profane wretches; but there is at least one Flint among them, a certain John Crossthwaite, who, beneath a stolid manner and within a stunted body, conceals a noble heart, beating strongly with the fiercest Chartist sentiments; and beside this diminutive Hercules, Alton crooks his thigh. Crossthwaite, like all little chaps, has a good conceit of himself, and an intense contempt for thews and sinews, stature, chest, and the like points, which excite the admiration of the statuary. On one occasion, when incensed, as tailors are apt to be, by the sight of a big bulky Life-guardsman, who could easily have crammed him into his boot, Alton's new friend thus develops his ideas:—
"'Big enough to make fighters?' said he, half to himself; 'or strong enough, perhaps?—or clever enough?—and yet Alexander was a little man, and the Petit Caporal, and Nelson, and Cæsar, too; and so was Saul of Tarsus, and weakly he was into the bargain. Æsop was a dwarf, and so was Attila; Shakspeare was lame; Alfred a rickety weakling; Byron club-footed; so much for body versus spirit—brute force versus genius—genius!'"
We had no previous idea that the fumes generated by cabbage produced an effect so nearly resembling that which is consequent on the inhalation of chloroform. Crossthwaite, however, is a learned man in his way, and can quote Ariosto when he pleases—indeed, most of the workmen who figure in these volumes seem to be adepts in foreign tongues and literature. From Crossthwaite, Alton Locke derives his first lesson as regards the rights of man, and becomes conscious, as he tells us, that "society had not given him his rights." From another character, Sandy Mackaye, a queer old Scotsman, who keeps a book-stall, he receives his first introduction to actual literature. Sandy is a good sketch—perhaps the best in the book. He is a Radical of course, and, like the Glasgow shoemaker, whom the late Dr Chalmers once visited, "a wee bit in the deistical line;" but he has a fine heart, warm sympathies, and, withal, some shrewdness and common sense, which latter quality very few indeed of the other characters exhibit. We are left in some obscurity as to Sandy's early career, but from occasional hints we are led to believe that he must have been honoured with the intimacy of Messrs Muir and Palmer, and not improbably got into some scrape about pike-heads, which rendered it convenient for him to remove beyond the jurisdiction of the High Court of Justiciary. On one occasion he seems to have averred that he was even older, alluding to a conversation he had with "Rab Burns ance, sitting up a' canty at Tibbie Shiels' in Meggot Vale." This is a monstrous libel against our excellent friend Tibbie, at whose well-known hostelry of the Lochs it was our good fortune, as usual, to pass a pleasant week no later than the bygone spring; the necessary inference being that she has pursued her present vocation for nearly three quarters of a century! The author might have stated, with equal propriety, that he had the honour of an interview with Ben Jonson, in a drawing-room of Douglas's hotel! But Sandy's age is quite immaterial to the story. He may have been out in the Forty-five for anything we care. It is enough to know that he takes a particular fancy to the young tailor; lends him books; puts him in the way of learning Latin, as we have already hinted, in three months; and, finally, receives him under his own roof when he is ejected from that of his mother on account of his having proclaimed himself, in her presence, a rank and open unbeliever.
Alton stitches on till he is nearly twenty, educating himself at spare hours as well as he can, by the aid of Sandy Mackaye, until he acquires a certain reputation among his comrades as an uncommonly clever fellow. The old bookdealer having some mysterious acquaintanceship with Alton's uncle, informs that gentleman of the prodigy to whom he is related, whereupon there is an interview, and the nephew is presented with five shillings. Cousin George now comes, for the first time, on the tapis, tall, clean-limbed, and apparently good-humoured, but, as is shown in the sequel, selfish and a tuft-hunter. His maxim is to make himself agreeable to everybody, because he finds it pay: and he gives Alton a sample of his affability, by proposing a visit to the Dulwich Gallery. At this point the story becomes deliciously absurd. Young Snip, to whom pictures were a novelty, instantly fastens upon Guido's St Sebastian, of which he is taking mental measure, when he is accosted by a young lady. Although we have little space to devote to extracts, we cannot refuse ourselves the gratification of transcribing a passage which beats old Leigh Hunt's account of the interviews between Ippolito de Buondelmonte and Dianora d'Amerigo hollow. This artist, indeed, has evidently dipped his pencil in the warmest colours of the Cockney School.
"A woman's voice close to me, gentle, yet of deeper tone than most, woke me from my trance.
"'You seem to be deeply interested in that picture?'
"I looked round, yet not at the speaker. My eyes, before they could meet hers, were caught by an apparition the most beautiful I had ever yet beheld. And what—what—have I seen equal to her since? Strange that I should love to talk of her. Strange that I fret at myself now because I cannot set down upon paper, line by line, and hue by hue, that wonderful loveliness of which—But no matter. Had I but such an imagination as Petrarch, or rather, perhaps, had I his deliberate cold, self-consciousness, what volumes of similes and conceits I might pour out, connecting that peerless face and figure with all lovely things which heaven and earth contain. As it is, because I cannot say all, I will say nothing, but repeat to the end, again and again, Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beyond all statue, picture, or poet's dream. Seventeen—slight, but rounded, a masque and features delicate and regular, as if fresh from the chisel of Praxiteles. I must try to describe, after all, you see—a skin of alabaster, (privet-flowers, Horace and Ariosto would have said, more true to nature,) stained with the faintest flush; auburn hair, with that peculiar crisped wave seen in the old Italian pictures, and the warm, dark, hazel eyes which so often accompany it; lips like a thread of vermillion, somewhat too thin, perhaps—but I thought little of that then; with such perfect finish and grace in every line and hue of her features and her dress, down to the little fingers and nails, which showed through their thin gloves, that she seemed to my fancy fresh from the innermost chamber of some enchanted palace, 'where no air of heaven could visit her cheek too roughly.' I dropped my eyes quite dazzled. The question was repeated by a lady who stood with her, whose face I remarked then—as I did to the last, alas!—too little, dazzled at the first by outward beauty, perhaps because so utterly unaccustomed to it.
"'It is indeed a wonderful picture.' I said timidly. 'May I ask what is the subject of it?'