Mr. Hood institutes “A Complaint against Greatness,” through “an unhappy candidate for the show at Sadler’s repository,” described in the following item of the catalogue—“The reverend Mr. Farmer, a four years’ old Durham ox, fed by himself, upon oil-cake and mangel-wurzel.” The complainant, however, says, “I resemble that worthy agricultural vicar only in my fat living.”
This being the season when these condemned animals come up from the country to the metropolis, it seems a fit time to hear the complainant’s description of his journey. “Wearisome and painful was my pilgrim-like progress to this place, by short and tremulous steppings—like the digit’s march upon a dial. My owner, jealous of my fat, procured a crippled drover, with a withered limb, for my conductor; but even he hurried me beyond my breath. The drawling hearse left me labouring behind; the ponderous fly-waggon passed me like a bird upon the road, so tediously slow is my pace. It just sufficeth, oh, ye thrice happy oysters! that have no locomotive faculty at all, to distinguish that I am not at rest. Wherever the grass grew by the way-side, how it tempted my natural longings—the cool brook flowed at my very foot, but this short, thick neck forbade me to eat or drink; nothing but my redundant dewlap is likely ever to graze on the ground!—If stalls and troughs were not extant, I must perish. Nature has given to the elephant a long, flexible tube, or trunk, so that he can feed his mouth, as it were, by his nose: but is man able to furnish me with such an implement? Or would he not still withhold it, lest I should prefer the green herb, my natural, delicious diet, and reject his rank, unsavoury condiments?—What beast, with free will, but would repair to the sweet meadow for its pasture”—
Verily, it is humane thus to lecture man from the mouth of an animal, whose species is annually deformed for butcherly pride, and the loathing of the table—“to see the prize-steak loaded with that rank, yellow abomination, might wean a man from carnivorous habits for ever.” The supplicant for our compassion adds, in behalf of himself and his dumb-fellow creatures, “It may seem presumption in a brute to question the human wisdom; but truly, I can perceive no beneficial ends worthy to be set off against our sufferings. There must be, methinks, a nearer (and a better) way of augmenting the perquisites of the kitchen-wench and the fire-man.” There is an admirable cut of the over-fed petitioner, breathing “O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!” The figure of the crippled drover is excellent.
Mr. Hood devises a romantic adventure that befel a herd of these animals of the common class, and a little wooden, white-painted house on four wheels, to which a sedentary citizen and his wife had retired to spend their days, “impaled” by the wayside on Hounslow-heath, where—
Having had some quarters of school breeding,
They turn’d themselves, like other folks, to reading;
But setting out where others nigh have done,
And being ripen’d in the seventh stage,
The childhood of old age,
Began as other children have begun,—
Not with the pastorals of Mr. Pope,
Or Bard of Hope,
Or Paley, ethical, or learned Porson,—
But spelt, on sabbaths, in St. Mark, or John,
And then relax’d themselves with Whittington,
Or Valentine and Orson—
But chiefly fairy tales they loved to con,
And being easily melted, in their dotage,
Slobber’d,—and kept
Reading,—and wept
Over the White Cat, in their wooden cottage.
Thus reading on—the longer
They read, of course, their childish faith grew stronger
In gnomes, and hags, and elves, and giant grim,—
If talking trees and birds reveal’d to him,
She saw the flight of fairyland’s fly-waggons,
And magic-fishes swim
In puddle ponds, and took old crows for dragons,—
Both were quite drunk from the enchanted flaggons;
When as it fell upon a summer’s day.
As the old man sat a feeding
On the old babe-reading,
Beside his open street-and-parlour door,
A hideous roar
Proclaim’d a drove of beasts was coming by the way.
Long-horned, and short, of many a different breed,
Tall, tawny brutes, from famous Lincoln-levels,
Or Durham feed;
With some of those unquiet, black, dwarf devils,
From nether side of Tweed,
Or Firth of Forth;
Looking half wild with joy to leave the North,—
With dusty hides, all mobbing on together,—
When,—whether from a fly’s malicious comment
Upon his tender flank, from which he shrank;
Or whether
Only in some enthusiastic moment,—
However, one brown monster, in a frisk,
Giving his tail a perpendicular whisk,
Kick’d out a passage thro’ the beastly rabble;
And after a pas seul,—or, if you will, a
Horn-pipe, before the basket-maker’s villa,
Leapt o’er the tiny pale,—
Back’d his beef-steaks against the wooden gable,
And thrust his brawny bell-rope of a tail
Right o’er the page,
Wherein the sage
Just then was spelling some romantic fable.
The old man, half a scholar, half a dunce,
Could not peruse, who could?—two tales at once;
And being huff’d
At what he knew was none of Riquet’s tuft;
Bang’d-to the door,
But most unluckily enclosed a morsel
Of the intruding tail, and all the tassel:—
The monster gave a roar,
And bolting off with speed, increased by pain,
The little house became a coach once more,
And, like Macheath, “took to the road” again!
When this happened the old man’s wife was absent,