MIXED BREEDS;
OR,
EDUCATION THROWN AWAY.
I came into a public-house once in London, where there was a black Mulatto-looking man sitting, talking very warmly among some gentlemen, who I observed were listening very attentively to what he said; and I sat myself down, and did the like; ’twas with great pleasure I heard him discourse very handsomely on several weighty subjects; I found he was a very good scholar, had been very handsomely bred, and that learning and study was his delight; and more than that, some of the best of science was at that time his employment: at length I took the freedom to ask him, if he was born in England? He replied with a great deal of good humour, but with an excess of resentment at his father, and with tears in his eyes, “Yes, yes, sir, I am a true born Englishman, to my father’s shame be it spoken; who, being an Englishman himself, could find in his heart to join himself to a negro woman, though he must needs know, the children he should beget, would curse the memory of such an action, and abhor his very name for the sake of it. Yes, yes, (said he repeating it again,) I am an Englishman, and born in lawful wedlock; happy it had been for me, though my father had gone to the devil for wh——m, had he lain with a cook-maid, or produced me from the meanest beggar in the street. My father might do the duty of nature to his black wife; but, God knows, he did no justice to his children. If it had not been for this black face of mine, (says he, then smiling,) I had been bred to the law, or brought up in the study of divinity: but my father gave me learning to no manner of purpose; for he knew I should never be able to rise by it to any thing but a learned valet de chambre. What he put me to school for I cannot imagine; he spoiled a good tarpawling, when he strove to make me a gentleman. When he had resolved to marry a slave, and lie with a slave, he should have begot slaves, and let us have been bred as we were born: but he has twice ruined me; first with getting me a frightful face, and then going to paint a gentleman upon me.”—It was a most affecting discourse indeed, and as such I record it; and I found it ended in tears from the person, who was in himself the most deserving, modest, and judicious man, that I ever met with, under a negro countenance, in my life.
CHINESE IDOL.
It had a thing instead of a head, but no head; it had a mouth distorted out of all manner of shape, and not to be described for a mouth, being only an unshapen chasm, neither representing the mouth of a man, beast, fowl, or fish: the thing was neither any of the four, but an incongruous monster: it had feet, hands, fingers, claws, legs, arms, wings, ears, horns, every thing mixed one among another, neither in the shape or place that nature appointed, but blended together, and fixed to a bulk, not a body; formed of no just parts, but a shapeless trunk or log; whether of wood, or stone, I know not; a thing that might have stood with any side forward, or any side backward, any end upward, or any end downward; that had as much veneration due to it on one side, as on the other; a kind of celestial hedgehog, that was rolled up within itself, and was every thing every way; formed neither to walk, stand, go, nor fly; neither to see, hear, nor speak; but merely to instil ideas of something nauseous and abominable into the minds of men that adored it.
MANNERS OF A LONDON WATERMAN, AND HIS FARE, A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
What I have [said last] [of the Manners of a spruce London Mercer,[184]] makes me think on another way of inviting customers, the most distant in the world from what I have been speaking of, I mean that which is practised by the watermen, especially on those whom by their mien and garb they know to be peasants. It is not unpleasant to see half a dozen people surround a man they never saw in their lives before, and two of them that can get the nearest, clapping each an arm over his neck, hug him in as loving and familiar a manner as if he were their brother newly come home from an East India voyage; a third lays hold of his hand, another of his sleeve, his coat, the buttons of it, or any thing he can come at, whilst a fifth or a sixth, who has scampered twice round him already without being able to get at him, plants himself directly before the man in hold, and within three inches of his nose, contradicting his rivals with an open-mouthed cry, shows him a dreadful set of large teeth, and a small remainder of chewed bread and cheese, which the countryman’s arrival had hindered from being swallowed. At all this no offence is taken, and the peasant justly thinks they are making much of him; therefore far from opposing them he patiently suffers himself to be pushed or pulled which way the strength that surrounds him shall direct. He has not the delicacy to find fault with a man’s breath, who has just blown out his pipe, or a greasy head of hair that is rubbing against his chaps: dirt and sweat he has been used to from his cradle, and it is no disturbance to him to hear half a score people, some of them at his ear, and the furthest not five feet from him, bawl out as if he was a hundred yards off: he is conscious that he makes no less noise when he is merry himself, and is secretly pleased with their boisterous usages. The hawling and pulling him about he construes in the way it is intended; it is a courtship he can feel and understand: he can’t help wishing them well for the esteem they seem to have for him: he loves to be taken notice of, and admires the Londoners for being so pressing in their offers of service to him, for the value of threepence or less; whereas in the country, at the shop he uses, he can have nothing but he must first tell them what he wants, and, though he lays out three or four shillings at a time, has hardly a word spoke to him unless it be in answer to a question himself is forced to ask first. This alacrity in his behalf moves his gratitude, and unwilling to disoblige any, from his heart he knows not whom to choose. I have seen a man think all this, or something like it, as plainly as I could see the nose on his face; and at the same time move along very contentedly under a load of watermen, and with a smiling countenance carry seven or eight stone more than his own weight, to the water side.
Fable of the Bees: 1725.