[28] In Wales the attenders of a country funeral adjourn, as regularly as they attend the funeral itself, to the alehouse; and it strikes an Englishman very strangely, to meet a funeral going to the church, and to hear the chief mourner, perhaps the widow, crying aloud, and repeating as she goes, all the virtues of the deceased; and in an hour after, to find the whole company seated in the public house, enveloped in a canopy of tobacco-smoke, loud in talk, and drowning their sorrow in their cups. I recollect how my feelings were harrowed by meeting such a funeral, and a widow just so lamenting; but the gentleman with me, a resident of the place, said “O, it is all the better—they run off the poignancy of their feelings by their lamentations. Their grief seems like one of their mountain torrents—loud and rapid, and then it is gone.”
But lest I should be accused of tempting my readers into the abodes of publicans and sinners, I must again remind them that I am only talking of those quiet, respectable old country inns, where the master and mistress had a character to maintain, had a regard to the opinion of the parson and the squire; and of those only as places of necessary refreshment. As parts and parcels of English rural life, I am bound to describe them; and who has not spent a pleasant hour in such a place with a friend, on a pedestrianizing excursion, or with a rural party at dinner or tea? And who has not rejoiced to escape from night and storms, on wide heaths or amongst the mountains, to the “shelter of such rustic roof?” Into such a house I remember, years ago, being driven by a wild night of wind, rain, and pitchy darkness, on the edge of Yorkshire, and the cheerful blaze of the fire, and the rustic group round it, as I entered, were a right welcome contrast to the tempestuous blackness without. Wet, and cold, and weary as I was, I had no intention of being conducted to the best parlour of so small a house as this was, in so secluded a part of the country, on a dismal night in October. Whoever is obliged at such a season to betake himself to such humble hostel, let him, if he do not find a good fire blazing in the parlour, seat himself in the old chimney-corner: there he is sure of warmth and comfort in a homely way. In summer a rustic inn, in the most obscure district, is pleasant enough; but in winter beware! Travellers are few—the best parlour is probably not used once a month, for all country incomers know that the old chimney-corner is always warm. Instead, therefore, of being led, as is the regular custom, on the arrival of a respectable looking stranger, into the best parlour, while a fire is lighted, and of waiting, chill and miserable, for its burning up, and for the coming of your tea or supper, watching the smoking, snapping, fizzing sticks, and the reek, refused ascent up the damp chimney, ever and anon puffing out into the room in clouds—march at once into the common room, or ensconce yourself as a privileged guest in the bar. If you find a fire blazing in the parlour, that is indication that there is passing enough on that road to keep one burning there: if not, the blazing ingle is your spot. There I took my station, with a high wooden screen behind me, a bright hearth before me; and having ordered a beef-steak and coffee, and secured the room over this very one for my lodging, knowing that that too is always dry in winter, I began to notice what company I had got. The scene presented is worth describing, as a bit of rural life. About half a dozen villagers occupied the centre of the great circular wooden screen, at one end of which I was seated. Before them stood the common three-legged round table of the country public-house, on which stood their mugs of ale. The table, screen, fire-irons, floor, every thing had an air of the greatest cleanness. Opposite to me, in one of the great old elbow-chairs, so common in country inns in the north, some of them, indeed, with rockers to them, in which full-grown people sit rocking themselves with as much satisfaction as children, sate an old man in duffil-grey trousers and jacket, and with his hat on; and close at my left hand a tall, good-looking fellow of apparently fifty-five, who had the dress of a master stonemason, but a look of vivacity and knowingness, very different to the rest of the company. There was a look of the wag, or the rake about him. He was, in fact, evidently a fellow that in any place or station would be a gay, roystering blade; and if dressed in a court dress, would cut a gallant figure too. He eyed me with that expression which said he only wanted half a word to make himself very communicative. The check which my entrance had given to the talk and laughter which I heard on first opening the door, had now passed, and I found a keen dispute going on, upon the important question of how many quicksets there are in a yard, when planted four inches asunder. The old man opposite I found was what a punster would term a fencing-master,—a planter of fences,—a founder and establisher of hawthorn hedges for the whole country round; and out of his profession the dispute had arisen. The whole question hinged on the simple inquiry, whether a quickset was put in at the very commencement of the line of fence, or only at the end of the first four inches. In the first case there would be evidently nine—in the latter only eight. The matter in dispute was so simple and demonstrable, that one wondered how it could afford a dispute at all. Some, however, contended there were eight quicksets, and some that there were nine; and to demonstrate, they had chalked out the line of fence with its division into yards, and sub-division into four inches, on the hearth with a cinder; but the dispute still went on as keenly as if the thing were not thus plainly before their eyes, or as disputes continue in a more national assembly on things as self-evident: and many an earnest appeal was made from both sides to the old hedger, who having once given his decision, disdained to return any further reply than by a quiet withdrawal of his pipe from his mouth, a quiet draught of ale, and the simple asseveration of—“Nay, I’m sure!” The debate might have grown as tediously prolix as the debates just alluded to, had not my left-hand neighbour, the tall man of lively aspect, turned to me, and, pointing to the cindery diagram on the hearth, said, “What things these stay-at-home neighbours of mine can make a dispute out of! What would Ben Jonson have thought of such simpletons? Look here! if these noisy chaps had ever read a line of Homer or Hesiod, they wouldn’t plague their seven senses out about nothing at all. Why, any child of a twelvemonth old would settle their mighty question with the first word it learned to speak. Eight or nine quicksets indeed! and James Broadfoot there, who should know rather better than them, for he has planted as many in his time as would reach all round England, and Ireland to boot, has told them ten times over. Eight or nine numbskulls, I say!”
“O!” said I, a good deal surprised—“and so you have read Homer and Hesiod, have you?”
“To be sure I have,” replied my mercurial neighbour, “and a few other poets too. I have not spent all my life in this sleepy-headed place, I can assure you.”
“What, you have travelled as well as read, then?”
“Yes, and I have travelled too, master. Ben Jonson was a stonemason; and if I am not a stonemason I am a sculptor, and that is first-cousin to it. When Ben Jonson first entered London with a hod of mortar on his head, and a two-foot rule in his pocket, I dare say he knew no more that he had twenty plays in his head, than I knew of all the cherubims I should carve, and the epitaphs I should cut; and yet I have cut a few in my time, and written them too beforehand.”
“O! and you are a poet too?”
He nodded assent, and taking up his mug of ale, and fixing his eyes stedfastly on me over the top of it as he drank with a look of triumph,—then setting down his mug—“And if you want to know that, you have only to walk into the churchyard in the morning, and there you’ll find plenty of my verses, and cut with a pen of iron too, as Job wished his elegy to be.” Here, however, lest I should not walk into the churchyard, he recited a whole host of epitaphs, many of which must have made epitaph-hunters stare, if they really were put on headstones.
“Well,” I said, “you astonish me with your learning and wit. I certainly did not look for such a person in this village—but pray where have you travelled?”
“O! it’s a long story—but this I can tell you—I have gone so near to the end of the world that I could not put sixpence between my head and the sky.”