There the poet could come and feel the presence of divinity in that noble scene, and hear sublime whispers in the trees, and create new heavens and new earths from the glorious charms of nature around him, and in one short hour live an empyrean of celestial life and love. There could come the very humblest children of the plebeian town, and feel a thrill of exquisite delight pervade their bosoms at the sight of the very flowers on the sod, and see heaven in the infinite blue above them. And poor Sir Roger, the holder, but not the possessor of all, walked only in a region of sterility, with no sublimer ideas than poachers and trespassers—no more rational enjoyment than the brute indulgence of hunting like a ferret, and seizing his fellow-men like a bulldog. He was a specimen of human nature degenerated; retrograded from the divine to the bestial, through the long-operating influences of false notions, and institutions continued beyond their time. He had only the soul of a keeper. Had he been only a keeper he had been a much happier man.
CHAPTER II.
THE FIRST OF A NEW LINE.
In Great Castleborough there lived a race of paupers. From the year of the 42nd of Elizabeth, or 1601, down to the present generation, this race maintained an uninterrupted descent. Like that of many a more worldly-favoured race, theirs was a descent; it had nothing of an ascent in it. But that is the fate of ancestry. A man on some particular occasion ascends; makes himself a mark in his time; perhaps a name in the world’s annals, and from him his family descends.
The expression is perfectly correct; as the heralds truly have it; it descends, fades out, and is gone. It has lived? no, continued, a thousand years perhaps; it has descended, and prided itself on descending. That was the case of the Rockvilles; and when we hear of families and persons illustriously or honourably descended, we hear an internal echo which says, “Yes—descended.” The truly great man ascends from his ancestors.
There was a steady and unbroken line of paupers in Great Castleborough, as the parish books testify. No families had a more unquestionable pedigree. There was no flaw, no dubious spot in it. The parish books were the red-books of this race. No genealogy could bear a more rigid scrutiny than theirs. From generation to generation their demands on the parish funds stand recorded. There were no lacunæ in their career; there was no occasion for the herald to skip skilfully from cousin to doubtful cousin, nor great lawyers to cast a costly glamour over some delicate question of legitimacy. There never failed a rightful heir to their families. Fed on the bread of idleness and legal provision, these people flourished, increased, and multiplied. Sometimes required to work for the weekly stipend which they received, they never acquired a taste for labour, or lost the taste for the bread for which they did not labour. These paupers regarded their maintenance by no means as a disgrace. They claimed it as a right—as their patrimony. They contended that one-third of the property of the Church had been given by benevolent individuals for the support of the poor, and that what the Reformation wrongfully deprived them of, the great enactment of Elizabeth rightfully—and only rightfully—restored.
Those who imagine that all paupers merely claim parish relief because the law has ordained it, commit a great error. There were numbers then who were hereditary paupers, on a higher principle even than hereditary peers, and that on a tradition carefully handed down, that they were only manfully claiming their own. They traced their claims from the most ancient feudal times. They were none of your modern manufactures, the offspring of wretched political necessities. They came down from times when the lord was as much bound to maintain his villein in gross, as the villein was to work for the lord. These paupers were in fact, or claimed to be, the original adscripti glebæ, and to have as sound a claim to parish support as the landed proprietor had to his land. For this reason, in the old Catholic times, after they had escaped from villenage by running away from their hundred, and remaining absent for a year and a day, dwelling for that period in a walled town, these people were amongst the most diligent attendants at the abbey doors, and, when the abbeys were dissolved, were, no doubt, amongst the most daring of those thieves, vagabonds, and sturdy rogues who, after the Robin Hood fashion, beset the highways and solitary farms of England, and claimed their black-mail in a very unceremonious style. It was out of this class that Henry VIII. hanged his seventy-two thousand during his reign, and, as it is said, without appearing materially to diminish their number.
That they continued to “increase, multiply, and replenish the earth,” overflowing all bounds, overpowering by mere populousness all the severe laws against them, of whipping, burning in the hand, in the forehead, or the breast, and hanging, and filling the whole country with alarm, is evidenced by the very Act of Elizabeth itself.
Amongst these hereditary paupers who, as we have said, were found in Castleborough, there was a family of the name of Deg. This family had never failed to demand and enjoy what it held to be its share of its ancient inheritance. It appeared from the parish records, that they practised, in different periods, the crafts of shoemaking, tailoring, and chimney-sweeping; but since the invention of the stocking-frame they had, one and all of them, followed the profession of stocking-weavers; or, as they were there called, stockingers. This was a trade which required no extreme exertion of the physical or intellectual powers. To sit in a frame, and throw the arms to and fro, was a thing that might be carried to a degree of extreme diligence, or be let down into a mere apology for idleness. An “idle stockinger” was then no very uncommon phrase, and the Degs were always classed under that head. Nothing could be more admirably adapted than this trade for building a plan of parish relief upon. The Degs did not pretend to be absolutely without work, or the parish authorities would soon have set them to some real labour—a thing that they particularly recoiled from, having a very old adage in the family, that “hard work was enough to kill a man.”
There was, indeed, an anecdote of three of the Degs which was continually quoted as exemplifying the three degrees of extreme indolence. According to this, three Degs were lying one fine autumn day under a neighbour’s pear-tree. One of them, in a languid tone, said, “There! a pear has dropped.” The second observed, still more languidly, “I wish I had it.” The third was too lazy even to open his mouth to express such a wish, much less to move and get it.