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THE
CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

MARCH, 1860.

CONTENTS.

LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO.,
65, CORNHILL.

THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

CONTENTS of No. 1.
January, 1860.

• Framley Parsonage. Chapters 1, 2 and 3.
• The Chinese and the “Outer Barbarians.”
• Lovel the Widower. Chapter 1. (With an Illustration.)
• Studies in Animal Life. Chapter 1.
• Father Prout’s Inaugurative Ode to the Author of “Vanity Fair.”
• Our Volunteers.
• A Man of Letters of the last Generation.
• The Search for Sir John Franklin (from the Private Journal of an Officer of the Fox). (With an Illustration and Map.)
• The First Morning of 1860.
• Roundabout Papers.—No. 1. On a Lazy Idle Boy.

CONTENTS of No. 2.
February, 1860.

• Nil Nisi Bonum.
• Invasion Panics.
• To Goldenhair (from Horace). By Thomas Hood.
• Framley Parsonage. Chapters 4, 5 and 6.
• Tithonus. By Alfred Tennyson.
• William Hogarth: Painter, Engraver, and Philosopher. Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time.—I. Little Boy Hogarth.
• Unspoken Dialogue. By R. Monckton Milnes. (With an Illustration.)
• Studies in Animal Life. Chapter 2.
• Curious if True. (Extract from a Letter from Richard Whittingham, Esq.)
• Life among the Lighthouses.
• Lovel the Widower. Chapter 2. (With an Illustration.)
• As Essay without End.

NOTICE TO CORRESPONDENTS.

⁂ Communications for the Editor should be addressed to the care of Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., 65, Cornhill, and not to the Editor’s private residence. The Editor cannot be responsible for the return of rejected contributions.

THE
CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

MARCH, 1860.

A Few Words on Junius and Macaulay.

The “secret of Junius” has been kept until, like over-ripe wines, the subject has lost its flavour. Languid indeed is the disposition of mind in which any, except a few veterans who still prefer the old post-road to the modern railway, take up an essay or an article professing to throw new light on that wearisome mystery, or to add some hitherto unknown name to the ghostly crowd of candidates for that antiquated prize. And yet there is a deep interest about the inquiry, after all, to those who, from any special cause, are induced to overcome the feeling of satiety which it at first excites, and plunge into the controversy with the energy of their grandfathers. The real force and virulence of those powerful writings, unrivalled then, and scarcely equalled since, let critics say what they may; the strangeness of the fact that none of the quick-sighted, unscrupulous, revengeful men who surrounded Junius at the time of his writing, who brushed past him in the street, drank with him at dinner, sat opposite him in the office, could ever attain to even a probable conjecture of his identity; the irresistible character of the external evidence which fixes the authorship on Francis, contrasted with those startling internal improbabilities which make the Franciscan theory to this day the least popular, although the learned regard it as all but established—the eccentric, repulsive, “dour” character of Francis himself, and the kind of pertinacious longing which besets us to know the interior of a man who shuts himself up against his fellow-men in fixed disdain and silence:—these are powerful incentives, and produce an attraction, of which we are sometimes ourselves ashamed, towards the occupation of treading over and over again this often beaten ground of literary curiosity.

Never have I felt this more strongly, than when accident led me, a few years ago, into Leigh and Sotheby’s sale-room, when the library of Sir Philip Francis was on view previous to auction. I know not whether any reader will sympathize with me in what I am about to say: but to me there is a solemn and rather oppressive feeling, which attends these exposures of books for sale, where the death is recent, and where the owner and collector was a man of this world, taking an interest in the everyday literature which occupies myself and those around me. There stands his copy of a memoir of some one whom both he and I knew well—he had just had time to read it, as I see by the date, and with interest, as I judge by the pencil marks—in what mysteriously separate relation do he and I now respectively stand towards that common acquaintance? There is his copy of the latest volume of Travels—he had only accompanied the adventurer, I see, as far as the First Cataract—what matters now to him the problem of the Source of the Nile? There is his last unbound number of the Quarterly—he had studied it for many a year: at such a page, the paper-cutter rested from its work, the marginal notes ended, the influx of knowledge stopped, the chain of thought was snapped, the mental perceptions darkened. Can it be, that the active mind of our fellow-worker ceased then and there from that continuous exertion of so many years, and became that we wot not of—a living Intelligence, it may be, but removed into another sphere, with which its habitual region of labour—the cycle in which it moved and had its being—had no connection whatever? Must it be (as Charles Lamb so quaintly expresses it) that “knowledge now comes to him, if it comes at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?”

But I do not wish to dally, here and now, with fancies like these. I only introduced the subject, because Sir Philip Francis’ library was a good deal calculated to suggest this class of thoughts. He was a great marginal note-maker. He criticized all that came under his eye, and especially what related to political events, even to his latest hour. And—singular enough, yet in accordance with much that we know of him, and with all that we must suppose, if Junius he was—he had avoided keeping up, in this way, his connection with the time in which his sinister and anonymous fame was achieved. So far as I remember, his books of the Junian period were little noted. He seemed to have exercised his memory and judgment on the records of Warren Hastings’ trial, the French Revolution, the revolutionary war—not on those of Burke and Chatham.

This, however, is all by the way, and I must crave pardon for the digression. I lost myself, and wandered off, it seems, just when I was reminding the reader that the subsidiary features of the Junian controversy have now become much more interesting than the old question of authorship itself, and that it is an admirable exercise for the intellectual faculties to trace the way in which different lines of reasoning, wholly distinct and yet severally complete, converge towards the “Franciscan” conclusion. It was in this light, especially, that the subject appeared to captivate the mind of that great historical genius whom we have lost: whom we have just seen in the ample enjoyment of most rare faculties, the fulness of fame, and the height of fortune, committed to the soft arms of an euthanasia such as has rarely waited on man. The “Junian controversy” was with Macaulay an endless subject of ingenious talk. It suited certain peculiarities of his mind. As he was the very clearest of writers, so he was also, in a special sense and manner, the most acute of reasoners. In limited, close historical argument—in the power to infer a third proposition from a second, a second from a first—the power to expand a fact, either proved or assumed as a trifling postulate, into a series of facts, with undeniable cogency—I think we must go far to find his equal.

If you gave Cuvier a tarsal bone, he constructed you, with unerring certainty, a humming-bird or an elephant. If you gave Macaulay a casual passage from a letter, he would divine, with strange precision, the circumstances of that letter: the occasion of its writing, the reason of its publication or non-publication, the way in which the writer was connected with some great event of the time, and in which the letter bore on that event. But his judgment of the character of the man, or character of the event, was another matter altogether, and tasked a different order of faculties, with which we are not now concerned. If we were to seek a rival to Macaulay in this peculiar province of clear and cogent reasoning from fact A to fact X, imparting to conjecture the force of truth, we should probably find him rather among lawyers than writers. In truth, the historian always retained, and to his great advantage, many of the mental habits, as well as many of the tastes and joyous recollections of the bar. He was at once the most Paleyan and the most forensic of historical inquirers. When he entered the arena of controversy, you might doubt whether he had donned his armour in the Senate House of Cambridge or the Assize Court of Lancaster. We may assume (as Coke assumed, lamentingly, of Bacon) that had he only stuck to the law he would have made a great lawyer. But it is open to doubt whether, as a judge, he would have done more of service by the marvellous lucidity with which he would have drawn out a series of circumstantial evidence before a jury, or more of harm by his tendency to force the various considerations attending a complicated case into conformity with his own too complete and too vivid ideal of that case.

There is no better way towards appreciating the intensity of this peculiar faculty in Macaulay, than to study the various controversies into which his essays and his history led him: both the few in which he vouchsafed a reply, and the many more in which he rested contented with his first statement—his issues with Dixon, Paget, the High Churchmen, the Scotch, the Quakers, and the like—and to contrast his method with that of his antagonists. They all beat the bush, more or less, and flounder in every variety of historical fallacy. They beg the question, frame “vicious processes” from their premisses, “pole” themselves on self-created dilemmas, commit, in short, every error which logicians denounce in their fantastic terminology—in Macaulay’s reasoning, simply as such, you will never detect a flaw. His conclusion follows his premisses as surely and safely as “the night the day.” You may agree with his antagonist, and not with him; but you will find that what you consider to be his error lies quite in another direction, and consists, not in misusing his own facts, but in ignoring or neglecting true and material facts adduced by his opponents. And beware, O young and ardent Reader, too readily pleased with seeing a hole picked in a great man’s coat, lest the triumphant crow, with which these opponents invariably trumpet their supposed victory, seduce you into premature acquiescence. By-and-by, when cooler and steadier, you may be inclined to conjecture that Macaulay’s piercing instinct was right after all, and that the facts evoked against him are in reality either doubtful or immaterial to the argument.

It was, as I have said, this fondness and aptitude for following up with accuracy converging lines of evidence, which gave Macaulay so great an interest in the Junian controversy, and made him so ready to allude to it incidentally both in writing and conversation. He contributed, himself, two, at least, of the most remarkable collateral proofs which tend to fix the authorship on Francis—the curious error of the English War-office clerk about the rules of Irish pensions, in the correspondence with Sir William Draper—the personal hostility of the Francis family towards the Luttrells, which accounts for the savage treatment by Junius of such obscure offenders. And now, having used the great historian’s name, somewhat unfairly, by way of shoeing-horn, to draw on a fresh chapter on the old controversy, let me place before you another singular instance of this class of collateral proofs, which, I believe, has not been made public before, but which greatly excited the curiosity of Macaulay, and which he would have followed out—if ever he had taken up the question again—with all the force of his inductive mind.

In one of the early letters of Woodfall’s collection, under the signature “Bifrons” (April 23, 1768: vol. ii. p. 175, of Bohn’s Edition), the writer, after accusing the Duke of Grafton of being a ‘casuist,’ proceeds as follows:—

“I am not deeply read in authors of that professed title: but I remember seeing Busenbaum, Suares, Molina, and a score of other Jesuitical books, burnt at Paris, for their sound casuistry, by the hand of the common hangman.”

I shall assume at once that Bifrons was the same writer as Junius. The general reasons for the assumption are familiar to those versed in the controversy. And even were those general grounds of identity less strong than they are, every one would allow that to prove that Francis was Bifrons, would go a long way towards proving him Junius.

A passage so pregnant with suggestion has of course provoked abundant comment: but all of the loosest description. No one seems to have taken the pains to follow out for himself a hint pointing to conclusions of so much importance, both negative and affirmative.

Mr. W. H. Smith, the recent editor of the Grenville Papers, thus presses it into the service of his theory, attributing the authorship of Junius to Lord Temple:

“The ceremony here alluded to probably took place in or about the year 1732, when the disputes between the King of France and his parliaments, relative to the Jesuits, had arrived at the highest point of acrimony. Several burnings of obnoxious and prohibited books and writings are described by cotemporary authorities at this time; and as Lord Temple, then Richard Grenville, was in France, and chiefly at Paris, from the autumn of 1731 to the spring of 1733, he had, consequently, many opportunities of witnessing the ceremonies of the burning of ‘scores of Jesuitical books’ by the common hangman, as described by Junius.”—(Introductory notes relating to the authorship of Junius, p. cxliv.)

Mr. Smith is scarcely so familiar with the details of French as of English history. No doubt books were publicly burnt in Paris about the time he mentions: but the books were Jansenist, not Jesuit: the letters concerning the Miracles of M. de Paris, the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, and the like—not the works of the Casuists. In 1732, the Jesuits were the executioners: their turn, as victims, came a generation later.

A writer, who endeavours to establish a claim for Lord Lyttelton, is nearer the mark: but, unluckily, just misses it:——

“We may assume,” says he, “that this burning took place in 1764, as it was in that year that Choiseul suppressed the Jesuits. Thomas Lyttelton was on the continent during the whole of 1764, and for part of the time resided at Paris.”

The burning of books, so accurately described by Bifrons, took place, beyond a doubt, as we shall presently see, on August the 7th, 1761. Now this date raises a curious question, which is indicated, but in a very careless manner, by Mr. Wade (in his notes to Junius, Bohn’s edition):——

“It may be doubted, indeed, whether Bifrons was an Englishman, or even an Irishman: he certainly could not have been a British subject in 1761, unless he was a prisoner of war: for in that year we were at war with France. But if a prisoner of war, how unlikely that he could be at Paris to witness an auto-da-fé of heretical works: he would have been confined in the interior of the kingdom, not left at large to indulge his curiosity in the capital.”

Now, assuming (as all these writers do), that Bifrons-Junius actually saw what he says he saw, how does the circumstance bear on the claims of the several candidates?

What was Lyttelton in August, 1761? An Eton boy, enjoying his holidays.

Where was Lord Temple? At Stowe (see the Grenville Letters) caballing with Pitt.

Where was Burke? At Battersea, preparing to join Gerard Hamilton in Ireland.

Where were Burke the younger, Lord George Sackville, and the rest of the illustrious persons implicated in some people’s suspicions? Not in Paris, we may safely answer, without pursuing our inquiry farther.

But it is undoubtedly possible that Bifrons-Junius, after all, did not himself see the auto-da-fé in question: he may have heard of it, or read of it, and may have described himself as a witness for effect, by way of a flourish, or even by way of false lure to throw inquirers off the scent.

It would then only remain to inquire, in what way, by what association of ideas, Bifrons-Junius came to give so circumstantial a description, and in so prominent a manner, of an occurrence which had passed in a time of war, almost unmarked by the English public, and which had excited in England but very little attention or interest since?

Now let us see how either supposition bears on the “Franciscan theory.”

Francis was a very young clerk in Mr. Pitt’s department (which answered to the Foreign Office of these days) in 1759. In that year he accompanied Lord Kinnoul on his special mission to Portugal. His lordship returned in November, 1760, with all his staff, and the youthful Francis (in all probability) returned to his desk at the same time.

He was certainly at work in the same office between October, 1761, and August 1768; for he says of himself (Parl. Debates, xxii. 97), that he “possessed Lord Egremont’s favour in the Secretary of State’s Office.” That nobleman came into office in October, 1761, and died in August, 1763. In the latter year Francis was removed to the War Office, where he remained until 1772.

Where was he in August, 1761?

According to all reasonable presumption, at work in Pitt’s department.

And yet Lady Francis, in that biographical account of her husband which was published by Lord Campbell—an account evidently incorrect in some details, yet authentic in striking particulars, as might be expected from a lady’s reminiscences of what she heard from an older man—says, “He was at the Court of France in Louis XV.’s time, when the Jesuits were driven out by Madame de Pompadour.”

This, it will be at once allowed, is a strange instance of coincidence between Bifrons and the lady. The more striking, because the particulars of disagreement show that the two stories do not come from the same source. But how can we account for either story? How came Francis to be in Paris—if in Paris he were—in time of war?

With a view to solve this question to my own satisfaction, I once consulted the State Paper Office. It happens that during the summer of 1761, Mr. Hans Stanley was in Paris, on a diplomatic mission, to negotiate terms of peace with Choiseul. He failed in that object—some folks thought Mr. Pitt never meant he should succeed—and returned home in September of that year. His correspondence with Pitt, as Secretary of State, is preserved in the office aforesaid. He seems to have had the ordinary staff of assistants from Pitt’s department: but I could not find any record of their names. His despatches are entirely confined to the subject of the negotiation on which he was engaged, with one exception. He seems, for some reason or other, to have taken much interest in the affair of the Jesuits. On August 10, he writes at length on the whole of that matter. To his despatch is annexed a careful précis, in Downing Street language, of the history of the Jesuits’ quarrel with the parliament: evidently drawn up by one of his subordinates. Enclosed in this précis is the original printed Arrêt de la Cour du Parlement, du 6 Août, 1761, condemning Molina, de Justitiâ et Jure; Suares, Defensio Fidei Catholicæ; Busenbaum, Theologia Moralis; and several other books of the same class, to be lacérés et brûlés en la cour du Palais. And a MS. note at the foot of the Arrêt states that the books were burnt on the 7th accordingly.

Thus much, therefore, is all but certain; some member of Mr. Stanley’s mission, or other confidential subordinate, was present in the Cour du Palais when that arrêt was executed, and reported it to his principal, who reported it to Mr. Pitt: and Francis was at that time a clerk in Pitt’s office, which was in constant communication with Stanley’s mission. We do not know the names of the individual clerks who were attached to that mission, or passed backwards and forwards between Paris and London in connection with it. But we do know that Francis had been twice employed in a similar way (to accompany General Bligh’s expedition to Cherbourg, and Lord Kinnoul’s mission to Portugal). Evidently, therefore, he was very likely to be thus employed again. He may then assuredly have witnessed with his own bodily eyes what no Englishman, unconnected with that mission, could well have witnessed: may have stood on the steps of the Palais de Justice, watched the absurd execution taking place in the courtyard below, and treasured up the details as food for his sarcastic spirit; or (to take the other supposition) he may have read at his desk in the office that curious despatch of Mr. Stanley’s; may have retained it in his tenacious memory; and, writing a few years afterwards, may have thought proper, for the sake of effect, to represent himself as an eye-witness of what he only knew by reading.

All this I once detailed to Macaulay, who, as I have said, was much interested by the argument, and took an eager part in discussing it. But one circumstance (I said) perplexed me, and seemed to interfere with the probabilities of the case. How came Junius, whose excessive fear of detection betrays itself throughout so much of his correspondence, and led him to employ all manner of shifts and devices for the sake of concealment, to give the public, as if in mere bravado, such a key to his identity as this little piece of autobiography affords?

The answer is plain, replied Macaulay on the instant, with one of those electric flashes of rapid perception which seemed in him to pass direct from the brain to the eye. The letter of Bifrons is one of Junius’s earliest productions—its date, half-a-year before the formidable signature of Junius was adopted at all. The first letter so signed is dated in November, 1768. In April, the writer had neither earned his fame, nor incurred his personal danger. A mere unknown scatterer of abuse, he could have little or no fear of directing inquiry towards himself.

But (he added) I much prefer your first supposition to your second. It is not only the most picturesque, but it is really the most probable. And unless the contrary can be shown, I shall believe in the actual presence of the writer at the burning of the books. Remember, this fact explains what otherwise seems inexplicable, Lady Francis’s imperfect story, that her husband “was at the court of France when Madame de Pompadour drove out the Jesuits.” Depend on it, you have caught Junius in the fact. Francis was there.

William Hogarth:
PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER.
Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time.

II.—Mr. Gamble’s Apprentice.

How often have I envied those who—were not my envy dead and buried—would now be sixty years old! I mean the persons who were born at the commencement of the present century, and who saw its glories evolved each year with a more astonishing grandeur and brilliance, till they culminated in that universal “transformation scene” of ’15. For the appreciation of things began to dawn on me only in an era of internecine frays and feuds:—theological controversies, reform agitations, corporation squabbles, boroughmongering debates, and the like: a time of sad seditions and unwholesome social misunderstandings; Captain Rock shooting tithe-proctors in Ireland yonder; Captain Swing burning hayricks here; Captains Ignorance and Starvation wandering up and down, smashing machinery, demolishing toll-bars, screeching out “Bread or blood!” at the carriage-windows of the nobility and gentry going to the drawing-room, and otherwise proceeding the wretchedest of ways for the redress of their grievances. Surely, I thought, when I began to think at all, I was born in the worst of times. Could that stern nobleman, whom the mob hated, and hooted, and pelted—could the detested “Nosey,” who was beset by a furious crowd in the Minories, and would have been torn off his horse, perchance slain, but for the timely aid of Chelsea Pensioners and City Marshalmen,—and who was compelled to screen his palace windows with iron shutters from onslaughts of Radical macadamites—could he be that grand Duke Arthur, Conqueror and Captain, who had lived through so much glory, and had been so much adored an idol? Oh, to have been born in 1800! At six, I might just have remembered the mingled exultation and passionate grief of Trafalgar; have seen the lying in state at Greenwich, the great procession, and the trophied car that bore the mighty admiral’s remains to his last home beneath the dome of Paul’s. I might have heard of the crowning of the great usurper of Gaul: of his putting away his Creole wife, and taking an emperor’s daughter; of his congress at Erfurt,—and Talma, his tragedian, playing to a pit full of kings, of his triumphal march to Moscow, and dismal melting away—he and his hosts—therefrom; of his last defeat and spectral appearance among us—a wan, fat, captive man, in a battered cocked hat, on the poop of an English war-ship in Plymouth Sound—just before his transportation to the rock appointed to him to eat his heart upon. I envied the nurse who told upon her fingers the names of the famous victories of the British army under Wellington in Spain; Vimieira, Talavera, Vittoria, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos, Fuentes d’Onore,—mille e tre; in fine—at last, Waterloo. Why had I not lived in that grand time, when the very history itself was acting? Strong men there were who lived before Agamemnon; but for the accident of a few years, I might have seen, at least, Agamemnon in the flesh. ’Tis true, I knew then only about the rejoicings and fireworks, the bell-ringings, and thanksgiving sermons, the Extraordinary Gazettes, and peerages and ribbons bestowed in reward for those deeds of valour. I do not remember that I was told anything about Walcheren, or about New Orleans; about the trade driven by the cutters of gravestones, or the furnishers of funeral urns, broken columns, and extinguished torches; about the sore taxes, and the swollen national debt. So I envied; and much disdained the piping times of peace descended to me; and wondered if the same soldiers I saw or heard about, with scarcely anything more to do than lounge on Brighton Cliff, hunt up surreptitious whisky-stills, expectorate over bridges, and now and then be lapidated at a contested election, could be the descendants of the heroes who had swarmed into the bloody breach at Badajos, and died, shoulder to shoulder, on the plateau of Mont St. Jean.

MR. GAMBLE’S APPRENTICE.

Came 1848, with its revolutions, barricades, states of siege, movements of vast armies, great battles and victories, with their multiplied hecatombs of slain even; but they did not belong to us; victors and vanquished were aliens; and I went on envying the people who had heard the Tower guns fire, and joybells ring, who had seen the fireworks, and read the Extraordinary Gazettes during the first fifteen years of the century! Was I never to live in the history of England? Then, as you all remember, came the great millennium or peace year ’51. Did not sages deliberate as to whether it would not be better to exclude warlike weapons from the congress of industry in Hyde Park? By the side of Joseph Paxton with his crystal verge there seemed to stand a more angelic figure, waving wide her myrtle wand, and striking universal peace through sea and land. It was to be, we fondly imagined, as the immortal blind man of Cripplegate sang:—

“No war or battle’s sound

Was heard the world around:

The idle spear and shield were high uphung,

The hookèd chariot stood

Unstain’d with hostile blood,

The trumpet spake not to the armèd throng;

And kings sate still with awful eye,

As if they sorely knew their Sovereign Lord was by.”

O blind man! it was but for an instant. The trodden grass had scarcely begun to grow again where nave and transept had been, when the wicked world was all in a blaze; and then the very minstrels of peace began to sharpen swords and heat shot red-hot about the Holy Places; and then the Guards went to Gallipoli, and farther on to Bulgaria, and farther on to Old Fort; and the news of the Alma, Inkermann, Balaklava, the Redan, the Tchernaya, the Mamelon, the Malakhoff came to us, hot and hot, and we were all living in the history of England. And lo! it was very much like the history of any other day in the year—or in the years that had gone before. The movements of the allied forces were discussed at breakfast, over the sipping of coffee, the munching of muffins, and the chipping of eggs. Newspaper-writers, parliament-men, club-orators took official bungling or military mismanagement as their cue for the smart leader of the morrow, the stinging query to Mr. Secretary at the evening sitting, or the bow-window exordium in the afternoon; and then everything went on pretty much as usual. We had plenty of time and interest to spare for the petty police case, the silly scandal, the sniggering joke of the day. The cut of the coat and the roasting of the mutton, the non-adhesiveness of the postage-stamp, or the misdemeanors of the servant-maid, were matters of as relative importance to us as the great and gloomy news of battle and pestilence from beyond sea. At least I lived in actual history, and my envy was cured for ever.

I have often thought that next to Asclepiades, the comic cynic,[1] Buonaparte Smith was the greatest philosopher that ever existed. B. Smith was by some thought to have been the original of Jeremy Diddler. He was an inveterate borrower of small sums. On a certain Wednesday in 1821, un sien-ami accosted him. Says the friend: “Smith, have you heard that Buonaparte is dead?” To which retorts the philosopher: “Buonaparte be ——!” but I disdain to quote his irreverent expletive—“Buonaparte be somethinged. Can you lend me ninepence?” What was the history of Europe or its eventualities to Buonaparte Smith? The immediate possession of three-fourths of a shilling was of far more importance to him than the death of that tremendous exile in his eyrie in the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles away. Thus, too, I daresay it was with a certain small philosopher, who lived through a very exciting epoch of the history of England: I mean Little Boy Hogarth. It was his fortune to see the first famous fifteen years of the eighteenth century, when there were victories as immense as Salamanca or Waterloo; when there was a magnificent parallel to Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, existent, in the person of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. I once knew a man who had lived in Paris, and throughout the Reign of Terror, in a second floor of the Rue St. Honoré. “What did you do?” I asked, almost breathlessly, thinking to hear of tumbrils, Carmagnoles, gibbet-lanterns, conventions, poissarde-revolts, and the like. “Eh! parbleu,” he answered, “je m’occupais d’ornithologie.” This philosopher had been quietly birdstuffing while royalty’s head was rolling in the gutter, and Carrier was drowning his hundreds at Nantes. To this young Hogarth of mine, what may Marlborough and his great victories, Anne and her “silver age” of poets, statesmen, and essayists, have been? Would the War of the Succession assist young William in learning his accidence? Would their High Mightinesses of the States-General of the United Provinces supply him with that fourpence he required for purchases of marbles or sweetmeats? What had Marshal Tallard to do with his negotiations with the old woman who kept the apple-stall at the corner of Ship Court? What was the Marquis de Guiscard’s murderous penknife compared with that horn-handled, three-bladed one, which the Hebrew youth in Duke’s Place offered him at the price of twentypence, and which he could not purchase, faute de quoi? At most, the rejoicings consequent on the battles of Blenheim or Ramillies, or Oudenarde or Malplaquet, might have saved William from a whipping promised him for the morrow; yet, even under those circumstances, it is painful to reflect that staying out too late to see the fireworks, or singeing his clothes at some blazing fagot, might have brought upon him on that very morrow a castigation more unmerciful than the one from which he had been prospectively spared.

Every biographer of Hogarth that I have consulted—and I take this opportunity to return my warmest thanks to the courteous book distributor at the British Museum who, so soon as he sees me enter the Reading Room, proceeds, knowing my errand, to overwhelm me with folios, and heap up barricades of eighteenth century lore round me—every one of the biographers, Nichols, Steevens, Ireland, Trusler, Phillips, Cunningham, the author of the article “Thornhill,” in the Biographia Britannica—the rest are mainly copyists from one another, often handing down blunders and perpetuating errors—every Hogarthian Dryasdust makes a clean leap from the hero’s birth and little schoolboy noviciate to the period of his apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble the silversmith. Refined Mr. Walpole, otherwise very appreciative of Hogarth, flirting over the papers he got from Vertue’s widow, indites some delicate manuscript for the typographers of his private press at Strawberry Hill, and tells us that the artist, whom he condescends to introduce into his Anecdotes of Painting, was bound apprentice to a “mean engraver of arms upon plate.” I see nothing mean in the calling which Benvenuto Cellini (they say), and Marc Antonio Raimondi (it is certain), perhaps Albert Durer, too, followed for a time. I have heard of great artists who did not disdain to paint dinner plates, soup tureens, and apothecary’s jars. Not quite unknown to the world is one Rafaelle Sanzio d’Urbino, who designed tapestry for the Flemish weavers, or a certain Flaxman, who was of great service to Mr. Wedgwood, when he began to think that platters and pipkins might be brought to serve some very noble uses. Horace Walpole, cleverest and most refined of dilettanti—who could, and did say the coarsest of things in the most elegant of language—you were not fit to be an Englishman. Fribble, your place was in France. Putative son of Orford, there seems sad ground for the scandal that some of Lord Fanny’s blood flowed in your veins; and that Carr, Lord Hervey, was your real papa. You might have made a collection of the great King Louis’s shoes, the heels and soles of which were painted by Vandermeulen with pictures of Rhenish and Palatinate victories. Mignon of arts and letters, you should have had a petite maison at Monçeaux or at the Roule. Surrounded by your abbés au petit collet, teacups of pâte tendre, fans of chicken-skin painted by Leleux or Lantara, jewelled snuff-boxes, handsome chocolate girls, gems and intaglios, the brothers to those in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, che non si mostrano alle donne, you might have been happy. You were good enough to admire Hogarth, but you didn’t quite understand him. He was too vigorous, downright, virile for you; and upon my word, Horace Walpole, I don’t think you understood anything belonging to England—nor her customs, nor her character, nor her constitution, nor her laws. I don’t think that you would have been anywhere more in your element than in France, to make epigrams and orange-flower water, and to have your head cut off in that unsparing harvest of ’93, with many more noble heads of corn as clever and as worthless for any purpose of human beneficence as yours, Horace.

For you see, this poor Old Bailey schoolmaster’s son—this scion of a line of north-country peasants and swineherds, had in him pre-eminently that which scholiast Warton called the “ἩΘΟΣ,” the strong sledgehammer force of Morality, not given to Walpole—not given to you, fribbles of the present as of the past—to understand. He was scarcely aware of the possession of this quality himself, Hogarth; and when Warton talked pompously of the Ethos in his works, the painter went about with a blank, bewildered face, asking his friends what the doctor meant, and half-inclined to be angry lest the learned scholiast should be quizzing him. It is in the probabilities, however, that William had some little Latin. The dominie in Ship Court did manage to drum some of his grammar disputations into him, and to the end of his life William Hogarth preserved a seemly reverence for classical learning. Often has his etching-needle scratched out some old Roman motto or wise saw upon the gleaming copper. A man need not flout and sneer at the classics because he knows them not. He need not declare Parnassus to be a molehill, because he has lost his alpenstock and cannot pay guides to assist him in that tremendous ascent. There is no necessity to gird at Pyrrha, and declare her to be a worthless jade, because she has never braided her golden hair for you. Of Greek I imagine W. H. to have been destitute; unless, with that ingenious special pleading, which has been made use of to prove that Shakspeare was a lawyer, apothecary, Scotchman, conjuror, poacher, scrivener, courtier—what you please—we assume that Hogarth was a Hellenist because he once sent, as a dinner invite to a friend, a card on which he had sketched a knife, fork, and pasty, and these words, “Come and Eta Beta Pi.” No wonder the ἩΘΟΣ puzzled him. He was not deeply learned in anything save human nature, and of this knowledge even he may have been half unconscious, thinking himself to be more historical painter than philosopher. He never was a connoisseur. He was shamefully disrespectful to the darkened daubs which the picture-quacks palmed on the curious of the period as genuine works of the old masters. He painted “Time smoking a picture,” and did not think much of the collection of Sir Luke Schaub. His knowledge of books was defective; although another scholiast (not Warton) proved, in a most learned pamphlet, that he had illustrated, sans le savoir, above five hundred passages in Horace, Virgil, Juvenal, and Ovid. He had read Swift. He had illustrated and evidently understood Hudibras. He was afraid of Pope, and only made a timid, bird-like, solitary dash at him in one of his earliest charges; and, curiously, Alexander the Great of Twickenham seemed to be afraid of Hogarth, and shook not the slightest drop of his gall vial over him. What a quarrel it might have been between the acrimonious little scorpion of “Twitnam,” and the sturdy bluebottle of Leicester Fields! Imagine Pope versus Hogarth, pencil against pen; not when the painter was old and feeble, half but not quite doting indeed, as when he warred with Wilkes and Churchill, but in the strength and pride of his swingeing satire. Perhaps William and Alexander respected one another; but I think there must have been some tacit “hit me and I’ll hit you” kind of rivalry between them, as between two cocks of two different schools who meet now and then on the public promenades—meet with a significant half-smile and a clenching of the fist under the cuff of the jacket.

To the end of his life Hogarth could not spell; at least, his was not the orthography expected from educated persons in a polite age. In almost the last plate he engraved, the famous portrait of Churchill as a Bear, the “lies,” with which the knots of Bruin’s club are inscribed, are all “lyes.” This may be passed over, considering how very lax and vague were our orthographical canons not more than a century ago, and how many ministers, divines, poets—nay, princes, and crowned heads, and nabobs—permitted themselves greater liberties than “lye” for “lie” in the Georgian era. At this I have elsewhere hinted, and I think the biographers of Hogarth are somewhat harsh in accusing him of crass ignorance, when he only wrote as My Lord Keeper, or as Lady Betty, or as his grace the Archbishop was wont to write. Hogarth, too, was an author. He published a book—to say nothing of the manuscript notes of his life he left. The whole structure, soul, and strength of the Analysis of Beauty are undoubtedly his; although he very probably profited by the assistance—grammatical as well as critical—of some of the clerical dignitaries who loved the good man. That he did so has been positively asserted; but it is forestalling matters to trot out an old man’s hobby, when our beardless lad is not bound ’prentice yet. I cannot, however, defend him from the charges of writing “militia,” “milicia,” “Prussia,” “Prusia”—why didn’t he hazard “Prooshia” at once?[2]—“knuckles,” “nuckles”—oh, fie!—“Chalcedonians,” “Calcidonians;” “pity,” “pitty;” and “volumes,” “volumns.” It is somewhat strange that Hogarth himself tells us that his first graphic exercise was to “draw the alphabet with great correctness.” I am afraid that he never succeeded in writing it very correctly. He hated the French too sincerely to care to learn their language; and it is not surprising that in the first shop card he engraved for his master there should be in the French translation of Mr. Gamble’s style and titles a trifling pleonasm: “bijouxs,” instead of “bijoux.”

No date of the apprenticeship of Hogarth is anywhere given. We must fix it by internal evidence. He was out of his time in the South Sea Bubble year, 1720. On the 29th of April[3] in the same year, he started in business for himself. The neatness and dexterity of the shop card he executed for his master forbid us to assume that he was aught but the most industrious of apprentices. The freedom of handling, the bold sweep of line, the honest incisive play of the graver manifested in this performance could have been attained by no Thomas Idle; and we must, therefore, in justice grant him his full seven years of ’prentice servitude. Say then that William Hogarth was bound apprentice to Mr. Ellis Gamble,[4] at the Golden Angel, in Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, in the winter of the year of our Lord, Seventeen hundred and twelve. He began to engrave arms and cyphers on tankards, salvers, and spoons, at just about the time that it occurred to a sapient legislature to cause certain heraldic hieroglyphics surmounted by the Queen’s crown, and encircled by the words “One halfpenny,” to be engraven on a metal die, the which being the first newspaper stamp ever known to our grateful British nation, was forthwith impressed on every single half-sheet of printed matter issued as a newspaper or a periodical. “Have you seen the new red stamp?” writes his reverence Doctor Swift. Grub Street is forthwith laid desolate. Down go Observators, Examiners, Medleys, Flying Posts, and other diurnals, and the undertakers of the Spectator are compelled to raise the price of their entertaining miscellany.

One of the last head Assay Masters at Goldsmith Hall told one of Hogarth’s biographers, when a very—very old man, that he himself had been ’prentice in Cranbourn Street, and that he remembered very well William serving his time to Mr. Gamble. The register of the boy’s indenture should also surely be among the archives of that sumptuous structure behind the Post Office, where the worthy goldsmiths have such a sideboard of massy plate, and give such jovial banquets to ministers and city magnates. And, doubt it not, Ellis Gamble was a freeman, albeit, ultimately, a dweller at the West-end, and dined with his Company when the goldsmiths entertained the ministers and magnates of those days. Yes, gentles; ministers, magnates, kings, czars, and princes were their guests, and King Charles the Second did not disdain to get tipsy with Sir Robert Viner, Lord Mayor and Alderman, at Guildhall. The monarch’s boon companion got so fond of him as to lend him, dit-on, enormous sums of money. More than that, he set up a brazen statue of the royal toper in the Stocks flower-market at the meeting of Lombard Street and the Poultry. Although it must be confessed that the effigy had originally been cast for John Sobieski trampling on the Turk. The Polish hero had a Carlovingian periwig given to him, and the prostrate and miscreant Moslem was “improved” into Oliver Cromwell. [Mem.:—A pair of correctional stocks having given their name to the flower-market; on the other hand, may not the market have given its name to the pretty, pale, red flowers, very dear to Cockneys, and called “stocks?”]

How was William’s premium paid when he was bound ’prentice? Be it remembered that silver-plate engraving, albeit Mr. Walpole of Strawberry Hill calls it “mean,” was a great and cunning art and mystery. These engravers claimed to descend in right line from the old ciseleurs and workers in niello of the middle ages. Benvenuto, as I have hinted, graved as well as modelled. Marc Antonio flourished many a cardinal’s hat and tassels on a bicchiére before he began to cut from Rafaelle and Giulio Romano’s pictures. The engraver of arms on plate was the same artist who executed delightful arabesques and damascenings on suits of armour of silver and Milan steel. They had cabalistic secrets, these workers of the precious, these producers of the beautiful. With the smiths, “back-hammering” and “boss-beating” were secrets;—parcel-gilding an especial mystery; the bluish-black composition for niello a recipe only to be imparted to adepts. With the engravers, the “cross-hatch” and the “double cypher,” as I cursorily mentioned at the end of the last chapter, were secrets. A certain kind of cross-hatching went out with Albert Durer, and had since been as undiscoverable as the art of making the real ruby tint in glass. No beggar’s brat, no parish protégé, could be apprenticed to this delicate, artistic, and responsible calling. For in graving deep, tiny spirals of gold and silver curl away from the trenchant tool, and there is precious ullage in chasing and burnishing—spirals and ullage worth money in the market. Ask the Jews in Duke’s Place, who sweat the guineas in horsehair bags, and clip the Jacobuses, and rasp the new-milled money with tiny files, if there be not profit to be had from the minutest surplusage of gold and silver.

Goldsmiths and silversmiths were proud folk. They pointed to George Heriot, King James’s friend, and the great things he did. They pointed to the peerage. Did not a Duke of Beaufort, in 1683, marry a daughter of Sir Josiah Child, goldsmith and banker? Was not Earl Tylney, his son, half-brother to Dame Elizabeth Howland, mother of a Duchess of Bedford, one of whose daughters married the Duke of Bridgewater, another, the Earl of Essex? Was not Sir William Ward, goldsmith, father to Humble Ward, created Baron Ward by Charles I.? and from him springs there not the present Lord Dudley and Ward?[5] O you grand people who came over with the Conqueror, where would you be now without your snug city marriages, your comfortable alliances with Cornhill and Chepe? Leigh of Stoneleigh comes from a lord mayor of Queen Bess’s time. Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, married an alderman’s daughter two years ere Hogarth was apprenticed. The ancestor to the Lords Clifton was agent to the London Adventurers in Oliver’s time, and acquired his estate in their service. George the Second’s Earl of Rockingham married the daughter of Sir Henry Furnese, the money-lender and stock-jobber. The great Duke of Argyll and Greenwich married a lord mayor’s niece. The Earl of Denbigh’s ancestor married the daughter of Basil Firebrace, the wine merchant. Brewers, money-scriveners, Turkey merchants, Burgomasters of Utrecht’s daughters,—all these married blithely into the haute pairie. If I am wrong in my genealogies, ’tis Daniel Defoe who is to blame, not I; for that immortal drudge of literature is my informant. Of course such marriages never take place now. Alliances between the sacs et parchemins are never heard of. Mayfair never meets the Mansion House, nor Botolph Lane Belgravia, save at a Ninth of November banquet. I question if I am not inopportune, and impertinent even, in hinting at the dukes and belted earls who married the rich citizens’ daughters, were it not that by and by ’prentice Hogarth will paint some scenes from a great life drama full of Warton’s ἩΘΟΣ, called Marriage à la Mode. Ah! those two perspectives seen through the open windows! In the first, the courtyard of the proud noble’s mansion; in the last, busy, mercantile London Bridge: court and city, city and court, and which the saddest picture!

Dominie Hogarth had but a hard time of it, and must have been pinched in a gruesome manner to make both ends meet. That dictionary of his, painfully compiled, and at last with infinite care and labour completed, brought no grist to the mill in Ship Court. The manuscript was placed in the hands of a bookseller, who did what booksellers often do when one places manuscripts in their hands. He let it drop. “The booksellers,” writes Hogarth himself, “used my father with great cruelty.” In his loving simplicity he tells us that many of the most eminent and learned persons in England, Ireland, and Scotland, wrote encomiastic notices of the erudition and diligence displayed in the work, but all to no purpose. I suppose the bookseller’s final answer was similar to that Hogarth has scribbled in the Manager Rich’s reply to Tom Rakewell, in the prison scene:—“Sir, I have read your play, and it will not doo.” A dreadful, heartrending trade was average authorship, even in the “silver age” of Anna Augusta. A lottery, if you will: the prizeholders secretaries of state, ambassadors, hangers-on to dukes and duchesses, gentlemen ushers to baby princesses, commissioners of hackney coaches or plantations; but innumerable possessors of blanks. Walla Billa! they were in evil case. For them the garret in Grub or Monmouth Street, or in Moorfields; for them the Welshwoman dunning for the milkscore; for them the dirty bread flung disdainfully by bookselling wretches like Curll. For them the shrewish landlady, the broker’s man, the catchpole, the dedication addressed to my lord, and which seldom got beyond his lacquey;—hold! let me mind my Hogarth and his silver-plate engraving. Only a little may I touch on literary woes when I come to the picture of the Distressed Poet. For the rest, the calamities of authors have been food for the commentaries of the wisest and most eloquent of their more modern brethren, and my bald philosophizings thereupon can well be spared.

But this premium, this indenture money, this ’prentice fee for young William: unde derivatur? In the beginning, as you should know, this same ’prentice fee was but a sort of “sweetener,” peace-offering, or pot de vin to the tradesman’s wife. The ’prentice’s mother slipped a few pieces into madam’s hand when the boy put his finger on the blue seal. The money was given that mistresses should be kind to the little lads; that they should see that the trenchers they scraped were not quite bare, nor the blackjacks they licked quite empty; that they should give an eye to the due combing and soaping of those young heads, and now and then extend a matronly ægis, lest Tommy or Billy should have somewhat more cuffing and cudgelling than was quite good for them. By degree this gift money grew to be demanded as a right; and by-and-by comes thrifty Master Tradesman, and pops the broad pieces into his till, calling them premium. Poor little shopkeepers in this “silver age” will take a ’prentice from the parish for five pounds, or from an acquaintance that is broken, for nothing perhaps, and will teach him the great arts and mysteries of sweeping out the shop, sleeping under the counter, fetching his master from the tavern or the mughouse when a customer comes in, or waiting at table; but a rich silversmith or mercer will have as much as a thousand pounds with an apprentice. There is value received on either side. The master is, and generally feels, bound to teach his apprentice everything he knows, else, as worthy Master Defoe puts it, it is “somewhat like Laban’s usage to Jacob, viz. keeping back the beloved Rachel, whom he served seven years for, and putting him off with a blear-eyed Leah in her stead;” and again, it is “sending him into the world like a man out of a ship set ashore among savages, who, instead of feeding him, are indeed more ready to eat him up and devour him.” You have little idea of the state, pomp, and circumstance of a rich tradesman, when the eighteenth century was young. Now-a-days, when he becomes affluent, he sells his stock and good-will, emigrates from the shop-world, takes a palace in Tyburnia or a villa at Florence, and denies that he has ever been in trade at all. Retired tailors become country squires, living at “Places” and “Priories.” Enriched ironmongers and their families saunter about Pau, and Hombourg, and Nice, passing for British Brahmins, from whose foreheads the yellow streak has never been absent since the earth first stood on the elephant, and the elephant on the tortoise, and the tortoise on nothing that I am aware of, save the primeval mud from which you and I, and the Great Mogul, and the legless beggar trundling himself along in a gocart, and all humanity, sprang. But then, Anna D. G., it was different. The tradesman was nothing away from his shop. In it he was a hundred times more ostentatious. He may have had his country box at Hampstead, Highgate, Edmonton, Edgeware; but his home was in the city. Behind the hovel stuffed with rich merchandise, sheltered by a huge timber bulk, and heralded to passers by an enormous sheet of iron and painters’ work—his Sign—he built often a stately mansion, with painted ceilings, with carved wainscoting or rich tapestry and gilt leather-work, with cupboards full of rich plate, with wide staircases, and furniture of velvet and brocade. To the entrance of the noisome cul-de-sac, leading to the carved and panelled door (with its tall flight of steps) of the rich tradesman’s mansion, came his coach—yes, madam, his coach, with the Flanders mares, to take his wife and daughters for an airing. In that same mansion, behind the hovel of merchandise, uncompromising Daniel Defoe accuses the tradesman of keeping servants in blue liveries richly laced, like unto the nobility’s. In that same mansion the tradesman holds his Christmas and Shrovetide feasts, the anniversaries of his birthday and his wedding-day, all with much merrymaking and junketing, and an enormous amount of eating and drinking. In that same mansion, in the fulness of time and trade, he dies; and in that same mansion, upon my word, he lies in state,—yes, in state: on a lit de parade, under a plumed tester, with flambeaux and sconces, with blacks and weepers, with the walls hung with sable cloth, et cætera, et cætera, et cætera.[6] ’Tis not only “Vulture Hopkins” whom a “thousand lights attend” to the tomb, but very many wealthy tradesmen are so buried, and with such pomp and ceremony. Not till the mid-reign of George the Third did this custom expire.

[I should properly in a footnote, but prefer in brackets, to qualify the expression “hovel,” as applied to London tradesmen’s shops at this time, 1712-20. The majority, indeed, merit no better appellation: the windows oft-times are not glazed, albeit the sign may be an elaborate and even artistic performance, framed in curious scroll-work, and costing not unfrequently a hundred pounds. The exceptions to the structural poverty of the shops themselves are to be found in the toymen’s—mostly in Fleet Street,—and the pastrycooks’—mainly in Leadenhall. There is a mania for toys; and the toyshop people realize fortunes. Horace Walpole bought his toy-villa at Strawberry Hill—which he afterwards improved into a Gothic doll’s-house—of a retired Marchand de Joujoux. The toy-merchants dealt in other wares besides playthings. They dealt in cogged dice. They dealt in assignations and billet-doux. They dealt in masks and dominos. Counsellor Silvertongue may have called at the toyshop coming from the Temple, and have there learnt what hour the countess would be at Heidegger’s masquerade. Woe to the wicked city! Thank Heaven we can go and purchase Noah’s arks and flexible acrobats for our children now, without rubbing shoulders with Counsellor Silvertongue or Lord Fanny Sporus, on their bad errands. Frequented as they were by rank and fashion, the toyshops threw themselves into outward decoration. Many of these shops were kept by Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, and it has ever been the custom of that fantastic nation to gild the outside of pills, be the inside ever so nauseous. Next in splendour to the toyshops were the pastrycooks. Such a bill as can be seen of the charges for fresh furnishing one of these establishments about Twelfth Night time! “Sash windows, all of looking-glass plates; the walls of the shop lined up with galley-tiles in panels, finely painted in forest-work and figures; two large branches of candlesticks; three great glass lanterns; twenty-five sconces against the wall; fine large silver salvers to serve sweetmeats; large high stands of rings for jellies; painting the ceiling, and gilding the lanterns, the sashes, and the carved work!” Think of this, Master Brook! What be your Cafés des Mille Colonnes, your Véfours, your Vérys, your Maisons-dorées, after this magnificence? And at what sum, think you, does the stern censor, crying out against it meanwhile as wicked luxury and extravagance, estimate this Arabian Nights’ pastrycookery? At three hundred pounds sterling! Grant that the sum represents six hundred of our money. The Lorenzos the Magnificent, of Cornhill and Regent Street, would think little of as many thousands for the building and ornamentation of their palaces of trade. Not for selling tarts or toys though. The tide has taken a turn; yet some comfortable reminiscences of the old celebrity of the city toy and tart shops linger between Temple Bar and Leadenhall. Farley, you yet delight the young. Holt, Birch, Button, Purssell, at your sober warehouses the most urbane and beautiful young ladies—how pale the pasty exhalations make them!—yet dispense the most delightful of indigestions.]

So he must have scraped this apprenticeship money together, Dominie Hogarth: laid it by, by cheeseparing from his meagre school fees, borrowed it from some rich scholar who pitied his learning and his poverty, or perhaps become acquainted with Ellis Gamble, who may have frequented the club held at the “Eagle and Child,” in the little Old Bailey. “A wonderful turn for limning has my son,” I think I hear Dominie Hogarth cry, holding up some precocious cartoon of William’s. “I doubt not, sir, that were he to study the humanities of the Italian bustos, and the just rules of Jesuit’s perspective, and the anatomies of the learned Albinus, that he would paint as well as Signor Verrio, who hath lately done that noble piece in the new hall Sir Christopher hath built for the blue-coat children in Newgate Street.” “Plague on the Jesuits,” answers honest (and supposititious) Mr. Ellis Gamble. “Plague on all foreigners and papists, goodman Hogarth. If you will have your lad draw bustos and paint ceilings, forsooth, you must get one of the great court lords to be his patron, and send him to Italy, where he shall learn not only the cunningness of limning, but to dance, and to dice, and to break all the commandments, and to play on the viol-di-gamby. But if you want to make an honest man and a fair tradesman of him, Master Hogarth, and one who will be a loyal subject to the Queen, and hate the French, you shall e’en bind him ’prentice to me; and I will be answerable for all his concernments, and send him to church and catechize, and all at small charges to you.” Might not such a conversation have taken place? I think so. Is it not very probable that the lad Hogarth being then some fourteen years old, was forthwith combed his straightest, and brushed his neatest, and his bundle or his box of needments being made up by the hands of his loving mother and sisters, despatched westward, and with all due solemnity of parchment and blue seal, bound ’prentice to Mr. Ellis Gamble? I am sure, by the way in which he talks of the poor old Dominie and the dictionary, that he was a loving son. I know he was a tender brother. Good Ellis Gamble—the lad being industrious, quick, and dexterous of hand—must have allowed him to earn some journeyman’s wages during his ’prentice-time; for that probation being out, he set not only himself, but his two sisters, Mary and Ann, up in business. They were in some small hosiery line, and William engraved a shop-card for them, which did not, I am afraid, prosper with these unsubstantial spinsters any more than did the celebrated lollipop emporium established in The House with the Seven Gables. One sister survived him, and to her, by his will, he left an annuity of eighty pounds.

Already have I spoken of the Leicester Square gold and silver smith’s style and titles. It is meet that you should peruse them in full:—

So to Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, is William Hogarth bound for seven long years. Very curious is it to mark how old trades and old types of inhabitants linger about localities. They were obliged to pull old Cranbourn Street and Cranbourn Alley quite down before they could get rid of the silversmiths, and even now I see them sprouting forth again round about the familiar haunt; the latest ensample thereof being in the shop of a pawnbroker—of immense wealth, I presume, who, gorged and fevered by multitudes of unredeemed pledges, has suddenly astonished New Cranbourn Street with plate-glass windows, overflowing with plate, jewellery, and trinkets; buhl cabinets, gilt consoles, suits of armour, antique china, Pompadour clocks, bronze monsters, and other articles of virtù. But don’t you remember Hamlet’s in the dear old Dædalean, bonnet-building Cranbourn Alley days?—that long low shop whose windows seemed to have no end, and not to have been dusted for centuries; those dim vistas of dish-covers, coffee biggins and centre-pieces. You must think of Crœsus when you speak of the reputed wealth of Hamlet. His stock was said to be worth millions. Seven watchmen kept guard over it every night. Half the aristocracy were in his debt. Royalty itself had gone credit for plate and jewellery at Hamlet’s. Rest his bones, poor old gentleman, if he be departed. He took to building and came to grief. His shop is no more, and his name is but a noise.

In our time, Cranbourn Street and Cranbourn Alley were dingy labyrinths of dish-covers, bonnets, boots, coffee-shops, and cutlers; but what must the place have been like in Hogarth’s time? We can have no realizable conception; for late in George the Third’s reign, or early in George the Fourth’s, the whole pâté of lanes and courts between Leicester Square and St. Martin’s Lane had become so shamefully rotten and decayed, that they half tumbled, and were half pulled down. The labyrinth was rebuilt; but, to the shame of the surveyors and architects of the noble landlord, on the same labyrinthine principle of mean and shabby tenements. You see, rents are rents, little fishes eat sweet, and many a little makes a mickle. Since that period, however, better ideas of architectural economy have prevailed; and, although part of the labyrinth remains, there has still been erected a really handsome thoroughfare from Leicester Square to Long Acre. As a sad and natural consequence, the shops don’t let, while the little tenements in the alleys that remain are crowded; but let us hope that the example of the feverish pawnbroker who has burst out in an eruption of jewellery and art fabrics, may be speedily followed by other professors of bricabrac.

Gay’s Trivia, in miniature, must have been manifest every hour in the day in Hogarth’s Cranbourn Alley. Fights for the wall must have taken place between fops. Sweeps and small coalmen must have interfered with the “nice conduct of a clouded cane.” The beggars must have swarmed here: the blind beggar, and the lame beggar, the stump-in-the-bowl, and the woman bent double: the beggar who blew a trumpet—the impudent varlet!—to announce his destitution;—the beggar with a beard like unto Belisarius, the beggar who couldn’t eat cold meat, the beggar who had been to Ireland and the Seven United Provinces—was this “Philip in the tub” that W. H. afterwards drew?—the beggar in the blue apron, the leathern cap, and the wen on his forehead, who was supposed to be so like the late Monsieur de St. Evremonde, Governor of Duck Island; not forgetting the beggar in the ragged red coat and the black patch over his eye, who by his own showing had been one of the army that swore so terribly in Flanders, and howled Tom D’Urfey’s song, “The Queene’s old souldiers, and the ould souldiers of the Queene.” Then there was the day watchman, who cried the hour when nobody wanted to hear it, and to whose “half-past one,” the muddy goose that waddled after him, cried “quack.” And then there must have been the silent mendicant, of whom Mr. Spectator says (1712), “He has nothing to sell, but very gravely receives the bounty of the people for no other merit than the homage due to his manner of signifying to them that he wants a subsidy.”[7] Said I not truly that the old types will linger in the old localities? What is this silent mendicant but the “serious poor young man” we have all seen standing mute on the edge of the kerb, his head downcast, his hands meekly folded before him, himself attired in speckless but shabby black, and a spotless though frayed white neckerchief?

Mixed up among the beggars, among the costermongers and hucksters who lounge or brawl on the pavement, undeterred by fear of barrow-impounding policemen; among the varlets who have “young lambs to sell”—they have sold those sweet cakes since Elizabeth’s time;—among the descendants and progenitors of hundreds of “Tiddy Dolls,” and “Colly Molly Puffs;” among bailiffs prowling for their prey, and ruffian cheats and gamesters from the back-waters of Covent Garden; among the fellows with hares-and-tabors, the matchsellers, the masksellers—for in this inconceivable period ladies and gentlemen wanted vizors at twelve o’clock at noon—be it admitted, nevertheless, that the real “quality” ceased to wear them about the end of William’s reign—among the tradesmen, wigs awry, and apron-girt, darting out from their shops to swallow their matutinal pint of wine, or dram of strong waters; among all this tohu-bohu, this Galimatias of small industries and small vices, chairmen come swaggering and jolting along with the gilded sedans between poles; and lo! the periwigged, Mechlin-laced, gold-embroidered beau hands out Belinda, radiant, charming, powdered, patched, fanned, perfumed, who is come to Cranbourn Alley to choose new diamonds. And more beaux’ shins are wounded by more whalebone petticoats, and Sir Fopling Flutter treads on Aramanta’s brocaded queue; and the heavens above are almost shut out by the great projecting, clattering signs. Conspicuous among them is the “Golden Angel,” kept by Ellis Gamble.

Mark, too, that Leicester Fields were then as now the favourite resort of foreigners. Green Street, Bear Street, Castle Street, Panton Street, formed a district called, as was a purlieu in Westminster too, by the Sanctuary, “Petty France.” Theodore Gardelle, the murderer, lived about Leicester Fields. Legions of high-dried Mounseers, not so criminal as he, but peaceable, honest, industrious folk enough, peered out of the garret windows of Petty France with their blue, bristly gills, red nightcaps, and filthy indoor gear. They were always cooking hideous messes, and made the already unwholesome atmosphere intolerable with garlic. They wrought at water-gilding, clock-making, sign-painting, engraving for book illustrations—although in this department the Germans and Dutch were dangerous rivals. A very few offshoots from the great Huguenot colony in Spitalfields were silk-weavers. There were then as now many savoury, tasting and unsavoury-smelling French ordinaries; and again, then as now, some French washerwomen and clearstarchers. But the dwellers in Leicester Fields slums and in Soho were mainly Catholics frequenting the Sardinian ambassador’s chapel in Duke Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. French hairdressers and perfumers lived mostly under Covent Garden Piazza, in Bow Street and in Long Acre. Very few contrived to pass Temple Bar. The citizens appeared to have as great a horror of them as of the players, and so far as they could, by law, banished them their bounds, rigorously. French dancing, fencing, and posture masters, and quack doctors, lived at the court end of the town, and kept, many of them, their coaches. Not a few of the grinning, fantastic French community were spies of the magnificent King Louis. Sunday was the Frenchmen’s great day, and the Mall in St. James’s park their favourite resort and fashionable promenade. It answered for them all the purposes which the old colonnade of the Quadrant was wont to serve, and which the flags of Regent Street serve now. On Sunday the blue, bristly gills were clean shaven, the red nightcaps replaced by full-bottomed wigs, superlatively curled and powdered. The filthy indoor gear gave way to embroidered coats of gay colours, with prodigious cuffs, and the skirts stiffened with buckram. Lacquer-hilted swords stuck out behind them. Paste buckles glittered in their shoon. Glass rings bedecked their lean paws. They held their tricornes beneath their arms, flourished their canes and inhaled their snuff with the best beaux on town. We are apt to laugh at the popular old caricatures of the French Mounseer, and think those engravings unkind, unnatural, and overdrawn; but just shave me this bearded, moustached, braided and be-ringed Jules, Gustave, or Adolphe who comes swaggering to-day from the back of Sherrard Street or Marylebone Street, round by the County Fire Office into Regent Street; shave me the modern Mounseer quite clean, clap a periwig on his head, a chapeau bras beneath his arm, a sword by his side; clothe his shrunken limbs in eighteenth century costume; or better, see the French comedian in some old comedy at the Français or the Odéon, and you will cry out at once: “There is the Mounseer whom Hogarth, Gilray, Bunbury, and Rowlandson drew.” And yet I owe an apology, here, to the Mounseers; for it was very likely some courteous, albeit grimacing denizen of Petty France who supplied our Hogarth with the necessary French translation of the gold and silver smith’s style and titles to engrave on his shop-card.

I am to be pardoned, I hope, for lingering long in Leicester Fields. I shall have to return to the place often, for William Hogarth much affected it. In Leicester Fields he lived years afterwards when he was celebrated and prosperous. Where Pagliano’s Hotel is now, had he his house, the sign, the “Golden Head,” and not the “Painter’s Head,” as I have elsewhere put it. There he died. There his widow lived for many—many years afterwards, always loving and lamenting the great artist and good man, her husband. It was about Leicester Fields too—nay, unless I mistake, in Cranbourn Alley itself, that old nutcracker-faced Nollekens the sculptor pointed out William to Northcote the painter. “There,” he cried, “see, there’s Hogarth.” He pointed to where stood a little stout-faced sturdy man in a sky-blue coat, who was attentively watching a quarrel between two street boys. It was Mr. Mulready’s “Wolf and the Lamb” story a little before its time. The bigger boy oppressed the smaller; whereupon Hogarth patted the diminutive victim on the head, and gave him a coin, and said with something like a naughty word that he wouldn’t stand it, if he was the small boy: no, not he.

Seven years at cross-hatch and double cypher. Seven years turning and re-turning salvers and tankards on the leathern pad, and every month and every year wielding the graver and burnisher with greater strength and dexterity. What legions of alphabets, in double cypher, he must have “drawn with great correctness;” what dictionary loads of Latin and Norman-French mottoes he must have flourished beneath the coats of arms! Oh, the scutcheons he must have blazoned in the symbolism of lines! Blank for argent, dots for or, horizontal for azure, vertical for gules, close-chequer for sable. The griffins, the lions, the dragons, rampant, couchant, regardant, langued, gorged, he must have drawn! The chevrons, the fesses, the sinoples of the first! He himself confesses that his just notions of natural history were for a time vitiated by the constant contemplation and delineation of these fabulous monsters, and that when he was out of his time he was compelled to unlearn all his heraldic zoology. To the end his dogs were very much in the “supporter” style, and the horses in the illustrations in Hudibras strongly resemble hippogriffs.

He must have been studying, and studying hard, too, at drawing, from the round and plane during his ’prentice years. Sir Godfrey Kneller had a kind of academy at his own house in 1711; but Sir James Thornhill did not establish his till long after Hogarth had left the service of Ellis Gamble. Hogarth tells us that as a boy he had access to the studio of a neighbouring painter. Who may this have been? Francis Hoffmann; Hubertz; Hulzberg, the warden of the Lutheran Church in the Savoy; Samuel Moore of the Custom House? Perhaps his earliest instructor was some High Dutch etcher of illustrations living eastwards to be near the booksellers in Paternoster Row; or perhaps the “neighbouring painter” was an artist in tavern and shop signs. Men of no mean proficiency wrought in that humble but lucrative line of emblematic art in Anna’s “silver age.”

That Hogarth possessed considerable graphic powers when he engraved Ellis Gamble’s shop-card, you have only to glance at the angel holding the palm above the commercial announcement, to be at once convinced. This figure, however admirably posed and draped, may have been copied from some foreign frontispiece. The engraving, however, as an example of pure line, is excellent. We are left to wonder whether it was by accident or by design of quaint conceit that the right hand of the angel has a finger too many.

Of Hogarth’s adventures during his apprenticeship, with the single exception of his holiday excursion to Highgate, when there was a battle-royal in a suburban public-house, and when he drew a capital portrait of one of the enraged combatants, the Muse is dumb. He led, very probably, the life of nineteen-twentieths of the London ’prentices of that period: only he must have worked harder and more zealously than the majority of his fellows. Concerning the next epoch of his life the Muse deigns to be far more explicit, and, I trust, will prove more eloquent on your worships’ behalf. I have done with the mists and fogs that envelop the early part of my hero’s career, and shall be able to trace it now year by year until his death.

FOOTNOTES

[1] According to Tertullian, Asclepiades, the comic cynic, advocated riding on cow-back as the most healthful, and especially the most independent means of locomotion in the world; for, said he, she goes so slowly that she can never get tired. Wherever there is a field, there is her banquet; and you may live on her milk all the way. But I think that the most economical and the merriest traveller on record was the Giant Hurtali (though the Rabbins will have that it was Og, King of Basan), who sat astride the roof of Noah’s ark à la cockhorse, steering that great galleon with his gigantic legs, getting his washing for nothing, and having his victuals handed up to him through the chimney.—See Menage and Le Pelletier; l’Arche de Noé, c. 25.

[2] This “Prusia” occurred in the dedication of the “March to Finchley” to Frederick the Great. His friends quizzed him a good deal about the error, and he undertook to correct it by hand in every proof of the plate sold. But he soon grew tired of making the mark ~ with a pen over the single s, and at last had the offensive “Prusia” burnished out of the copper, and the orthodox “Prussia” substituted. But even then the quizzers were not tired, and showed him a Prussian thaler bearing Frederick’s effigy, and the legend of which spoke of him as Borussiæ Rex. ’Twas the story of the old man and his donkey over again.

[3] Till the legislature deprives the people of their “eleven days,” I am using the old-style calendar.

[4] I have seen it somewhere stated that Gamble was a “silversmith of eminence,” residing on or near Snow Hill. “Cela n’empêche pas,” as the Hanoverian Queen on her death-bed said to her repentant husband. I see no reason why Gamble should not have been originally of Snow Hill, and have emigrated before 1720 to the Court end of the town.

[5] “The Complete English Tradesman,” i. 234.

[6] “Let it be interred after the manner of the country, and the laws of the place, and the dignity of the person. And Ælian tells us that excellent persons were buried in purple, and men of an ordinary fortune had their graves only trimmed with branches of olive and mourning flowers.” So Bishop Taylor in Holy Dying. The tide of feeling in this age of ours sets strongly against mortuary pomp; yet should we remember that with the old pomps and obsequies of our forefathers much real charity was mingled. All the money was not spent in wax-tapers and grim feastings. At the death of a wealthy citizen, hundreds of poor men and women had complete suits of mourning given to them, and the fragments of the “funeral baked meats” furnished forth scores of pauper tables before evensong. Lazarus had his portion when Dives passed away. Now, who profits by a funeral beyond half a dozen lacqueys, and Messrs. Tressel and Hatchment, the undertakers?

[7] I can’t resist the opportunity here to tell a story of a Beggar, the more so, that it made me laugh, and was told me by an Austrian officer; and Austrian officers are not the most laughter-compelling people in the world. My informant happened to alight one day at some post town in Italy, and was at once surrounded by the usual swarm of beggars, who, of course, fought for the honour (and profit) of carrying his baggage. Equally, of course, each beggar took a separate portion of the impedimenta—one a hat-box, one an umbrella, and so on—so that each would claim a separate reward. At the expenditure of much patience, and some small change, the traveller had at last paid each extortionate impostor that which was not due to him; when there approached a reverend, but ragged-looking man, with a long white beard, and who, with an indescribable look of dirty dignity, held out his hand like the rest. The traveller had remarked that this patriarch had stood aloof during the squabble for the luggage, and had moved neither hand nor foot in pretending to carry it. Naturally, before the traveller disbursed more coin, he briefly desired the man with the white beard to define his claim. The reply was, I think, incomparable for cool and dignified impudence. The patriarch drew himself up to his full height, placed his right hand on his breast, and in slow and solemn accents made answer:—“Ed anche io sono stato presente.” “I, too, was present!” Sublime beggar!

Mabel.

I.

In the sunlight:—

Little Mab, the keeper’s daughter, singing by the brooklet’s side,

With her playmates singing carols of the gracious Easter-tide;

And the violet and the primrose make sweet incense for the quire,

In the springlight, when the rosebuds hide the thorns upon the briar.

II.

In the lamplight:—

With a proud defiant beauty, Mab, the fallen, flaunts along,

Speaking sin’s words, wildly laughing, she who sang that Paschal song,

And a mother lies a-dying in the cottage far away,

And a father cries to Heaven, “Thou hast said, ‘I will repay.’”

III.

In the moonlight:—

By the gravestone in the churchyard, Mabel, where her mother sleeps,

Like the tearful saint of Magdala, an Easter vigil keeps:—

There, trailing cruel thorns, storm-drenched, plaining with piteous bleat,

The lost lamb (so her mother prayed) and the Good Shepherd meet.

S. R. H.

Studies in Animal Life.

“Authentic tidings of invisible things;

Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power,

And central peace subsisting at the heart

Of endless agitation.”—The Excursion.

CHAPTER III.

A garden wall, and its traces of past life—Not a breath perishes—A bit of dry moss and its inhabitants—The “Wheel-bearers”—Resuscitation of Rotifers: drowned into life—Current belief that animals can be revived after complete desiccation—Experiments contradicting the belief—Spallanzani’s testimony—Value of biology as a means of culture—Classification of animals: the five great types—Criticism of Cuvier’s arrangement.

Pleasant, both to eye and mind, is an old garden wall, dark with age, gray with lichens, green with mosses of beautiful hues and fairy elegance of form: a wall shutting in some sequestered home, far from “the din of murmurous cities vast:” a home where, as we fondly, foolishly think, Life must needs throb placidly, and all its tragedies and pettinesses be unknown. As we pass alongside this wall, the sight of the overhanging branches suggests an image of some charming nook; or our thoughts wander about the wall itself, calling up the years during which it has been warmed by the sun, chilled by the night airs and the dews, and dashed against by the wild winds of March: all of which have made it quite another wall from what it was when the trowel first settled its bricks. The old wall has a past, a life, a story; as Wordsworth finely says of the mountain, it is “familiar with forgotten years.” Not only are there obvious traces of age in the crumbling mortar and the battered brick, but there are traces, not obvious, except to the inner eye, left by every ray of light, every raindrop, every gust. Nothing perishes. In the wondrous metamorphosis momently going on everywhere in the universe, there is change, but no loss.

Lest you should imagine this to be poetry, and not science, I will touch on the evidence that every beam of light, or every breath of air, which falls upon an object, permanently affects it. In photography we see the effect of light very strikingly exhibited; but perhaps you will object that this proves nothing more than that light acts upon an iodized surface. Yet in truth light acts upon, and more or less alters, the structure of every object on which it falls. Nor is this all. If a wafer be laid on a surface of polished metal, which is then breathed upon, and if, when the moisture of the breath has evaporated, the wafer be shaken off, we shall find that the whole polished surface is not as it was before, although our senses can detect no difference; for if we breathe again upon it, the surface will be moist everywhere except on the spot previously sheltered by the wafer, which will now appear as a spectral image on the surface. Again and again we breathe, and the moisture evaporates, but still the spectral wafer reappears. This experiment succeeds after a lapse of many months, if the metal be carefully put aside where its surface cannot be disturbed. If a sheet of paper, on which a key has been laid, be exposed for some minutes to the sunshine, and then instantaneously viewed in the dark, the key being removed, a fading spectre of the key will be visible. Let this paper be put aside for many months where nothing can disturb it, and then in darkness be laid on a plate of hot metal, the spectre of the key will again appear. In the case of bodies more highly phosphorescent than paper, the spectres of many different objects which may have been laid on in succession will, on warming, emerge in their proper order.[8]

This is equally true of our bodies, and our minds. We are involved in the universal metamorphosis. Nothing leaves us wholly as it found us. Every man we meet, every book we read, every picture or landscape we see, every word or tone we hear, mingles with our being and modifies it. There are cases on record of ignorant women, in states of insanity, uttering Greek and Hebrew phrases, which in past years they had heard their masters utter, without of course comprehending them. These tones had long been forgotten: the traces were so faint that under ordinary conditions they were invisible; but the traces were there, and in the intense light of cerebral excitement they started into prominence, just as the spectral image of the key started into sight on the application of heat. It is thus with all the influences to which we are subjected.

If a garden wall can lead our vagabond thoughts into such speculations as these, surely it may also furnish us with matter for our Studies in Animal Life? Those patches of moss must be colonies. Suppose we examine them? I pull away a small bit, which is so dry that the dust crumbles at a touch; this may be wrapped in a piece of paper—dirt and all—and carried home. Get the microscope ready, and now attend.

I moisten a fragment of this moss with distilled water. Any water will do as well, but the use of distilled water prevents your supposing that the animals you are about to watch were brought in it, and were not already in the moss. I now squeeze the bit between my fingers, and a drop of the contained water—somewhat turbid with dirt—falls on the glass slide, which we may now put on the microscope stage. A rapid survey assures us that there is no animal visible. The moss is squeezed again; and this time little yellowish bodies of an irregular oval are noticeable among the particles of dust and moss. Watch one of these, and presently you will observe a slow bulging at one end, and then a bulging at the other end. The oval has elongated itself into a form not unlike that of a fat caterpillar, except that there is a tapering at one end. Now a forked tail is visible; this fixes on to the glass, while the body sways to and fro. Now the head is drawn in—as if it were swallowed—and, suddenly, in its place are unfolded two broad membranes, having each a circle of waving cilia. The lifeless oval has become a living animal! You have assisted at a resuscitation, not from death by drowning, but by drying: the animal has been drowned into life! The unfolded membranes, with their cilia, have so much the appearance of wheels that the name of “Wheel-bearer” (Rotifera) or “Wheel Animalcule” has been given to the animal.

The Rotifera (also—and more correctly—called Rotatoria) form an interesting study. Let us glance at their organization:—

Fig. 16.

Rotifer Vulgaris. A, with the wheels drawn in (at c). B, with wheels expanded; b, eye spots; c, jaws and teeth; f, alimentary canal; g, embryo; h, embryo further developed; i, water-vascular system; k, vent.

There are many different kinds of Rotifers, varying very materially in size and shape; the males, as was stated in the last chapter, being more imperfectly organized than the females. They may be seen either swimming rapidly through the water by means of the vibratile cilia called “wheels,” because the optical effect is very much that of a toothed-wheel; or crawling along the side of the glass, fastening to it by the head, and then curving the body till the tail is brought up to the spot, which is then fastened on by the tail, and the head is set free. They may also be seen fastened to a weed, or the glass, by the tail, the body waving to and fro, or thrusting itself straight out, and setting the wheels in active motion. In this attitude the aspect of the jaws is very striking. Leuwenhoek mistook it for the pulsation of a heart, which its incessant rhythm much resembles. The tail, and the upper part of the body, have a singular power of being drawn out, or drawn in, like the tube of a telescope. There is sometimes a shell, or carapace, but often the body is covered only with a smooth firm skin, which, however, presents decided indications of being segmented.

The first person who described these Rotifers was the excellent old Leuwenhoek;[9] and his animals were got from the gutter of a house-top. Since then, they have been minutely studied, and have been shown to be, not Infusoria, as Ehrenberg imagined, but Crustacea.[10] Your attention is requested to the one point which has most contributed to the celebrity of these creatures—their power of resuscitation. Leuwenhoek described—what you have just witnessed, namely—the slow resuscitation of the animal (which seemed as dry as dust, and might have been blown about like any particle of dust,) directly a little moisture was brought to it. Spallanzani startled the world with the announcement that this process of drying and moistening—of killing and reviving—could be repeated fifteen times in succession; so that the Rotifer, whose natural term of life is about eighteen days, might, it was said, be dried and kept for years, and at any time revived by moisture. That which seems now no better than a grain of dust will suddenly awaken to the energetic life of a complex organism, and may again be made as dust by evaporation of the water.

This is very marvellous: so marvellous that a mind, trained in the cultivated caution of science, will demand the evidence on which it is based. Two months ago I should have dismissed the doubt with the assurance that the evidence was ample and rigorous, and the fact indisputable. For not only had the fact been confirmed by the united experience of several investigators: it had stood the test of very severe experiment. Thus in 1842, M. Doyère published experiments which seemed to place it beyond scepticism. Under the air-pump he set some moss, together with vessels containing sulphuric acid, which would absorb every trace of moisture. After leaving the moss thus for a week, he removed it into an oven, the temperature of which was raised to 300° Fahrenheit. Yet even this treatment did not prevent the animals from resuscitating when water was added.

In presence of testimony like this, doubt will seem next to impossible. Nevertheless, my own experiments leave me no choice but to doubt. Not having witnessed M. Doyère’s experiment, I am not prepared to say wherein its fallacy lies; but that there is a fallacy, seems to me capable of decisive proof. In M. Pouchet’s recent work[11] I first read a distinct denial of the pretended resuscitation of the Rotifers; this denial was the more startling to me, because I had myself often witnessed the reawakening of these dried animals. Nevertheless, whenever a doubt is fairly started, we have not done justice to it until we have brought it to the test of experiment; accordingly I tested this, and quickly came upon what seems to me the source of the general misconception. Day after day experiments were repeated, varied, and controlled, and with results so unvarying that hesitation vanished; and as some of these experiments are of extreme simplicity, you may verify what I say with little trouble. Squeeze a drop from the moss, taking care that there is scarcely any dirt in it; and, having ascertained that it contains Rotifers, or Tardigrades,[12] alive and moving, place the glass-slide under a bell-glass, to shield it from currents of air, and there allow the water to evaporate slowly, but completely, by means of chloride of calcium, or sulphuric acid, placed under the bell-glass; or, what is still simpler, place a slide with the live animals on the mantelpiece when a fire is burning in the grate. If on the day following you examine this perfectly dry glass, you will see the contracted bodies of the Rotifers, presenting the aspect of yellowish oval bodies; but attempt to resuscitate them by the addition of a little fresh water, and you will find that they do not revive, as they revived when dried in the moss: they sometimes swell a little, and elongate themselves, and you imagine this is a commencement of resuscitation; but continue watching for two or three days, and you will find it goes no further. Never do these oval bodies become active crawling Rotifers; never do they expand their wheels, and set the œsophagus at work. No: the Rotifer once dried is dead, and dead for ever.

But if, like a cautious experimenter, you vary and control the experiment, and beside the glass-slide place a watch-glass containing Rotifers with dirt, or moss, you will find that the addition of water to the contents of the watch-glass will often (not always) revive the animals. What you cannot effect on a glass-slide without dirt, or with very little, you easily effect in a watch-glass with dirt, or moss; and if you give due attention you will find that in each case the result depends upon the quantity of the dirt. And this leads to a clear understanding of the whole mystery; this reconciles the conflicting statements. The reason why Rotifers ever revive is, because they have not been dried—they have not lost by evaporation that small quantity of water which forms an integral constituent of their tissues; and it is the presence of dirt, or moss, which prevents this complete evaporation. No one, I suppose, believes that the Rotifer actually revives after once being dead. If it has a power of remaining in a state of suspended animation, like that of a frozen frog, it can do so only on the condition that its organism is not destroyed; and destroyed it would be, if the water were removed from its tissues: for, strange as it may seem, water is not an accessory, but a constituent element of every tissue; and this cannot be replaced mechanically—it can only be replaced by vital processes. Every one who has made microscopic preparations must be aware that when once a tissue is desiccated, it is spoiled: it will not recover its form and properties on the application of water; because the water was not originally worked into the web by a mere process of imbibition—like water in a sponge—but by a molecular process of assimilation, like albumen in a muscle. Therefore, I say, that desiccation is necessarily death; and the Rotifer which revives cannot have been desiccated. This being granted, we have only to ask, What prevents the Rotifer from becoming completely dried? Experiment shows that it is the presence of dirt, or moss, which does this. The whole marvel of the Rotifer’s resuscitation, therefore, amounts to this:—that if the water in which it lives be evaporated, the animal passes into a state of suspended animation, and remains so, as long as its own water is protected from evaporation.

I am aware that this is not easily to be reconciled with M. Doyère’s experiments, since the application of a temperature so high as 300° Fahr. (nearly a hundred degrees above boiling water) must, one would imagine, have completely desiccated the animals, in spite of any amount of protecting dirt. It is possible that M. Doyère may have mistaken that previously-noted swelling-up of the bodies, on the application of water, for a return to vital activity. If not, I am at a loss to explain the contradiction; for certainly in my experience a much more moderate desiccation—namely, that obtained by simple evaporation over a mantelpiece, or under a large bell-glass—always destroyed the animals, if little or no dirt were present.

The subject has recently been brought before the French Academy of Sciences by M. Davaine, whose experiments[13] lead him to the conclusion that those Rotifers which habitually live in ponds will not revive after desiccation: whereas those which live in moss always do so. I believe the explanation to be this: the Rotifers living in ponds are dried without any protecting dirt, or moss, and that is the reason they do not revive.

After having satisfied myself on this point, I did what perhaps would have saved me some trouble if thought of before. I took down Spallanzani, and read his account of his celebrated experiments. To my surprise and satisfaction, it appeared that he had accurately observed the same facts, but curiously missed their real significance. Nothing can be plainer than the following passage: “But there is one condition indispensable to the resurrection of wheel-animals: it is absolutely necessary that there should be a certain quantity of sand; without it they will not revive. One day I had two wheel-animals traversing a drop of water about to evaporate, which contained very little sand. Three quarters of an hour after evaporation, they were dry and motionless. I moistened them with water to revive them; but in vain, notwithstanding that they were immersed in water many hours. Their members swelled to thrice the original size, but they remained motionless. To ascertain whether the fact was accidental, I spread a portion of sand, containing animals, on a glass slide, and waited till it became dry in order to wet it anew. The sand was carelessly scattered on the glass, so as to be a thin covering on some parts, and on others in a very small quantity: here the animals did not revive: but all that were in those parts with abundance of sand revived.”[14] He further says that if sand be spread out in considerable quantities in some places, much less in others, and very little in the rest, on moistening it the revived animals will be numerous in the first, less numerous in the second, and none at all in the third.

It is not a little remarkable that observations so precise as these should have for many years passed unregarded, and not led to the true explanation of the mystery. Perhaps an inherent love of the marvellous made men greedily accept the idea of resuscitation, and indisposed them to attempt an explanation of it. Spallanzani’s own attempt is certainly not felicitous. He supposes that the dust prevents the lacerating influence of the air from irritating and injuring the animals. And this explanation is accepted by his Translator.

[Since the foregoing remarks were in type, M. Gavarret has published (Annales des Sciences Naturelles, 1859, xi. p. 315) the account of his experiments on Rotifers and Tardigrades, in which he found that after subjecting the moss to a desiccation the most complete according to our present means, the animals revived after twenty-four hours’ immersion of the moss in water. This result seems flatly to contradict the result I arrived at; but only seems to contradict it, for in my experiments the animals, not the moss, were subjected to desiccation. Nevertheless, I confess that my confidence was shaken by experiments so precise, and performed by so distinguished an investigator, and I once more resumed the experiments, feeling persuaded that the detection of the fallacy, wherever it might be, would be well worth the trouble. The results of these controlling experiments are all I can find room for here:—Whenever the animals were completely separated from the dirt, they perished; in two cases there was a very little dirt—a mere film, so to speak—in the watch-glass, and glass-cell, and this, slight as it was, sufficed to protect two out of eight, and three out of ten Rotifers, which revived on the second day; the others did not revive even on the third day after their immersion. In one instance, a thin covering-glass was placed over the water on the slide, and the evaporation of the water seemed complete, yet this glass-cover sufficed to protect a Rotifer, which revived in three hours.

If we compare these results with those obtained by M. Davaine, we can scarcely avoid the conclusion that it is only when the desiccation of the Rotifers is prevented by the presence of a small quantity of moss, or of dirt—between the particles of which they find shelter—that they revive on the application of water. And even in the severe experiments of M. Doyère and M. Gavarret, some of the animals must have been thus protected; and I call particular attention to the fact that, although some animals revived, others always perished. But if the organization of the Rotifer, or Tardigrade, is such that it can withstand desiccation—if it only needs the fresh applications of moisture to restore its activity—all, or almost all, the animals experimented on ought to revive; and the fact that only some revive leads us to suspect that these have not been desiccated—a suspicion which is warranted by direct experiments. I believe, then, that the discrepancy amounts to this: investigators who have desiccated the moss containing animals, find some of the animals revive on the application of moisture; but those who desiccate the animals themselves, will find no instances of revival.]

The time spent on these Rotifers will not have been misspent if it has taught us the necessity of caution in all experimental inquiries. Although Experiment is valuable—nay, indispensable—as a means of interrogating Nature, it is constantly liable to mislead us into the idea that we have rightly interrogated, and rightly interpreted the replies; and this danger arises from the complexity of the cases with which we are dealing, and our proneness to overlook, or disregard, some seemingly trifling condition—a trifle which may turn out of the utmost importance. The one reason why the study of Science is valuable as a means of culture, over and above its own immediate objects, is that in it the mind learns to submit to realities, instead of thrusting its figments in the place of realities—endeavours to ascertain accurately what the order of Nature is, and not what it ought to be, or might be. The one reason why, of all sciences, Biology is pre-eminent as a means of culture, is, that owing to the great complexity of all the cases it investigates, it familiarizes the mind with the necessity of attending to all the conditions, and it thus keeps the mind alert. It cultivates caution, which, considering the tendency there is in men to “anticipate Nature,” is a mental tonic of inestimable worth. I am far from asserting that biologists are more accurate reasoners than other men; indeed, the mass of crude hypothesis which passes unchallenged by them, is against such an idea. But whether its advantages be used or neglected, the truth nevertheless is, that Biology, from the complexity of its problems, and the necessity of incessant verification of its details, offers greater advantages for culture than any other branch of science.

I have once or twice mentioned the words Mollusc and Crustacean, to which the reader unfamiliar with the language of Natural History will have attached but vague ideas; and although I wanted to explain these, and convey a distinct conception of the general facts of Classification, it would have then been too great an interruption. So I will here make an opportunity, and finish the chapter with an indication of the five Types, or plans of structure, under one of which every animal is classed. Without being versed in science, you discern at once whether the book before you is mathematical, physical, chemical, botanical, or physiological. In like manner, without being versed in Natural History, you ought to know whether the animal before you belongs to the Vertebrata, Mollusca, Articulata, Radiata, or Protozoa.

Fig. 17.

Male Triton, or Water-Newt.

A glance at the contents of our glass vases will yield us samples of each of these five divisions of the animal kingdom. We begin with this Triton. It is a representative of the Vertebrate division, or sub-kingdom. You have merely to remember that it possesses a backbone and an internal skeleton, and you will at once recognize the cardinal character which makes this Triton range under the same general head as men, elephants, whales, birds, reptiles, or fishes. All these, in spite of their manifold differences, have this one character in common:—they are all backboned; they have all an internal skeleton; they are all formed according to one general type. In all vertebrate animals the skeleton is found to be identical in plan. Every bone in the body of a triton has its corresponding bone in the body of a man, or of a mouse; and every bone preserves the same connection with other bones, no matter how unlike may be the various limbs in which we detect its presence. Thus, widely as the arm of a man differs from the fin of a whale, or the wing of a bird, or the wing of a bat, or the leg of a horse, the same number of bones, and the same connections of the bones, are found in each. A fin is one modified form of the typical limb; an arm is another; a wing another. That which is true of the limbs, is also true of all the organs; and it is on this ground that we speak of the vertebrate type. From fish to man one common plan of structure prevails; and the presence of a backbone is the index by which to recognize this plan.

The Triton has been wriggling grotesquely in our grasp while we have made him our text, and, now he is restored to his vase, plunges to the bottom with great satisfaction at his escape. This water-snail, crawling slowly up the side of the vase, and cleaning it of the green growth of microscopic plants, which he devours, shall be our representative of the second great division—the Mollusca. I cannot suggest any obvious character so distinctive as a backbone, by which the word Mollusc may at once call up an idea of the type which prevails in the group. It won’t do to say “shell-fish,” because many molluscs have no shells, and many animals which have shells are not molluscs. The name was originally bestowed on account of the softness of the animals. But they are not softer than worms, and much less so than jelly-fish. You may know that snails and slugs, oysters and cuttlefish, are molluscs; but if you want some one character by which the type may be remembered, you must fix on the imperfect symmetry of the mollusc’s organs. I say imperfect symmetry, because it is an error, though a common one, to speak of the mollusc’s body not being bilateral—that is to say, of its not being composed of two symmetrical halves. A vertebrate animal may be divided lengthwise, and each half will closely resemble the other; the backbone forms, as it were, an axis, on either side of which the organs are disposed; but the mollusc is said to have no such axis, no such symmetry. I admit the absence of an axis, but I deny the total absence of symmetry. Many of its organs are as symmetrical as those of a vertebrate animal—i.e. the eyes, the feelers, the jaws—and the gills in Cuttlefish, Eolids, and Pteropods; while, on the other hand, several organs in the vertebrate animal are as unsymmetrical as any of those in the mollusc, i.e. the liver, spleen, pancreas, stomach, and intestines.[15] As regards bilateral structure, therefore, it is only a question of degree. The vertebrate animal is not entirely symmetrical, nor is the mollusc entirely unsymmetrical. But there is a characteristic disposition of the nervous system peculiar to molluscs: it neither forms an axis for the body—as it does in the Vertebrata and Articulata—nor a centre—as it does in the Radiata—but is altogether irregular and unsymmetrical. This will be intelligible from the following diagram of the nervous systems of a Mollusc and an insect, with which that of a Star-fish may be compared (Fig. 18). Here you perceive how the nervous centres, and the nerves which issue from them, are irregularly disposed in the molluscs, and symmetrically in the insect.

But the recognition of a mollusc will be easier when you have learned to distinguish it from one of the Articulata, forming the third great division,—the third animal Type. Of these, our vases present numerous representatives: prawns, beetles, water-spiders, insect-larvæ, entomostraca, and worms. There is a very obvious character by which these may be recognized: they have all bodies composed of numerous segments, and their limbs are jointed, and they have mostly an external skeleton from which their limbs are developed. Sometimes the segments of their bodies are numerous, as in the centipede, lobster, &c.; sometimes several segments are fused together, as in the crab; and sometimes, as in worms, they are indicated by slight markings or depressions of the skin, which give the appearance of little rings, and hence the worms have been named Annelida, or Annulata, or Annulosa. In these last-named cases the segmental nature of the type is detected in the fact that the worms grow, segment by segment; and also in the fact that in most of them each segment has its own nerves, heart, stomach, &c.—each segment is, in fact, a zöoid.[16]

Fig. 18.

Nervous System of Sea-Hare (A) and Centipede (B).

Just as we recognize a vertebrate by the presence of a backbone and internal skeleton, we recognize an articulate by its jointed body and external skeleton. In both, the nervous system forms the axis of the body. The Mollusc, on the contrary, has no skeleton, internal or external;[17] and its nervous system does not form an axis. As a rule, both vertebrates and articulates have limbs—although there are exceptions in serpents, fishes, and worms. The Molluscs have no limbs. Backboned,—jointed,—and non-jointed,—therefore, are the three leading characteristics of the three types.

Let us now glance at the fourth division—the Radiata,—so called because of the disposition of the organs round a centre, which is the mouth. Our fresh-water vases afford us only one representative of this type—the Hydra, or fresh-water Polype, whose capture was recorded in the last chapter. Is it not strange that while all the Radiata are aquatic, not a single terrestrial representative having been discovered, only one should be found in fresh water? Think of the richness of the seas, with their hosts of Polypes, Actiniæ, Jelly-fish, Star-fishes, Sea-urchins, Sea-pens (Pennatulæ), Lily-stars (Comatulæ), and Sea-cucumbers (Holothuriæ), and then compare the poverty of rivers, lakes, and ponds, reduced to their single representative, the Hydra. The radiate structure may best be exhibited by this diagram of the nervous system of the Star-fish.[18]

Fig. 19.

Nervous System of Star-Fish.

Cuvier, to whom we owe this classification of the animal kingdom into four great divisions, would have been the first to recognize the chaotic condition in which he left this last division, and would have acquiesced in the separation of the Protozoa, which has since been made. This fifth division includes many of the microscopic animals known as Infusoria; and receives its name from the idea that these simplest of all animals represent, as it were, the beginnings of life.[19]

But Cuvier’s arrangement is open to a more serious objection. The state of science in his day excused the imperfection of classing the Infusoria and parasites under the Radiata; but it was owing, I conceive, to an unphilosophical view of morphology, that he placed the molluscs next to the Vertebrata, instead of placing the Articulata in that position. He was secretly determined by the desire to show that there are four very distinct types, or plans of structure, which cannot by any transitions be brought under one law of development. Lamarck and Geoffroy St. Hilaire maintained the idea of unity of composition throughout the animal kingdom;—in other words, that all the varieties of animal forms were produced by successive modifications: and several of the German naturalists maintained that the vertebrata in their embryonic stages passed through forms which were permanent in the lower animals. This idea Cuvier always opposed. He held that the four types were altogether distinct; and by his arrangement of them, their distinctness certainly appears much greater than would be the case on another arrangement. But without discussing this question here, it is enough to point out the fact of the enormous superiority in intelligence, in sociality, and in complexity of animal functions, which insects and spiders exhibit, when compared with the highest of the molluscs, to justify the removal of the mollusca, and the elevation of the articulata to the second place in the animal hierarchy. Nor is this all. If we divide animals into four groups, these four naturally dispose themselves into two larger groups: the first of these, comprising Vertebrata and Articulata, is characterized by a nervous axis and a skeleton; the second, comprising Mollusca and Radiata, is characterized by the absence of both nervous axis and skeleton. It is obvious that a bee much more closely resembles a bird, than any mollusc resembles any vertebrate. If there are many and important differences between the vertebrate and articulate types, there are also many and important resemblances; if the nervous axis is above the viscera, and forms the dorsal line of the vertebrate, whereas it is underneath the viscera, and forms the ventral line in the articulate, it is, nevertheless, in both, the axis of the body, and in both it sends off nerves to supply symmetrical limbs; in both it has similar functions. And while the articulata thus approach in structure the vertebrate type, the mollusca are not only removed from that type by many diversities, but a number of them have such affinities with the Radiate type, that it is only in quite recent days that the whole class of Polyzoa (or Bryozoa, as they are also called) has been removed from the Radiata, and ranged under the Mollusca.

To quit this topic, and recur once more to the five divisions, we have only the broad outlines of the picture in Vertebrata, Mollusca, Articulata, Radiata, and Protozoa; but this is a good beginning, and we can now proceed to the further sub-divisions. Each of these five sub-kingdoms is divided into Classes; these again into Orders; these into Families; these into Genera; these into Species; and these finally into Varieties. Thus suppose a dwarf terrier is presented to us with a request that we should indicate its various titles in the scheme of classification: we begin by calling it a vertebrate; we proceed to assign its Class as the mammalian; its Order is obviously that of the carnivora; its Family is that of the fox, wolf, jackal, &c., named Canidæ; its Genus is, of course, that of Canis; its Species, terrier; its Variety, dwarf-terrier. Inasmuch as all these denominations are the expressions of scientific research, and not at all arbitrary or fanciful, they imply an immense amount of labour and sagacity in their establishment; and when we remember that naturalists have thus classed upwards of half a million of distinct species, it becomes an interesting inquiry,—What has been the guiding principle of this successful labour? on what basis is so large a superstructure raised? This question we shall answer in the next chapter.

FOOTNOTES

[8] Draper: Human Physiology, p. 288.

[9] Leuwenhoek: Select Works, ii. p. 210. His figures, however, are very incorrect.

[10] See Leydig: Ueber den Bau und die systematische Stellung der Räderthiere, in Siebold und Kölliker’s Zeitschrift, vi., and Ueber Hydatina Senta, in Müller’s Archiv: 1857.

[11] Pouchet: Hétérogénie, ou Traité de la Génération Spontanée, 1859, p. 453.

[12] The Tardigrade, or microscopic Sloth, belongs to the order of Arachnida, and is occasionally found in moss, stagnant ponds, &c. I have only met with four specimens in all my investigations, and they were all found in moss. Spallanzani described and figured it (very badly), and M. Doyère has given a fuller description in the Annales des Sciences, 2nd series, vols. xiv. xvii. and xviii.

[13] Davaine in Annales des Sciences Naturelles, 1858, x. p. 335.

[14] Spallanzani: Tracts on the Natural History of Animals and Vegetables: Translated by Dalyell, ii. p. 129.

[15] In some cases of monstrosity, these organs are transposed, the liver being on the left, and the pancreas on the right side. It was in allusion to a case of this kind, then occupying the attention of Paris, that Molière made his Médecin malgré Lui describe the heart as on the right side, the liver on the left; on the mistake being noticed, he replies: “Oui, autrefois; mais nous avons changé tout cela.”

[16] The term zöoid was explained in our last.

[17] In the cuttlefish there is the commencement of an internal skeleton in the cartilage-plates protecting the brain.

[18] It is right to add, that there are serious doubts entertained respecting the claim of a star-fish to the possession of a nervous system at all; but the radiate structure is represented in the diagram; as it also is, very clearly, in a Sea-anemone.

[19] Protozoa, from proton, first, and zoon, animal.

Framley Parsonage.

CHAPTER VII.
Sunday Morning.

It was, perhaps, quite as well on the whole for Mark Robarts, that he did not go to that supper party. It was eleven o’clock before they sat down, and nearly two before the gentlemen were in bed. It must be remembered that he had to preach, on the coming Sunday morning, a charity sermon on behalf of a mission to Mr. Harold Smith’s islanders; and, to tell the truth, it was a task for which he had now very little inclination.

When first invited to do this, he had regarded the task seriously enough, as he always did regard such work, and he completed his sermon for the occasion before he left Framley; but, since that, an air of ridicule had been thrown over the whole affair, in which he had joined without much thinking of his own sermon, and this made him now heartily wish that he could choose a discourse upon any other subject.

He knew well that the very points on which he had most insisted, were those which had drawn most mirth from Miss Dunstable and Mrs. Smith, and had oftenest provoked his own laughter; and how was he now to preach on those matters in a fitting mood, knowing, as he would know, that those two ladies would be looking at him, would endeavour to catch his eye, and would turn him into ridicule as they had already turned the lecturer?

In this he did injustice to one of the ladies, unconsciously. Miss Dunstable, with all her aptitude for mirth, and we may almost fairly say for frolic, was in no way inclined to ridicule religion or anything which she thought to appertain to it. It may be presumed that among such things she did not include Mrs. Proudie, as she was willing enough to laugh at that lady; but Mark, had he known her better, might have been sure that she would have sat out his sermon with perfect propriety.

As it was, however, he did feel considerable uneasiness; and in the morning he got up early with the view of seeing what might be done in the way of emendation. He cut out those parts which referred most specially to the islands,—he rejected altogether those names over which they had all laughed together so heartily,—and he inserted a string of general remarks, very useful, no doubt, which he flattered himself would rob his sermon of all similarity to Harold Smith’s lecture. He had, perhaps, hoped, when writing it, to create some little sensation; but now he would be quite satisfied if it passed without remark.

But his troubles for that Sunday were destined to be many. It had been arranged that the party at the hotel should breakfast at eight and start at half-past eight punctually, so as to enable them to reach Chaldicotes in ample time to arrange their dresses before they went to church. The church stood in the grounds, close to that long formal avenue of lime-trees, but within the front gates. Their walk therefore, after reaching Mr. Sowerby’s house, would not be long.

Mrs. Proudie, who was herself an early body, would not hear of her guest—and he a clergyman—going out to the inn for his breakfast on a Sunday morning. As regarded that Sabbath-day journey to Chaldicotes, to that she had given her assent, no doubt with much uneasiness of mind; but let them have as little desecration as possible. It was, therefore, an understood thing that he was to return with his friends; but he should not go without the advantage of family prayers and family breakfast. And so Mrs. Proudie on retiring to rest gave the necessary orders, to the great annoyance of her household.

To the great annoyance, at least, of her servants! The bishop himself did not make his appearance till a much later hour. He in all things now supported his wife’s rule; in all things now, I say; for there had been a moment, when in the first flush and pride of his episcopacy other ideas had filled his mind. Now, however, he gave no opposition to that good woman with whom Providence had blessed him; and in return for such conduct that good woman administered in all things to his little personal comforts. With what surprise did the bishop now look back upon that unholy war which he had once been tempted to wage against the wife of his bosom?

Nor did any of the Miss Proudies show themselves at that early hour. They, perhaps, were absent on a different ground. With them Mrs. Proudie had not been so successful as with the bishop. They had wills of their own which became stronger and stronger every day. Of the three with whom Mrs. Proudie was blessed one was already in a position to exercise that will in a legitimate way over a very excellent young clergyman in the diocese, the Rev. Optimus Grey; but the other two, having as yet no such opening for their powers of command, were perhaps a little too much inclined to keep themselves in practice at home.

But at half-past seven punctually Mrs. Proudie was there, and so was the domestic chaplain; so was Mr. Robarts, and so were the household servants,—all excepting one lazy recreant. “Where is Thomas?” said she of the Argus eyes, standing up with her book of family prayers in her hand. “So please you, ma’am, Tummas be bad with the tooth-ache.” “Tooth-ache!” exclaimed Mrs. Proudie; but her eye said more terrible things than that. “Let Thomas come to me before church.” And then they proceeded to prayers. These were read by the chaplain, as it was proper and decent that they should be; but I cannot but think that Mrs. Proudie a little exceeded her office in taking upon herself to pronounce the blessing when the prayers were over. She did it, however, in a clear, sonorous voice, and perhaps with more personal dignity than was within the chaplain’s compass.

Mrs. Proudie was rather stern at breakfast, and the vicar of Framley felt an unaccountable desire to get out of the house. In the first place she was not dressed with her usual punctilious attention to the proprieties of her high situation. It was evident that there was to be a further toilet before she sailed up the middle of the cathedral choir. She had on a large loose cap with no other strings than those which were wanted for tying it beneath her chin, a cap with which the household and the chaplain were well acquainted, but which seemed ungracious in the eyes of Mr. Robarts after all the well-dressed holiday doings of the last week. She wore also a large, loose, dark-coloured wrapper, which came well up round her neck, and which was not buoyed out, as were her dresses in general, with an under mechanism of petticoats. It clung to her closely, and added to the inflexibility of her general appearance. And then she had encased her feet in large carpet slippers, which no doubt were comfortable, but which struck her visitor as being strange and unsightly.

“Do you find a difficulty in getting your people together for early morning-prayers?” she said, as she commenced her operations with the teapot.

“I can’t say that I do,” said Mark. “But then we are seldom so early as this.”

“Parish clergymen should be early, I think,” said she. “It sets a good example in the village.”

“I am thinking of having morning prayers in the church,” said Mr. Robarts.

“That’s nonsense,” said Mrs. Proudie, “and usually means worse than nonsense. I know what that comes to. If you have three services on Sunday and domestic prayers at home, you do very well.” And so saying she handed him his cup.

“But I have not three services on Sunday, Mrs. Proudie.”

“Then I think you should have. Where can the poor people be so well off on Sundays as in church? The bishop intends to express a very strong opinion on this subject in his next charge; and then I am sure you will attend to his wishes.”

To this Mark made no answer, but devoted himself to his egg.

“I suppose you have not a very large establishment at Framley?” asked Mrs. Proudie.

“What, at the parsonage?”

“Yes; you live at the parsonage, don’t you?”

“Certainly—well; not very large, Mrs. Proudie; just enough to do the work, make things comfortable, and look after the children.”

“It is a very fine living,” said she; “very fine. I don’t remember that we have anything so good ourselves,—except it is Plumstead, the archdeacon’s place. He has managed to butter his bread pretty well.”

“His father was bishop of Barchester.”

“Oh, yes, I know all about him. Only for that he would barely have risen to be an archdeacon, I suspect. Let me see; yours is 800l., is it not, Mr. Robarts? And you such a young man! I suppose you have insured your life highly.”

“Pretty well, Mrs. Proudie.”

“And then, too, your wife had some little fortune, had she not? We cannot all fall on our feet like that; can we, Mr. White?” and Mrs. Proudie in her playful way appealed to the chaplain.

Mrs. Proudie was an imperious woman; but then so also was Lady Lufton; and it may therefore be said that Mr. Robarts ought to have been accustomed to feminine domination; but as he sat there munching his toast he could not but make a comparison between the two. Lady Lufton in her little attempts sometimes angered him; but he certainly thought, comparing the lay lady and the clerical together, that the rule of the former was the lighter and the pleasanter. But then Lady Lufton had given him a living and a wife, and Mrs. Proudie had given him nothing.

Immediately after breakfast Mr. Robarts escaped to the Dragon of Wantly, partly because he had had enough of the matutinal Mrs. Proudie, and partly also in order that he might hurry his friends there. He was already becoming fidgety about the time, as Harold Smith had been on the preceding evening, and he did not give Mrs. Smith credit for much punctuality. When he arrived at the inn he asked if they had done breakfast, and was immediately told that not one of them was yet down. It was already half-past eight, and they ought to be now under weigh on the road.

He immediately went to Mr. Sowerby’s room, and found that gentleman shaving himself. “Don’t be a bit uneasy,” said Mr. Sowerby. “You and Smith shall have my phaeton, and those horses will take you there in an hour. Not, however, but what we shall all be in time. We’ll send round to the whole party and ferret them out.” And then Mr. Sowerby having evoked manifold aid with various peals of the bell sent messengers, male and female, flying to all the different rooms.

“I think I’ll hire a gig and go over at once,” said Mark. “It would not do for me to be late, you know.”

“It won’t do for any of us to be late; and it’s all nonsense about hiring a gig. It would be just throwing a sovereign away, and we should pass you on the road. Go down and see that the tea is made, and all that; and make them have the bill ready; and, Robarts, you may pay it too, if you like it. But I believe we may as well leave that to Baron Borneo—eh?”

And then Mark did go down and make the tea, and he did order the bill; and then he walked about the room, looking at his watch, and nervously waiting for the footsteps of his friends. And as he was so employed, he bethought himself whether it was fit that he should be so doing on a Sunday morning; whether it was good that he should be waiting there, in painful anxiety, to gallop over a dozen miles in order that he might not be too late with his sermon; whether his own snug room at home, with Fanny opposite to him, and his bairns crawling on the floor, with his own preparations for his own quiet service, and the warm pressure of Lady Lufton’s hand when that service should be over, was not better than all this.

He could not afford not to know Harold Smith, and Mr. Sowerby, and the Duke of Omnium, he had said to himself. He had to look to rise in the world, as other men did. But what pleasure had come to him as yet from these intimacies? How much had he hitherto done towards his rising? To speak the truth he was not over well pleased with himself, as he made Mrs. Harold Smith’s tea and ordered Mr. Sowerby’s mutton chops on that Sunday morning.

At a little after nine they all assembled; but even then he could not make the ladies understand that there was any cause for hurry; at least Mrs. Smith, who was the leader of the party, would not understand it. When Mark again talked of hiring a gig, Miss Dunstable indeed said that she would join him; and seemed to be so far earnest in the matter that Mr. Sowerby hurried through his second egg in order to prevent such a catastrophe. And then Mark absolutely did order the gig; whereupon Mrs. Smith remarked that in such case she need not hurry herself; but the waiter brought up word that all the horses of the hotel were out, excepting one pair neither of which could go in single harness. Indeed, half of their stable establishment was already secured by Mr. Sowerby’s own party.

“Then let me have the pair,” said Mark, almost frantic with delay.

“Nonsense, Robarts; we are ready now. He won’t want them, James. Come, Supplehouse, have you done?”

“Then I am to hurry myself, am I?” said Mrs. Harold Smith. “What changeable creatures you men are! May I be allowed half a cup more tea, Mr. Robarts?”

Mark, who was now really angry, turned away to the window. There was no charity in these people, he said to himself. They knew the nature of his distress, and yet they only laughed at him. He did not, perhaps, reflect that he had assisted in the joke against Harold Smith on the previous evening.

“James,” said he, turning to the waiter, “let me have that pair of horses immediately, if you please.”

“Yes, sir; round in fifteen minutes, sir: only Ned, sir, the post-boy, sir; I fear he’s at his breakfast, sir; but we’ll have him here in less than no time, sir!”

But before Ned and the pair were there, Mrs. Smith had absolutely got her bonnet on, and at ten they started. Mark did share the phaeton with Harold Smith, but the phaeton did not go any faster than the other carriages. They led the way, indeed, but that was all; and when the vicar’s watch told him that it was eleven, they were still a mile from Chaldicotes’ gate, although the horses were in a lather of steam; and they had only just entered the village when the church bells ceased to be heard.

“Come, you are in time, after all,” said Harold Smith. “Better time than I was last night.” Robarts could not explain to him that the entry of a clergyman into church, of a clergyman who is going to assist in the service, should not be made at the last minute, that it should be staid and decorous, and not done in scrambling haste, with running feet and scant breath.

“I suppose we’ll stop here, sir,” said the postilion, as he pulled up his horses short at the church-door, in the midst of the people who were congregated together ready for the service. But Mark had not anticipated being so late, and said at first that it was necessary that he should go on to the house; then, when the horses had again begun to move, he remembered that he could send for his gown, and as he got out of the carriage he gave his orders accordingly. And now the other two carriages were there, and so there was a noise and confusion at the door—very unseemly, as Mark felt it; and the gentlemen spoke in loud voices, and Mrs. Harold Smith declared that she had no prayer-book, and was much too tired to go in at present;—she would go home and rest herself, she said. And two other ladies of the party did so also, leaving Miss Dunstable to go alone;—for which, however, she did not care one button. And then one of the party, who had a nasty habit of swearing, cursed at something as he walked in close to Mark’s elbow; and so they made their way up the church as the absolution was being read, and Mark Robarts felt thoroughly ashamed of himself. If his rising in the world brought him in contact with such things as these, would it not be better for him that he should do without rising?

His sermon went off without any special notice. Mrs. Harold Smith was not there, much to his satisfaction; and the others who were did not seem to pay any special attention to it. The subject had lost its novelty, except with the ordinary church congregation, the farmers and labourers of the parish; and the “quality” in the squire’s great pew were content to show their sympathy by a moderate subscription. Miss Dunstable, however, gave a ten-pound note, which swelled up the sum total to a respectable amount—for such a place as Chaldicotes.

“And now I hope I may never hear another word about New Guinea,” said Mr. Sowerby, as they all clustered round the drawing-room fire after church. “That subject may be regarded as having been killed and buried; eh, Harold?”

“Certainly murdered last night,” said Mrs. Harold, “by that awful woman, Mrs. Proudie.”

“I wonder you did not make a dash at her and pull her out of the arm-chair,” said Miss Dunstable. “I was expecting it, and thought that I should come to grief in the scrimmage.”

“I never knew a lady do such a brazen-faced thing before,” said Miss Kerrigy, a travelling friend of Miss Dunstable’s.

“Nor I—never; in a public place, too,” said Dr. Easyman, a medical gentleman, who also often accompanied her.

“As for brass,” said Mr. Supplehouse, “she would never stop at anything for want of that. It is well that she has enough, for the poor bishop is but badly provided.”

“I hardly heard what it was she did say,” said Harold Smith; “so I could not answer her, you know. Something about Sundays, I believe.”

“She hoped you would not put the South Sea islanders up to Sabbath travelling,” said Mr. Sowerby.

“And specially begged that you would establish Lord’s-day schools,” said Mrs. Smith; and then they all went to work and picked Mrs. Proudie to pieces, from the top ribbon of her cap down to the sole of her slipper.

“And then she expects the poor parsons to fall in love with her daughters. That’s the hardest thing of all,” said Miss Dunstable.

But, on the whole, when our vicar went to bed he did not feel that he had spent a profitable Sunday.

CHAPTER VIII.
Gatherum Castle.

On the Tuesday morning Mark did receive his wife’s letter and the ten-pound note, whereby a strong proof was given of the honesty of the post-office people in Barsetshire. That letter, written as it had been in a hurry, while Robin post-boy was drinking a single mug of beer,—well, what of it if it was half filled a second time?—was nevertheless eloquent of his wife’s love and of her great triumph.

“I have only half a moment to send you the money,” she said, “for the postman is here waiting. When I see you I’ll explain why I am so hurried. Let me know that you get it safe. It is all right now, and Lady Lufton was here not a minute ago. She did not quite like it; about Gatherum Castle I mean; but you’ll hear nothing about it. Only remember that you must dine at Framley Court on Wednesday week. I have promised for you. You will: won’t you, dearest? I shall come and fetch you away if you attempt to stay longer than you have said. But I’m sure you won’t. God bless you, my own one! Mr. Jones gave us the same sermon he preached the second Sunday after Easter. Twice in the same year is too often. God bless you! The children are quite well. Mark sends a big kiss.—Your own F.”

Robarts, as he read this letter and crumpled the note up into his pocket, felt that it was much more satisfactory than he deserved. He knew that there must have been a fight, and that his wife, fighting loyally on his behalf, had got the best of it; and he knew also that her victory had not been owing to the goodness of her cause. He frequently declared to himself that he would not be afraid of Lady Lufton; but nevertheless these tidings that no reproaches were to be made to him afforded him great relief.

On the following Friday they all went to the duke’s, and found that the bishop and Mrs. Proudie were there before them; as were also sundry other people, mostly of some note, either in the estimation of the world at large or of that of West Barsetshire. Lord Boanerges was there, an old man who would have his own way in everything, and who was regarded by all men—apparently even by the duke himself—as an intellectual king, by no means of the constitutional kind,—as an intellectual emperor rather, who took upon himself to rule all questions of mind without the assistance of any ministers whatever. And Baron Brawl was of the party, one of her Majesty’s puisne judges, as jovial a guest as ever entered a country house; but given to be rather sharp withal in his jovialities. And there was Mr. Green Walker, a young but rising man, the same who lectured not long since on a popular subject to his constituents at the Crewe Junction. Mr. Green Walker was a nephew of the Marchioness of Hartletop, and the Marchioness of Hartletop was a friend of the Duke of Omnium’s. Mr. Mark Robarts was certainly elated when he ascertained who composed the company of which he had been so earnestly pressed to make a portion. Would it have been wise in him to forego this on account of the prejudices of Lady Lufton?

As the guests were so many and so great the huge front portals of Gatherum Castle were thrown open, and the vast hall adorned with trophies—with marble busts from Italy and armour from Wardour Street,—was thronged with gentlemen and ladies, and gave forth unwonted echoes to many a footstep. His grace himself, when Mark arrived there with Sowerby and Miss Dunstable—for in this instance Miss Dunstable did travel in the phaeton while Mark occupied a seat in the dicky—his grace himself was at this moment in the drawing-room, and nothing could exceed his urbanity.

“O Miss Dunstable,” he said, taking that lady by the hand, and leading her up to the fire, “now I feel for the first time that Gatherum Castle has not been built for nothing.”

“Nobody ever supposed it was, your grace,” said Miss Dunstable. “I am sure the architect did not think so when his bill was paid.” And Miss Dunstable put her toes up on the fender to warm them with as much self-possession as though her father had been a duke also, instead of a quack doctor.

“We have given the strictest orders about the parrot,” said the duke—

“Ah! but I have not brought him after all,” said Miss Dunstable.

“And I have had an aviary built on purpose,—just such as parrots are used to in their own country. Well, Miss Dunstable, I do call that unkind. Is it too late to send for him?”

“He and Dr. Easyman are travelling together. The truth was, I could not rob the doctor of his companion.”

“Why? I have had another aviary built for him. I declare, Miss Dunstable, the honour you are doing me is shorn of half its glory. But the poodle—I still trust in the poodle.”

“And your grace’s trust shall not in that respect be in vain. Where is he, I wonder?” And Miss Dunstable looked round as though she expected that somebody would certainly have brought her dog in after her. “I declare I must go and look for him,—only think if they were to put him among your grace’s dogs,—how his morals would be destroyed!”

“Miss Dunstable, is that intended to be personal?” But the lady had turned away from the fire, and the duke was able to welcome his other guests.

This he did with much courtesy. “Sowerby,” he said, “I am glad to find that you have survived the lecture. I can assure you I had fears for you.”

“I was brought back to life after considerable delay by the administration of tonics at the Dragon of Wantly. Will your grace allow me to present to you Mr. Robarts, who on that occasion was not so fortunate. It was found necessary to carry him off to the palace, where he was obliged to undergo very vigorous treatment.”

And then the duke shook hands with Mr. Robarts, assuring him that he was most happy to make his acquaintance. He had often heard of him since he came into the county; and then he asked after Lord Lufton, regretting that he had been unable to induce his lordship to come to Gatherum Castle.

“But you had a diversion at the lecture, I am told,” continued the duke. “There was a second performer, was there not, who almost eclipsed poor Harold Smith?” And then Mr. Sowerby gave an amusing sketch of the little Proudie episode.

“It has, of course, ruined your brother-in-law for ever as a lecturer,” said the duke, laughing.

“If so we shall feel ourselves under the deepest obligations to Mrs. Proudie,” said Mr. Sowerby. And then Harold Smith himself came up, and received the duke’s sincere and hearty congratulations on the success of his enterprise at Barchester.